Death Penalty News

WASHINGTON (TNND) — Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was indicted on multiple charges after he was captured and removed from the country early Saturday morning, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced. The White House posted on social media of Maduro's walk into the DEA office in New York City, where Maduro arrived Saturday evening. The post captioned "perp walked" shows Maduro walking down the hallway of the DEA's New York Department with his hands cuffed in front of his body, escorted by officers.

Though capital punishment is in global decline, there are horrifying exceptions to the general trend Next month, Oklahoma will embark on a grim schedule: an execution nearly every month until the end of 2024. In September, it is due to execute Richard Glossip, whom many believe to be the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. A 5-year moratorium has come to an end with the failure of a lawsuit arguing that the use of lethal injections was unconstitutional. Oklahoma is not the only place that is enthusiastically resuming state-sanctioned killing after a pause. Myanmar’s rulers announced on Monday that they had executed 4 prisoners, including Phyo Zeya Thaw, a rapper and former MP, drawing international condemnation. This was the first time the death penalty had been used there for more than 30 years, said the UN. And on Tuesday it emerged that Tomohiro Kato has been executed in Japan for stabbing seven people to death in 2008. Recorded executions fell sharply in 2020 across the wo...

Gopal Krishna Gandhi The process to elect the Vice-President of the country has started. There is a straight fight between the NDA candidate Venkaiah Naidu, and Opposition’s Gopal Krishna Gandhi. But this piece is not about the election. It is about the place of death penalty in a civilised country like ours, in the context of the protests against Gopal Gandhi on the ground that he had asked for Yakub Menon’s death penalty to be commuted to life imprisonment in the Mumbai blasts case, which had killed many innocent citizens. Headlines were flashed to say that Gopal Gandhi wanted mercy to be given to the terrorists. This was an incorrect interpretation of what he had said. It is not denied that Gopal Gandhi has been a long time opponent of death penalty. Around two years ago, the Law Commission of India had held a seminar on death penalty. I was one of the speakers there. I am for the abolition of death penalty. A near unanimous resolution was passed there for the abolition of deat...

GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) — The United States has disavowed torture and pledged to treat terror suspects humanely, but set aside calls to drop the death penalty, as the United Nations carried out its first review of Washington's human rights record. As part a groundbreaking commitment to improvement under the Obama administration, the US joined the 47-nation Human Rights Council in 2009. And in doing so, submitted to more international scrutiny. State Department legal adviser Harold Koh outlined nine key improvement areas yesterday, encompassing about 174 of the 228 recommendations the community had urged on Washington in an initial report last November. Nations are held accountable for what they agree to improve. He said the US would agree to improvements in areas ranging from civil rights to national security to immigration, including intolerance of torture and the humane treatment of suspects at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. But in some areas the US stance wa...

Johan Alfred Andersson Ander was the last person executed in Sweden. The guillotine has only been used once in Sweden: exactly 100 years ago. It was the last time a person was executed in the Scandinavian. At the time most countries still practiced the capital punishment. Only four countries had abolished it: Colombia, Costa Rica, San Marino and Venezuela. Today still 58 nations, such as the United States, China and Saudi Arabia, actively practice “the ultimate denial of Human Rights”, as Amnesty International calls it. The last person to be executed in Sweden was Johan Alfred Andersson Ander, who was sentenced to death for a murder during the course of a robbery. The execution took place at Långholmen prison in Stockholm on November 23, 1910. He was the only person in Sweden to have been executed by the guillotine. Previous decapitations were made with an axe. Until the beginning of the 19th century hanging by the neck was reserved for commoners and beheadings reserved for no...

Western powers accused Tehran of waging "bloody repression" since elections last year as they challenged Iran to open up to international scrutiny during a UN human rights meeting Monday. In a public review of Iran's record at the UN Human Rights Council, Britain, France, the United States and other Western nations expressed deep concern about reports of killings, arrests and torture in a clampdown on dissent. "The authorities are waging bloody repression against their own people, who are peacefully claiming their rights," French ambassador Jean Baptiste Mattei said. "France recommends that Iran accept the creation of a credible and independent international inquiry mechanism to shed light on these violations," he told the Council. Senior Iranian official Mohammad Javad Larijani rejected a "barrage of accusations" and accused some Western nations of "double standards" following their support for repression under the Shah of Iran...