Death Penalty News

Teo Ghim Heng, who strangled his pregnant wife and four-year-old daughter in 2017 before burning their bodies, was executed on 16 April 2025 after exhausting all legal avenues. His clemency pleas were rejected and his conviction upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2022. Teo Ghim Heng, who was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and their four-year-old daughter in 2017, was executed on 16 April 2025. The Singapore Prison Service confirmed that Teo’s death sentence was carried out at Changi Prison Complex. In a news release on the same day, the police stated: “He was accorded full due process under the law, and was represented by legal counsel both at the trial and at the appeal. His petitions to the President for clemency were unsuccessful.”

As attorney general of Oklahoma, Gentner Drummond has personally attended nine executions. Since taking office in 2023, he's approved of every death row case in the state — except one. "I believed it my duty to look at…every person on death row," he told CBS News. "When I stumbled across Richard Glossip, it was different. This is an individual who didn't murder the victim."   Glossip was convicted in the 1997 murder of a man who had been beaten to death. When Drummond examined the case, he learned the state knew its key witness lied during Glossip's trial. 

The method is a vivid reminder of the brutality of state killing. That undermines the pro-capital-punishment narrative On 11 April, South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi by firing squad . Mahdi had been convicted and sentenced for the 2004 killing of an off-duty law enforcement officer. One month before his execution, South Carolina put Brad Sigmon to death using the same method. He was the first person since 2010 to be killed by the firing squad. Both Mahdi and Sigmon chose the firing squad from a menu of three ways to die, the others being lethal injection and the electric chair.

As the state resumes executions of death row prisoners, a bill in the legislature aims to cut back on the time people convicted of crimes can spend trying to reduce or overturn their sentences, and it would vest more power over the process with the attorney general's office. The move also comes seven months after state lawmakers took action against Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams over deals he made through the post-conviction relief process to reduce the sentences of long-serving inmates.

Saudi authorities have executed Afghan national Badshah Qul Suleimani in Mecca after he was convicted of smuggling heroin into the Kingdom by ingesting it. Saudi Arabia's interior ministry announced on Sunday the execution of Afghan national Badshah Qul Suleimani in the Mecca region, after he was convicted of attempting to smuggle heroin into the kingdom. According to the ministry, Suleimani was apprehended by border security while trying to bring the drug into the country by ingesting it - a method commonly referred to as "body packing".

House Bill 36, introduced in the Ohio Legislature by Republican Reps. Brian Stewart and Phil Plummer, proposes adding nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution, replacing oxygen intake with pure odorless and colorless nitrous gas. Plummer and Stewart were not available for comment. Although Gov. Mike DeWine said no executions will occur during his time as governor, many have expressed worries due to his term ending in 2026, according to the Associated Press. Earlier this year, Attorney General David Yost, an outspoken supporter of the bill, announced his bid for Governor. 

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); April 14, 2025: Ali Dehani, a Baluch man on death row for murder, was executed in Zahedan Central Prison. According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a Baluch man was hanged in Zahedan Central Prison on 14 April 2025. His identity has been established as Ali Dehani, a conscript soldier from the village of Genk in the Sib and Soran County. He was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder.

Japan has taken a major step toward revising the country's retrial system, which has been criticized as making the process of overturning a wrongful conviction excessively lengthy. But the prospects of swift reform are unclear, with fierce opposition from within the Justice Ministry to one of the key proposed changes -- restricting objections from prosecutors against court decisions ordering retrials. On March 28, the Legislative Council, a ministry advisory body, was asked by Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki to look into the issue.

A new book by a national expert explores the failures of the United States’ favored execution method. Texas was the first U.S. state to execute someone by lethal injection, but the idea for the novel method came from Oklahoma. Our northern neighbor was the first to adopt the plan to replace the spectacle of the electric chair with something more palatable for witnesses and the public. Texas was just the first to test it out on a person.  Since 1982, when state officials injected Charlie Brooks—convicted of murder in Fort Worth—with a lethal cocktail of drugs dreamt up by Oklahoma’s medical examiner but untested in any research setting, Texas has led the country in lethal injections. Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (NYU Press, April 2025)—a new book by law professor, former prosecutor, and death penalty expert Corinna Barrett Lain—brings readers into the death chamber to bear disturbing witness to the reality of lethal injection.

Introduction: 49 Lives on the Brink of Death Imagine a 12-year-old child, with small hands and eyes full of dreams that never had the chance to blossom, confined for years in a cold cell with the shadow of the gallows looming overhead. Recall a 70-year-old father, his body worn by illness and the scars of torture yet unyielding, standing tall with a heart full of hope for justice, awaiting execution. These are real glimpses into the lives of 49 freedom-seeking individuals across Iran—from Kurdistan to Baluchistan, from Ahvaz to Tehran, and from Khorasan to Isfahan.

