Death Penalty News

Alabama executes man who volunteered to die  Alabama executed an inmate Thursday evening after he volunteered to die for his crime – the 2010 slaying and rape of a Chilton County woman. In his last words, he apologized for the slaying.  James Osgood was executed at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, just miles from the Florida state line. He was put to death using the state’s 3-drug lethal injection method, after he declined to choose death by nitrogen gas when Alabama allowed that swap in 2018. 

The chief of the Shizuoka Prefectural Police on Monday offered an apology in person to Iwao Hakamada at his home in Shizuoka Prefecture following his acquittal in a retrial over a 1966 murder case last month. Takayoshi Tsuda visited the home of Hakamada, 88, in the city of Hamamatsu, bowing deeply for about two minutes. “I am sorry for the pain and burden I have caused you over the last 58 years, which cannot be expressed in words,” Tsuda said to Hakamada and his older sister Hideko, 91, who fought a decades-long legal battle on behalf of her brother.

Accused mass murderer Satoshi Uematsu will admit to killing 19 people and injuring 26 others at a care home for the disabled south of Tokyo when his trial begins in January next year, the 29-year-old has revealed to the Mainichi Shimbun in a series of interviews. Uematsu is currently in detention awaiting trial for the killings at the Tsukui Yamayuri En (Tsukui Lily Garden) care facility in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, in the predawn hours of July 26, 2016. According to the indictment, Uematsu broke a window to access the building to carry out the murders. The trial is set to start on Jan. 8, 2020 at the Yokohama District Court, which will conduct hearings on the case 26 times before handing down its judgment on March 16, if all goes to schedule. The Mainichi conducted its first interview with Uematsu on March 1, 2017, and went on to speak with the accused 25 more times, questioning him on his motives among other aspects of the murders. During a meeting on Nov. 25 this y...

Letters sent from prison by some of the executed AUM Shinrikyo doomsday cult members expressed regret for committing heinous crimes and a wish to atone. But their letters sent to civic groups also included those calling for abolition of capital punishment and requests for amnesty, showing their continued hopes to live even well over 10 years after their death sentences were finalized. Cult founder Shoko Asahara, who was convicted of numerous murders including the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, and 6 other former senior members were executed Friday . Among them, Kiyohide Hayakawa, 68, wrote words of remorse and showed discontent with Asahara in his letters. Hayakawa was responsible for the murder of lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto, who had been helping parents seeking to free their children of the cult's control, and his wife and 1-year-old son in 1989 and construction of nerve gas production facilities among other crimes. "My feelings of apol...

Anthony Ray Hinton was mowing the lawn at his mother's house in 1985 when Alabama police came to arrest him for 2 murders he did not commit. One took place when he was working the night shift at a Birmingham warehouse. Yet the state won a death sentence, based on 2 bullets it falsely claimed matched a gun found at his mother's home. In his powerful new memoir , "The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row," Hinton describes how racism and a system stacked against the poor were the driving forces behind his conviction. He also writes about the unique and unexpected bonds that can form on death row, and in particular about his relationship with Henry Hays, a former Klansman sentenced to death for a notorious lynching in 1981. Hays died in the electric chair in 1997 - 1 of 54 people executed in Alabama while Hinton was on death row. After almost 30 years, Hinton was finally exonerated in 2015, thanks to the Equal Justice Initiative , or EJI. On A...

Glenn Ford I have covered countless wrongful convictions in nearly two decades of work as a legal analyst but I don’t think that any case, any cause, ever touched me the way the Glenn Ford story did . Here was a man, an uneducated black man in the South, who was railroaded into a murder conviction and death sentence. He then was left to languish in solitary confinement for decades in one of the most despicable prisons on Earth , and then upon his belated release denied the compensation he was owed by the state of Louisiana, by some of the very officials who allowed his false conviction and sentence to fester for 30 years in the first place. Here was a man, a petty thief, whose long-ago trial was a travesty upon justice , whose lung cancer likely was left untreated, or mistreated, while he was in confinement, so much so that he lived only a few months as a free man before succumbing to the disease. In the end, adding insult to injury, Louisiana officials decided just to wait him out...

