Death Penalty News

Supreme Court says capital punishment can be awarded only when life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed; commutes death sentence in Uttarakhand double murder case to 25 years without remission. The Supreme Court recently observed that capital punishment can be awarded only when the alternative of life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed. Court explained that while deciding whether a convict deserves the death penalty, judges must carefully balance aggravating and mitigating circumstances, taking into account not only the nature of the crime but also the background of the offender, prior antecedents, socio-economic circumstances, and the possibility of reformation and rehabilitation.

SINGAPORE – Despite criticism against Singapore and international tolerance in attitudes towards drug abuse, the Republic will continue to take a very tough line in its war against drug abuse. Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam said this on March 12 at the Community Resilience Against Drug Abuse Roundtable 2026 held at Furama RiverFront hotel. Citing the World Drug Report 2025, Mr Shanmugam, who is also Coordinating Minister for National Security, said 292 million people worldwide used drugs in 2022. This figure jumped to about 316 million in 2023. He said that while many countries had either given up on the fight against drugs or were planning to legalise drugs, Singapore had done the opposite by continuing to be tough on drugs.

HANOI: A man who murdered four members of his own family in a shocking case has been sentenced to death by a Hanoi court on Tuesday (July 8). The Hanoi People’s Court handed down the death penalty to 52-year-old Vu Van Vuong for the brutal killings of his daughter, son, wife and elderly mother earlier this year. According to court proceedings, Vuong carried out the murders over two days in mid-January at the family’s home in the former Phu Xuyen District of Hanoi.

The Supreme Court yesterday rejected an appeal from death row prisoner Cheng Wu-sung (鄭武松) to suspend his execution. In September last year, the Constitutional Court issued Constitutional Judgement No. 8, which said that although the death penalty is constitutional, it should only be applied in “exceptional cases.” This led to Cheng filing for a retrial on the grounds that he could be rehabilitated. The constitutional judgement allows for the death penalty only for the “most serious” of premeditated crimes and if the case followed the strictest requirements of due process.

An amendment to the Penal Code placing greater emphasis on rehabilitation efforts in prison took effect Sunday, marking the first time changes have been made to the forms of punishment under Japan's more than a century-old crime laws. Imprisonment is no longer divided into the categories of with and without labor, and prison work is no longer mandatory for inmates, allowing more time to be allocated for rehabilitative guidance and education to reduce recidivism, according to the Justice Ministry. The revised law, which will affect people convicted from Sunday, stipulates anew that imprisonment consists of "confinement in a penal institution" and that inmates can be assigned to undertake "necessary work" or can undergo "necessary guidance" for rehabilitation and improvement.

The Michigan Supreme Court ruled last week that a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without parole for young adults who were 19 or 20 years old at the time of the offense is a “grossly disproportionate punishment” that violates the Michigan Constitution. The decision extends to 19- and 20-year-olds the court’s 2022 ruling in People v. Parks , which applied the federal constitutional ban on automatic life-without-parole sentences for juveniles to 18-year-olds under the broader and more protective provisions of the Michigan Constitution.

Taipei, April 18 (CNA) Taiwan's Supreme Court on Friday revoked the death sentence of Liang Yu-chih (梁育誌), who was convicted of murdering a Malaysian university student in 2020, and ordered a new trial. The court said the most recent ruling by the Taiwan High Court Kaohsiung Branch, issued in January, failed to thoroughly examine the evidence and did not provide sufficient reasoning. The case can still be appealed. This is the first case to reaffirm a death sentence after Taiwan's Constitutional Court ruled in September 2024 that capital punishment is conditionally constitutional.

South Carolina executes Richard Moore despite broadly supported plea to cut sentence to life   South Carolina put Richard Moore to death by lethal injection Friday for the 1999 fatal shooting of a convenience store clerk, despite a broad appeal for mercy by parties that included 3 jurors and the judge from his trial, a former prison director, pastors and members of his family.

Richard Moore, a 59-year-old father and grandfather, is scheduled to be executed in South Carolina on Nov. 1 for the 1999 killing of a convenience store clerk in a shootout, though Moore  entered the store without a weapon. His attorneys said he never intended to kill anyone and the death penalty is not a fair punishment. Advocates for commutation include a former state supreme court justice, jurors, a former director of the state’s department of corrections and more.

SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — Utah's next execution is days away, when convicted murderer and death row inmate Taberon Honie will died by lethal injection at the state prison. Honie was sentenced to die for the murder of Claudia Benn, his ex-girlfriend's mother, in the mid '90s. Leading up to Thursday, when Honie's sentence is scheduled to be carried out at 12:01 a.m., a group opposing capital punishment is holding a series of events that began Friday at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City.

Earlier charges of drug trafficking were dropped, it would’ve carried the death penalty A court in Indonesia has sentenced an Australian man to 6 months of medical rehabilitation after finding him guilty of possessing methamphetamine on the tourist island of Bali.

Texas executed Ramiro Gonzales on Wednesday despite a stunning reversal from a psychiatrist who helped send him to death row 17 years ago.  Gonzales, 41, was killed by lethal injection as punishment for kidnapping, raping and murdering Bridget Townsend when they were both 18. At the time, Gonzales was struggling with drug addiction. He killed Townsend, his drug dealer’s girlfriend, while trying to steal drugs. He had turned 18 two months before the killing, making him barely old enough to be legally eligible to be sentenced to death.

WASHINGTON — Two executions — one in Texas and one in Oklahoma — scheduled for the end of June will be the eighth and ninth executions to take place this year in the United States. They would also be the second executions in each state this year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Catholic Mobilizing Network, a group that seeks to end the death penalty, urged state leaders to stop the executions by lethal injection of Ramiro Gonzales in Texas on June 26 and Richard Rojem in Oklahoma on June 27.

Days before his scheduled execution in Texas, Ramiro Gonzales speaks on faith, legacy — and apologizing to the family of his victim, Bridget Townsend. On Wednesday evening, Texas prison officials plan to execute Ramiro Gonzales, the 41-year-old who kidnapped, raped and murdered Bridget Townsend when they were both 18.

On August 9, 2018, Steven Hale stood outside a Tennessee prison as a convicted murderer inside awaited a lethal dose of a three-drug cocktail. It was the first execution of a death row inmate in the state in nearly a decade. Hale was one of seven reporters selected by a grim lottery to witness Billy Ray Irick’s execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He’d written stories about Irick’s horrific rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl more than three decades earlier.

ST. LOUIS -- Missouri Gov. Mike Parson on Monday denied clemency for Brian Dorsey one day before the inmate's scheduled execution for killing his cousin and her husband nearly two decades ago. The governor's decision is "devastating," said Megan Crane, Dorsey's attorney, in an email. The clemency petition included requests from 72 current and former corrections officers who vouched for Dorsey's rehabilitation while behind bars, as well as support from a former Missouri Supreme Court justice and others.

Some death penalty lawyers get paid the same no matter how long they work on a case. Critics say it’s a perverse incentive when a life is at stake. Brian Dorsey’s argument for why he should not be executed by the state of Missouri requires the kind of math familiar to any gig worker.

California is transferring everyone on death row at San Quentin prison to other places, as it tries to reinvent the state's most notorious facility as a rehabilitation centre. Many in this group will now have new freedoms. But they are also asking why they've been excluded from the reform - and whether they'll be safe in new prisons. Keith Doolin still remembers the day in 2019 when workers came to dismantle one of the United States' most infamous death chambers.

Even before France's National Assembly abolished capital punishment in 1981, the nation's Catholic bishops had already said the death penalty was incompatible with the Gospel France has paid tribute to Robert Badinter, the Socialist politician who began his term as the country's Minister of Justice (1981-86) fighting to end the death penalty. Badinter, who later became president of the Constitutional Court and then a senator, died on February 9 at age ninety-five . 

In a significant ruling that underscores the Indian judiciary’s nuanced approach to capital punishment, the Karnataka High Court has commuted the death sentences of three men convicted of a 2013 double-murder to life imprisonment.  The bench, comprising Justices Sreenivas Harish Kumar and Ramachandra Huddar, delivered the verdict on December 19, 2023, maintaining that the case did not embody the ‘rarest of rare’ criteria necessary for upholding a death sentence.