Mikal Mahdi, 42, was executed for the 2004 murder of 56-year-old James Myers A man facing the death penalty for committing two murders was executed by firing squad on Friday, the second such execution in the US state of South Carolina this year. Mikal Mahdi, 42, was executed for the 2004 murder of 56-year-old James Myers, an off-duty police officer, and the murder of a convenience store employee three days earlier. According to a statement from the prison, "the execution was performed by a three-person firing squad at 6:01 pm (2201 GMT)," with Mahdi pronounced dead four minutes later.

Although mandatory death penalty was abolished in 2023, many death sentences in Malaysia still involve drug offences. Concerned about the situation, Amnesty International (AI) calls for a moratorium, highlighting human rights violations. For AI Interim Executive Director Vilasini Vijandran, the country’s credibility is undermined. The gap between lower and higher courts on this matter is growing.

Four men have been publicly executed by the Taliban, with relatives of their victims shooting them several times in front of spectators at a sport stadium. Two men were shot around six to seven times by a male relative of the victims in front of spectators in Qala-i-Naw, the centre of Afghanistan's Badghis province, witnesses told an AFP journalist in the city.  The men had been 'sentenced to retaliatory punishment' for shooting other men, after their cases were 'examined very precisely and repeatedly', the statement said.  'The families of the victims were offered amnesty and peace but they refused.'

South Carolinian Randy Poindexter writes about the effects 16 years of solitary confinement had on him ahead of South Carolina’s planned execution of Mikal Mahdi , who spent months in solitary as a young man. For 16 years, I lived in a concrete cell. Twenty-three hours a day, every day, for more than 3,000 days, South Carolina kept me in solitary confinement. I was a young man before I was sent to solitary — angry, untreated and unwell. I made mistakes. But I wasn’t sentenced to madness. That’s what solitary did to me. My mental health worsened with each passing day. At first, paranoia and depression set in. Then, hallucinations and self-mutilation. I talked to people who weren’t there. I cut myself to feel something besides despair. I could do nothing as four of my friends and fellow prisoners took their own lives rather than endure another day of torturous isolation.

South Carolina plans to execute Mikal Mahdi on Friday for the murder of a police officer, draping a hood over his head and firing three bullets into his heart. The choice to die by firing squad – rather than lethal injection or the electric chair – was Mahdi’s own, his attorney said last month: “Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils.” If it proceeds, Mahdi’s execution would be the latest in a recent string of events that have put the spotlight on the firing squad as a handful of US death penalty states explore alternatives to lethal injection, by far the nation’s dominant execution method.

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); April 9, 2025: Farhad Shakeri, Abdolhakim Azim Gorgij, Abdolrahman Gorgij, Taj Mohammad Khormali and Malek Ali Fadayi Nasab, five political prisoners on death row for security-related charges, were executed in Mashhad Central Prison without last family visits. Iran Human Rights condemns the executions and warns of a significant rise in executions, particularly of political prisoners, and calls on the international community to take appropriate action to prevent further executions.

The number of executions in Saudi Arabia doubled in 2024 as the Middle East led a global surge, according to a new report by Amnesty International . Rights groups say the trend has continued into 2025. Recorded executions in the kingdom doubled in comparison with 2023, largely for terrorism and drug related offences, Amnesty International said in a new report. Saudi Arabia carried out at least 345 death penalty executions in 2024, compared to 172 in the previous year, marking the highest recorded number by the monitoring group in any given year. The only two countries that executed more people were China and Iran. It said Iran had executed at least 972 people and China was believed to have executed thousands, but it did not have a figure.

Florida on Tuesday executed a death row inmate described by one local detective as a "fledgling serial killer" for the murder of a beloved Miami Herald employee. Florida executed Michael Tanzi on Tuesday, 25 years after the murder of beloved Miami Herald employee Janet Acosta, who was attacked in broad daylight on her lunch break in 2000.   Michael Tanzi, 48, was executed by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison in Raiford and pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. ET. 

Mikal Mahdi, 48, who was found guilty of killing an off-duty police officer and a convenience store worker, is the second inmate scheduled to executed by South Carolina's new firing squad A murderer who ambushed and shot an off duty police officer eight times before burning his body in a killing spree is set to become the second person to die by firing squad. South Carolina's highest court has rejected the last major appeal from Mikal Mahdi, 41, who is to be put to death with three bullets to the heart at 6pm on April 11 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. Mahdi's lawyers said his original lawyers put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that didn't call on relatives, teachers or people who knew him and ignored the impact of weeks spent in solitary confinement in prison as a teen.

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); April 6, 2025: Zoheir Shamsi, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Ahvaz Sepidar Prison. According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was hanged in Ahvaz Sepidar Prison on 5 April 2025. His identity has been established as 32-year-old Zoheir Shamsi from Dezful. He was a tiler prior to arrest and was father to a five-year-old girl. Zoheir was arrested for the murder of his male (maternal) cousin four years ago and sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind).