Death Penalty News

Rick Perry (left) became Governor of Texas in 2001, and to date has presided over 231 executions, more than any other governor in American history . After the death penalty was re-legalized in the USA on July 2, 1976, Texas resumed executions on December 7, 1982, and to date, has put to death 470 condemned inmates, including 6 (of the nation's 24) executions this year. Below is a list of impending Texas executions in the weeks and months ahead; please note that likely before the end of this year, Rick Perry will have presided over (more than) half of all people executed in Texas . date/name of impending execution---------# executed under Gov Perry------# executed in Texas since 1982 July 7--Humberto Leal---------------------------------232----------------------------------------471 July 20---Mark Stroman-------------------------------233----------------------------------------472 Aug. 10--Martin Robles-------------------------------234---------------------------------...

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono The nation fumed with rage upon hearing of the unexpected beheading of migrant worker Royati binti Sapubi in Saudi Arabia last week, prompting the Indonesian government to go on a mission to save hundreds more citizens facing the death penalty abroad. Ironically, there are still many foreigners in this country’s own backyard awaiting execution. Just one day before Royati was executed by Saudi authorities for the murder her female employer, Indonesia’s Supreme Court quashed a final death sentence appeal by Australian Andrew Chan , a member of the so-called Bali Nine convicted for attempting to smuggle more than eight kilograms of heroin off the resort island in 2005. Chan’s fate is now in the hands of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the only one with the power to grant him clemency. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has joined Chan’s family in their plea for mercy, stating that her government would “put as much force as we can into the appeal for...

WHEN A GOVERNMENT policy for decades has failed to accomplish its purpose and costs far more than an effective alternative, one would think a change would come easily. But that is hardly the case regarding California's dysfunctional and highly expensive death penalty. Since the state's death penalty was reinstated in 1978, taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment. California has 714 inmates on death row, more than any other sate. However, only 13 executions have been carried out, the last one in 2006. That amounts to $308 million per execution. Housing prisoners on death row is inordinately expensive, costing California taxpayers $184 million more every year than it would if those same prisoners were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, according to a major new analysis of the cost of capital punishment. It is not just the high cost of housing one inmate per cell on death row that makes capital punishment so expensive. Death penalty pro...

Vietnam will carry out the death penalty using lethal injection from July instead of a firing squad, police said, to reduce suffering. Vietnam, one of several countries in Asia where the death penalty remains in force, has been executing around 100 condemned prisoners a year by firing squad. The switch to lethal injection will "reduce physical pain for the condemned and also provide psychological relief to executioners," police Major General Cao Ngoc Oanh was quoted as saying by the Nguoi Dua Tin (nguoiduatin.vn) newspaper on Saturday. The administration is building chambers at prison facilities where the lethal injection will be administered to convicted prisoners, Oanh said. Lethal injection is the principle method used in the United States to carry out the death penalty. The Vietnamese police ministry first suggested an end to the firing squad in early 2006, saying it had led to mental disorder in the case of one member of the firing squad while many others had quit t...

Paris Gay Pride (2011) Affirmer et vivre librement son orientation sexuelle n’est pas un crime et ne devrait nullement avoir sa place dans un code pénal ! Au nom de la liberté et des droits humains les plus élémentaires, ECPM a défilé au milieu de centaines de milliers de personnes réunies à Paris, le samedi 25 Juin, pour défendre le droit à la vie des homosexuels et clamer haut et fort : « Pas d’homo à l’échafaud ! » Pour la 7e année consécutive, ECPM a sensibilisé le public de la marche des fiertés lesbiennes, gaies, bi et transgenres, au sujet des neufs pays qui condamnent encore à mort les homosexuels (Arabie saoudite, Afghanistan, Émirats arabes unis, Iran, Mauritanie, Nigeria, Pakistan, Soudan et Yemen), grâce à ses potences grandeur nature. L’association a également informé sur la situation de l’ Ouganda , où un projet de loi proposant d’instaurer la peine capitale en cas d’homosexualité aggravée* a été présenté devant le Parlement. Sous le mot d’ordre « Pour l’égalité : e...

