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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.

Execution set for Alabama inmate convicted of killing teen

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Death Row Unit, Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama has set an execution date for an inmate sentenced to death for the 1995 fatal stabbing of a 15-year-old girl.

The Alabama Supreme Court set a Feb. 7 execution date for Dominique Ray.

Tiffany Harville disappeared from her Selma home on July 15, 1995. Her decomposing body was found in a field a month later.

Ray was convicted in 1999 after co-defendant Marcus Owden testified that Ray cut the girl’s throat after they picked her up from her home and raped her. Owden said they also took the girl’s purse which had $6 or $7 in it.

A judge sentenced Ray to die after jurors voted 11-1 to recommend that he receive the death penalty.

Months before his death penalty trial, Ray got a life sentence for the 1994 slaying of two brothers, 13-year-old Reinhard Mabins and his 18-year-old brother, Ernest Mabins.

Newspaper reports from the time say another man had been initially charged in Harville’s slaying, but those charges were dropped when Owden confessed to a role in all three killings. According to Owden’s confession, the Mabins brothers were shot in February 1994 after they refused to join a gang organized by Owden and Ray.

Owden was sentenced to life in prison.

Lawyers for Ray unsuccessfully sought to overturn the death sentence, arguing Ray’s defense lawyers were not told that Owden was suffering from schizophrenia at the time he implicated Ray and testified against him.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2016 upheld the death sentence, rejecting defense claims that Ray’s trial counsel had failed to present mitigating evidence regarding his traumatizing childhood, mental deficiencies and steroid abuse. The appellate court wrote that while it was “troubled by the paucity of counsel’s mitigation investigation, our confidence in the outcome of the sentencing is not undermined.”

Alabama last carried out an execution in April when 83-year-old Walter Leroy Moody was put to death for killing a federal judge with a mail bomb.

Source: dailyjournal.net, Kim Chandler, November 9, 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: Alabama, USA
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