FEATURED POST

'Express lane to death': Texas seeks approval to speed up death penalty appeals, execute more quickly

Published
Image
Texas is seeking to speed up executions with a renewed request to opt-in to a federal law that would shorten the legal process and limit appeals options for death-sentenced prisoners.
Defense attorneys worry it would lead to the execution of innocent people and - if it's applied retroactively, as Texas is requesting - it could potentially end ongoing appeals for a number of death row prisoners and make them eligible for execution dates.
"Opt-in would speed up the death penalty treadmill exponentially," said Kathryn Kase, an longtime defense attorney and former executive director of Texas Defender Services.
But a state attorney general spokeswoman framed the request to the Justice Department as a necessary way to avoid "stressful delays" and cut down on the "excessive costs" of lengthy federal court proceedings.
Robbie Kaplan, co-founder of the #TimesUp movement, says sweeping changes to laws in recent years have dissuaded attorneys from taking on har…

2 Baluchi Juvenile Offenders Executed in Iran

Published
Watching a public execution in Iran (file photo)
Watching a public execution in Iran (file photo)
According to close sources, 2 Baluchi prisoners were hanged to death at Yazd Central Prison on drug related charges.

The executions were reportedly carried out on Monday February 1. 

According to the Baloch Activists Campaign, the names of the prisoners are Khaled Kordi and Moslem Abarian. 

A relative of Khaled Kordi confirms to Iran Human Rights that both prisoners were under the age of 18 at the time of their arrests. 

Iranian authorities carried out the executions without informing the family members of the prisoners.

The 2 prisoners were reportedly riding a bus to work when they were arrested by Iranian authorities for drug offenses. 

The relative tells IHR that he believes Khaled and Moslem were innocent and the drugs were planted on them by someone else on the bus.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Iran is a signatory of, bans death sentences for offenses committed under the age of 18.

Source: Iran Human Rights, February 4, 2016


U.N. panel rebukes Iran for allowing sex, execution at 9 years old

Iran must reform its laws that allows girls as young as nine to be executed for crimes or forced into sexual relations with older husbands, a United Nations watchdog said on Thursday.

Iran continues to execute children and youth who committed a crime while under 18 years of age, in violation of international standards, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said, after its 18 independent experts reviewed Iran and 13 other countries.

"The age of criminal responsibility in Iran is discriminatory, it is lower and lower for girls, that is to say 9 lunar years while for boys it is 15. At 9 a girl can marry, even if the law sets the age at 13," said Hynd Ayoubi Idrissi, a panel member.

9 lunar years in the Iranian calendar is equivalent to 8 years and 9 months, a U.N. spokeswoman said.

The age for boys having criminal responsibility is 15, but the age for girls at 9 is "extremely low", Idrissi said.

The experts deplored that Iran "allows sexual intercourse with girls as young as 9 lunar years and that other forms of sexual abuse of even young children is not criminalised". They called for the age of sexual consent to be raised to 16.

Shaqayeq, 15, has been in prison for almost a year on the charge of armed
robbery from a Tehran chain store. Her death sentence has been issued and
she must reach 18 so the verdict can be carried out. Read more...
"The Committee is seriously concerned about the reports of increasing numbers of girls at the age of 10 years or younger who are subjected to child and forced marriages to much older men."

Girls suffered discrimination in the family, in the criminal justice system, in property rights, and elsewhere, while a legal obligation for girls to be subject to male guardianship is "incompatible" Tehran's treaty obligations, the panel said.

Iran made "positive progress" last year with a new Criminal Procedure Code that introduced juvenile courts, but nevertheless there were very serious concerns, the panel's chairman Benyam Mezmur told a news briefing.

"The age of criminal responsibility is very low and there are instances where the death penalty can apply for persons below the age of 18 or for offences they committed while below the age of 18," Mezmur said.

There were no figures for the number of executions of children or juvenile offenders, nor those imprisoned, due to secrecy surrounding the cases, he added.

