Death Penalty News

Jakarta. The Indonesian government has agreed to transfer French citizen Serge Areski Atlaoui, who is on death row for a drug conviction, back to his home country on compassionate grounds, a senior official announced on Friday. Atlaoui, who has been diagnosed with cancer, requested to undergo medical treatment in France. The transfer is scheduled for February 4. "He is now in poor health and requires serious medical treatment," said Yusril Ihza Mahendra, Coordinating Minister for Legal, Immigration, Human Rights, and Correctional Affairs.

Activists delivered a petition to Texas Governor Rick Perry on Friday with more than 100,000 signatures seeking the release of a death row inmate they say is terminally ill and only has weeks to live. The governor's office was not immediately available to comment on the petition launched by religious groups and activists including the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Max Soffar, convicted in the July 1980 slaying of 3 people at a Houston bowling alley. "This is the time for mercy - let's not let him fall through the cracks of justice; let's not let him die behind bars," the petition said. It is seeking clemency so that he can die at home. Soffar's case has been the focus of anti-death penalty campaigners for years. They have said he is an innocent man largely convicted on the basis of a confession signed after days of "oppressive interrogation" and without clear objective evidence pointing to his guilt. The state has mai...

Max Soffar Max Soffar has a long history of self-medicating. When he was 4, his parents found him passed out next to their car, gas cap in hand. Since birth, Max's brain has been damaged. That damage has been made worse by years of physical and mental abuse by adoptive parents and staff at mental institutions.  At the age of 24 in 1980, Max had the mentality of an 11-year-old. His brain was "fried," according to police, who knew him as a dropout and wannabe police informant. Officers arrested Max on a stolen motorcycle after an infamous robbery-murder at a Houston bowling alley that year.  The police locked Max in a small room and subjected him to a 3-day marathon of aggressive, unrecorded interrogation - marked by prodding, pressure, and lies - which culminated in a false confession, typed by police, that the officers convinced a worn down Max to sign.  Max has spent the last 34 years on death row in Texas, but he won't be alive long enough to be exe...