Death Penalty News

During the French annexation, 36 prisoners were executed using this device. Built in 1799, this structure basically consists of a tall, vertical oak frame fitted with a heavy steel blade with an oblique cutting edge and suspended from the top. It was designed for a rapid execution by decapitation of those who were condemned to death in the Swiss canton of Geneva during the French period. Today it is part of the Permanent Collection at the Tavel House, the oldest building in Geneva.  

A blood-stained guillotine used by an infamous executioner to kill 1,200 people in Nazi Germany should be put on public display, the man who rediscovered it has said. The grisly relic was operated by Johann Reichhart, believed to be the fastest executioner in history, and took just seconds to take somebody’s life with a blade weighing 30lbs and a wooden bench bleached from constant washing. Journalist and author Ulrich Trebbin found it by accident at the Bavarian National Museum in Munich, announcing his discovery in 2014. However, at the time, the Bavarian regional government concluded it should stay out of the public eye in case it offends the families of victims and attracts ghoulish attention.

RICHMOND, Va. (CBS19 NEWS) -- Implements of execution that are no longer being used in Virginia have been conveyed to a museum. Governor Ralph Northam announced Friday that the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond was asked to accept the oak electric chair that was used to execute people for more than a century. “This action closes the era of state-sponsored execution in Virginia,” said Northam. “The Commonwealth asked the Museum to accept these items, as they have the curatorial expertise to appropriately manage and interpret such materials. The Commonwealth’s history of using capital punishment is an important part of history, and the museum is focused on telling Virginia’s full and true story for future generations.” Last year, he signed legislation ending the use of the death penalty in Virginia, making the Commonwealth the first state in the South to abolish it. According to a release, Virginia has executed more than 1,300 people in its history, which is more than an...

Virginia's ultimate sanction was carried out for more than a century on an oak chair from Trenton, N.J. used to execute 267 people who were deemed too vile or dangerous to live among us. Their limbs and torsos bound by straps and heads crowned with a metal helmet and brine-soaked sponge, the last moments and thoughts of some of the state's most egregious criminals were spent in an electric chair first installed at the Virginia State Penitentiary in 1908. If the chair was a symbol of extreme, immutable justice, it was also a tool of racial intimidation for much of its history. In modern times, a more diverse group of offenders were electrocuted or killed by injection on a gurney first used in 1995. Now, like the fate of the Confederate statues and monuments taken down in Richmond and across the state, the question arises: What should be done with such significant, yet arguably dark, pieces of state history? The death penalty was abolished in Virginia last month by a law signed b...

The carnivals of death where African-American men, women and children were hanged, burned and dismembered as cheering crowds of whites looked on were the cornerstone of white supremacist rule in the Jim Crow-era South. These bloody spectacles terrified black communities into submission and showed whites that there would be no price to pay for murdering black people who asserted the right to vote, competed with whites in business — or so much as brushed against a white person on the sidewalk. The lynching belt states looked away from this history, even as they developed now-popular tourism programs that attract visitors to churches, schools, courthouses and other landmarks associated with the civil rights movement. The long-neglected chapter of this story becomes breathtakingly visible on Thursday in Montgomery, Ala., where the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative will inaugurate two institutions focused on racial-terror lynching as the practice manifested itself between the late 1...

Two-thirds of Millennials interviewed, between the ages of 18 and 34, could not identify what Auschwitz is. Forty-one percent of Americans don’t know what Auschwitz was, according to a comprehensive national survey of Holocaust awareness and knowledge among US adults. The survey, to be released Thursday, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day, by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), found that there are critical gaps in Americans’ awareness of basic facts and in their detailed knowledge of the Holocaust, awareness and knowledge that deteriorate in the younger generations. Two-thirds of Millennials interviewed, between the ages of 18 and 34, could not identify what Auschwitz is. Claims Conference Board member Matthew Bronfman led a task force comprising Holocaust survivors as well as representatives from museums, educational institutions, and leading nonprofits in the field of Holocaust education, such as Yad Vashem, the United St...

A weeklong photo exhibition being held next month will aim to shed light on the everyday lives of inmates of Japanese prisons and promote public awareness about the challenges the country's criminal justice system faces. Around 60 photos, which were taken by 6 photography majors of Tokyo Polytechnic University with permission of the Justice Ministry, will be displayed at Hibiya Library & Museum in Hibiya Park, central Tokyo, from April 1 to 7.

Hilton Butler experienced the history of US executions like few others, assisting with Louisiana’s portable electric chair and then overseeing executions as the Warden of Angola, the state’s largest penitentiary.  In 2002 I interviewed him at the Angola Prison museum for my documentary series The Executioners and this is an edited transcript. Q. How did you first become involved in execution work? “Well, in 1955 I was assigned as a young officer to go around to where the crime was committed. The chair was transported to wherever the crime was committed, at that time and there was a Captain [Ephie] Foster that was in charge of the chair and I was assigned to go with him and transport the chair to wherever the crime was committed.” [Note: Prison guard Foster was responsible for the drunken botched execution of Willie Francis in 1946. Whilst Foster may have sometimes been involved in transporting the chair to executions in the 50’s, the executioner was usually Gra...

An Indonesian museum that allowed visitors to take selfies with a life-size wax sculpture of Hitler against a backdrop of Auschwitz concentration camp has removed the exhibit following international outrage, the manager said Saturday. De ARCA Statue Art Museum in the Javanese city of Jogjakarta drew swift condemnation from rights groups after details of the controversial display were published in foreign media. The exhibit features a sure-footed Hitler standing in front of a huge photo of the gates of Auschwitz -- the largest Nazi concentration camp where more than 1.1 million people were killed. Poor schooling, lack of awareness and ignorance The museum’s operations manager, Jamie Misbah, said the the wax sculpture had been removed after the building was alerted to criticism from prominent Jewish human rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "We don’t want to attract outrage," Misbah told AFP. "Our purpose to display the Hitler figure ...