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Arkansas Supreme Court Decision Allows New DNA Testing in Case of the ​“West Memphis Three,” Convicted of Killing Three Children in 1993

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On April 18, 2024, the Arkansas Supreme Court decided 4-3 to reverse a 2022 lower court decision and allow genetic testing of crime scene evidence from the 1993 killing of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis. The three men convicted in 1994 for the killings were released in 2011 after taking an Alford plea, in which they maintained their innocence but plead guilty to the crime, in exchange for 18 years’ time served and 10 years of a suspended sentence. 

Japan: Family of executed Aum cult member to seek retrial

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Yoshihiro Inoue
TOKYO - The family of a former Aum Shinrikyo cult member plans to file for a retrial after he was executed in July for his role in the deadly 1995 Tokyo subway nerve gas attack and other crimes committed by the group, an informed source said.

RELATED: Japan executes last Aum Shinrikyo members on death row

Yoshihiro Inoue, 48, had filed for a retrial at the Tokyo High Court in March over the sarin attack that left 13 people dead and over 6,000 ill as well as the fatal confinement of a notary clerk the same year, after his death sentence was finalized in January 2010 for murder and other crimes in 10 cases.

Inoue, a close aide of cult leader Shoko Asahara, claimed the life sentence given to him by a lower court was appropriate as he was not involved in the death of the notary clerk, Kiyoshi Kariya, who died after being abducted and injected with an anesthetic by the group in February 1995.

But court procedures for his retrial filing were terminated in August after Inoue was executed on July 6 along with Asahara and five other members of the cult. Six other Aum members were executed later in the month.

Death row inmates who have filed for retrials are generally not executed in Japan. In the case of the former Aum members 10 of the 13 executed had filed for retrials.

Source: Japan Today, October 14, 2018


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Location: Japan
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