Death Penalty News

Video footage shows Siddqa, 25, covered completely by a blue burkha, buried up to her waist in the ground as a crowd of people watches on Horrific video footage has emerged of Taliban insurgents stoning a couple to death for alleged adultery in northern Afghanistan. Hundreds of villagers can be seen on the video standing around as 19-year-old Siddqa, is buried up to her waist in a hole in the ground. Two mullahs pass sentence before the crowd begins to throw rocks at her head and body as she desperately tries to crawl free. After the 25-year-old collapsed to the ground, covered in blood, miraculously still alive, a Taliban fighter then shot her three times. Her alleged lover, Khayyam, is then marched in front of the crowd with his hands tied behind his back. He was blindfolded and crouched down close to the ground as he tried to protect his body from the stones. But he is battered to the floor by a barrage of rocks, before falling silent. The stoning took place in...

David Kato A Ugandan gay rights campaigner who sued a newspaper for publishing the names and photos of gay people has been beaten to death. David Kato’s death is being investigated by police and activists say he was attacked in his home near Kampala yesterday afternoon. His name, photograph and address were published by the tabloid newspaper Rolling Stone last year and he is said to have received death threats. Mr Kato, along with a few others, complained to a judge about Rolling Stone’s anti-gay campaign and the newspaper was ordered to cease outing gays and lesbians. Sexual Minorities Uganda called him a “dear friend, colleague, teacher, family member and human rights defender”. Frank Mugisha, of the group, said: “No form of intimidation will stop our cause. The death of David will only be honored when the struggle for justice and equality is won. David is gone and many of us will follow, but the struggle will be won. David wanted to see a Uganda where all people will be tr...

If inmate Carey Dean Moore is put to death, it would be Nebraska's 1st execution since 1997 and its first lethal injection. Attorney General Jon Bruning said a motion was filed with the Nebraska Supreme Court on Monday, requesting that a date be set. Moore was sentenced to death for the 1979 murders of 2 Omaha cabbies. The state's last execution occurred in 1997, when Robert Williams was electrocuted for killing three women. 11 men remain on Nebraska's death row. Besides Williams, Harold Otey and John Joubert also have been electrocuted since the state resumed executions in 1994. Moore's attorney, Alan Peterson, did not immediately respond to a message Tuesday. Moore was convicted of 1st-degree murder for killing taxi drivers Maynard D. Helgeland and Reuel Eugene Van Ness in botched robberies. Moore, 53, came within a week of being executed in 2007, but 6 days before his scheduled execution the state's high court issued a stay because it wanted to consider wheth...

Iran Human Rights, January 25: Two men were hanged in northeastern Iranian town of Bojnord yesterday January 24, reported the state run Iranian news agency Fars. The men, who were brothers, were identified as Kamran Khaki and Mehran Khaki and were convicted of "corruption on earth" and "Moharebeh" for killing a guard, keeping arms, armed robbery and disruption of public order, according to the report. The charges have not been confirmed by independent sources. Six others, among them two political prisoners were executed in Tehran and Karaj on the same day. According to the official Iranian reports at least 72 people have been executed in Iran since the beginning of January 2011. Source: Iran Human Rights , January 25, 2011 -  [ فارسى ] _________________________ Use the tags below or the search engine at the top of this page to find updates, older or related articles on this Website.

(AP) COLUMBUS, Ohio - The state is switching its sole lethal injection drug to one commonly used to put animals to sleep as a shortage of the drug normally used for executions has worsened, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction announced Tuesday. Beginning in March, the state execution team will use a single, powerful dose of pentobarbital, a common anesthetic used in surgeries and also by veterinarians to euthanize pets. The drug replaces sodium thiopental, which was already scarce when its only U.S. manufacturer announced last week it would no longer produce it. Ohio is following the lead of Oklahoma, which switched to pentobarbital last year and has since used it three times. However, Ohio, which uses only a single dose of anesthetic to execute inmates, would become the first state to use pentobarbital alone, without two additional drugs that paralyze inmates and stop their hearts. The prisons department said it will use its remaining supply of sodium thiopental f...

JACKSON, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia man convicted of killing an Atlanta preschool teacher more than two decades ago has been executed by state corrections officials. Emmanuel Hammond (left) was put to death by injection Tuesday at the state prison in Jackson after state and federal courts turned down his appeals. The 45-year-old was pronounced dead at 11:39 p.m. Hammond was convicted of the 1988 murder of 27-year-old Julie Love, who was abducted in north Atlanta after her car ran out of gas. Prosecutors say Love was beaten and raped before Hammond took her into the woods, shot her to death and dumped her body into a trash pile. Investigators didn't find her body until August 1989, when Hammond's girlfriend told police he was responsible for her disappearance. Source: Associated Press, January 25, 2011 U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halts Georgia execution The U.S. Supreme Court delayed the execution Tuesday of a death row inmate whose lawyers filed a last-minute appeal question...

