Death Penalty News

On 27 January 1945, Soviet troops cautiously entered Auschwitz. Primo Levi - one of the most famous survivors - was lying in a camp hospital with scarlet fever when the liberators arrived. The men cast "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive", he would later write. "They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by... the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist." "We saw emaciated, tortured, impoverished people," soldier Ivan Martynushkin said of liberating the death camp. "We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell." In less than four years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Almost one million were Jews. Those deported to the camp complex were gassed, starved, worked to death and even killed in medical experiments. The vast ma...

Avram Nika The Government of Serbia has this week appealed to a US court to spare the life of one of its citizens, Avram Nika, currently facing execution in Nevada. In a ground-breaking intervention, the first of its kind for Serbia, the Government expresses “grave doubts as to the validity of the death sentence rendered against Mr Nika”, citing multiple failures by the State of Nevada. Serbia’s amicus curiae ('friend of the court') brief, submitted today to Nevada’s Washoe District Court, describes how Mr Nika - a marginalised Serbian Roma who couldn’t speak English - was denied translation and consular services by the Nevada authorities, rendering him unable to participate meaningfully in his trial. As a result, his defence was perfunctory, with no mitigating evidence presented, and his death sentence became a virtual certainty. Mr Nika, who is now being assisted by Reprieve’s EC Project, was sentenced to death in 1995 for murder. The Serbian consulate was not inf...