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has given his first public statement since carrying out the April 2013 terrorist attack. “I would like to now apologize to the victims, to the survivors,” he told a Boston court shortly before being formally sentenced to death for the bombing. “I want to ask forgiveness of Allah and his creation.” He added: “I am sorry for the lives I have taken, for the suffering that I have caused you, for the damage I have done – irreparable damage. “In case there is any doubt, I am guilty of this attack, along with my brother,” Tsarnaev said, standing at the defense table, referring to his older brother Tamerlan, killed during the manhunt following the bombing. To the victims attending the hearing at the US district court, he said: “I pray for your relief, for your healing.” Tsarnaev’s voice occasionally faltered as he spoke, and he left meaningful pauses after each apology to the victims of the 2013 bombi...

This photo of Glenn Ford was taken by his lawyer on March 11, 2014— Ford's first day of freedom after 30 years in prison—near St. Francisville, LA (Gary Clements) In a letter published Friday in the Shreveport Times, he pleads for compensation for the man exonerated last year but battling cancer. Marty Stroud was 33 years old when he fought to have Glenn Ford sentenced to death . Stroud was relatively new in his role as assistant district attorney in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, when Ford was indicted on a charge of 1st-degree murder for the 1983 killing of a watchmaker who ran a jewelry store in Shreveport. "The case took about a week and a half," Stroud recalls now. Ford, a black man before an all-white jury, was convicted and sentenced in 1984 . He remained on death row for three decades. It was the 1st and only death sentence Stroud won as a prosecutor. A.M. "Marty" Stroud III of Shreveport, La., wrote a letter of apology, pub...

Formal apology for colonial era mass killings comes ahead of state visit by the Dutch prime minister to Jakarta. The Dutch government has formally apologised for the mass killing of Indonesians during colonial occupation which ended in 1949. The Dutch ambassador in Indonesia, Tjeerd de Zwaan, officially presented the state's apology at a Jakarta ceremony on Thursday. "On behalf of the Dutch government I apologise for these excesses," De Zwaan said. The Netherlands had already apologised and paid compensation in certain specific cases, but this was the first general apology for atrocities carried out during the colonial era. "The Dutch government is aware that it bears a special responsibility in respect of Indonesian widows of victims of summary executions comparable to those carried out by Dutch troops in what was then Celebes (Sulawesi) and Rawa Gede (West Java)," De Zwaan added. Representatives of the victims welcomed the apology. ...

Hamza Kashgari March 8, 2012: An apostate Saudi journalist who is believed to be facing execution for insulting Prophet Mohammed has repented at court and this means reduced sentence. According to the Arabic language daily Sharq, Hamza Kashgari declared his repentance before the judge at the court in Riyadh. “Kashgari declared his repentance and expressed regret for offending the Prophet….this means he will face a light sentence,” the paper said, citing Kashgari relatives. The 23-year-old man, who works for Albilad Arabic language daily, fled to Malaysia last month after King Abdullah ordered his arrest on charges of apostasy in an article he wrote on Twitter. A few days later, he was deported to the Kingdom and arrested on arrival. Speculation mounted after his arrest that Kashgari could be executed following statements by a senior Saudi Muslim cleric that the writer would be sentenced to death for apostasy. Sheikh Saleh bin Fowzan Al Fowzan, a member of the 7-man supreme com...

Wilfred Laurier University researcher Judy Eaton, who was part of a panel discussion at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences conference in Toronto Wednesday, concluded in a study that nearly 1/3 of death row inmates made sincere apologies for their crimes. When Canadian researcher Judy Eaton set out to study the human yearning to apologize she turned her sights to Texas’s death row. In the final minutes before execution, condemned prisoners have no realistic hope of changing their fate and nothing practical to gain from telling victims they are sorry. Yet many do. In what is believed to be the first study of apologies in such a setting, Eaton, an associate professor of psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus, along with criminology student Anna Theuer, analyzed the last statements of 305 inmates executed by Texas between 1982 and 2007. Nearly a third spontaneously apologized for their crimes and showed signs of true repentance, such as taking responsibility...