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Communist Vietnam's secret death penalty conveyor belt: How country trails only China and Iran for 'astonishing' number of executions

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Prisoners are dragged from their cells at 4am without warning to be given a lethal injection Vietnam's use of the death penalty has been thrust into the spotlight after a real estate tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to be executed in one of the biggest corruption cases in the country's history. Truong My Lan, a businesswoman who chaired a sprawling company that developed luxury apartments, hotels, offices and shopping malls, was arrested in 2022.

Aurora, Colo., movie theater gunman sentenced to 12 lifetimes in prison and another 3,318 years

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James Holmes ordered to serve life in prison without parole plus 3,318 years
James Holmes sentenced to life in prison
without parole plus 3,318 years
The gunman who shot and killed 12 people inside a packed Aurora, Colo., movie theater in 2012 was formally sentenced Wednesday morning to life in prison without parole.

In July, a jury found James Holmes guilty on each of the 165 charges he faced in the case, unanimously rejecting an argument made by his attorneys that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. 

But last month, the same jury said he should be sentenced to life imprisonment rather than death by lethal injection, a surprising decision considering that jurors had declined earlier opportunities to spare him a death sentence.

District Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. announced the sentence at a hearing Wednesday, ending a grueling, emotional trial that had stretched out for much of this year. 

As Samour had told the jurors before they deliberated on Holmes’s punishment, he was required to sentence the gunman to life in prison without parole if the jurors could not reach a unanimous decision.

But during Wednesday’s hearing, Samour made clear that he still wanted to give Holmes the most severe punishment allowed to him under the law to make it clear that Holmes will “never set foot in free society again.”


Source: The Washington Post, Mark Berman, August 26, 2015

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