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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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German woman who belonged to IS jailed for allowing 5-year-old child slave to die of thirst in Iraq

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When leniency goes too far...

BERLIN (AP) — A Munich court on Tuesday sentenced a German woman who was a member of the Islamic State group to 14 years in prison for allowing a 5-year-old Yazidi girl she and her husband kept as a slave in Iraq to die of thirst in the sun. [Are we living on the same planet????? — DPN]

The decision replaced an earlier prison sentence of 10 years. 

A German appeals court had ordered a new sentencing hearing for the woman, who has been identified only as Jennifer W. in line with German privacy rules, after the country's Federal Court of Justice threw out an appeal by the defendant but partly approved an appeal by prosecutors. 

It overturned the sentence, though not the rest of the verdict, and sent the case back to the Munich state court for a new decision.

The Munich state court convicted the 32-year-old of, among other things, enslavement resulting in death, and accused her of acting out of contempt for human life, German news agency dpa reported.

The woman from Lohne in Lower Saxony had previously confessed to watching the girl die in the summer of 2015. The girl and her mother were enslaved by the woman and her then-husband in their home in Iraq, and the man had chained the child in the blazing midday sun to punish her.

Among other things, the court pointed to the behavior of the woman after the death of the child. She had held a gun to the mother’s head to force her to stop crying, dpa reported. 

The court also considered the serious psychological consequences for the mother, which she suffers to this day.

Jennifer W. was taken into custody while trying to renew her identity papers at the German Embassy in Ankara in 2016, and deported to Germany.

Her former husband, an Iraqi citizen who was identified only as Taha Al-J., was convicted by a Frankfurt court in November 2021 of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and bodily harm resulting in death. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Source: The Associated Press, Staff, August 30, 2023


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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: Germany
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