Death Penalty News

The Iranian authorities have sentenced to death four more people, including a woman, over protests in January, several rights groups said on April 14. Iran has already hanged seven people in connection with the protests, which activists say were quelled in a crackdown that left thousands dead and tens of thousands arrested. Rights groups accuse the Islamic republic of using the death penalty as a tool of repression to instil fear in society, and fear it will ramp up capital punishment in the wake of the war against Israel and the United States.

On 13 April 2026, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court stayed a death sentence awarded to three convicts in a case from Dakshina Kannada. A trial court had convicted them and sentenced them to death in October 2024 for rape and murder under the penal code and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012 . A death sentence awarded by a trial court is not executable until it is confirmed by a High Court. On 6 February 2026, a Division Bench of the Karnataka High Court confirmed the trial court’s decision. The Supreme Court left the conviction of the appellants untouched and reopened the sentencing question on two grounds: the High Court loosely engaged with the mitigation question in a single paragraph, and a third form of punishment—viewed as an alternative between ordinary life imprisonment and death penalty—was unconsidered.

Post Oct 7th, 2023, first came the words of outrage followed by encouragement and sympathy. Numerous heads of state flew in to tour Gaza-adjacent Israeli communities, where 1,200 men women and children were slaughtered, raped, beheaded, and taken hostage by Hamas bloodthirsty terrorists. Then an eerie silence as Hamas supporters, extreme haters of Israel, al Jazeera and a tsunami of social media bots, flipped the script, embedding Israel as the evil doer. Their crime? Counterattacking against Hamas and its 500 km underground city of terror. UN agencies, pious international courts, special rapporteurs, human rights NGOs, BBC-led hit pieces and social media bots and influencers, demonized a traumatized Jewish nation and taught the world to spell Zionist=N-A-Z-I.

TEHRAN — Iranian authorities have formalized the use of capital punishment for individuals utilizing Starlink satellite internet terminals as a nationwide communications blackout enters its seventh week. According to data from cybersecurity monitor NetBlocks, the state-imposed disruption has now surpassed 1,080 hours of near-total digital isolation, marking the most extensive connectivity shutdown in the country’s history.

Responding to the sentencing of nine police officers to death by the First Additional District and Sessions Court in Madurai for the 2020 custodial torture and killing of P. Jayaraj and P. Bennix, Aakar Patel, Amnesty International India’s Chair of Board, said:  “The court verdict marks a rare moment of accountability in India’s long struggle against police torture. The verdict acknowledges the brutality of a crime that shocked the nation. But this death penalty sentence is not justice – it is a deflection from the deeper reforms urgently required to ensure police oversight and accountability. Punishing a human rights violation with another does not end violence; it just perpetuates it.

The 18th Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran, published by Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) and Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM), reveals an unprecedented escalation in the use of the death penalty by the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2025.  At least 1,639 people were executed, marking the highest number of recorded executions since 1989 and a dramatic 68% increase compared to 2024, when 975 executions were recorded. This is the continuation of the execution surge that began after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” nationwide protests in 2022, illustrating the authorities’ continued reliance on the death penalty as a tool to instil fear and deter new protests.

Adding a compensation clause to the Road Transport Act will help victims avoid a long-drawn-out civil suit, minister says There is no necessity to introduce the death penalty into the Road Transport Act 1987 for driving under the influence, according to Malaysian Transport Minister Anthony Loke. Loke said existing laws were sufficient to prosecute serious offences and that offenders could still be charged under Section 302 of the Penal Code for murder, where applicable.

Saudi authorities executed seven people who had been convicted of drug trafficking in a single day, state media says. The Saudi Press Agency says five Saudis and two Jordanians were found guilty of trafficking amphetamine pills into the kingdom. “The death penalty was carried out as a discretionary punishment against the perpetrators,” the agency reports, adding that the executions took place on Sunday in the Riyadh region. Since the beginning of 2026, Riyadh has executed 38 people in drug-related cases, the majority of the 61 executions carried out, according to an AFP tally based on official data.

Shelby Nealy will be executed by the state for bludgeoning his wife’s family to death in 2018, a judge decided Friday. During a two-week sentencing trial in July, jurors heard how Nealy, 32, ended a volatile relationship with his second wife by killing her, then murdered her parents and brother a year later in an effort to never be caught. He pleaded guilty to the crimes in 2023. On July 25, the jury of three men and nine women deliberated for about two hours and voted 11-1 that Nealy should be sentenced to death. He stared straight ahead as the verdict was read.

Jason Jones will join 11 men on Nebraska’s death row after a three-judge panel unanimously decided on Friday that he should be sentenced to death for a quadruple murder in 2022 that stunned the small town of Laurel. District Court Judge Bryan Meismer, who presided over Jones’ trial, read from the sentencing memorandum at the Cedar County Courthouse on Friday afternoon. The other two judges on the panel, Timothy Burns of Douglas County and Patrick Heng of Red Willow County, sat on either side of Meismer.

