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First Third Of 2024 In Saudi Arabia: Executions Rise By 189% And Portend Another Bloody Year. At Least 71 Currently Facing Execution.

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Since the beginning of 2024 until the end of April, the Ministry of Interior in Saudi Arabia announced the execution of 55 individuals. This figure constitutes a 189% increase compared to the executions in the first third of 2023, which witnessed 19 executions. The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights views these numbers as a clear indication of the Saudi government's continued approach towards executing and issuing death sentences, and that the promises made in recent years have become elusive.

Two Years After Aurora Theater Rampage, Colorado Braces for Trial

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James Holmes and attorney
DENVER — To choose a jury in the trial of the man charged with killing 12 people in a packed Colorado movie theater, court officials mailed notices to 9,000 people in suburban Arapahoe County, casting such a wide net that residents ran about a one-in-50 chance of being tapped as potential jurors. An uncle, a father, husbands and friends of people who work in the prosecutor’s office received jury summonses. So did 12 people who are slated to be prosecution witnesses.

The numbers speak to the huge scale of a murder trial whose preamble is set to begin this month, more than two and a half years after a gunman sprayed bullets into a crowd of people at a midnight screening of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises.” The defendant, James E. Holmes, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. After multiple delays, Colorado is bracing for the start of his trial, one of the most complicated and emotionally wrenching judicial proceedings the state has faced.

Mr. Holmes’s trial could sprawl over six to eight months, with jury selection alone lasting months. Scores of police officers, crime scene experts, witnesses, mental health experts and others are expected to present detailed testimony about the shooting in July 2012, the elaborate explosive booby traps that the police said Mr. Holmes left in his apartment and his mental state in the days and months before the shooting.

It will be a deluge of details for jurors, ultimately focused on two questions: Was Mr. Holmes, a former neuroscience graduate student, legally sane or insane when he killed a dozen people and wounded more than 50 others? And if he is found criminally culpable, does he deserve to be executed?

The district attorney, George Brauchler, is seeking the death penalty, and prosecutors have said that Mr. Holmes acted with calculation and deliberation as he amassed an arsenal and plotted his rampage. Mr. Holmes’s lawyers admit he was the gunman but argue he was in the grips of a psychotic episode the night of the shooting.


Source: The New York Times, January 13, 2015

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Location: Colorado, USA
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First Third Of 2024 In Saudi Arabia: Executions Rise By 189% And Portend Another Bloody Year. At Least 71 Currently Facing Execution.

Published
Image
Since the beginning of 2024 until the end of April, the Ministry of Interior in Saudi Arabia announced the execution of 55 individuals. This figure constitutes a 189% increase compared to the executions in the first third of 2023, which witnessed 19 executions. The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights views these numbers as a clear indication of the Saudi government's continued approach towards executing and issuing death sentences, and that the promises made in recent years have become elusive.
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20 Minutes to Death: Witness to the Last Execution in France

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The following document is a written record of convicted killer Hamida Djandoubi's last moments before he was guillotined in a Marseilles prison on September 10, 1977. This written record -- dated September 9 -- was written by a judge appointed to witness the execution. Djandoubi's execution was the last execution carried out in France before capital punishment was abolished in 1981. Then-President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who had voiced his "loathing for the death penalty" before he was elected to office, flatly turned down Djandoubi's appeal for clemency and chose to let "Justice run its course", as he did on two previous instances ( Christian Ranucci , executed on July 28, 1976 and Jérôme Carrein , executed on June 23, 1977). Hamida Djandoubi , a Tunisian national, was sentenced to death for killing his former lover, Elisabeth Bousquet. He was executed in Marseilles' Baumettes prison in September 1977. The following text was writ
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