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So the South’s White Terror Will Never Be Forgotten

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The carnivals of death where African-American men, women and children were hanged, burned and dismembered as cheering crowds of whites looked on were the cornerstone of white supremacist rule in the Jim Crow-era South. These bloody spectacles terrified black communities into submission and showed whites that there would be no price to pay for murdering black people who asserted the right to vote, competed with whites in business — or so much as brushed against a white person on the sidewalk.
The lynching belt states looked away from this history, even as they developed now-popular tourism programs that attract visitors to churches, schools, courthouses and other landmarks associated with the civil rights movement. The long-neglected chapter of this story becomes breathtakingly visible on Thursday in Montgomery, Ala., where the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative will inaugurate two institutions focused on racial-terror lynching as the practice manifested itself between the late 19th a…

Indonesian court sentences 4 drug smugglers to death

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Meth bust by Indonesian police (file photo)
Meth bust by Indonesian police (file photo)
The Medan District Court on Wednesday decided on capital punishment for 4 Indonesians convicted of smuggling 270 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine from Malaysia to North Sumatra.

The 4 defendants are businessmen Ayau and Daud, alias Athiam, from Bengkalis, Riau, Lukmansyah, a security guard in Dumai, Riau, and Jimmy Syahputra, a resident of Deli Serdang, North Sumatra.

The panel of judges found that they violated the Narcotics Law, which carries a maximum penalty of death for traffickers.

"The defendants are proven to have conspired to traffic narcotics. With all the evidence, the judges rejected their defence and ordered the death penalty," said presiding judge Asmar while reading out the verdict on Wednesday night.

In October, the National Narcotics Agency (BNN), along with the Dumai Customs Office, foiled the smuggling in Medan, North Sumatra.

Almost 300 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine, locally known as shabu-shabu, were packaged in 45 boxes.

The value of the substance is estimated to be Rp 500 billion, with the average price of meth in Indonesia Rp 2 billion per kilogram.

Indonesia is currently one of the main markets for meth trafficking in Asia. A number of smuggling attempts in large amounts have been successfully foiled by the authorities.

President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has implemented a tough drug policy by ordering executions of drug traffickers since he took office in 2014.

The government is currently preparing for a 3rd round of executions of 18 inmates, despite condemnation from human rights activists.

Asmar said the syndicate transported the meth from China to Malaysia and finally to Medan, North Sumatra.

Daud first met a person, identified as Lau Lai alias Aan alias Jecky who is still at large, at the CK Malaka Hotel in Malaysia in August.

They later plotted to smuggle the drugs to Medan. Lau Lai asked Daud to find a receiver and a warehouse to keep the meth in Medan.

Daud later contacted Ayau and Irwan Toni, also still at large, to find the meth storage place in Medan.

Daud also contacted Jimmy and transferred Rp 55 million to the latter's account to purchase a car to unload and transport the large amount of meth from Dumai port, Riau, to Medan.

The court also revealed that in September Irwan contacted Lukmansyah to tell him that the meth packages were on their way to Medan. It was at this time that the information was leaked to the custom officials in Dumai.

The meth arrived at Dumai in October and was initially to be kept in a water tank at the Jade Square warehouse complex on Jl. Yos Sudarso, Medan.

Authorities raided the warehouse a day after the meth arrived and arrested Jimmy and seized the meth packages.

The lawyer of the 4 defendants, Nurwadi Aco, said he would appeal the verdict.

"Several facts are still in dispute," he said after the trial.

Source: The Jakarta Post, June 23, 2016

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Location: Indonesia

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Texas executes Erick Davila

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Texas has executed a 31-year-old prisoner condemned for killing a 5-year-old girl and her grandmother in a gang-related shooting at a child's birthday party in Fort Worth a decade ago.
Erick Davila received lethal injection Wednesday evening for using a semi-automatic rifle to spray bullets at about 20 people — more than a dozen of them children.

Minutes before his scheduled 6 p.m. death, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal, and he was strapped to a gurney in a mint green room, where he spoke his final words as Stevenson and other family members of the victim watched through a glass pane.

“Yes, I would like to say nephew, it burns, huh," he said. "You know, I might have lost the fight, but I’m still a soldier. I still love you all. To my supporters and family, y’all hold it down. Ten Toes down right. That’s all.”

He was then injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital and was pronounced dead at 6:31 p.m.

