Death Penalty News

Hundreds of Hamas terrorists accused of committing war crimes during their October 2023 attack could face the death penalty after Israel late Monday approved the creation of a special military tribunal to prosecute their cases. In a rare show of Israeli political unity, the legislation received broad backing from both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition and much of the opposition, passing with 93 votes in favor and zero against.

Eichmann was hanged at midnight between May 31 and June 1, 1962. He was the only person executed in Israel after a full civilian judicial process Adolf Eichmann , one of the key architects of the Holocaust , was captured by Mossad agents on May 11, 1960, in Argentina and flown to Israel for trial. Originally born in Solingen, Germany, Eichmann moved with his family to Austria but later returned once the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. During his time as part of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) - the Nazi Security Service, he was involved in the surveillance of Jewish organizations. In 1937, he visited the British Mandate of Palestine to promote the Zionist emigration of Jews from Germany. This experience would later prove instrumental when he was appointed head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs division at the outset of World War II.

A Nazi executioner in an infamous World War II photograph has been unmasked for the first time after 80 years, using Artificial Intelligence .  The man holding a pistol to the head of a kneeling Jewish victim in the harrowing photo known as 'The Last Jew of Vinnytsia' has been identified by a historian as Schutzstaffel (SS) officer Jakobus Onnen , who was 33 at the time of the killing. The heart-wrenching photograph, long regarded as one of the most haunting images of World War II, shows a German soldier in spectacles aiming his weapon at a man kneeling beside a mass grave while several other soldiers look on.

Opponents of the bill, including Gov. Jeff Landry, bucked Jewish faith leaders who said nitrogen gas evokes the Holocaust. A few months after Louisiana lawmakers legalized executing death row prisoners by nitrogen gas suffocation, an effort backed by Jewish faith leaders to remove that method from state law has died for the current legislative session.

Each year on January 27, people across the globe observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was on this day 79 years ago Nazi Germany's largest death camp Auschwitz was liberated — by which point upwards of one million prisoners had been killed. It is on this grim occasion that the author, a Jewish cantor, reflects on the aftermath of Alabama's killing of Kenneth Eugene Smith with the novel use of nitrogen hypoxia...

Hamas terrorists cold-bloodedly execute 90-year-old Israeli woman As Israeli forces continue to clear Gaza border towns of Hamas terrorists, harrowing scenes keep emerging, with particularly gruesome images being revealed in Kibbutz Kissufim. "Dozens of terrorists entered Kissufim and broke into homes of innocent civilians," says a local going by the name Shmulik Harel.  "While they were outside, they shouted 'IDF, IDF,' possibly in an attempt to lull us into a false sense of security and make us leave our homes. However, most of the residents sensed that something was amiss."

Alan Dershowitz is now involved in effort to avert execution scheduled for Oct. 10 Attorney Alan Dershowitz has joined a last-ditch effort to avert the execution of a Jewish man on death row in Texas. Jedidiah Murphy, 48, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Oct. 10. The date coincides with World Against the Death Penalty Day, a day of advocacy by death-penalty opponents. Murphy murdered 79-year-old Bertie Cunningham on Oct. 4, 2000, in Garland, Texas. He was high on cocaine when he shot her, stole her car and bought alcohol and cigarettes with her credit cards. He has been on death row in Livingston, Texas, since 2001.

Early 2023, the newly elected government of Israel announced an ensemble of judicial reforms; including a new bill that would introduce the death penalty for acts of terrorism. As of May 2023, the judicial reforms have been put on hold by the PM Netanyahu. This article takes a historical perspective to recontextualize the issue of the death penalty in Israel, as well as the views of civil society organizations on the subject. In January, the newly elected government of Israel announced an ensemble of judicial reforms which would modify the entire Israeli judiciary system. As part of this reform package is a law trying to instate mandatory death penalty for those deemed “terrorists” by the State. Specifically, the law targets anyone who “intentionally or out of indifference causes the death of an Israeli citizen when the act is carried out from a racist motive or hate to a certain public… and with the purpose of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its hom...

Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labor and concentration camps, has died. He had just turned 103 in March. Ferencz died Friday evening in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to St. John’s University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog about the Nuremberg trials. The death also was confirmed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted. Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated as a very young boy with his parents to New York to escape rampant antisemitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the U.S. Army in time to take part in the Normandy invasion during World War II. Using his legal background, he became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against U.S. soldiers as p...