A 21-year-old music student named Yao Jiaxin was executed this month for a particularly grievous crime: After accidentally hitting a woman bicyclist with his car, Yao saw she was still alive, so he stopped, got out and stabbed her 8 times to make sure she was dead and could not identify him. In a country with the world’s highest number of executions, the fact that Yao was sentenced to death was not uncommon. At least on the Internet, his crime was widely denounced, with citizens demanding death for Yao. But what was unusual was the intense public soul-searching the case also unleashed. Many legal professionals and others openly questioned whether justice was served by executing a young man who voluntarily turned himself in and confessed, and whose family offered to pay compensation. His crime touched a nerve here — a young man of privilege who killed a poor woman on a bicycle — but many blamed an online mob mentality for forcing a supposedly dispassionate court into imposing a death...

An Indonesian maid convicted of murder in Saudi Arabia has been spared execution by beheading after the Indonesian government paid Rp 4.6 billion ($534,000) in “blood money." Foreign Ministry spokesman Michael Tene confirmed the news on Sunday, saying that the compensation, or diyat , to spare the life of Darsem has been paid by officials from the Indonesian Embassy in Riyadh to the head of the court in the Saudi capital. “The court immediately issued a verdict to repeal her qisas sentence,” Michael said, referring to the reprisal system under Shariah law. “Darsem is now released from the death sentence." The funds were taken from the Foreign Ministry’s protection budget and transferred to the embassy ahead of the July 7 deadline. Darsem, from Subang, West Java, was convicted in May 2009 and sentenced to death despite her plea that she had killed the victim in self-defense because he had attempted to rape her. In January, the victim’s family forgave Darsem and agreed to ...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry presided over 231 executions -- more than any governor in U.S. history AUSTIN, Texas — Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has presided over 231 executions, more than any governor in the death penalty's modern history. If he runs for president, one of those executions may become a campaign issue — a case involving questions of whether he allowed an innocent man to be put to death, then tried to scuttle a state commission's investigation into the matter. The execution of Cameron Todd Willingham drew little attention when it took place in February 2004. But in the subsequent seven years, the way Perry handled the execution and an ongoing investigation into the case has become controversial. A presidential bid would likely increase the scrutiny, particularly as the Republican governor becomes better known. Whether the scrutiny would influence the outcome of the presidential campaign is another question. When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he rushed back...

A federal judge has refused to stop the upcoming execution of a Mexican national convicted of the 1994 rape-slaying of a 16-year-old San Antonio girl. Humberto Leal, 38, a native of Monterrey, Mexico, faces lethal injection July 7 in Huntsville. Leal’s attorneys argued his punishment should be blocked because he wasn’t told he could contact the Mexican consulate for legal help after his arrest for the murder of Adria Sauceda. They also said a bill introduced last week in Congress would allow federal courts to review cases of condemned foreign nationals. U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia ruled Wednesday the consulate claim was “utterly lacking in arguable merit." He also said the measure introduced June 11 by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy was “a mere proposal” and that similar attempts have failed twice in recent years. “It is not an enactment of new law,” Garcia said. Leal’s attorneys presented several dozen former diplomats, State Department officials and retired military of...

Kerobokan prison A Perth man released from Bali's Kerobokan prison a year ago on marijuana charges says conditions at the jail for Australians are horrendous and inhumane. Robert McJannett says the unsuccessful appeal of Bali Nine member Andrew Chan is "deeply saddening" and urged the Federal Government to bring Australian prisoners there home to serve their sentence. Mr McJannett spent five months in the Indonesian prison after being arrested at Denpasar Airport in December 2009 with 1.7g of marijuana in his luggage. He was released in May last year. The former trade unionist praised Mr Chan as a “reformed drug trafficker” and “reborn humanitarian”. "He’s caring and he’s got compassion,” Mr McJannett said. “He’s got a lot of remorse for what he did. "I’m sure he feels a bit guilty about those younger fellows in the Bali 9 as well. "I saw Andrew mentor other prisoners on a regular basis, including looking out for the younger members of the Bali 9, ...

June 20, 2011: the Government in the Bahamas plans to introduce capital punishment legislation which will strengthen death sentence cases from being overturned on appeal by the Privy Council, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham said. The new legislation will specify which categories of crimes warrant capital punishment and he plans to bring the law to Parliament for debate before the summer recess. The proposed legislation will be crafted around recent recommendations made by the Privy Council after it quashed the death sentence of Maxo Tido, who was found guilty of the 2002 murder of 16-year-old Donnover Conover, Mr Ingraham said. "They set out in their judgment a number of circumstances which, they say, can result in the death penalty being imposed. "For instance, somebody being killed during the course of an armed robbery or being killed during the course of a rape or drug trafficking. There are a number of other things that they said," said Mr Ingraham. "For inst...

