Free Republic

Star witness Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi has spent hours in lurid description of how he and his old partner, James "Whitey" Bulger, tortured victims, yanked out teeth with dental tools and buried bodies in secret graves. But Flemmi stammered and hesitated Monday. Bulger's lawyers were asking the questions on cross-examination and they opened with the January 1985 murder of 26-year old Deborah Hussey – a stepdaughter Flemmi is accused of having sexually abused.

A quick Google search can tell you what John Lennon’s last words were, but for anyone who isn’t a celebrity, last words are either forgotten or unmemorable. In the case of death row convicts in the state of Texas, they may not all be famous, but their words are being preserved forever. Ever since the death penalty was reinstated in December 1982, last words have been recorded, and more recently they’ve been posted on a penitentiary website. Texas euthanizes more convicts than any other state in the U.S., having reached their monumental 500th execution on June 26. …

The prospect of gently dozing off while taunting victims right-to-the-end is hardly an effective deterrent... The death penalty is currently a legal sentence in 33 American states and in the federal civilian and military legal systems. Lethal injection has become the most common method of capital punishment utilized since SCOTUS re-enstated the death penalty in 1976, popularity owed to the theory it's the most 'humane' method available... but humane to whom? Not society, the victims, nor their families, that's for sure... Case-in-point being yesterday's execution of Richard Cobb (29) in Texas: he and his crime partner Beunka Adams (righteously executed April 2012) went on...

A Texas inmate was executed Thursday evening for fatally shooting one of three people he and a partner abducted during a convenience store robbery nearly 11 years ago. Richard Cobb, 29, didn’t deny using a 20-gauge shotgun to kill Kenneth Vandever in an East Texas field where two women also were shot and one was raped. He was convicted of capital murder. “Life is death, death is life. I hope that someday this absurdity that humanity has come to will come to an end,” Cobb said when asked if he had any last words. “Life is too short. I hope...

Arkansas plans to put prisoners to death with a drug that apparently hasn’t been used in a U.S. execution, and lawyers for condemned inmates warn that it could take longer for someone to die from it than from other lethal injection drugs. Arkansas Department of Correction spokeswoman Shea Wilson told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the state plans to use phenobarbital, along with lorazepam, in lethal injections. None are currently scheduled, but Arkansas recently passed a law that will allow the state to resume executions. … In a letter obtained by the AP, federal public defender Jennifer Horan told...

NEW DELHI: Fewer countries are carrying out executions than a decade ago, but India along with nations like Gambia, Pakistan and Japan bucked the trend to resume handing out death penalties. An Amnesty International report says that 21 countries executed convicts last year as compared to 28 in 2003. But there is greater concern that Indian courts had meted out at least 78 death sentences with more than 400 estimated to be on death row at the end of this year. The new death sentences given by India (78) are second only to Pakistan (242) in the Asia-Pacific region. At...

A Dallas judge has halted the scheduled Tuesday night execution of a Texas woman who would have been the first woman put to death in the U.S. in three years. The order from state District Judge Larry Mitchell moves the execution of Kimberly McCarthy, 51, to April 3. McCarthy faced lethal injection for the 1997 beating, stabbing and robbery of a 71-year-old neighbor in Lancaster, about 15 miles south of Dallas.

RICHMOND — A man who strangled his prison cellmate and made good on a vow to continue killing if he wasn’t executed was put to death Wednesday in Virginia’s electric chair. Robert Gleason Jr., 42, was pronounced dead by authorities at 9:08 p.m. at Greensville Correctional Center. He became the first inmate executed in the U.S. this year and the first to choose death by electrocution since 2010. In Virginia and nine other states, death row inmates are allowed to choose between electrocution and lethal injection. Gleason was serving life in prison for the 2007 fatal shooting of a man...

On Saturday, the Minister Louis Farrakhan began a 52-week sermon series entitled, “The Time and What Must Be Done.” Originally announced in early January, the lecture series will air every Saturday at 6 p.m. CT. Intended to educate African Americans about building a better future and taking control of their destiny, it also has some seriously-apocalyptic undertones. For example — and like past sermons — Farrakhan’s introductory message had no shortage of anti-American sentiment, calling U.S. citizens “a savage people” while dismissing the country’s current culture as “wild, untamed, uncivilized, uncultured [and] unrefined.” America, he claimed, is referred to in...

