Free Republic

"Somali jihadists forcing civilians to watch executions" SNIPPET: "Movies and television? No way. Executions? Bring the whole family -- or else! "Somalis 'made to view executions'," by Mary Harper for BBC News, October 25:" SNIPPET: "Hundreds of people in Somalia have been forced to watch Islamist militants executing two people accused of spying. People in Merca said al-Shabaab militia patrolled the town with loudspeakers, demanding they attend the executions. The militants also ordered schools to close for the day as they were keen for children to watch the two men being shot dead by a firing squad. Most of those...

BAGHDAD (AP) — Execution-style killings, not headline-grabbing bombings, have been the leading cause of death among civilians in the Iraq war, a study released Wednesday shows. The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, point to the brutal sectarian nature of the conflict, where death squads once roamed the streets hunting down members of the rival Muslim sect. Estimates of the number of civilians killed in Iraq vary widely. The study was based on the database maintained by Iraq Body Count, a private group that among other sources uses media reports including those of The Associated Press. The...

PHOENIX (Reuters) – Hit men dressed in fake police tactical gear burst into a home in Phoenix, rake it with gunfire and execute a man.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas – Texas is wasting little time claiming its annual notoriety as the nation's most active capital punishment state. Convicted killer Curtis Moore, condemned for killing three people during a drug-related robbery in 1995 in Fort Worth, is set for lethal injection this week – the first execution in the U.S. in 2009. It's the first of eight scheduled executions this month in the U.S., all but two of them in Texas. Moore, 40, is set to die Wednesday. Two more executions are set for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit next week, then three more the...

... I introduced myself by giving my first name, surname, my father’s name, birth certificate number, place of birth and occupation, and then the following exchange took place....

Formal statistics are impossible to come by as killing of officers and non-commissioned members of the late-Shah's military and security forces were not centrally ordered. We have tried to gather numbers that are as reliable as possible but they are, at best, estimates. Usually very accurate estimates but we believe we have understated actual numbers. Here are some figures in no particular order, other than as they came in. 144 Air Force Pilots including the Nojeh attempted counter-revolution by the Air Force. (Nojeh is still a not fully told story we will write up as time permits. We have have...

A state appeals court Friday ensured further delays in California's already inert death penalty system, finding that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration did not follow proper procedures when it attempted to revise the state's lethal injection method to get executions back on track. In a 14-page ruling, the San Francisco-based 1st District Court of Appeal upheld last year's decision by a Marin County judge who found state officials failed to provide public scrutiny of plans to overhaul California's execution method. The appeals court ruling, if it stands, would force the state to go back to the drawing board in its efforts...

Cynthia McKinney says 5000 executed Katrina used as cover. News Type: Event — Tue Sep 30, 2008 Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney announced for the first time on Sunday that she has received information that some 5000, mostly male, possibly prisoners were killed execution style, by single gunshot to the head, using the tragic events of hurricane Katrina as a cover. Candidate McKinney made the announcement at a conference in Oakland, Ca, for the Critical Resistance 10 on Sunday. While speaking she informed the audience that she has received information from a sources that were involved in the clean-up and disposal...

The news from Barbara Wagner's doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing. Barbara Wagner(Paul Carter/Register-Guard) The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay. What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50. "It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter in the mail that basically...

An illegal immigrant from Honduras who claimed his treaty rights were violated when he was arrested for a robbery-murder near Dallas lost his appeal ... at the U.S. Supreme Court, clearing the way for his execution. In the second case of its kind this week in Texas, lawyers for condemned killer Heliberto Chi went to the nation's highest court claiming Chi should have been told he could get legal assistance from the Honduran consulate when he was arrested in California and extradited to Texas to face charges for killing his former boss at a men's clothing store during a robbery...

Mexico, who allows hundred of thousands of its citizens ("immigrants") to illegally cross over into the United States each year, has shown its "compassionate" side. The Mexican government has appealed to the World Court to "take urgent measures" to get the U.S. to stay all executions of Mexicans on Death Row in American jails. Amazingly, President Bush had already agreed with the World Court back in 2004. The court, which resides at the Hague in the Netherlands, ruled that the trials of some 50 Mexicans on Death Row were in violation of the 1963 Vienna Convention. It was then that...

