Death Penalty News

The Myanmar junta’s military tribunals have sentenced 65 people to death following unjust trials since the military coup on February 1, 2021, Human Rights Watch said today. State media and local groups have reported that 26 of those sentenced are currently detained, while 39 were convicted in absentia. Military tribunals handed down the death sentences in areas of Yangon where the junta declared martial law in March. In imposing martial law, the junta transferred all executive and judicial power to the head of the relevant regional military command and instituted the death penalty as a possible sentence for 23 crimes. “The Myanmar junta has added to its mass shootings of protesters on the streets by having military tribunals hand down several dozen death sentences after egregiously unfair trials,” said Shayna Bauchner, Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Apparently aimed to chill the anti-coup protest movement, these death sentences should serve as a stark warning to foreign govern...

Almost a decade since the last execution in Thailand, a 26-year-old man was killed by lethal injection for the frenzied stabbing of a teenager. And though no one is saying why the nation has suddenly reversed its position on capital punishment, rumours that it is connected to the royal succession are difficult to ignore Two months ago, 26-year-old Teerasak Longji was stretched out on a rack and killed. In decades past, the young Thai man would have stared down a firing squad in his final waking moments. But in 2018, his end came via a lethal cocktail of drugs. Teerasak, whose family was not notified until after his death, was just 20 years old when he was arrested for stabbing a teenage boy in a bloody robbery in Thailand’s Trang province. His victim, who was stabbed 24 times by Teerasak, lost his wallet, his phone and his life. Teerasak’s execution marks the first death sentence to be carried out in Thailand in almost a decade following an arduous campaign against it i...