Death Penalty News

John Koch has covered 100 executions since 1989 John Koch’s colleagues know him by a different name: Dr. Death.  The radio news journalist has witnessed over 100 executions since the start of his career 50 years ago, according to his own count. He documented infamous killer Ted Bundy’s last moments alive and every other death row inmate’s in Florida’s execution chamber since. Now 76, he has no intentions of stopping.

Cuba's one-party legislature Sunday passed a new Penal Code, which was considered to be “modern” and adjusted to the country's socialist “reality,” it was announced in Havana. Although the new legal instrument was designed in tune with international criteria on human rights according to local authorities, the death penalty was not entirely removed and may still be applied. “The norm is of extraordinary relevance in the robustness of Cuba as a socialist state of law, a modern criminal law, adjusted to the socioeconomic realities and updated with the Constitution and other legal provisions,” Ruben Remigio Ferro, president of the People's Supreme Court, told the National Assembly of People's Power, the national parliamentary body. The new code provides for penalties that range from life imprisonment to 30-year prison sentences for the most serious crimes. It also maintains the death penalty for 23 extremely serious offenses , it was reported. Offenders are accountable sinc...

One of the most restrictive death rows in the country lets inmates listen to the prison-run radio station . "The Tank has helped me," John Henry Ramirez, an inmate on death row, said of the station. Ramirez was convicted for a 2004 killing, and the Supreme Court has stayed his execution. Death row inmate John Henry Ramirez said the prisoner-run radio station at a Texas prison helps get him through his time in solitary confinement, according to a report by The Marshall Project via The Guardian. The Allan B. Polunsky Unit — described as "one of the most restrictive death rows in the country," according to The Marshall Project — under normal circumstances does not allow inmates to communicate with each other, but the radio station is the exception. "You just don't know if you exist anymore," Ramy Hozaifeh, an inmate radio host, said, according to The Marshall Project. "It just kind of removes your humanity from you, and I think the radio has put tha...

They can’t go to classes or prison jobs, and they don’t have tablets or televisions. But they do have radios. As soon as I drive past the East Tempe Church on the outskirts of Livingston, Texas, I can hear the laugh track on my radio. It’s from “Martin,” a three-decade-old television sitcom. The fictional Detroiters’ racy wisecracks seem incongruous crackling through my car speakers on a winding country road. When the laughter dies down, the slight Southern lilt of a DJ named “Megamind” cuts in to introduce the next segment. “Bringing it to you room service-style,” he says, signing off with a catchphrase that’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek: Like most of his listeners, Megamind doesn’t have a room. He lives on a metal bunk in a maximum security prison, and his real name is Ramy Hozaifeh. To the men in the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, he is best known as a regular voice on 106.5 FM The Tank, the prison’s own radio station. The Tank is so low wattage you can only hear it for a minute or two af...