For weeks, Isaiah Mosley shuffled into the morning chaos of the Miami criminal courthouse. He would head upstairs and find his place in the jury box of courtroom 4-1, sitting feet away from the man convicted of leaving a 5-year-old girl to be eaten by alligators in the dark, mucky waters of the Everglades.  Mosley, alongside 11 other jurors, faced a daunting task: Whether Harrel Franklin Braddy, who kidnapped the girl and her mother nearly three decades ago, should get life or death for his heinous crime. 

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche has directed federal prosecutors in Los Angeles to seek the death penalty against three members of a transnational street gang charged with murdering a former gang member who was cooperating with law enforcement on a racketeering and methamphetamine trafficking case, officials announced Thursday. In a letter to First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli on Wednesday, Blanche told prosecutors in the Central District of California they are “authorized and directed” to seek the death penalty against Dennis Anaya Urias, 27, Grevil Zelaya Santiago, 26, and Roberto Carlos Aguilar, 31. All are from South Los Angeles.

The Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Thursday that Clarence Jordan’s punishment was unconstitutional  A death sentence handed down by a Harris County jury in 1978 was overturned Thursday by the Court of Criminal Appeals.  Clarence Jordan, 70, has been on Texas Death Row for almost 50 years, serving out one of the longest death sentences in the nation while suffering from intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia, his attorney told the Houston Press. 

DeCarlos Brown, accused of stabbing Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train, has been found mentally unfit for trial, stalling death penalty proceedings. DeCarlos Brown Jr., accused of fatally stabbing 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail train in August 2025, has been found mentally incapable of standing trial, according to a court motion filed 7 April in Mecklenburg Superior Court. A 29 December 2025 report from Central Regional Hospital, a state psychiatric facility in Granville County, concluded that Brown was "incapable to proceed to trial," according to the motion filed by his attorney, Daniel Roberts. The evaluation was ordered after Brown's defense raised concerns about his mental state.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said Tuesday it won't consider another man's confession as a reason to pause a scheduled lethal injection in three weeks. James Broadnax was convicted of murdering two Christian music producers in Garland, but his cousin, Demarius Cummings, recently confessed that he was the shooter. University of Texas School of Law Capital Punishment Clinic professor Jim Marcus said the appeals court acts as a gatekeeper for cases meeting criteria to get back in court.

FORT WORTH, Texas — Tanner Lynn Horner, a former contract delivery driver for FedEx, pleaded guilty Tuesday to the 2022 capital murder and aggravated kidnapping of 7-year-old Athena Strand, a move that abruptly shifted the proceedings into a high-stakes punishment phase where jurors will decide between life imprisonment and the death penalty. Horner, 34, entered the plea in a Tarrant County courtroom as his trial was set to begin. The case was moved to Fort Worth from neighboring Wise County last year after defense attorneys argued that pretrial publicity would prevent a fair trial in the community where the girl disappeared.

Mohsen Eslamkhah, a 20-year-old Kurdish citizen who was arrested in connection with the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in Bukan, has been sentenced to death on charges of “enmity against God” (moharebeh) by Branch One of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Mahabad. Eslamkhah is currently held in Bukan Prison alongside two other political prisoners facing execution: Rauf Sheikh-Maroufi and Mohammad Faraji. An informed source who spoke to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) said: “Mohsen Eslamkhah was identified by security forces in 2022 due to his participation in the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Bukan. His family home was raided several times by these forces in an attempt to arrest him. He was 16 years old at the time and, due to pressure from security bodies and fear of arrest, he was forced to leave Iran and lived in the Kurdistan Region [of Iraq] until 2025.”

Case termed ‘rarest of rare’ In a landmark verdict, a court in Tamil Nadu on 6 April sentenced nine police personnel to death in the 2020 Sathankulam custodial deaths case, holding them guilty of the brutal killing of a father-son duo. First Additional District and Sessions Judge G Muthukumaran classified the case as the “rarest of rare”, observing that those entrusted with protecting citizens had committed a crime that “shook the collective conscience of society”. The court awarded capital punishment to all nine convicted personnel for the murder of P Jayaraj and his son J Bennix.

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); 6 April 2026: State media reported the execution of Ali Fahim, a 23-year-old protester arrested at the 8 January protests in Tehran. He is the fourth defendant in the case to be hanged in five days. His co-defendants Abolfazl Salehi Siavashani, Shahab Zohdi and Yaser Rajaifar are at grave and imminent risk of execution. Condemning Ali Fahim’s execution in the strongest terms, IHRNGO calls on the international community and civil society organisations to react strongly to the daily execution of political prisoners in Iran.