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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.

When Reasonable Doubt Is Lethal

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Warren Lee Hill
It is unconstitutional to execute the mentally disabled. Warren Hill was almost certainly mentally disabled, but "almost certainly" was not good enough for the State of Georgia. So on Tuesday night, Georgia executed Hill for murdering his cellmate in 1990. The Supreme Court denied Hill’s petition to hear his case and refused to halt his execution, after a lengthy and hard-fought appeals process,with only Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor voting for a stay.

All seven medical experts who examined Hill—including the three experts appointed by the state—found him to be intellectually disabled. Hill’s lawyers claimed their client had “the emotional and cognitive ability of a young boy” and that his execution would violate the Eighth Amendment. The American Bar Association, the ACLU, the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, the Vatican, the European Union, and mental-health organizations sided with Hill during his four-year legal battle. Even the family of Hill’s victim and some jurors from his trial opposed his execution.

“This execution is an abomination,” Brian Kammer, Hill’s attorney, said in a statement. “Like the execution of Jerome Bowden in 1986, the memory of Mr. Hill’s illegal execution will live on as a moral stain on the people of this State and on the courts that allowed this to happen.”


Source: The Atlantic, Matt Ford, January 29, 2015

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