Ten more "official" executions last week bring the number to 50 or the same pace of one a day since January 1st, 2008. Perma Link http://terrornewsbriefs.blogspot.com/2008/02/iran-executions-continue-at-one-day.html Also look at the video article asking to compare 30-yeafrs of the Mullahs with about that of the Monarchy and deciding which you rather have now in Iran.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- If six suspected terrorists are sentenced to death at Guantanamo Bay for the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. Army regulations that were quietly amended two years ago open the possibility of execution by lethal injection at the military base in Cuba, experts said Tuesday. Any executions would probably add to international outrage over Guantanamo, since capital punishment is banned in 130 countries, including the 27-nation European Union. Conducting the executions on U.S. soil could open the way for the detainees' lawyers to go to U.S. courts to fight the death sentences. But the updated regulations make...

Iran's Chief Judge Orders an End to Executions in Public January 30, 2008 The Associated Press Santa Barbara News-Press TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's chief judge has ordered that executions will no longer take place in public, the official IRNA news agency reported Wednesday. Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, a moderate conservative cleric, also banned publishing pictures and broadcasting video footage of executions, the report said. Executions can now only be carried out in public after special approval by the head of the judiciary, the report said. Since the start of this year, Iran has hanged more than 20 people convicted of...

Two former prison employees have filed federal lawsuits against South Carolina Department of Corrections director Jon Ozmint and another official, saying they were forced to perform executions in order to keep leadership positions. Ira Baxley and Terry Bracey say they were not trained properly to perform the executions or given counseling, according to the lawsuits, both filed Tuesday. Baxley, a 22-year prison employee, was a major in charge of the SWAT team. Bracey was a security division major and a 23-year employee, according to the lawsuits. Baxley's suit claims that operations director Robert Ward "made it clear that (Baxley) could...

Nashville, Tenn. (AP) -- A federal judge has ruled that Tennessee's procedure for lethal injections is cruel and unusual punishment. U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger's ruling could halt an execution scheduled for next week.

Baghdad, Sept 7, (VOI) – Three of the six defendants in the Anfal case will be executed by hanging on Saturday, a Saudi newspaper quoted the lawyer of former Iraqi deputy premier Tareq Aziz as saying. "The Iraqi Criminal Court notified Ali Hassan al-Majid, alias Chemical Ali, former defense minister Sultan Hashim and former chief of staff Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti that they will be executed tomorrow," lawyer Badie Aref Ezzat told Saudi newspaper al-Watan, published on Friday. The lawyer said he was told by the three convicts that they only wanted to meet their families before the executions. Ezzat said...

BRUSSELS, Belgium — The European Union on Tuesday urged the governor of Texas to halt executions and introduce a moratorium on capital punishment in the United States' busiest death penalty state. In an unusual direct appeal, the EU said Texas Gov. Rick Perry must "exercise all powers vested in his office" to halt the impending 400th execution since Texas resumed carrying out death sentences in 1982. The execution of Johnny Ray Conner is scheduled for this week. He is to die for the shooting death of a Houston grocery store owner during an attempted holdup in 1998, "The European Union...

Texas will almost certainly hit the grim total of 400 executions this month, far ahead of any other state, testament to the influence of the state's conservative evangelical Christians and its cultural mix of Old South and Wild West. "In Texas you have all the elements lined up. Public support, a governor that supports it and supportive courts," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "If any of those things are hesitant then the process slows down," said Dieter. "With all cylinders working as in Texas it produces a lot of executions." Texas has executed 398...

Iran has just carried out the largest wave of executions since 1984. It is early dawn as seven young men are led to the gallows amid shouts of "Allah Akbar" (Allah is the greatest) from a crowd of bearded men as a handful of women, all in hijab, ululate to a high pitch. A few minutes later, the seven are hanged as a mullah shouts: "Alhamd li-Allah" (Praise be to Allah). The scene was Wednesday in Mashad, Iran's second most populous city, where a crackdown against "anti-Islam hooligans" has been under way for weeks. The Mashad hangings, broadcast live on...

As the U.S. wound up its second meeting with Iran to discuss the security of Iraq, the Iranian regime continued to face its own escalating insecurity. The deterioration of Iran’s economy, increase in civil unrest and sharp deterioration of human rights under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are three examples of a nation unraveling at the seams. Ahmadinejad has taken desperate measures to reign in the escalating civil unrest throughout Iranian society by closing newspapers, enforcing strict dress codes and stepping up public hangings and stonings. The high priority of implementing these new “security measures” was made clear in a July 2007...

