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Becky Harper sobbed as she spoke to a Missouri dispatcher after stumbling across her expectant daughter in a pool of blood, her womb slashed open and the child she had been carrying missing. “It’s like she exploded or something,” Harper told the dispatcher on Dec. 16, 2004, during the desperate yet futile attempt to get help for her daughter, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who had been eight months pregnant. Lisa Montgomery, who strangled Stinnett with a rope before performing a crude cesarean and fleeing with the baby, awaits execution Tuesday, just eight days before the presidential inauguration of death penalty opponent...

On this date in 1786, Elizabeth Wilson was hanged in Chester, Pennsylvania for the murder of her infant twins. “One of the melodramas of the early American republic,” our Elizabeth (sometimes called “Harriot Wilson” in the accounts) was a farmer’s daughter of Chester County who got knocked up by a passing sailor. When this gentleman declined to make an honest woman of her after she had borne the bastards, the kids disappeared — later to be discovered dead in the woods by a hunter. The fallen woman denied having killed them directly, but “acknowledged having placed the children by the...

A federal death-row inmate scheduled to be executed days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration has tested positive for the coronavirus, his attorney said Thursday. Dustin John Higgs is one of several people on federal death row set to be executed during the presidential transition, which has drawn condemnation from attorneys and critics who argue against carrying out their sentenced before President Trump, who supports capital punishment, is replaced by Biden, who opposes it. “Today, we were informed by the Bureau of Prisons that Dustin Higgs has tested positive for COVID-19,” Shawn Nolan, Higgs’s attorney, said in a statement. “This is...

One-time Gambino crime family executioner Sammy “The Bull” Gravano’s new podcast arrives with a bang this week. The former underboss to John Gotti premieres his new venture Wednesday, the 35th anniversary of the holiday season mob hit on family boss Paul Castellano outside Sparks Steakhouse in Midtown. SNIP “I think (Gotti) single-handedly destroyed the Mafia,” Gravano told the Daily News in a recent interview. “I think he made every mistake you could make." The Apple podcast extends Gravano’s social media presence. The confessed killer of 19 is already out and about on Facebook and Instagram.

Iranian dissident journalist Ruhollah Zam, who was convicted of fomenting violence during anti-government protests in 2017, was executed on Saturday, Iran’s state television reported. France reacted with anger to the hanging of the Paris-based journalist, which it called “barbaric and unacceptable” and said ran counter to Iran’s international obligations. Iran said on Tuesday its Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence against Zam, who was captured in 2019 after years of living in exile in France. His Amadnews feed had more than 1 million followers.

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department is quietly amending its execution protocols, no longer requiring federal death sentences to be carried out by lethal injection and clearing the way to use other methods like firing squads and poison gas. The amended rule, published Friday in the Federal Register, allows the U.S. government to conduct executions by lethal injection or use “any other manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence was imposed.” A number of states allow other methods of execution, including electrocution, inhaling nitrogen gas or death by firing squad. It remains unclear whether the Justice...

The Supreme Court denied a convicted murderer’s Thursday appeal, allowing the execution to move forward just before midnight. It was the eighth federal execution since Attorney General William Barr greenlit the punishment this summer and the first of three scheduled for convicted killers during the transition period for President-elect Joe Biden, who now opposes capital punishment.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department executed Orlando Cordia Hall on late Thursday for his role in the 1994 kidnapping and killing of a 16-year-old girl, after the Supreme Court cleared the way earlier in the night. His execution, by lethal injection at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., was the eighth by the Trump administration since this summer, when it resumed use of capital punishment by the federal government after a 17-year hiatus. Mr. Hall, 49, was the first of three federal prisoners scheduled for execution during the presidential transition. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has said he will work...

The father of a jailed political prisoner who has been sentenced to death for his participation in Iran’s November 2019 protests committed suicide and passed away. According to ROKNA state-run News Agency, Mohammad Moradi, the 60-year-old father of jailed protester Amir Hossein Moradi, died this morning in his home. The report said that he hanged himself in his basement. Amir Hossein Moradi’s lawyer, Babak Paknia also confirmed the report. Emteded, a “reformist” Telegram channel that operates from Iran, said that immediately after Mohammad’s death, security forces came to his home along with a number of people with cameras, who stayed...

Recently, I joined with 80 other current and former Iranian athletes and sports figures in signing a letter that urges an international commitment to saving the life of an Iranian national champion in wrestling, Navid Afkari. The 27-year-old is the youngest of three brothers who were arrested in 2018 for taking part in anti-government protests that summer in the city of Kazerun. While the two elder brothers have been handed prison sentences totaling more than 81 years, Navid Afkari was apparently made a scapegoat on the basis of his celebrity, and was given two death sentences along with a sentence...