NEW DELHI: Jolted by the extreme cruelty unleashed on Nirbhaya by the only juvenile among the six accused in the Delhi gang-rape case, the government may be looking at enhanced punishment for minors — even a waiver of the delinquent's age by six months to a year — keeping in view the severity of the crime. While this review comes too late for the Delhi gang-rape case as it cannot be applied with retrospective effect, the shift is significant because heinousness of the crime committed rather than the exact age of the accused will determine the punishment. If the government...

Manuel Pardo was a decorated Florida highway patrolman and police officer who went horribly bad, slaying nine people during a three-month crime spree after he had been fired for lying. Now, almost 27 years later, Pardo, 56, is scheduled to be executed Tuesday night at Florida State Prison in Starke barring a last-minute stay, fulfilling a request he made to jurors at his 1988 trial.

Richard Stokley was executed this morning by lethal injection. He was convicted of the killing of two 13 year old girls in Elfrida. The killings happened in 1991. Stokley's accomplice, Randy Brazeal, is free after serving a 20-year sentence.

A man who killed two teenagers in his home in Little Falls on Thanksgiving Day told investigators he shot and wounded the two at close range before "finishing" them with shots to the head. Byron David Smith, 64, was charged Monday, Nov. 26, in Morrison County District Court with two counts of second-degree murder without premeditation in the deaths of Nicholas Brady, 17, and his cousin Haile Kifer, 18. Smith claims Brady and Kifer broke into his home and he was "fearful" they had weapons, according to the criminal complaint.

Official KNCA news agency: 'obliterated' for  drinking during official Kim Jong Il mourning period Anybody hoping for some sort of improvement from new leadership in the penniless Stalinist hell of North Korea can get back to reality now that a monstrous  bloody purge has been executed by 28-year-old 'Outstanding Leader' Kim Jong Un... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kim Chol, vice minister of the army, was taken into custody earlier this year on the orders of Kim Jong-un, who assumed the leadership after the death of his father in December.  On the orders of Kim Jong-un to leave "no trace of him behind, down...

North Korean official is executed by MORTAR SHELL for drinking during 100-day mourning period for late 'Dear Leader' Kim Jong-il • Senior military official broke the rules of mourning Kim Jong-il • During the 100-day mourning period North Koreans were forced to abstain from pleasurable activities - including drinking A North Korean military officer has been executed with a mortar shell blast for disrespecting late 'Dear Leader' Kim Jong-il by drinking alcohol during the 100-day mourning period. South Korean media claim Kim Chol, the secretive state’s former vice minister of the army, was forced to stand on a spot that...

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. A South Dakota man who beat a prison guard with a pipe and covered his head in plastic wrap to kill him during a failed escape attempt was put to death Monday, in the state's first execution since 2007. Eric Robert, 50, received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls at 10:24 p.m. He is the first South Dakota inmate to die under the state's new single-drug lethal injection method, and only the 17th person to be executed in the state or Dakota Territory since 1877. Robert had no expression...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Tuesday evening execution of a Texas death row inmate whose lawyers say should be ineligible for the death penalty because of his low IQ.

A video showing the public execution of a 22-year-old woman accused of adultery in Afghanistan has been condemned by the government as un-Islamic and inhuman. The video shows her being shot repeatedly in the back in front of a crowd of men in Qol village in Parwan province just north of the capital Kabul. The woman, named as Najiba, was married to a member of a Taliban militant group and was accused of adultery with a Taliban commander, said Roshna Khalid, a Parwan provincial spokeswoman, yesterday. "Within one hour they decided that she was guilty and sentenced her to death....

Twenty-four hours after a police officer shot Lily, a 5-year-old Border Collie-English Setter mix, its owners still don't understand why the police officer was on their property and why he used lethal force. ... had just returned from a shopping trip and their two dogs had slipped into their truck, then into the garage, before re-emerging when an officer walked up the driveway... Asked by the officer to control his two dogs, Mark Boling urged him not to advance, but he did. "My dogs don't bite, They're not going to hurt you," Boling, 52, an electronics technician with a defense...

In 1916, a circus in Tennessee sentenced an elephant to death by hanging In the early 1900s, it wasn't uncommon for humans to use their waxing technological prowess for the express purpose of torturing the hell out of animals. In one particularly mind-boggling incident, a five-ton circus elephant named Mary was condemned to death by hanging after her owners nixed executions by firearms, dismemberment, and electrocution. After Mary killed her handler in St. Paul, Virginia because of abuse/poor training/a toothache/some nebulous combination thereof, the proprietors of Sparks World Famous Shows executed the pachyderm in the railyards of Erwin, Tennessee on...