The authors of the war that nearly everybody thought was necessary at the time seem genuinely puzzled that so many Americans think all of Arabia isn't worth the life of a single American soldier. If they're curious about why, the folks at the White House should read the stories that occasionally make it only to the back pages of the newspapers. Item (London Daily Telegraph): "The imminent execution of a teenage maid in Saudi Arabia drew fierce criticism yesterday and provoked condemnation of the kingdom's prolific use of capital punishment. The case has brought fresh attention to the draconian Saudi...

Militants have crucified Christians in Iraq, including converts from Islam and people involved in "mixed marriages," a senior Dutch parliamentarian has established. Joel Voordewind of the governing coalition’s junior party 'ChristianUnie', or ChristianUnion (CU), said he managed to confirm information received from a "trustworthy source" at the United Nations about the recent crucifixions, according to declarations obtained by BosNewsLife Monday, July 16. Several Iraqi Christians "are nailed to a cross and their arms are tied up with ropes. The ropes are put on fire," Voordewind said. Voordewind described how a person, who "survived" a crucifixion, "even showed holes in his...

LUCASVILLE, Ohio - An overweight inmate was executed by injection Thursday after a delay of more than an hour while prison medical staff struggled to find suitable veins in his arms. The execution of Christopher Newton, who had killed a cellmate in 2001 and insisted on the death sentence, had been set to begin at 10 a.m. But members of the medical staff at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility struggled to find veins in each arm, said Leo Jennings, a spokesman for the attorney general. Newton, 37, was pronounced dead shortly before noon. He weighed 265 at his physical on...

Arizona conducted its first execution in seven years, after administering a lethal injection to Robert Comer. Comer was convicted in a 1987 crime spree in which he killed a fellow camper at Apache Lake east of Phoenix. Additionally, he was also convicted of repeatedly, brutally raping a female camper the same night, in front of her boyfriend. Robert Comer was termed the most dangerous man in the Arizona prison system. Comer is the first inmate to be put to death in Arizona since Donald Miller was executed November 8, 2000, for participating in the murder of an 18-year-old woman. The...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California said on Tuesday it would revise its lethal injection procedure to ensure "a dignified end of life" for condemned inmates as it seeks to overcome a U.S. judge's objections to the procedure. In December, Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose ruled the "implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed" and gave the nation's most-populous state a chance to revise how it metes out its ultimate punishment. Lawyers for a condemned California inmate had argued that lethal injection was "cruel and unusual" punishment barred by the U.S. Constitution. With the fate of...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A man convicted of killing a Memphis police officer in 1981 was executed early Wednesday after a court rejected defense pleas for more time to examine newly revised execution protocols. Philip Workman, whose execution had been delayed on five prior occasions, became Tennessee's third lethal injection since 2000. The Tennessee Supreme Court rejected a final defense request for more time to challenge the way the state carries out its three-chemical injection procedure. A federal judge halted Workman's execution last week over concerns about the revisions, but a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - A federal judge in Nashville this afternoon delayed the scheduled execution of Philip Workman. He was scheduled to die by lethal injection early next Wednesday. U-S District Judge Todd Campbell ruled shortly after Workman's attorneys asked for a delay on grounds they did not have time to file complaints against new execution procedures. The new guidelines were released Wednesday. Workman was convicted for the 1981 shooting death of Memphis police Lieutenant Ronald Oliver after a fast food robbery. He twice has come within hours of execution before the courts stepped in. Campbell cited the likelihood that...

Tennessee is ready to resume executions under new rules it released Monday, using a three-drug lethal injection method opponents say is still inhumane and unconstitutional. Gov. Phil Bredesen will lift a 90-day moratorium on executions on Wednesday. Philip Workman, convicted of killing a Memphis police officer, is scheduled to die May 9. "It's essentially the same protocol as before, with a little window dressing," Nashville attorney Brad MacLean said. Among the complaints MacLean and other defense lawyers have about the execution method is the use of three chemicals to kill inmates. Last week a medical review of dozens of executions...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas - A death-row inmate who had vowed not to go willingly to the death chamber set a fire in his cell Thursday, but when the time came, walked to his death without a fight. Roy Lee Pippin, 51, was executed by lethal injection for the deaths of two Florida men gunned down in a dispute about missing drug money. From the gurney, he blamed the jury, the trial judge and the prosecutor, and said that he was innocent. "You will answer to your maker when God has found out that you have executed an innocent man. May God...

