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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.

Missouri death row prisoner Reggie Clemons appeals for freedom based on new evidence

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The Missouri death row prisoner Reggie Clemons will make one final appeal on Monday at a special hearing that marks the last glimmer of hope that his life might be spared.

Clemons and his defence lawyer, alongside the opposing legal team of the state of Missouri, will come before judge Michael Manners in his court room in Independence, Missouri, to give their final oral arguments in what amounts to one last role of the dice for Clemons. The prisoner has been on death row for 20 years for the double murder of two sisters who were raped and thrown off the Chain of Rocks bridge over the Mississippi in April 1991.

Clemons, 41, has consistently claimed innocence. In the course of a three-hour interview with the Guardian, filmed in prison, he said: "I know, and God knows I'm not a rapist. I know I'm not a murderer or a killer. I know I didn't do any of these things. I know I'm innocent."

At Monday's final hearing, the onus will be on Clemons as the petitioner to persuade the judge that as a result of new evidence that has come to light since his 1993 trial his death sentence is no longer sound.

In final written arguments prepared for the judge, Clemons's lawyer, New York attorney Joshua Levine, has concentrated on three peculiarities of the case that he argues should lead to a retrial, or at least commutation to a life sentence. First, the defence has presented new evidence that an all-important "confession" that Clemons made to police shortly after the Kerry sisters fell to their deaths in April 1991 was beaten out of him.

Yet Clemons retracted the statement the day after he made it, complaining it had been forced from him through police brutality. Since the previous hearing in front of Manners last September, new testimony has been deposed that has never been heard before from a bail investigator called Warren Weeks who interviewed Clemons just a few hours after his police questioning.

Weeks swore under oath that he had seen a "golf-ball-sized welt" and "a rather large bump on the side of his face" that he had interpreted to be a result of the interrogation.


Source: The Guardian, March 18, 2013
Location: Missouri
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