Death Penalty News

Iran Human Rights (IHR); February 24, 2021: A 73-year-old man facing the death penalty after being arrested for the fourth time on charges of alcohol consumption , has been acquitted and released by Branch 9 of the Tehran Criminal Court. According to Rokna, a man identified only as Ehsan, a retired pilot with a military doctorate, was arrested for alcohol consumption and driving while under the influence of alcohol in Tehran.  He was sentenced to death by Branch 9 of the Tehran Criminal Court, presided over by Judge Mohammadi-Kashkouli.  According to new reports, he has now been acquitted by the same court and released. Ehsan had been arrested for alcohol consumption on three previous occasions and had been punished by flogging each time.  According to Article 136 of the Islamic Penal Code: "Where anyone commits the same offence punishable by hadd three times, and each time the hadd punishment is executed upon him/her, the hadd punishment on the fourth occasion shall be t...

Wilfred Laurier University researcher Judy Eaton, who was part of a panel discussion at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences conference in Toronto Wednesday, concluded in a study that nearly 1/3 of death row inmates made sincere apologies for their crimes. When Canadian researcher Judy Eaton set out to study the human yearning to apologize she turned her sights to Texas’s death row. In the final minutes before execution, condemned prisoners have no realistic hope of changing their fate and nothing practical to gain from telling victims they are sorry. Yet many do. In what is believed to be the first study of apologies in such a setting, Eaton, an associate professor of psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus, along with criminology student Anna Theuer, analyzed the last statements of 305 inmates executed by Texas between 1982 and 2007. Nearly a third spontaneously apologized for their crimes and showed signs of true repentance, such as taking responsibility...