RICHMOND - Saying he felt morally correct but not necessarily politically correct, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine on Monday vetoed five bills that would expand the death penalty. "I feel like I did the right thing," said Kaine, who is opposed to the death penalty but pledged, when running for governor, not to scale back capital punishment laws. Kaine said he did not violate that promise. The five bills he vetoed would have increased the number of people who would be put to death by the state, he said. Two bills would have expanded the "triggerman rule," which provides that only...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The death penalty is under what may be an unprecedented review in the United States, mostly involving questions about lethal injection, by far the most common method of execution. "Although many of the stays of exeecutions are due to the lethal injection process, the openness of courts, of governors and legislators to reconsider issues that were thought to be settled is a sign of broad discomfort with the death penalty," said Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, which works against capital punishment. About one-third of the 38 states that allow capital punishment have halted...

Iraq delays executions amid UN pressure By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent Last Updated: 2:46pm GMT 04/01/2007 Iraq has postponed the execution of two former officials convicted alongside Saddam Hussein, bowing to international pressure to respect legal and religious traditions. The former dictator’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikrit and the ex-head of the Ba’athist revolutionary court, Awad Ahmed al-Bandar were to be hanged today but the government said the date had been put back. A spokesman for the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said pleas from outside Iraq, including a call for restraint from Ban Ki-moon, the new United Nations Secretary General,...

IRAN is said to have defied international pleas for clemency and hanged three ethnic Arabs convicted of "waging war on God".Another 11 Iranian Arabs are awaiting execution after being convicted in secret trials of involvement in a bombing spree. Neil Durkin, of Amnesty International, told The Scotsman: "We are seeking more details, including whether any of those executed received proper trials and had the right to appeals." Activists insist the men were innocent and had paid the price for merely hailing from the country's disadvantaged Arab minority, which is concentrated in Iran's oil-rich province of Khuzestan, bordering Iraq. Tehran has...

Iraqi authorities executed 13 men by hanging Tuesday after they were convicted of murder and kidnapping, lining them up in hoods and green jumpsuits with their hands bound behind their backs. In a rare move that came amid chaotic violence sweeping the capital, the Iraqi government recorded and distributed graphic television footage of the convicts in the moments before they were put to death. The footage was given to both Iraqi and foreign media. The images showed two men standing together on a gallows with nooses around their necks. Several of them stooped, and one had his arm around the...

After a botched execution that took 34 minutes to end a convicted murderer’s life, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has suspended all death sentences until a commission can review lethal-injection procedures “to ensure they don’t inflict cruel and unusual punishment on their helpless victims.” In a gesture of goodwill, Florida’s leading association of murderers also announced a temporary hold on premeditated and/or serial killings as well as brutal rapes, according to a spokesman, “until we can determine if some of our victims experience discomfort or pain.” The Sunshine State Coalition of Capital Criminals released the statement through its ACLU attorney, pledging...

Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi, took 70 pictures of an execution in Kurdistan on Aug. 27, 1979. One picture (No. 20, below) won the Pulitzer Prize. It was, however, awarded to an unnamed photographer -- the only anonymous recipient in the 90-year history of the award. Mr. Razmi preserved 27 of the photos on a contact sheet and stowed it away in his home. Below are those photos -- made public for the first time. Photos: http://online.wsj.com/public/page/8_0004.html VIDEO - interview of WSJ reporter's story about identifying the photographer http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-iranpics0611-28.html

Shocking new evidence of the trade in human body parts has revealed how British patients could be buying organs from executed prisoners for £50,000.An undercover investigation has found doctors in China are willing to sell organs from death row prisoners to foreigners in need of a transplant. The grisly practice add to mounting evidence of how human organs are being traded around the globe. Only last week it emerged at least 40 British patients may have been given transplants using body parts stolen by a corpse-snatching gang. More than 1,000 bodies including that of veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke, were stolen...

The brutal excesses of Saddam Hussein's regime were relived yesterday as Iraq's new government announced that it had hanged 27 prisoners convicted of terror and criminal charges. Mass executions at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, which has several gallows erected in the execution chamber, were suspended after coalition-led troops overthrew Saddam three years ago. The death penalty was reinstituted in 2004, and yesterday's executions took place just days after control of Abu Ghraib was handed over to the Iraqi authorities. An Iraqi Justice Ministry official said two of those hanged had been convicted of terrorism charges, and the other 25 –...