After a series of botched executions, the state is choosing a path of technical, rather than moral, innovation. Critics called 2022 “the year of the botched execution”—and it was indeed an infamous period, mainly because the state of Alabama lost the ability to competently kill prisoners in its charge while retaining the sovereignty to try.

A former secretary who worked for the commander of a Nazi concentration camp has been convicted of complicity in the murders of more than 10,500 people. Irmgard Furchner, 97, was taken on as a teenaged shorthand typist at Stutthof and worked there from 1943 to 1945. Furchner, the first woman to be tried for Nazi crimes in decades, was given a two-year suspended jail term. Although she was a civilian worker, the judge agreed she was fully aware of what was going on at the camp. Some 65,000 people are thought to have died in horrendous conditions at Stutthof, including Jewish prisoners, non-Jewish Poles and captured Soviet soldiers. Furchner was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people and complicity in the attempted murder of five others. As she was only 18 or 19 at the time, she was tried in a special juvenile court. At Stutthof, located near the modern-day Polish city of Gdansk, a variety of methods was used to murder detainees and thousands died in gas chambers...

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Saturday declared as martyrs a Polish couple who were executed by German police during World War II for hiding Jews in their farmhouse. A farmer and beekeeper, Jozef Ulma, and wife Wiktoria in the Polish town of Markowa hid several members of the Jewish community, who were being hunted down during the German occupation of Poland. An informant apparently betrayed them, and the Jews were killed by police in March 1944. The couple were then shot to death along with their six young children, the oldest of whom was 8 years old. Recognition of martyrdom would permit the couple to be beatified, the last formal step before possible sainthood. After beatification, a miracle attributed to their intercession would be necessary for eventual canonization, as the Catholic church's sainthood process is called. According to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, the couple had witnessed the execution of Jews who were seized from their h...

PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona prisoner convicted in the 1984 killing of an 8-year-old girl is scheduled to be executed Wednesday in what would be the state’s second execution since officials started carrying out the death penalty in May after a nearly eight-year hiatus. Frank Atwood, 66, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence for his murder conviction in the killing of Vicki Hoskinson, whose body was found in the desert. She went missing months earlier after leaving her home in Tucson to drop a birthday card in a nearby mailbox. If the execution isn’t halted by court action, Atwood will be the second Arizona prisoner to be put to death in less than a month. The execution of Clarence Dixon last month ended Arizona’s halt to executions that was blamed on the difficulty of obtaining lethal injection drugs and criticism that a 2014 execution in the state was botched. Death penalty opponents worry that Arizona will now start executing a steady stream of prisoner...

Jim Klein participated in 17 executions for the state of Arizona. With executions scheduled to resume, Klein is ready to share his story. Jim Klein says he stopped talking to his family about his job early in his career. “They didn’t want to hear about it.” he said. “They just couldn’t process it. They didn’t understand how I could deal with so much death.” And so for the past 30 years, Klein, now 68, kept his thoughts mostly to himself about his time working as an executioner. Arizona, like many states, has laws on the books that protect the identity of “any person ... who participates in or performs any ancillary function(s) in the execution, including the source of the execution chemicals, and any information contained in records that would identify those persons.” Corrections officers who took part in executions in the past rarely speak about their participation. But as Arizona resumes the death penalty this week, Klein decided to talk with The Arizona Republic about the executions...

44 years after ASU student's brutal murder, family waits for justice. Her killer is scheduled for execution Wednesday. The family of Deana Bowdoin has waited 44 years for justice. Next week, the man who brutally murdered the 21-year-old Arizona State University honors student in 1978 is scheduled to be executed at the state prison in Florence. It's the 1st execution in Arizona in 8 years, and it casts a spotlight on what one critic has called the state's "relentless search" for ways to put condemned inmates to death. Arizona is moving ahead with executions again, even as most states are backing off. Over more than a decade, Arizona's search for new execution methods has skirted the law, seen the state refurbish a gas chamber, and operated largely behind a veil of secrecy. A botched execution in 2014 proved to be a turning point that tested the state's commitment to enforcing the death penalty. 'Gasping and gulping' One dose of a lethal injection wa...