Source: Reuters, February 4, 2016

Related articles:
- Report an error, an omission: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com - Follow us on Facebook and Twitter
Location: Iran

Most Viewed (Last 7 Days)

Iran: Execution Of A Sports Coach In Hamadan

Published
Image
The Iranian regime’s criminal judiciary hanged Bahman Varmazyar, a sports coach, in the central prison of Hamadan on Wednesday morning April 18. 
There was no private plaintiff in his dossier who was accused of armed robbery of a jewelry store.
Following the efforts of Bahman’s family to save their son from execution, the mullahs’ regime falsely reported on Tuesday that his death sentence had been stopped, but he was executed on Wednesday early morning.
Thousands of prisoners across the country are on death row. 
A Baluch prisoner named Abdul Malek Baluchi, at the central prison of Zahedan, was transferred to the solitary confinement on April 13 after serving six and a half years imprisonment, and is on the verge of execution.
The mullahs’ regime is executing the youth of the country under the excuse of theft and smuggling at a time that Khamenei and other ruling mullahs from various factions and the IRGC and other government organs are the biggest thieves in Iran's history that …
Read more

20 Minutes to Death: Record of the Last Execution in France

Published
Image
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 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 written on the night of the e…
Read more

Alabama executes Walter Moody

Published
Image
Walter Leroy Moody, 83, has been executed for the 1989 murder of a federal judge, the office of Gov. Kay Ivey confirms.
Moody was executed by lethal injection at Holman Correctional Facility. The execution was slated to happen nearly 30 years after Moody killed Robert S. Vance, a federal judge, with a bomb mailed to his home.
Earlier Thursday evening the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay of execution that temporarily halted Alabama's execution of Walter Leroy Moody, Jr. The order cleared the way for the execution to proceed.
The Supreme Court gave no explanation in its orders for the delay or why it later lifted the stay.
The execution began at 8:16 p.m. and according to prison officials his time of death was 8:42 p.m.
Moody kept his eyes closed and head still throughout the lethal injection execution and did not respond when asked by the warden whether he wanted to make a last statement.
Other than his chest moving during the early part of the execution and his jaw dropping sligh…
Read more

Warden Describes Life on Texas Death Row in Delacruz Testimony

Published
Image
Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison warden Stephen Bryant testified about living conditions on death row for jurors in the Isidro Delacruz trial on April 3, 2018.
Jurors unanimously sentenced Delacruz to death late Tuesday for the murder of 5-year-old Naiya Villegas on Sept. 2, 2014.
District Judge Ben Woodard told Delacruz his case was automatically appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal state court in Texas. He also informed Delacruz that he had appointed Hilary Sheard as his appellant attorney. Sheard will work with Delacruz's current court-appointed attorneys to begin the mandatory appeal of his capital murder conviction.
Sheard is a capital murder appellant qualified indigent defense attorney.
There are 229 male inmates on Texas death row. Isidro Delacruz will be the only inmate from Tom Green County.
Bryant is Senior Warden at the Pam Lychner State Prison in Humble, TX and spent 8 years working on Texas death row in the Allan B. Poluns…
Read more

Alabama set to execute 83-year-old for pipe bomb murders

Published
Image
Alabama on Thursday is set to execute its oldest death row inmate, an 83-year-old man convicted of mailing a deadly pipe bomb to a Birmingham judge in 1989.
Walter Moody was convicted of mailing the bomb that killed U.S. 11th Circuit Judge Robert Vance, 58, and seriously injured his wife, Helen, in the kitchen of their Mountain Brook home in December 1989. A similar bomb killed a Georgia civil rights attorney, Robert Robinson, at his Savannah law office the same month.
Moody was convicted in federal court in 1991 on 71 charges before an Alabama jury sentenced Moody to the death penalty in 1997.
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year declined to take up Moody's appeal, leading Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall to set an April 19 execution date. Moody on Thursday filed a stay of execution motion over jurisdiction issues.
Moody, who maintains his innocence in the case, has previously argued his federal sentence of 7 life terms plus 400 years should take precedent over the st…
Read more