The FBI has warned Chicago-area law enforcement that nearly three-dozen street gangs "have formed a pact to 'shoot on-site any cop that has a weapon drawn on any subject in public'," reports ABC7. According to an August 26 'situation information report' from Chicago-based FBI officials, "members of these gang factions have been actively searching for, and filming, police officers in performance of their official duties. The purpose of which is to catch on film an officer drawing his/her weapon on any subject and the subsequent 'shoot on-site' of said officer, in order to garner national media attention." Alerts based...

“They executed my partner. They hunted him down, they hunted us down. They recognized our Patriot Prayer hats. For anybody who doesn’t know Joey Gibson, citizens advocating for men, we support him, Christian and conservative. Um, so they identified our hats: “We got a couple of ’em right here. We got a couple of ’em right here. Pull it out. Pull it out”…I turned around. I didn’t even, it didn’t even register that somebody was pointing a gun at us until the shots went off and took off running…the shooter took off running and uh, you know, you, it takes...

On this date in 1936, thousands thronged Owensboro, Kentucky, for a glimpse of what would prove to be the last public hanging in the United States. The U.S. followed the trend of its onetime mother country, England, in moving the formerly iconic public hanging increasingly behind closed doors, but its federalist structure made that change uneven. In Kentucky itself at this time, the law displayed sedimentary layers of death penalty history. Caught up for killing a 70-year-old woman — done in the midst of a drunken burglary, he had left a telltale ring at the scene; fingerprint analysis also helped...

Source: Mugshot of Darius Nathaniel Sessoms via Wilson Police Department We have a brutal crime in North Carolina, and if the races of those involved were reversed, this would be a national story. Instead, the victim is white. A five-year-old was shot in the head by a 25-year-old black man in front of his siblings as they played outside of their father’s house in Wilson, North Carolina. We don’t know a motive, other than pure evil (via WSOCTV): A 25-year-old man accused of shooting his 5-year-old neighbor in the head at point blank range in Wilson, North Carolina on Sunday...

A prisoner on San Quentin's death row died Sunday at an outside hospital, apparently from complications related to the COVID-19 coronavirus, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Sunday. Orlando G. Romero, 48, was sentenced to death in Riverside County on Aug. 28, 1996, for first-degree murder and second-degree robbery while armed with a firearm. .... He was admitted onto death row on Sept. 4, 1996 Romero is the 11th condemned prisoner at San Quentin to die since late June, the Department of Corrections said. He was the 20th San Quentin prisoner overall to die from complications of COVID-19,...

The most recent execution in the Russian Federation was that of serial killer Sergey Golovkin on this date in 1996. Known as “The Fisher” or “The Boa”, Golovkin (English Wikipedia entry | Russian) grew up in Moscow as a shy outsider type (Russian link) with a noticeable slump and a predilection for animal cruelty, the kind of whom oblivious classmates will later say that they never saw it coming. He graduated from an agricultural academy and worked as a horse-breeding expert: people skills just weren’t his thing. But people killing skills …

Attorney General William P. Barr today directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule the executions of two federal death-row inmates who were each convicted of murder. William Emmett LeCroy raped and murdered Joann Lee Tiesler, a 30-year-old nurse, in 2001. LeCroy had previously served 10 years in federal and state prison for, among other crimes, aggravated assault, burglary, child molestation, and statutory rape.  After his release to supervised probation, LeCroy began planning to flee the country.  In furtherance of that plan, LeCroy broke into Tiesler’s home in Gilmer County, Georgia.  Once she returned home, LeCroy attacked her, bound her...

Department of Justice Spokesperson Kerri Kupec has issued the following statement:“Today, Dustin Lee Honken was executed at USP Terre Haute in accordance with the death sentence imposed by a federal district court in 2004.  Honken was pronounced dead at 4:36 p.m. EDT by the Vigo County Coroner.In 1993, Honken, a meth kingpin, kidnapped, fatally shot, and buried Lori Duncan, a single, working mother, Duncan’s two young daughters — 10-year-old Kandi and 6-year-old Amber — and Greg Nicholson, a government informant who testified against Honken on federal drug trafficking charges.  Honken also murdered Terry DeGeus, who Honken thought might also...

The Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted another injunction on the Trump administration's rapid push to resume federal death sentences this week. A divided court lifted one of a handful of injunctions temporarily blocking the execution of a man whose lawyers say suffers from severe dementia. The vote was 5-4 with the liberal justices — Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — dissenting. DEVELOPING...

A federal judge in Washington has blocked federal executions scheduled for this week, citing concerns that the lethal injection protocol involved is "very likely to cause extreme pain and needless suffering." Judge Tanya Chutkan said the last-minute ruling only hours before executions were set to resume for the first time in 17 years was "unfortunate," but she blamed the Justice Department for racing ahead before legal challenges had been fully aired. The judge said the prison's plan to use a single drug, pentobarbital, could cause pulmonary edema, producing a sense that the condemned men were drowning. That would violate the...