Death Penalty News

After a week of fighting for his life, a 7-year-old boy died at Valley Children's Hospital. The boy's mother is responsible for his death and the death of his 12-year-old brother, according to Tulare County homicide detectives. Sherri Telnas, 45, has been charged with drowning Jacob's older brother, Jackson Telna. She will most likely face additional homicide charges in connection with Jacob's death. Last week, District Attorney Tim Ward filed a four-count complaint against Telnas. The charges shed light on the "horrific" June 29 morning in rural Tulare County. Detectives believe the mother took her children to a rural irrigation ditch and drown both boys. Telnas told deputies she drowned her children because "they were possessed by demons," according to court documents. After being interrogated, detectives said Telnas "threw spit" on the deputies who interviewed her. Jackson died after being submerged in water, a...

The mother of one of the victims came to know after the child watched a TV show that depicted sexual assault and told her the principal "did the same to her."  Bangladeshi police have arrested the principal of Baitul Huda Cadet Madrasa for raping at least a dozen girls since 2018 at Fatulla region outside Dhaka. The accused claimed he was 'possessed by Satan', and said he was innocent.  Al Amin was arrested on Thursday by the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) for sexually assaulting children studying in his institution. His criminal acts came to light after the mother of a 10-year-old girl victim filed a case of rape against him.  Chief of RAB Lieutenant Colonel Kazi Samser Uddin said the mother came to know about his acts after the child watched a TV show that depicted sexual assault and told her that the principal "did the same to her," reported AFP.  Uddin also said the investigation revealed that the principal raped 10 to 12 girl...

Pakistan has released the purported blasphemer against Islam. Now what nation will have the courage to grant her asylum? Asia Bibi, the Catholic mother imprisoned in Pakistan for nine years and condemned to hang for violating that country’s strict blasphemy law, has drawn broad sympathy throughout the West. Lacking credible evidence, and despite her denials, lower courts plainly yielded to Islamist pressure in making the illiterate field hand the first Pakistani woman to be given a death sentence for insulting Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. Then on October 31, Bibi finally received justice in an acquittal by Pakistan’s supreme court. But when she was released a week later, she found that mobs were baying for her blood throughout Pakistan — and, most surprisingly, that the West held out no firm offer of a safe haven. Islamabad has given assurances that Bibi has been taken to a secret, secure location inside Pakistan, pending a permanent place of refuge. But her escape seems stall...

3 followers of the Baha'i faith in Yemen have reportedly been sentenced to death by a court controlled by the rebel Houthi movement. The Baha'i community in the UK said the unnamed individuals had been convicted of espionage and apostasy. They were being tried alongside 21 other people by a judge who sentenced a Baha'i man to death last January. Baha'i representative Diane Alai said they had been "falsely and maliciously accused under absurd pretexts". She urged the international community to "condemn these baseless actions in the strongest possible terms and call for the immediate release of all detained Baha'is". In a speech in March, rebel leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi denounced the Baha'i faith as "satanic" and claimed it was "waging a war of doctrine" against Islam. The Baha'i faith was founded in Iran in the mid-19th Century by Mirza Husayn Ali, a man known as "Baha'ullah" ...

The persecution of witches came down to a battle for the 'market share' of post-Reformation Christians, according to a paper by 2 economists It was a terrifying phenomenon that continues to cast a shadow over certain parts of Europe even today. The great age of witch trials, which ran between 1550 and 1700, fascinates and repels in equal measure. Over the course of a century and a half, 80,000 people were tried for witchcraft and 1/2 of them were executed, often burned alive. And then trials disappeared almost completely. Their appearance was all the more strange because between 900 and 1400 the Christian authorities had refused to acknowledge that witches existed, let alone try someone for the crime of being one. This was despite the fact that belief in witches was common in medieval Europe, and in 1258 Pope Alexander IV had to issue a canon to prevent prosecutions. But by 1550 Christian authorities had reversed their position, leading to a witch-hunt across...

