Death Penalty News

The 37 death row prisoners in Taiwan who have exhausted their appeals may petition for extraordinary appeals to alter their sentencing following a ruling by the Constitutional Court on Friday that stated the death penalty was constitutional, but only for “exceptional” cases . In a case brought by the 37 prisoners, the Constitutional Court ruled that the death penalty was constitutional only for “the most serious” premeditated murders and premeditated crimes resulting in death.

In response to a ruling by the Constitutional Court of Taiwan that found the death penalty constitutional for offences such as murder, E-Ling Chiu, Director of Amnesty International Taiwan, said: “Today’s decision is a small step for human rights in Taiwan. The Constitutional Court has recognized the fundamental flaws of the death penalty and strengthened human rights protections for those on death row. Yet the death penalty remains on the books for several offences. This marks a start in Taiwan’s journey towards abolition, and we must ensure it does not stop here.

"In the year of 1996... A-Ma was robbed on a hot summer night and left for dead in the street," attorney Essen Lee (李宣毅) recounted the tragic incident surrounding the death of his grandmother at the Constitutional Court in April. Lee then recalled the fury he experienced as a 16-year-old high schooler after his grandmother, Lin Li-e (林李娥), died from head injuries. But rather than voice a desire for revenge, Lee, now in his 40s, instead urged the 12 justices in front of him to do away with the death penalty system for good.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the death sentence imposed upon Michael Madison, who killed three women over nine months at his East Cleveland apartment. The court’s seven justices unanimously affirmed Madison’s 2016 conviction and three separate sentences of death in what is likely the first of several appeals for the 39-year-old who is currently on death row at the Southern Ohio Correctional Institution. Justice R. Patrick DeWine authored the court’s 64-page opinion, which vacated Madison’s conviction on two charges of kidnapping and two charges of murder, but rejected Madison’s challenges to the fairness of his trial and the constitutionality of the death penalty and upheld the remaining convictions. A jury convicted Madison of strangling 18-year-old Shirrellda Terry, 28-year-old Shetisha Sheeley, and 38-year-old Angela Deskins between October 2012 and July 2013. Madison met the three women in separate incidents and lured them back to h...

Federal executions resumed last week following a 17-year hiatus, greenlighted by a spate of late-night divided orders from the U.S. Supreme Court that have sparked calls from dissenting justices to revisit the constitutionality of the death penalty. A 5-4 per curiam opinion Tuesday and a pair of similarly split orders Thursday allowed the country's first federal executions since 2003. The decisions sparked heated opposition from the court's liberal justices, who argued the executions would violate the inmates' Eighth Amendment rights against "cruel and unusual" punishment. Last summer, Attorney General William Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to restart federal executions and adopt new protocols for using a single-drug lethal injection. The two cases the high court addressed last week had both spent decades in the appellate courts and thus were first in line for the restart of executions, but the liberal justices noted there were still concer...

Justice Kurian Joseph speaks with angst on what Parliament and the judiciary should have done long ago. It has been unequivocally exposed by two Supreme Court rulings, that the death penalty in India has the rationality of the roulette table—it is a lethal lottery, and the only principle underpinning its continuation is bloodlust, which does not have any validity in law. Time and again, courts, even the Supreme Court has justified the imposition of the death penalty to snuff out the lives of criminals who are a menace to the society, and these now sound as clichés repeated ad nauseam. Only last week, a trial court in Delhi handed death penalty to a man convicted of participating in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and this decision was celebrated in many political circles. In such a scenario, it takes exemplary courage for a Supreme Court judge to hold that: “[T]he constitutional regulation of capital punishment attempted in Bachan Singh has failed to prevent death sentences from b...