American Medical Association President Dr. William G. Plested said Monday that medical professionals should not participate in executions of prisoners. "The American Medical Association is troubled by continuous refusal of many state courts and legislatures to acknowledge the ethical obligations of physicians, which strictly prohibit physician involvement in a legally authorized execution," he said in a statement. "The AMA's policy is clear and unambiguous - requiring physicians to participate in executions violates their oath to protect lives and erodes public confidence in the medical profession. "A physician is a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is...

Doctors shouldn't help put inmates to death by lethal injection or work with the legal system to ensure inmates don't feel pain when they are executed, said the president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists in a message to his colleagues. "The legal system has painted itself into this corner and it is not our obligation to get it out," Dr. Orin F. Guidry, president of the 40,000-member group, wrote in a message posted Friday on the organization's Web site. Patients could lose trust in their doctors if they see them as executioners, he wrote. Guidry said Monday he posted...

Excerpt - ST. LOUIS — A federal judge on Monday halted executions in Missouri until the state makes sweeping changes to ensure that inmates do not suffer excruciating pain when they are put to death. U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan Jr. cited "numerous problems" with the state's lethal injections, including a lack of a written protocol setting drug levels and a dyslexic doctor who is in charge of mixing the three drugs used. ~ snip ~

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court decided, in a 5-to-3 opinion, that a Tennessee prison inmate named Paul G. House was entitled to prove he did not commit the crime for which he was sent to death row. On the same day, I received a letter from Centurion Ministries, which argued for more than a decade that a Virginia man named Roger K. Coleman had not committed the crime for which he was executed in 1992. The letter admitted that Centurion had been wrong. These cases have something in common: they pivot on the question of innocence. For too many...

Less than two hours before he was to die by injection for three 1996 murders, Percy Levar Walton won a six-month reprieve from Gov. Timothy M. Kaine last night. The governor delayed the execution until Dec. 8 so Walton's long-debated mental capacity and competence to be executed can be independently evaluated.

Part of me died when I saw this cruel killing, HALA JABER EVEN by the stupefying standards of Iraq’s unspeakable violence, the murder of Atwar Bahjat, one of the country’s top television journalists, was an act of exceptional cruelty. Nobody but her killers knew just how much she had suffered until a film showing her death on February 22 at the hands of two musclebound men in military uniforms emerged last week. Her family’s worst fears of what might have happened have been far exceeded by the reality. Bahjat was abducted after making three live broadcasts from the edge of...

Judges in several states have started to put up potentially insurmountable roadblocks to the use of lethal injections to execute condemned inmates. Their decisions are based on new evidence suggesting that prisoners have endured agonizing executions. In response, judges are insisting that doctors take an active role in supervising executions, even though the American Medical Association's code of ethics prohibits that. A federal judge in North Carolina, for instance, ordered state officials there to find medical personnel by noon today to supervise an execution scheduled for next week. Otherwise, the judge said, he will impose a stay of execution. "This,...

In commemoration of International Women’s Day, human rights activists have prepared a report on the condition of Iranian women and the widespread oppression on Iranian citizens during the year 2005. Using this set of statitstics on women only, indicates a minute part of the tragic and intolerable conditions that Iranians are subjected to under the boot of the present rulers. The statistics shown below are the scant number of cases that the regime itself partially admits to, in its own media. Note that there are three separate networks of law enforcement, secret police, and nationwide sets of prisons governed by...

ATLANTA - A moratorium should be placed on seeking the death penalty in Georgia because the state cannot ensure fairness in trials and appeals, according to a new report by the American Bar Association. The 323-page report found seven flaws in Georgia's administration of the death penalty. For example, Georgia is the only state in the nation that does not guarantee lawyers for death row inmates' habeas corpus appeals, which challenge the constitutionality of convictions and sentences and sometimes result in new trials, the report found. And, of the 26 states that prohibit executing the mentally retarded, the report says...

<p>BASRA, Iraq (AP) - Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed ``Chemical Ali'' by opponents of the Iraqi regime for ordering a poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds, has been found dead, a British officer said Monday.</p> <p>Maj. Andrew Jackson of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment told The Associated Press that his superiors had confirmed the death of the man who is also President Saddam Hussein's first cousin.</p> <p>Jackson said the body was found along with that of his bodyguard and the head of Iraqi intelligence services in Basra.</p>

I am so tried of these movie stars showing up only at slect death row hearings tokie williams etc. that is fine that they oppose the death penalty but they only show up to further their carreer and at big names in the news small cases they are no where to be found.Sounds like a bunch of phonies to me and what are we to base their opionons on ours for?