Death Penalty News

People everywhere have long been oddly fascinated by the last meals of those on death row, specifically wanting to know more about the last meal requests of notorious criminals, like convicted serial killers: Did these men request an elaborate meal, or did they opt for something nostalgic like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or an order of KFC ? Or, like Ted Bundy, did they refuse a last meal altogether? But instead of looking at the last meals of specific prisoners, perhaps the focus should be on how this practice got started in the first place and how it’s changed over time. The history of the “last meal” One of the most well-recognized “last meals” is the last supper shared by Jesus Christ and his disciples before his crucifixion, as depicted in the Bible. In fact, the ritual of a doomed person eating some special kind of final meal goes back even further to pre-Christian times. A faculty publication from the Mercer University School of Law titled “Cold (Comfort?) Food: A System...

The guillotine is one of the most recognizable execution devices in the world. The iconic appearance of the fearsome angled blade ranks up there with the gallows and the cross as the more prominent images of human execution.  The guillotine dominated a gruesome part of European history and continues to engage the imagination to this day. But the guillotine was never supposed to become the killing machine that it did. When the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin advocated for the use of the beheading device as a method of execution, he could not have known that it would be used to kill thousands of his countrymen. The guillotine was initially invented as a mercy device. It was supposed to be a modernization of Medieval execution methods that had grown gory and inhumane. Enlightened people could not bear to kill people in such ways any longer. There had to be a better way. Those condemned to die should not also have to be tortured en-route to their final punishment. A death pena...

On this day in 1972, 27-year-old Cretan electrician Vassilis Lymberis was executed by a firing squad for murdering his mother-in-law, his wife, and his two children. Lymberis and his accomplices burned down his family home, while 4 members of his family were inside in January 1972. It was August 25, 1972, with Greece still under military rule, when the last execution in the country took place before the abolition of the death penalty. Lymberis, who had three accomplices in his crime, claimed he didn’t know that his children were in the house at the time he set fire to it. He said he only wanted to hurt his mother-in-law because she was driving him insane with her behavior. Lymberis’ heinous crime Vassilis Lymberis and Vassiliki Markou were married in December 1967 and set up their home together in Metamorphosi, a northern suburb of Athens. He was 22 years of age and she was 19. After a time, the couple began to have arguments and were known to not be getting alon...