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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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Saudi Arabia executes 5 Yemenis, displays bodies

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Saudi Arabia executes 5 Yemenis, displays bodies
Darkness at noon...
Riyadh: Saudi Arabia on Tuesday executed five Yemenis and displayed their bodies in public for killing a national and forming a gang that committed robberies across several towns in the kingdom, the interior ministry said.

The five were executed in the southwestern town of Jizan, bringing the number of people executed in the kingdom this year to 46, according to an AFP tally.

A witness in Jizan told AFP that the five men were displayed in public near a university.

In a picture posted on Twitter (left), five men are seen hanging from a rope tied to their waists on a horizontal bar between two cranes. It was unclear if they were beheaded or shot.

The ministry said that Khaled, Adel and Qasim Saraa as well as Saif Ali Al Sahari and Khaled Showie Al Sahari had formed a gang which committed “several crimes in various regions in the kingdom and robbed stores.”

The five had killed Ahmad Haroubi, a Saudi, by beating him up and strangling him, it said.

In March, a Saudi firing squad executed seven men convicted of armed robbery in public despite last-minute appeals by rights groups that their lives be spared.

In 2012, the kingdom executed 76 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. The US-based Human Rights Watch put the number at 69.

Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery, homosexuality and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under Saudi Arabia’s strict version of sharia.

Source: Agence France-Presse, May 21, 2013
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