Death Penalty News

A man with his right hand and left foot covered in bandages after they were chopped off by Islamists/AFP As conflict continues in Mali, Amnesty International has unearthed evidence that civilians are on the receiving end of horrific abuses that include amputations, sexual violence and extra-judicial executions. After a 15-day research mission to Mali earlier this month, the organization launched a new briefing revealing such abuses in several locations across the country. Amputations In northern Mali, Islamist groups bent on imposing their interpretation of Sharia law are increasingly imposing violent punishments such as amputations following sham trials of those accused of committing crimes. The latest amputation was carried out on 16 September, and since August Amnesty International has documented a total of seven people who faced such punishment after hasty sham trials on charges of theft or robbery. An eyewitness to one amputation on 10 September in the t...

Robert Harris The U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the execution Thursday of an ex-con who confessed to killing five people at a Dallas-area car wash a week after he was fired from his job there. Harris, 40, was convicted of two of the five slayings 12 years ago at the Mi-T-Fine Car Wash in Irving. He also was charged with abducting and killing a woman months before the March 2000 spree and led police to her remains. Robert Wayne Harris, 40, received lethal injection less than two hours after the U.S. Supreme Court refused appeals to halt his punishment. Harris expressed love to his brother and three friends who were watching through a window. "I'm going home. I'm going home," Harris said. "Don't worry about me. I'll be alright. God bless, and the Texas Rangers." He was pronounced dead at 6:43 p.m., 25 minutes after the lethal dose of pentobarbital began. Harris is the eighth Texas prisoner executed this year. Another is ...

Iran Human Rights, September 20: According to official and unofficial reports from Iran at least six prisoners were executed in three different prisons today. One prisoner hanged in Western Iran. According to the official Iranian news agency IRNA, one prisoner was hanged in the prison of Doroud, Lorestan Province (West of Iran). The prisoner who was not identified by name, was convicted keeping 9 kilos and 618 grams of heroin, said the report. Three prisoners were hanged in Northern Iran According to the official website of the Iranian judiciary in Semnan province (Northern Iran), three prisoners were hanged in the prison of Shahrud early this morning, Thursday September 20. The prisoners were identified as "M.M.", "A. M." and "M. R." and convicted of "keeping and carrying large amounts of the narcotic substance crack", said the report. At least two prisoners were hanged in Urmia (Northwestern Iran) According to t...

RICHMOND — A judge said Wednesday that he did not need to hear any evidence before concluding that lethal injection in Virginia does not amount to practicing medicine without a license. Richmond Circuit Judge Gregory Rupe commended two Alexandria attorneys for an "imaginative" challenge, but he refused to let their lawsuit go to trial. Rupe said he could require Department of Corrections officials to appear in court to defend the way they carry out death sentences, but the question would ultimately come down to whether he believes lethal injection is the practice of medicine. "It is not," the judge said in dismissing the lawsuit filed by attorneys Meghan Shapiro and Christopher Leibig. Shapiro said after the half-hour hearing that she and Leibig "respectfully disagree" with Rupe's conclusion and are considering an appeal. "General anesthesia is medicine and only medical professionals can legally do it," Shapiro said. ...

Donald Palmer CINCINNATI — An Ohio inmate executed Thursday for killing two strangers in 1989 was calm but emotional as he spent some of his last hours visiting with his grown children, praying and writing letters, prison officials said. Donald Palmer, 43, spent the 24 hours leading up to his execution by lethal injection meeting several times with his grown daughter and son, his ex-wife and his spiritual advisers, said JoEllen Smith, a spokeswoman with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. She described one of the visits between Palmer and his children as "very emotional." "They prayed together, they were reading the Bible and singing," Smith said, adding that Palmer also was calm and cooperative as he's spoken to the execution team. Palmer was being held in the state's single-cell death house in Lucasville in southern Ohio as officials prepared to execute him by lethal injection at 10 a.m. Thursday. His lawyer, Davi...

President Yahya Jammeh President Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia has given the strongest hint yet that his government is prepared to repeal the country's controversial death penalty laws. Mr Jammeh who has already announced suspension of all executions of death row inmates, said changes to the capital punishment laws in the country’s constitution will only be made when the Gambian people express a desire for him to repeal the law and not through international pressure and condemnation. “I am working for you and I’ll live for you and die for you,” Mr Jammeh told a group of youth in his native village, Kanilai, some 43 kilometres away from the capital, Banjul where he is on his annual leave. “I will not succumb to human pressure to change the death penalty, no way, but if you the Gambian people plead with me to halt the executions, I will suspend it because whatever I do, I do it for your interest. If you Gambians want the death penalty to be removed from the constitutio...