Davila fought his sentence to the end, maintaining t…
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Warden Describes Life on Texas Death Row in Delacruz Testimony

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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…
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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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Alabama executes Walter Moody

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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…
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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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Texas death row inmate slated for execution Wednesday denied clemency

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A Fort Worth man on Texas death row was denied clemency and a late-stage federal appeal on Monday, barely 48 hours before he is scheduled for execution in the Huntsville death chamber.
Erick Davila was convicted of killing a rival gang member's mother and a 5-year-old girl at a Hannah Montana-themed children's birthday party in 2008.
He was sentenced to death in 2009 but his lawyers have since argued that Annette and Queshawn Stevenson were not his intended victims, according to court filings. Instead, attorney Seth Kretzer alleged that Davila was high at the time of the slayings, and also that he only meant to one person, rival gang member Jerry Stevenson. Killing one person is not necessarily a death-eligible crime.
"The jury never learned that at the time of the shooting Davila was heavily intoxicated, likely to the degree that it would have rendered him temporarily insane," Kretzer wrote in a court filing earlier this month.
Kretzer said prosecutors of withheld …
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Number of Beheadings in Saudi Arabia Rises by 70%

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Amid mounting criticism of Saudi Arabia over its human rights record, a new report by a nonprofit organization shows that the number of beheadings in the kingdom during the 1st quarter of 2018 rose by over 70 % compared to the same period last year.
In its latest report published Saturday, the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights (ESOHR) said executions by the Saudi government in the 1st quarter of 2018 increased by 72% compared to the corresponding period last year.
According to the report, a number of foreign nationals also face capital punishment in Saudi Arabia.
The report came against a backdrop of widespread criticism of the kingdom over its terrible human rights record, including the censorship of free speech, indiscriminate incarceration of citizens with no due process, or the lack of basic freedoms for women and girls.
Although the Riyadh government does not disclose any official statistics for people on death row, ESOHR has confirmed that 42 people are facing immine…
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California has over 700 people on death row and executions could begin soon

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California is often viewed as the center of progressive politics in the United States. It has some of the strongest environmental regulations in the country, the strongest pesticide regulations and along with Connecticut the strongest gun control measures. California's legislature is already working to reinstate the net neutrality measures recently dumped by the Federal Communications Commission, and many cities have spent the last 18 months actively resisting the Trump administration's siege on undocumented immigrants.
Yet California also has more than twice as many people on death row as the next highest state - 746, compared with Florida's 347. That is the largest population of inmates awaiting execution in the entire Western Hemisphere and two-thirds of the total number of people known to have been executed by their governments worldwide in 2016.
Even a careful observer of the Golden State can be forgiven for not knowing these figures. The state has executed only 13 p…
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6 North Koreans executed by firing squad after trying to smuggle out nation's phonebook

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6 North Koreans were executed by firing squad after trying to smuggle out the nation's phonebook, it has emerged.
The residents from the capital Pyongyang were executed at the end of last year on the charge of treason for attempting to leak the contents of a directory to the outside world.
Their relatives were booted out of the city and exiled in the countryside. North Korea's phonebook is considered a secret document.
It contains the phone numbers of factories and companies, managers, party chairmen and other high-ranking officials and office numbers and can sell for up to around 5,700 pounds in China.
'The authorities relayed the message to legal organisations through lecture materials stating that, 'At the end of last year, 6 Pyongyang residents who attempted to distribute a phonebook outside of the country were executed.'
'The point was emphasised that those who commit such acts can be punished at any moment,' a high-ranking source in the capital told …
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Georgia: Judge rejects condemned inmate's argument for resentencing

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A judge on Friday declined to hold a new sentencing for a condemned Georgia inmate who argued he should be resentenced because he wouldn't get the death penalty if he were sentenced today.
Robert Earl Butts Jr., 40, is scheduled to die May 3. He and 41-year-old Marion Wilson Jr. were convicted and sentenced to death in the March 1996 slaying of Donovan Corey Parks in central Georgia.
Butts' lawyers argued in a court filing earlier this week that he should have a new sentencing.
The murder for which Butts and Wilson were sentenced had a single victim. There was just one aggravating factor, a circumstance that increases the severity of a crime and increases the possible sentence. According to sentencing data obtained and analyzed by Butts' lawyers, no one has been sentenced to death for a murder with one victim and one aggravating factor in over a decade.
That fact, they argue, "raises a threshold inference that Butts' death sentence is grossly disproportionate,&qu…
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