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Communist Vietnam's secret death penalty conveyor belt: How country trails only China and Iran for 'astonishing' number of executions

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Prisoners are dragged from their cells at 4am without warning to be given a lethal injection Vietnam's use of the death penalty has been thrust into the spotlight after a real estate tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to be executed in one of the biggest corruption cases in the country's history. Truong My Lan, a businesswoman who chaired a sprawling company that developed luxury apartments, hotels, offices and shopping malls, was arrested in 2022.

Ohio death-row inmate Billy Sowell dies of natural causes

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The state says a condemned Ohio inmate has died of natural causes after more than a year at a prison medical facility.

Billy Sowell was sentenced to death for shooting 36-year-old Calvert Graham in Graham’s apartment in Cincinnati in 1983.

Ohio prisons spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said Sowell died of multiple organ failure yesterday at 5:45 a.m. at the Franklin Medical Center in Columbus, where he’d been treated for health problems since February 2011.

Although the 75-year-old Sowell was still considered a death row inmate, 2 federal courts had ruled in favor of overturning his sentence.

The state says it stopped appeals because of Sowell’s illness.

Inmates dying of natural causes on death row are rare but not unheard of, with 6 such deaths in Ohio in the past 6 years.

Source: Columbus Dispatch, March 28, 2012
Location: Ohio, USA
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