Execution chamber and witness room at San Quentin prison, California California's death penalty has not satisfied anyone since it was reinstated 35 years ago. Those who are morally opposed to capital punishment decry the 13 lives taken by the state. Those who believe the death penalty brings justice and closure are frustrated that the average time between sentence and execution is 25 years. "I have concluded that it is dysfunctional and cannot be fixed," said Gil Garcetti, former Los Angeles district attorney who supports capital punishment but argues that the way it is imposed in California is "a colossal waste of money." Garcetti has become a leading spokesperson for Proposition 34, which would reduce the maximum penalty for murder to life without the possibility of parole. Taxpayers have spent about $4 billion in expenses related to California's capital cases since its reinstatement - working out to more than $300 million for each executi...

The tiny oil-rich kingdom of Bahrain pledged on Wednesday to improve its treatment of political activists, crack down on torture and prevent violence against ethnic and religious communities while accepting the vast majority of the U.N.'s recommendations regarding human rights. Bahrain is now the 1st country to be subjected to the 47-nation U.N. Human Rights Council's reviews of all nations' records in 2008 and this year. Each time Bahrain has been subjected to a bright, somewhat harsh spotlight. This time around, the council had issued 176 recommendations for Bahrain. Some of these focused on the government's response to the unrest that has hit Bahrain since early 2011, calling for fair trials in the wake of arrests and prosecutions of demonstrators and guarantees against the use of torture. Others called for stepped-up cooperation with the U.N. in its attempts to investigate alleged abuses in Bahrain, where the Shiite majority has been demanding a great...

COLUMBUS (AP) - Ohio has enough of its now-off-limits execution drug to complete seven of its 10 scheduled lethal injections, meaning that over the next year it must somehow acquire new batches or again switch to a different drug, according to a review of state pharmacy documents by The Associated Press. The state's supply of pentobarbital expires next September, and the sedative's manufacturer has agreed to prevent its sale to prisons for executions. Ohio and other states stockpiled supplies before that went into effect. The state plans to put a killer of two men to death Thursday and has executions scheduled through March 2014. Those include three executions after the drug expires at the end of September 2013. Prisons agency spokeswoman JoEllen Smith told the AP on Tuesday that the department will be working with state pharmacists and the attorney general's office to address the issue. She declined further comment. It's unclear what Ohio would do on...

Louisiana Death Row "When the judge sentenced me to death, he tells you about how he is going to kill you," Thompson said. "How much electric volts are going to run through your body." "I wasn't ready for what was ahead of me," he said. Innocence Irrelevant Thompson spent the first four years of his incarceration at the Orleans Parish Prison. But the true reality of his death sentence didn't hit him until guards moved him to Angola. He arrived at his cell to find the clothes of man who had just been executed, still inside. "That really blew me away," Thompson recalled. "I started throwing the stuff out in the hallway. They were laughing at me, saying, 'You better get used to that little brother.'" However, there was not much laughter during his 14 years of solitary confinement. "John Thompson, while he was on death row, had seven stays of execution," said Gauthier, recounting so...

Beheading brings to 60 the number of people executed in kingdom this year Riyadh: Saudi Arabia beheaded a Pakistani national on Wednesday in the holy city of Madinah after convicting him of drug smuggling, the interior ministry said. Bashir Khamis Ahmad was found guilty of trying to smuggle large quantities of heroin into the kingdom, the ministry said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency. The beheading brings to 60 the number of people executed in Saudi Arabia so far this year, according to an AFP tally based on official reports. Amnesty International says 79 people were put to death in the Gulf kingdom last year. Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery, homosexuality and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under its strict version of Sharia, or Islamic law. Source: AFP, Sept. 19, 2012

The Connecticut Supreme Court agreed Thursday to hear death row inmate Eduardo Santiago’s request to extend the recent abolition of the death penalty to his own sentence, despite the bill’s iron-clad language restricting the repeal to new cases. In April, the state legislature passed a repeal of the death penalty, but the legislation did not apply to those sentenced to death before the law was passed. Out of the 11 inmates currently on the state’s death row, five of them have already appealed to the Court regarding the validity of their sentences. Santiago’s death sentence was overturned in June because of withheld evidence, but he will have to face re-trial unless he can successfully argue that the legislature’s appeal should apply to him, said Mark Rademacher, his attorney. State legislators interviewed were split on how they think Santiago’s case will turn out, with pro-death penalty Republicans predicting he will escape his sentence and anti-death penalty Democrats expecting...

HARRISBURG - Condemned Philadelphia killer Terrance Williams lost in a bid for clemency Monday when the state Board of Pardons did not unanimously recommend his case for consideration by Gov. Corbett. Nevertheless, advocates for Williams - scheduled for execution Oct. 3 for the 1984 murder of a Mount Airy man, Amos Norwood - noted that three of the five board members voted to spare Williams' life, and some suggested that Corbett might not be barred from commuting his sentence to life in prison without parole even without a unanimous recommendation. Monday's session was the first clemency hearing in a death-penalty case in 50 years. Pennsylvania voters in 1997 amended the state constitution to require the board's vote for clemency to be unanimous instead of a majority. But advocates suggested after the hearing that because the amendment was spurred by the commutation of a life sentence, the change might not apply to a death-penalty case. The board granted the ...

