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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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Death row Briton to launch last-ditch appeal

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A British grandmother on death row is to lodge a last-ditch appeal with the US Supreme Court in a bid to save her life.

Linda Carty (left) was convicted in 2002 over the abduction and murder of a 25-year-old woman after a trial which campaigners say was "catastrophically flawed".

A video plea on behalf of the 51-year-old will be submitted to the Supreme Court alongside the appeal from her legal team and an brief from the British Government. If it fails, Carty could be executed within months.

Carty was convicted over the kidnap and murder of Joana Rodriguez, who was seized alongside her four-day-old son by three men on 16 May 2001.

The baby was later found unharmed in a car, but Rodriguez was killed, having suffocated with duct-tape over her mouth and a plastic bag placed around her head.

Prosecutors argued that the men were hired by Carty who, unable to get pregnant herself, intended to "cut the baby out" of the woman and pass it off as her own.

Carty has always maintained that she was framed over the murder by the men who carried out the abduction due to her earlier work as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency.

She had been employed by the authorities to befriend suspected drug dealers in a bid to obtain information from them.

Source: YahooNews, Feb. 26, 2010
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