Death Penalty News

U.K.’s anti-gay laws, which date back to colonial times, remain on the books in dozens of countries The U.K. is set to pardon individuals convicted under now-abolished laws criminalizing gay sex, more than 50 years after the country first began to decriminalize homosexual relationships.  An amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill will expand the existing scope of past convictions that can be pardoned. Currently, the list includes just nine former offences, according to U.K. newspaper The Guardian. They are “largely focused on the repealed offenses of buggery and gross indecency between men.”  The legislation has passed the House of Commons and is currently awaiting approval from the House of Lords. Were it to become law, people will be able to have any convictions under laws that previously prohibited same-sex activity wiped from their records. People in England and Wales have been able to apply to have historical convictions for gay sex thrown out since 201...

"Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed−time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing. "For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The ve...

"Capital punishment: them without the capital get the punishment." - Last words of John Spenkelink , executed on May 25, 1979 in Starke Prison, Florida. "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty ... I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial." -  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg , U.S. Supreme Court "He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first." - Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus Christ), interrupting the public execution of a woman for adultery. John 8:7 "The death penalty is a poor person's issue. Always remember that: after all the rhetoric that goes on in the legislative assemblies, in the end, when the deck is cast out, it is the poor who are selected to die in this country." -  Sister Helen Prejean , C.S.J., au...