Damien Echols Six years ago Saturday (Aug. 19), Damien Echols woke for the last time on the wrong side of a set of jail bars. He spent 18 years in prison, convicted of the murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis in 1993. He, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., denied any involvement and there were question about the evidence against them. Echols told Talk Business & Politics the scars from his incarceration are still real. Each day he copes with physical and psychological damage he suffered while in prison. “I spent 18 years in prison under abject conditions,” he said. “Ten years was spent in solitary torture. The brain injury I sustained will always plague me.” The specific injury was not disclosed. Echols wife, Lorri Davis Echols told Talk Business & Politics her husband suffers from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He has had bouts of depression, and has spent years acclimating to life outside of prison. “It’s been a roller...

Steven Dean Gordon Steven Dean Gordon, the serial killer who says he deserves to die for his crimes, found no disagreement last year from the jury nor, on Friday, from the judge. Orange County Superior Court Judge Patrick H. Donahue sentenced Gordon to death for the abduction and murder of four women who had been working as prostitutes in Santa Ana and Anaheim in 2013 and 2014. In December, a jury convicted the 47-year-old Gordon of the murders and voted that he should die. Gordon has repeatedly said he ought to be executed for his crimes, and said he fired his public defender and represented himself at trial in the hopes of speeding along the system. Three of his victims — Kianna Jackson, 20, of Las Vegas, Josephine Vargas, 34, of Santa Ana, and Martha Anaya, 27, of Santa Ana — never were found. The fourth victim, 21-year-old Jarrae Estepp of Elk City, Okla., was found in an Anaheim recycling plant in March 2014, and the discovery launched the investigation th...

Salman Rushdie TEHRAN — A group of hard-line Iranian news media organizations says it has raised $600,000 to add to a bounty for the killing of the British novelist Salman Rushdie. Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, in 1989 calling for Mr. Rushdie to be killed because of his book “The Satanic Verses,” which the ayatollah found to be blasphemous and insulting toward Muslims. Mr. Rushdie has since then been living largely out of sight and under the protection of bodyguards. The semiofficial Fars news agency, one of the organizations involved, reported that the new reward money was gathered during a trade fair called the Islamic Republic’s Digital Media Exhibition. It quoted the secretary of the exhibition saying that the $600,000 had been announced last week to mark the anniversary of the 1989 fatwa. The Iranian government distanced itself from calls for Mr. Rushdie’s death under former President Mohammad Khatam...

Damien Echols My name is Damien Echols , and in 1993 I was arrested for three counts of capital murder in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas. Nine months later I was sentenced to death, and spent almost 19 years on death row before being released in 2011 when new evidence came to light. Prison is a dark and stagnant place. It's filled with the most cold, horrendous energy you can imagine. It feels like a kind of psychic filth that penetrates into your very soul. In 1993, when three eight year old boys were found murdered in my small town, attention immediately turned to me. Why? Because I was the town weirdo. I dressed in all black, had long hair, and listened to heavy metal music. As if this wasn't enough to make me suspect in a small, hardcore fundamentalist town in the midst of the era of Satanic panic, I also practiced magick. Some of the most damning evidence brought against me during the trial was my love of knowledge of Crowley, and the fact that I owned Ste...

Scott Panetti December 3, 2014 A federal appeals court issued a stay of execution Wednesday for Texas death-row inmate Scott Panetti, who was scheduled to be put to death later in the day. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative in the country, stayed Panetti's execution "pending further order of the court to allow us to fully consider the late arriving and complex legal questions at issue in this matter." Panetti's case has drawn considerable attention and controversy in recent weeks, as mental health experts and death penalty opponents have said he is too mentally ill to be executed. An unlikely coalition of conservatives, including former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and Baptist minister Pat Robertson, have pleaded with Texas Gov. Rick Perry to halt Panetti's execution, on grounds that "as conservatives, we must be on guard that such an extraordinary government sanction not be used against a person who i...