June 21, 2011: an additional district and sessions judge in Talagang, Pakistan, sentenced a man to death for committing blasphemy. Abdul Sattar, a 29-year-old resident of Larkana was sent to prison in Jhelum. Mohammad Saeed, of Talagang town, had filed a complaint with the city police station on Feb, 2010. He said he had been receiving derogatory text messages and calls from a wrong number for several days. He told police that contents of the messages and conversation of the caller blasphemed Holy Quran, Prophet and Sahabas (companions of the Prophet). A case was registered and District Police Officer Syed Ali Mohsin set up a special inquiry committee, headed by then Superintendent of Police (Investigation) Malik Matloob. The committee collected data of calls and text messages sent by a cell number belonging to Abdul Sattar, who was arrested in Larkana. SP Matloob said Sattar had confessed to have committed the crime. “The accused behaved quite normally when arrested,” the SP added...

Mick Keelty rightly made an effort to get Scott Rush off death row in Indonesia - after the AFP had put him there. Why aren't the other Australians facing the death penalty getting the same support? Australian drug-smuggler Andrew Chan has lost his final appeal against a death sentence for his role in attempting to smuggle more than 8kg of heroin out of Indonesia. He will now almost certainly be killed by an Indonesian firing squad — unless he receives an unlikely last-minute pardon from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The decision to kill Chan was reportedly made by Indonesia’s Supreme Court more than a month ago, but it has only now been made public — two days after Abu Bakar Bashir was handed a 15-year sentence for being the motivating force behind the Bali bombings, which violently killed 88 Australians. Chan’s fellow death-row inmate Myuran Sukumaran’s appeal is still pending. The news that an Australian will be killed by the Indonesian state was greeted here with barel...

Dr Yudhoyono The prospects of Australian drug traffickers Schapelle Corby and Andrew Chan successfully appealing to Indonesia's President for clemency have been dealt a blow with Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (left) saying he gets plenty of requests from foreigners but rejects ''almost'' all of them. ''I often receive requests from many countries, be they directly or indirectly [communicated], be they written or not written,'' Dr Yudhoyono said in a televised speech yesterday morning. ''My answer is that law is supreme above everything else. I turn down almost all requests of pardon and acquittal from the death sentence. ''It is for the sake of justice. Our fellow countrymen get death sentence for heavy crimes. Why would we then grant a pardon for foreign nationals?'' Corby, serving a 20-year term for smuggling cannabis into Indonesia, lodged her clemency request almost a year ago. While a panel of Supreme Court judges, whi...

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (left) on Thursday condemned the beheading of an Indonesian maid in Saudi Arabia and accused Riyadh of breaking the "norms and manners" of international relations. In unusually strident terms, the leader of the world's most populous Muslim-majority country said he had lodged a "strong protest" with the Saudi government over Saturday's execution of the Indonesian citizen for murder. His comments signal Indonesia's growing anger over the treatment of its manual laborers in the Gulf countries, after a spate of cases of abuse and killings. "This week we were shocked by the execution of Royati binti Sapubi. Like all Indonesians, I also express sorrow over the disaster," Yudhoyono told a nationally televised press conference. "I also express my strong protest to the Saudi government, which by carrying out the death sentence broke the norms and manners of international relations." Indonesia is angry t...

Roy Willard Blankenship JACKSON, Ga. (AP) - A prisoner who was executed Thursday for killing an elderly Savannah woman more than three decades ago appeared to grimace and jerk as he became the first person put to death in Georgia with a drug that the state had not used before. Roy Willard Blankenship jerked his head several times throughout the procedure and muttered after the pentobarbital was injected into his veins. The 55-year-old's breathing and movements slowed within minutes, and he was pronounced dead at 8:37 p.m. He was executed for the 1978 murder of Sarah Mims Bowen, who died of heart failure after she was sexually assaulted in her Savannah apartment. Before the procedure began, Blankenship stammered and then told the warden "I hope to see you again." Blankenship's attorneys claimed in court filings that pentobarbital was unsafe and unreliable, and his attorney Brian Kammer warned that using the drug as the first part of a three-drug combination would...