Death Penalty News

Sections 365 and 365A of the colonial-era Penal Code still criminalises homosexuality. Penalties include up to 10 years in prison, though no one has been prosecuted yet under the said provisions. Yet, the discriminatory law fosters social stigma and creates a permissive context for abuse. Criminalisation also stands in the way of any meaningful measures for equal opportunities for LGBTQ communities in employment and social life, effectively entrenching discrimination against citizens based on sexual identity and orientation. The bitter irony is that some of the most powerful political bigwigs of the country were openly gay, others lived a lie, and either way, the public did not care about their private lives. Yet the dubious anomaly in the colonial-era law has persisted under successive governments. 

NAIROBI, June 22 (Reuters) - Mohamed Ali doesn't believe gay Africans exist. He says homosexuality is a Western invention imposed on the continent. Openly gay Africans are liars seeking visas to the West or money from rights groups, he adds. Ali is a member of Kenya's parliament. He is desperate to follow neighbour Uganda by unleashing a sweeping legislative crackdown on LGBT people. Even if he happened to be sick in intensive care, he would ask to be dragged to parliament to approve it. "I will ask them to take me to vote for that, to kick them out, kick LGBT people out of Kenya completely," he said. Weeks after Uganda enacted one of the most draconian anti-LGBT laws on Earth, Kenya could be poised to follow suit with a similarly formulated bill that punishes gay sex with prison or even death in some cases, according to a draft of the law and two lawmakers backing it in parliament.

For the ninth time, Richard Glossip had an execution date in Oklahoma—this one is set for May 18. He’s been up for execution enough times that conservative Christians in the state have learned about the mishandling of his case, and some are starting to question the death penalty itself. Last Friday, the US Supreme Court halted Glossip’s execution while it considers whether to hear procedural challenges. In what appears to be an unprecedented move, the state attorney general—whose office ordered the execution—joined Glossip in asking the court for a stay of his execution. If the court declines to take up his case, the pause immediately goes away, and the state can move forward with the execution. The case concerns the 1997 murder of motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Justin Sneed admitted to the murder, but in a plea deal to avoid the death penalty he testified that motel employee Richard Glossip hired him to carry out the attack. Sneed receiv...

Ralph Drollinger, a minister who leads the weekly Bible study group for Donald Trump’s cabinet, says coronavirus is God’s judgment on us. In particular he blames LGBT+ people, environmentalists and people with ‘depraved minds’.  However, the good news is that God doesn’t think America is as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah – yet. In the Old Testament of the Bible, God destroyed those towns with fire and brimstone. Their crimes apparently were either gay male sex – sodomy – or not being good hosts, depending on who you listen to. Writing in blog posts and a ‘Bible study guide’ online, Drollinger sets out his case. He says coronavirus is an example of God’s ‘sowing and reaping wrath’. Apparently divine anger splits into a top five. In at number one is ‘eternal wrath’, better known as Hell. Meanwhile ‘cataclysmic wrath’ is at number three. It can be seen in the Bible stories of Sodom and Gomorrah or the Great Flood, which inspired Noah’s Ark. By comparison,...

Tennessee has executed seven men in the past 18 months For a while as the hour of Nick Sutton’s electrocution approached on Thursday night, no one stood outside the prison to cheer on his execution. As a few dozen people gathered in their normal spot in a field outside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to hold a vigil beneath the flood lights — to remember the victims, to pray for Nick Sutton and to stand against state killings — the area designated for supporters of the death penalty was empty.  But that changed closer to 7 p.m. A lone man in a cowboy hat — a regular — arrived and took his place. He paced alone in the bitter cold, stopping occasionally to clap his gloved hands. In moments like this, it feels as if the death penalty continues not because of a mandate from the people of Tennessee, but as a result of their quiet consent. It is the law, yes, but one that many other states have left behind either by abolishing capital punishment or declining to ...

Alabama executed a convicted murderer on Thursday, a day after the state enacted a near-total ban on abortions — two actions on contentious social issues that often have people across the political spectrum invoking the sanctity of human life. “It’s a contradiction that I always observed,” said Hannah Cox, the national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, an advocacy group. Approving of executions, Ms. Cox said, is “a stance that cheapens the pro-life argument.” Ms. Cox, who is originally from Alabama and opposes both abortion and the death penalty, said that more conservatives were coming to feel the same way, offering as evidence Republican-sponsored bills to repeal the death penalty that have been introduced in 11 state legislatures. Michael Brandon Samra was executed by lethal injection Thursday evening, according to the Alabama attorney general, Steven T. Marshall. Mr. Samra and a friend, Mark Duke, were convicted in 1997 of killing four peopl...

Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected on Wednesday to issue a moratorium on the death penalty in California, granting reprieves to the hundreds of people on death row. By signing his executive order, Newsom will lower the country’s death row population by a quarter. The move isn’t particularly surprising considering the Democrat’s record as an elected official — he was an early proponent of same-sex marriage as mayor of San Francisco — and considering California’s politics. Nor should it be surprising that President Trump weighed in Wednesday morning to oppose Newsom’s move. “Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers,” Trump said . “Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!” The death penalty is not a new entrant to the political culture wars, but in recent years, the partisan split on the issue has widened. A Pew Research Center poll completed last year found that...

IMPORTANT NOTICE: It seems that Google made a few changes to the way images are shown on Google-powered blogs. Pictures and links to social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) will no longer be loaded if you are using an ad blocker. Please be advised that no commercial activity whatsoever (ads, links, etc.) is conducted by DPN on their website. Ads, if any shown, are selected and inserted on this page by Google, not by DPN. Disable your ad blocker if pictures and/or videos are no longer shown on DPN pages. Please note that this may not apply to all browsers. When it comes to the death penalty, guilt or innocence shouldn’t really matter to Christians.   NASHVILLE — Until August, Tennessee had not put a prisoner to death in nearly a decade. Last Thursday, it performed its third execution in four months. This was not a surprising turn of events. In each case, recourse to the courts had been exhausted. In each case Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, declined to intervene, tho...

According to recent Datafolha research, support for the use of the death penalty has grown significantly in the last nine years. The recent poll found 57% of those interviewed in favor of the adoption of capital punishment. In 2008, the last time that the institute polled on this subject, 47% held the same opinion. This is the highest number recorded since the Datafolha started polling on this subject in 1991. But it is within the statistical margin of error - 2 % points higher or lower - with levels recorded in 1993 and 2007, when 55% of the population said they were in favor of the punishment. The death penalty is not used in Brazil, although it is provided for during times of a declared state of war in paragraph 37 of article 5 of the Constitution. The last time Brazil was in a declared state was during the Second World War. In 2015, for the 1st time in more than 150 years, Brazilians were condemned to capital punishment. The executions of Marco Archer in January foll...

The bottom line on the death penalty deserves to be at the top of any discussion of the death penalty, so here it is: To support the death penalty, you must be willing to take the chance that the state will execute an innocent person. The development of DNA technology proved how often the criminal justice system can go awry. Scores of death row inmates have been released after they were cleared by DNA evidence. 1 of them was Ray Krone, who spent 10 years in prison, including 3 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. At least 1 of the votes in the Legislature to repeal the death penalty came after the senator talked with Krone. If it happened to Krone, a former Air Force sergeant with no criminal record, "It can happen to anybody," Krone says. Could you sit across a desk from Krone and tell him you don't care if the occasional innocent person is executed? Nebraskans know how fallible the criminal system can be. The "Beatrice 6...