Death Penalty News

A Dead Woman’s Sentence Is Commuted to Life in Prison. Justice or Farce? On July 8, England’s Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, David Lammy, informed his colleagues in the House of Commons that King Charles had granted a conditional pardon to a woman who was executed on July 13, 1955. The beneficiary of the King’s posthumous mercy was Ruth Ellis, who, as a report in the Guardian notes , “was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom.”

Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in the UK, has been granted a posthumous conditional pardon. Ellis was hanged at London's Holloway Prison in 1955 after being convicted of murdering her lover David Blakely. Her family have campaigned for her murder conviction to be overturned, arguing she was a victim of domestic abuse and was physically and emotionally abused by Blakely before shooting him. Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy told MPs the King had granted the pardon, saying that the death penalty had been replaced with a sentence of life imprisonment.

The Fukuoka High Court rejected an appeal on Monday for a retrial for the 1992 murder of two 7-year-old girls in the city of Iizuka in Fukuoka Prefecture, for which a death row convict was executed. The defense plans to file a special appeal with the Supreme Court against the decision.  In what's known as the Iizuka incident, despite the assertion of his innocence, Michitoshi Kuma's death sentence became final in 2006 based on DNA test results and eyewitness accounts. He was executed at the age of 70 in 2008.  The defendant's side submitted in the second round of its retrial request a woman's testimony as new evidence. 

The family of Ruth Ellis, from Rhyl, said she was a victim of domestic abuse that was let down by the criminal justice system and the impact of her execution had been 'devastating for her family' The grandchildren of the last woman to be hanged in Britain are seeking a posthumous pardon, saying she was physically and emotionally abused by her partner before killing him.  Ruth Ellis, a nightclub hostess from Rhyl, was executed on July 13, 1955, at Holloway Prison after being convicted of murdering her lover, David Blakely.

Court says forced confession and wrongful conviction led to death penalty of innocent in 1967 A man executed after wrongfully being convicted of spying for North Korea has been posthumously exonerated by court, in a retrial held over half a century after his death. Court officials said Wednesday that the Supreme Court confirmed a lower court's not-guilty verdict for the late Oh Gyeong-mu, who was convicted of violating the National Security Act and now-defunct Anti-Communism Act in 1967. A separate retrial in the 2020s also cleared the charges against the younger brother and sister of the deceased.

Fukuoka, June 5 (Jiji Press)--A Japanese court Wednesday turned down a request for a retrial for the 1992 murder of two girls in the southwestern prefecture of Fukuoka, for which a death row convict had been executed. Fukuoka District Court thus denied the second retrial request over the so-called Iizuka incident, in which two primary school first graders in the Fukuoka city of Iizuka were killed. 

The U.S. Army on Monday set aside the court-martial convictions from a century ago of 110 African American soldiers, including 19 who were executed, saying they were denied fair trials in a landmark acknowledgement of official racism in America. The Army Board for Correction of Military Records overturned the convictions, restoring their service records as having concluded honorably and making their descendants eligible for military benefits, the Army said in a statement.

A Japanese high court approved Monday a posthumous retrial for a man who was convicted of murdering a 69-year-old woman in 1984 in western Japan, upholding a lower court's decision. In accepting the 2nd retrial plea, sought by the family of Hiromu Sakahara, who died of illness aged 75 while serving his term in 2011, the Osaka High Court said the new evidence presented in the latest plea is "clear" and "should (warrant) an acquittal."

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...

A South Carolina lawmaker wants the state to pay for those people it wrongfully executes, beginning with the family of George Stinney. A bill filed in the House of Representatives ahead of the upcoming legislative session would establish the George Stinney Fund, which would provide $10 million to families of those exonerated after being executed, no matter how much time has lapsed. The bill is named for the 14-year-old Black teen convicted in the brutal murder of 2 White girls in Clarendon County and executed by electrocution in June 1944 . RELATED |  He was 14 years, 6 months and 5 days old -- and the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th Century A judge vacated Stinney’s conviction in 2014, finding numerous instances of his constitutional rights being violated, from his arrest to an hours-long trial and conviction by an all-White jury only months after the girls were found dead. “We can’t do justice, because justice would be us resurrecting Mr. Stinney and all...

A North Carolina man who moved to Chicago was one of the victims of John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted of killing 33 young men and boys in the 1970s, authorities said Monday. Francis Wayne Alexander would have been 21 or 22 years old when Gacy killed him sometime between early 1976 and early 1977, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said at a news conference in announcing the identification of Alexander’s remains. In a statement, Alexander’s sister, Carolyn Sanders, thanked the sheriff’s office for giving the family some level of “closure.” “It is hard, even 45 years later, to know the fate of our beloved Wayne,” Sanders wrote. “He was killed at the hands of a vile and evil man. Our hearts are heavy, and our sympathies go out to the other victims’ families. … We can now lay to rest what happened and move forward by honoring Wayne.” Alexander’s remains were among 26 sets that police found in the crawl space under Gacy’s home just outside the city. 3 victims, meanwhile, were found buried on Gac...

