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

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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…

Mary Jane Veloso: what happened to the woman who escaped execution in Indonesia?

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Mary Jane Veloso
Mary Jane Veloso
Filipina who was temporarily spared at 11th hour, as the Bali Nine pair and six others were killed, remains on death row amid uncertain future

A woman who was temporarily spared death by firing squad last year remains on death row in Indonesia with her life precariously wagered on an slow-moving court case.

Mary Jane Veloso won sympathy in her home country of the Philippines, as well as within Indonesia, after she said she was duped into smuggling drugs. And in a shock turnaround, Indonesian president Joko Widodo – known as Jokowi – delayed her killing with a temporary reprieve just hours before she was due to be executed in April 2015.

Indonesia shot dead eight others that night, including two Australians, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, who fought a years-long campaign for clemency and were part of the Bali Nine heroin-smuggling ring. Four Nigerians, a Brazilian and an Indonesian were also killed.

Sparing the domestic worker and mother-of-two was unexpected and several Filipino newspapers wrongly reported on their front pages the next day that she had been killed. The Philippine Daily Inquirer ran the headline: “Death came before Dawn.”

But in the year that has passed, the outburst of joy and relief has given way to a lengthy human trafficking trial in the Philippines and no guarantees that Veloso will be taken off death row even if she can prove she was tricked.

Migrante International, a group that promotes the rights of overseas Filipino workers, says Veloso’s life depends of the speedy trial and conviction of her accused traffickers, Maria Kristina Sergio and Julius Lacanilao.

But the group complains that the defence has employed delaying tactics by filing motion after motion to keep the case in the early stages of legal proceedings.

“Mary Jane is still facing the threat of execution,” Migrante International vice-chair Rina Anastacio told the Guardian. “Unfortunately the trial is going very slowly.”

Hours before Veloso was due to be killed last year, Sergio handed herself in to police in Manila, and the Philippines president, Benigno Aquino, made an appeal to his Indonesian counterpart on the basis that Veloso would be needed as a witness in the case against her alleged recruiter.

Key to the last-minute reprieve was that the Philippines invoked a regional treaty (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations mutual legal assistance treaty, or Asean MLAT) signed to fight transnational crimes in south-east Asia, which obliges Indonesia to help provide Veloso as a witness to the human trafficking court case.

Filipino officials have travelled to Indonesia to discuss the case that they hope can save her life.

Activists fear that Veloso, who has already been convicted in an Indonesian court, could yet be executed if the trial is overly delayed, as she is being kept alive only to give testimony. Her supporters want the Indonesian government to allow Veloso to fly home so she can testify in person in court.

They hope a swift conviction in the Philippines will show that Veloso was a pawn and might persuade Indonesia to spare her life.

The plan is far from certain. Indonesian officials suggest executions could restart again this year after a short hiatus, and the attorney general said in January the country was “ready” to execute Veloso.

Attorney general Prasetyo told Rappler: “We will look at the verdict, perhaps the verdict can be new evidence to appeal for clemency from the president. But surely Mary Jane will not be free from punishment. The fact is that she smuggled drugs to Indonesia.”

Yohanes Sulaiman, a lecturer and political analyst at Indonesia’s Universitas Jenderal Achmad Yan, said Veloso’s story resonated with Indonesians who, like Filipinos, have a large emigrant population, some of whom are exploited. “Lots of people here in Indonesia were against her execution because her story was so close to home … it’s not unlike Indonesians in the Middle East.”


Source: The Guardian, Oliver Holmes, April 28, 2016

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Location: Indonesia

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Vengeful Alabama to Kill 83-Year-Old Man

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Barring intervention by courts or its governor, Alabama will kill an 83-year-old man on April 19; long-incarcerated for the 1989 mail-bomb killings of United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Judge Robert S. Vance and civil rights attorney Robert E. Robinson, Walter Moody, Jr.’s wizened, withered body, will, three decades after his crimes, be strapped to a gurney, pricked with a sharp needle (possibly many, many times), and pumped full of chemicals until he is dead.
Why? Other than the reactionary, regressive idea of “retribution” – whose flawed moral underpinning is interchangeable with bloodthirsty, wild, wild West revenge – how will justice be served? And, for whom?
The premeditated, state-sponsored senicide of the most senior of senior citizens on Alabama’s death row won’t make anyone – not anyone in Alabama, and not anyone anywhere in the United States or the world – safer. As I have written elsewhere, the myth that capital punishment – in this instance for an old…
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20 Minutes to Death: Record of 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 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…
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Alabama set to execute 83-year-old for pipe bomb murders

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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…
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Texas: Why This Judge Dreads Execution Day

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“I wondered whether the system I have been a part of for so long was, simply, barbaric.”
The execution was set for 6 p.m. I knew because I set the date and time myself.
With a little more than an hour to go, I sat alone by the phone in my office. More than three decades had passed since the defendant was first convicted of murdering a police officer. I had been the judge at his final trial, and now there was a chance I’d be called on to spare his life.
Higher courts and the Texas governor had already denied the man’s last-ditch appeals. His lawyers had tried to broker a deal with prosecutors to keep him alive, but that had failed, too. Now he was down to his last shot: The defense could present some new argument or evidence to convince me to intervene and stop the execution. If they did, I would have to make a life-or-death decision with essentially no time for research or discussion.
I waited. As the minutes passed, I felt a familiar sense of unease. In the years since I’d presided o…
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California death row inmate to be freed; no retrial planned

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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…
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Iran: Execution Of A Sports Coach In Hamadan

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

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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…
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Middle East tops death penalty list with 'gruesome tally' of executions

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Iran carried out more than 1/2 of all recorded executions in 2017, a new report from Amnesty International revealed on Thursday. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are responsible for carrying out 85 % of all reported death sentences worldwide, the report said.
The figures show that the Middle East and North Africa accounted for 847 of 933 reported death sentences carried out worldwide in 2017.
This was despite an overall decrease of 1 % in executions across the region against figures from 2016, the report said.
Figures for China, where thousands are thought to be executed every year, were not recorded.
The report also does not include figures for executions in Libya and Syria, where militant groups are thought to be responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings.
Lucy Wake, Amnesty International UK's government and political relations manager, told MEE: "Aside from China, the bulk of the world's executions are taking place in the Middle East, which sets an important chal…
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Jeff Sessions: It's OK with feds if Alabama executes judge's killer

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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…
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Iraq: French female Daesh member escapes death penalty, given life in jail

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Two Russian women, both holding children in their arms, were also sentenced to life in prison
Baghdad: Iraq on Tuesday sentenced a French woman to life in prison for belonging to Daesh, the latest in a series of court rulings since the country’s defeat of Daesh.
Djamila Boutoutaou, a 29-year-old of Algerian origin, told a Baghdad court that she had left France with her husband, a rapper.
She said she thought they were going on holiday but “when I arrived in Turkey I discovered that my husband was a terrorist”.
She said she was forced by her husband to join Daesh and live in the “caliphate” that Daesh proclaimed in 2014 straddling Syria and Iraq.
Her husband was killed near the former Daesh stronghold of Mosul, northern Iraq, and her son died in bombardment, Boutoutaou said.
Two Russian women, both holding children in their arms, were also sentenced to life in prison at the same hearing.
Iraq declared victory in December against Daesh, which at one point controlled a third of the count…
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