Attorneys for Troy Anthony Davis are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule a federal judge who decided last year the Georgia death row inmate failed to clear his name after getting a rare chance to prove his innocence. Davis' latest appeal, filed Friday, says the U.S. District Court judge ordered by the Supreme Court to hear his innocence claim last year "evinced a clear hostility to Mr. Davis and his claims throughout the hearing." Davis has long said he could prove he was wrongly convicted of the 1989 slaying of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail if a court agreed to hear new evidence. The Supreme Court in late 2009 ordered U.S. District Court Judge William T. Moore Jr. in Savannah to preside over such a hearing. Moore heard 2 days of testimony in June. In August, the judge ruled evidence presented by Davis' attorneys wasn't nearly strong enough to prove he's innocent. He wrote that while the evidence casts some additional doubt on Davis...

The news in today's New York Times that Hospira, Inc., the only FDA approved manufacturer of the lethal injection anesthetic sodium thiopental, has decided to stop making that drug has thrown the status of U.S. executions into further disarray. There has been a shortage of the drug for a year, delaying some executions and prompting states to take unusual and often highly secretive measures to find other suppliers. Now it is clear that the shortage will be permanent. It is certainly NOT good news that the production of a drug with positive medical uses has been discontinued, but pharmaceuticals (and, for that matter, human beings) are not created to kill people, so using them for that purpose is bound to cause confusion, both moral and legal. This ongoing saga, with states scrambling to find drugs for their executions, has only served to illustrate how degrading the whole death penalty enterprise is. All who participate in it, from the jurors, to the lawyers and judges, t...

Two young men who filmed themselves having sex with a 17-year-old have been sentenced to death by stoning in Iran. The film was discovered on the mobile phones of Ayub and Mosleh, 20 and 21 years old, by agents of the Iranian regime in the Kurdistan city of Piranshahr in northwest Iran. It has been claimed that the video included them having sex with a third, 17-year-old who told religious police that the pair raped him in exchange for sparing his own life. The pair’s full names have not been released. Pictures of President Ahmadinejad and a headshot of Supreme Leader Khamenei pasted over a donkey were allegedly incorporated into the film. Reports say that the young men’s stoning was immediately ordered for this Friday “to instill fear in the people of Iran”. News of the sentence originates from a Kurdish newspaper and has been distributed by the International Committee Against Stoning, which launched the worldwide campaign against the stoning of Sakineh Ashtiani for adultery. It...

Zahra Bahrami The Iran government has confirmed that the Dutch-Iranian woman Zahra Bahrami has been sentenced to death. A spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry made an official announcement over the weekend. Insiders say it is unusual for the death penalty to be announced in advance.  Iranian Human rights activist Sadegh Naghaskar told Radio Netherlands Worldwide on Monday that the death sentence was referred to in an interview with the state news agency Irna. The Dutch Foreign Ministry has confirmed this to RNW.  Pressure  Naghaskar is concerned about the fate of the 45-year-old woman who was found guilty of possessing cocaine. "In principle she could be executed any moment now, but it could just as easily be several months." He says she has been transferred to an isolation wing of the prison known as 'Methadone'. This houses a number of political prisoners accused of possessing drugs.  Speaking from Tehran, Bahrami's daughter Banafsheh Naj...

Florida's electric chair The decision by an Illinois drug company to stop producing a drug used in Florida executions could lead to delays. The nearly 400 men and women sitting on Florida's death row may have received a stay of execution -- at least temporarily -- from an unexpected source. An Illinois pharmaceutical company announced Friday it will discontinue the production of a drug used in Florida lethal injections, creating far-reaching obstacles -- and delays -- for the state's backed-up execution system, experts say. With a four-paragraph statement on its website Friday announcing it would "exit the sodium thiopental market,'' Hospira Inc. changed how convicted felons would be put to death across the nation, including here in Florida. Sodium thiopental, an anesthetic, is 1 of the 3 drugs used by the state during lethal injections. Hospira was the only U.S. maker of the anesthetic. When reserves of the drug are exhausted, Florida will need to find...

The head of the Iranian regime’s Supreme Court has called for more hangings at a faster rate, according to the state-run Fars news agency on Wednesday. According to Fars, Ahmad Mohseni Gorgani added that more executions will ultimately bring more stability and security for the regime. “If offenders in society are not hanged, instability will increase. The hangings will cause stability and security in society.” He said the “firmness” displayed by the regime’s judiciary chief, Sadeq Larijani, regarding “offenders, traitors, and criminals has created contentment in society.” Gorgani suggested that global condemnations of the regime’s rights record arise from “negative propaganda on the death sentence,” adding, “An important part of the society’s security lies with the judiciary and in view of the fact that the sentences are issued on the basis of Islamic laws, everyone must defer to them and the rulings must be implemented with firmness and speed.” Source: NCRI, Freedom Messenger , J...

Reprieve today reveals that British businessman Matt Alavi of Dream Pharma knew his drugs would be used to kill and expedited prison orders for that reason. The US state of Georgia is poised to execute Emanuel Hammond using drugs knowingly and willingly supplied by Mr Alavi , who runs Dream Pharma out of the back of a driving academy in West London. Newly released emails between Mr Alavi and Georgia , obtained in Georgia litigation, offer an insight into the extent of Dream Pharma’s culpability for deaths throughout the US prison system. Until today Mr Alavi has only admitted to sending one batch of execution drugs to Arizona’s State Prison Complex. It is now clear that Dream Pharma has been doing a brisk trade across the USA, quietly supplying Georgia and others with sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Similarly, Mr Alavi denied that he knew what the drugs were being used for. However, today’s revelations prove that Mr Alavi was explicitly in...