President Jammeh Gambian President Yahya Jammeh's conditional moratorium on executions of death row prisoners leaves at least 38 people at great risk of execution, Amnesty International said today. On the evening of Friday 14 September, President Jammeh announced a moratorium on executions as the deadline he set for all death sentences to be carried out neared. The statement from the President's office stated "what happens next will be dictated by either declining violent crime rate in which case the moratorium will be indefinite or an increase in violent crime rate in which case the moratorium will be lifted automatically." "The President's announcement of a conditional moratorium is simply not good enough. Making the moratorium permanent, with a view to abolishing the death penalty in law, is necessary to ease some of the anxiety of the death row inmates and their families" said Lisa Sherman-Nikolaus, Amnesty International's Gambia...

Public hanging in Iran Human rights campaigners are increasingly worried that funding to combat the narcotics trade is providing indirect assistance to a judicial system that is engaged in what has been described as 'a killing spree of staggering proportions'. In Vakilabad prison, northern Iran, there is a long beam that can take up to 60 nooses. The condemned are made to stand on stools which are then kicked away. Vakilabad's record is 89 executions in one day. The true number of those executed in Iran is impossible to quantify, especially for those convicted of drug offences, but it is clear there is a large disjunction between official figures and the reality. In 2010 the Iranian authorities acknowledged that 172 people had been executed for drugs offences. However, the Foreign Office is aware of credible reports suggesting the real figure could be at least 590. In the 12 months to November last year, there were at least 600 executions, according to Amne...

Just a little over a year ago, Echols was facing execution on Arkansas' death row: "You sleep on concrete. You walk on concrete. You sit on concrete. It wears the joints of your body out. You're living with death hanging over your head at any moment, and all these things combined wear you down," he said. He wears glasses in order to see beyond four or five inches from his face, due, he says, to being enclosed in a very small space for so many years. "Your eyes are just like any other part of your body. If it doesn't get use, it starts to wither away. And that's what happened to my eyes." And then in August of 2011, after spending nearly two decades in Arkansas prisons, Damien Echols and two other men were suddenly released as part of a highly-unusual plea deal (which we'll explain later). Source: CBSNews , Sept. 16, 2012

Public hanging in Iran Human rights watchers say regime in Tehran is executing many hundreds of people, often on the flimsiest of evidence and after trials held behind closed doors. In Iran, the country I was born in and where I lived until three years ago, public hanging is a horrific but familiar scene for many, at least for those living close to city centres and public squares. Once as a child, on my way to school, I became an inadvertent spectator of an execution, my eyes shocked at seeing the guards draping a rope around the neck of a convict. The sight has haunted me ever since. Hanging is the common method for execution in Iran. The judicial killings usually take place in the morning as the sun rises, often at the crime scene or in a city centre. The families of victims and convicts gather as the authorities prepare to hang the condemned from cranes. Under Iran's sharia law, the victim's family has the right to spare the convict from execution for certai...

Terrance "Terry" Williams' execution is still set for Oct. 3, but a Philadelphia judge on Friday agreed to hear testimony on his lawyers' claim that the prosecutor at his 1986 trial withheld from the jury evidence of Williams' history of sexual abuse by his victim. Although Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina questioned whether Williams' lawyers had met the legal standard for an emergency hearing, she added that "The fact is, death is different. . . . The penalty is serious enough, and it cannot be reversed." Sarmina said the hearing Thursday would involve two witnesses: Andrea Foulkes, the city prosecutor in Williams' trial in the 1984 murder of Amos Norwood; and Marc Draper, Williams' admitted accomplice, who in new sworn statements says detectives and Foulkes ordered him to testify that Williams killed Norwood in a robbery - not in a rage over years of sexual abuse by Norwood. In seeking clemency, Williams' atto...

St. Louis, MO (KSDK) - The footage has aged, but the day is no doubt still vivid for those close to what happened here on the Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi River on April 4t 1991: two sisters, Julie and Robin Kerry, ages 20 and 19, raped and pushed to their deaths. "There are some times that he's very hopeful and there are some times there's a resignation," said Jamala Rogers, Justice for Reggie. Since the early days of the case, Rogers has been by the side of one of the four men convicted in the Kerry sisters' murders: Reggie Clemons, who, 21 years later, still maintains he is innocent from a cell on death row. "It's big, it's historic, it's huge," Rogers said. "This has been the day that he's been waiting for." On Monday, a Missouri Supreme Court appointed judge will open a hearing on Clemons' case, reexamining old evidence from prosecutors and hearing claims of a forced confession, police bru...