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Arkansas Supreme Court Decision Allows New DNA Testing in Case of the ​“West Memphis Three,” Convicted of Killing Three Children in 1993

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On April 18, 2024, the Arkansas Supreme Court decided 4-3 to reverse a 2022 lower court decision and allow genetic testing of crime scene evidence from the 1993 killing of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis. The three men convicted in 1994 for the killings were released in 2011 after taking an Alford plea, in which they maintained their innocence but plead guilty to the crime, in exchange for 18 years’ time served and 10 years of a suspended sentence. 

View to a kill: Indian hangman prepares for his first execution

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Pawan Kumar
Pawan Kumar, who learned his trade from his father and grandfather, is paid £30 a month as a registered executioner

The phone call will come some time in the next few weeks, and when it does Pawan Kumar will be ready.

"I have already done a test run, with a sack of sand the weight of the criminal. I have been waiting for this moment all my life," said the part-time clothes hawker in the northern Indian town of Meerut.

For while selling shirts from the back of a bicycle pays Kumar's rent, his vocation lies elsewhere: the 52-year-old is one of a handful of officially registered professional hangmen in India.

So far, however, he has never actually carried out an execution.

Last month, he was called to a jail in the city of Jaipur, 250 miles south of Meerut, to execute a condemned prisoner. At the last minute though, the man was reprieved.

In early September, Kumar was scheduled to hang Surinder Koli, one of India's most notorious murderers. But another last-minute decision meant the execution was postponed to allow further legal argument, though just until the end of next month.

"I wouldn't say I was disappointed. That would be a personal thing. I am just sorry that a man who has committed such heinous acts has not died yet," said Kumar.

In India, the death sentence is reserved for cases that are deemed "the rarest of the rare". In the past decade, there have been only three executions. The 350 convicted prisoners who theoretically face hanging include four men found guilty of the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi in 2012.


Source: The Guardian, September 18, 2014
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