California death row inmate to be freed; no retrial planned

Published
Image
A man who spent nearly 25 years on California's death row for raping and killing a toddler before his conviction was overturned won't be retried and could be freed within days, authorities said Tuesday.
Vicente Benavides Figueroa, 68, has remained in prison even though the state Supreme Court last month overturned his 1993 conviction on grounds that medical testimony at his trial was false.
Many doctors who testified to the cause of the girl's injuries recanted.
Kern County Dist. Atty. Lisa Green said Tuesday that prosecutors won't retry Benavides for first-degree murder and that without the medical testimony, it would be "difficult, if not impossible" to win a conviction for second-degree murder.
Even if Benavides was convicted on the lesser charge, he would be immediately eligible for parole, Green said.
Benavides will remain on death row at San Quentin prison until a court order to release him is submitted, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the Califor…
Read more

Aging death row: Is executing old or infirm inmates cruel?

Published
Image
Vernon Madison has spent decades on Alabama's death row. Now 67, Madison has suffered from strokes and dementia and his lawyers say he no longer recalls the crime that put him there: the 1985 killing of a police officer.
His speech is slurred, he suffers from confusion, and once thought he was near release and talked of moving to Florida, according to his lawyers. This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to review the claims by Madison's defense team that executing someone in his condition would violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
"Killing a fragile man suffering from dementia is unnecessary and cruel," Madison's attorney, Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, said in January, when the justices stayed Madison's execution the night he was to receive a lethal injection.
The U.S. death row population is aging, and that leaves courts increasingly likely to grapple with questions of when it becomes unconstitutionally cru…
Read more

Jeff Sessions: It's OK with feds if Alabama executes judge's killer

Published
Image
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday paved the way for this week's execution of death row inmate Walter Leroy Moody for the 1989 pipe bombing that killed a federal judge.
Last week Moody asked the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to stay his lethal injection execution, which is set for 6 p.m. Thursday at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. 
Moody recently argued the federal government which convicted him first on non-death penalty charges should have him in custody instead of the state.
The appeals court held a hearing Thursday but has not yet ruled.
Justice Department attorneys at that hearing and in written briefs have said that they have had an agreement since the 1990s to allow Moody to serve his sentence in Alabama. Then on Monday the Justice Department filed another brief on behalf of Sessions.
"Before the United States filed its amicus brief in this case and presented its position at oral argument, the Attorney General, Jefferson B. Sessions, III, infor…
Read more

Iran: Juvenile Offender Mohammad Reza Haddadi at Imminent Risk of Execution

Published
Image
Iran Human Rights (Apr 13, 2018): Mohammad Reza Haddadi, a juvenile offender who was arrested for murder during a robbery at the age of 15, is in danger of execution.
According to a close source, prison authorities have told Mohammad Reza Haddadi’s father that if they fail to obtain the consent of the plaintiff, their son might be executed very soon.
Mohammad Reza Haddadi, currently held at Adel Abad Prison in Shiraz, was born on March 17, 1988, and has been in jail since 2002. He is convicted of murder during a robbery along with three other people. 
Haddadi had pleaded guilty at first, but later he explained that his friends promised him some money to admit the charge because he was a minor and he wouldn’t receive a death penalty.
The juvenile offender’s lawyer, Hossein Ahmadi Niaz, told Iran Human Rights, “Last year, we were able to delay the execution. The Supreme Court has to apply Article 91 which states that if a juvenile confesses, it should be made clear to him that what wou…
Read more

A 10-Minute Trial, a Death Sentence: Iraqi Justice for ISIS Suspects

Published
Image
BAGHDAD — The 42-year-old housewife had two minutes to defend herself against charges of supporting the Islamic State.
Amina Hassan, a Turkish woman in a flowing black abaya, told the Iraqi judge that she and her family had entered Syria and Iraq illegally and lived in the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate for more than two years. But, she added: “I never took money from Islamic State. I brought my own money from Turkey.”
The whole trial lasted 10 minutes before the judge sentenced her to death by hanging.
Another accused Turkish woman entered the courtroom. Then another, and another.
Within two hours, 14 women had been tried, convicted and sentenced to die.
Iraq’s judicial assembly line has relentlessly churned out terrorism convictions since the battlefield victories over the Islamic State last year led to the capture of thousands of fighters, functionaries and family members. Authorities accuse them of helping to prop up the group’s vicious three-year rule over nearly a third of…
Read more