Death Penalty News

TOKYO -- A 28-year-old man was arrested early Sunday after a three-hour siege at a Tokyo yakiniku restaurant. Police said the man, Akito Araki, of unknown occupation, entered the restaurant in the basement of a building in Yoyogi, Shibuya Ward, Fuji TV reported.  He had dinner and then at around 9:30 p.m., he gave the manager a note in which he said he had activated a home-made bomb in a box.  He also brandished two knives, ordered other customers out of the restaurant and told the manager to call 110. Araki locked the door and barricaded it with chairs. He refused to come out while police negotiated with him.  The stand-off continued until about 12:30 a.m. when police decided to break in.  The manager was able to escape out the back door and was not harmed. Police said three objects wrapped in adhesive tape with cell phones attached were found in the box but none were explosive devices.  Police did not say what the objects were. Araki was quoted by police as sa...

Serial killer Lucky Ward, who strangled a transgender woman to death, has been sentenced to die. The murderer, of Houston, Texas, was handed a death sentence by a jury on Tuesday over the 2010 murders of transgender woman Charlie Rodriguez and homeless woman Reita Long. Lucky Ward was convicted for murdering one trans woman, suspected of killing another. Charlie Rodriguez, who had worked as a hairdresser, was found strangled in her home, naked and covered by blankets. Lucky Ward was also suspected of involvement in the deaths of three other women by strangulation – including another transgender woman, Myra Chanel Ical. Ical was murdered in January 2010, eight months before Rodriguez and Long were killed.  Ical – who was misgendered by police and media at the time of the killing – was found half-naked, strangled “with numerous bruises and defensive wounds, as if [she] had struggled against [her] attacker”. No charges were brought against Ward over Ical...

Iran Human Rights (IHR); March 5, 2020: A “homeless” man who had been arrested for robbery, was last week hanged after he had “confessed to committing murder” under interrogations.  The prisoner who is identified as Hamid by the Iranian Davat-Online website, was hanged at Ghezel-Hesar Prison of Karaj the last week of February. The exact date of the execution is not known.  According to the website, Hamid was a homeless man who was arrested three years ago for robbery. However, he had “confessed” to committing two murders during the interrogation. It is not known under what circumstances the confession was extracted.  In 2014 a man who had confessed to the crime but was absolved of all charges 48 hours before his execution was to be carried out, was asked as to why he had confessed to a murder he had not committed? He answered: “They beat me up so much that I thought if I falsely do not confess, I would die during the interrogation”.  Man Hanged...

McKINNEY, Texas -(CBSDFW.COM) – After eight hours of deliberations a Collin County jury sentenced convicted capital murderer Brandon McCall to death. McCall shot and killed Richardson Police Officer David Sherrard in February 2018. Earlier in the day, the prosecution and defense teams made stirring closing arguments. One side pleaded for mercy on a young man raised in cruel conditions. The other called McCall the worst of the worst. “When you go to war with police those are death penalty cases in Collin County,” prosecutor Bill Wirskye told the jury. “The man is a cold-blooded calculated cop killer. He deserves the death penalty” Defense attorneys asked the jury to think about McCall’s upbringing with an alcoholic father which led to homelessness and neglect. “If you grew up in a car and had to shower with a hose behind a church would you be the person you are today,” asked Defense Attorney Bubba King who pleaded for a life sentence. “He’ll always be behi...

Unexpectedly, the 2020 presidential campaign is drilling down on petty crime and homelessness. Donald Trump and his Republican allies are reviving law-and-order themes similar to those used effectively by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the late 1960s and early 1970s to demonize racial minorities. To this end, Republicans seek to discredit liberalized law enforcement initiatives adopted by a new breed of Democratic prosecutors. These Democratic district attorneys — in cities, counties and suburbs from Philadelphia, Orlando, Chicago and St. Louis to Contra Costa County, Calif., Suffolk County, Mass., and Durham County, N.C. — are pursuing policies intended to decriminalize vagrancy, and eliminate cash bail, and they are aggressively pursuing charges in cases of shootings by police officers. They are playing a key role in a hotly politicized movement to curb mass incarceration and to roll back what has become known as “the carceral state.” The decarceration movement i...