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has granted posthumous pardons to seven Black men executed in 1951 for the rape of a white woman RICHMOND, Va. -- Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam granted posthumous pardons Tuesday to seven Black men who were executed in 1951 for the rape of a white woman, in a case that attracted pleas for mercy from around the world and in recent years has been denounced as an example of racial disparity in the use of the death penalty. Northam announced the pardons after meeting with about a dozen descendants of the men and their advocates. Cries and sobs could be heard from some of the descendants after Northam's announcement. The “Martinsville Seven," as the men became known, were all convicted of raping 32-year-old Ruby Stroud Floyd, a white woman who had gone to a predominantly black neighborhood in Martinsville, Virginia, on Jan. 8, 1949, to collect money for clothes she had sold. Four of the men were executed in Virginia's electric chair on Feb. 2, 1951. Th...

In a compelling new interview conducted by attorney and filmmaker Ted Corless, the late Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerald Kogan lists the numerous reasons why he believed Florida’s death penalty should be abolished. “I have been a member of the Florida Bar for 63 years,” Kogan said in the interview recorded shortly before his death. “I have handled capital cases for most of that period of time. I became the chief prosecutor in Miami Dade County. And what happened was, at the beginning I would tell all of the people who worked under me, you’ve got to go ahead and ask the jury to enter the death penalty in this particular case. And then I began as the years went by, I began saying, wait a minute, that’s a bad position for me to take. And I believe that the death penalty should absolutely not be a punishment delivered by the State of Florida, or for that matter, neither any place in the United States or the world.” The video , released today on the Corless Barfeld Trial Group You...

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Iran revoked the death sentence of a Kurdish man ten months after his execution, his family told Rudaw on Sunday, adding that they have filed a complaint to seek justice for him. “Two weeks ago, a letter was sent to Khedir Qavidel’s brothers, saying to visit us [at the Urmia prosecutor office] so that your brother is freed. This letter comes after 10 months have passed since the execution of Khedir Qavidel,” a close relative, who preferred to stay anonymous for safety reasons, told Rudaw on Sunday. “They told them your brother’s death sentence was not approved by the Supreme Court, he’s been executed,” added the relative. "They told them you can get financial compensation [for his blood], but they said we don’t need financial compensation. We just want to know why he was executed before his sentence was approved by the Supreme Court.” The relative noted that the brothers have filed a complaint, seeking justice. Qavidel, from Sardasht, was arrested abo...

DNA testing could resolve the innocence claims of 2 Tennessee men — 1 set to die and 1 already dead Earlier this month, Gov. Bill Lee invoked perhaps his most significant power for the first time when he granted a reprieve to Harold Nichols less than three weeks before Nichols was set to be executed. Lee has allowed four men to be executed since he became governor in January 2019. He denied pleas for clemency from those men and has not used the power to commute the sentences of anyone in prison, or to grant any pardons. That’s not particularly unusual. Governors are often hesitant to grant executive clemency, fearing a political backlash. That’s why it’s typically reserved for one’s final days in office. But it doesn’t have to be that way — Lee can show mercy whenever he wants to. In Nichols’ case, the governor’s intervention was not motivated by questions about the man’s guilt. Nichols confessed to the 1988 rape and murder of Karen Pulley, as well as a series of other r...

The terrible miscarriage of justice in the case of Timothy Evans would feature prominently in the campaign to end the death penalty in Britain In 1950 a young Welshman was hanged for a heinous crime – the murder of his wife and daughter in the London flat where the family lived. The main prosecution witness in the trial had been another tenant in the property, a seemingly mild-mannered post office clerk and former police special constable who told the court about the bitter rows he had heard between the accused and his partner. After a trial lasting just three days Timothy Evans was convicted and subsequently executed. The man whose testimony had played such a large part in securing the conviction was John Christie – a man who would later be unmasked as a serial killer and necrophiliac. And among his victims had been Evans' wife, Beryl, and the couple's 14-month-old daughter Geraldine. The wrongful conviction and hanging of Evans would go on to play a maj...

✔  Click here to Google translate this story into your own language Ce vendredi, le Conseil constitutionnel n'a pas estimé contraire à la Constitution la non réhabilitation judiciaire des condamnés à mort. Il était saisi par le fils de Jacques Fesch, guillotiné en 1957, qui avait trouvé la foi en prison, à tel point que l'Église envisage de le béatifier. Le Conseil constitutionnel a estimé ce vendredi matin que l'impossibilité de réhabilitation judiciaire des condamnés à mort n'était pas contraire à la Constitution. Toutefois, il a recommandé au législateur d'instituer une procédure particulière pour les ayants-droit des personnes condamnées à mort. La possibilité d'une réhabilitation judiciaire de Jacques Fesch n'est donc pas complètement écartée. En 1957, Jacques Fesch a été exécuté à la guillotine à l’âge de 27 ans. Il avait été condamné à mort quelques mois plus tôt par la Cour d’assises de la Seine pour avoir tué un policier après le braq...