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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – Ohio says it’s following a mandatory checklist for putting inmates to death as it prepares for the state’s first execution in more than three years. Items on that checklist include determining that the state has enough lethal drugs for the execution, evaluating the inmate’s mental health and checking his veins for the insertion of IVs.

Virginia has executed a man who killed a hospital security guard and sheriff's deputy after escaping from custody in 2006. Thirty-five-year-old William Morva was pronounced dead at 9:15 p.m. Thursday after an injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt. He had no last words. It was the first execution carried out in Virginia under a new protocol that makes more of the lethal injection procedure secret. Morva was in jail awaiting trial on attempted robbery charges when he overpowered a deputy sheriff during a trip to the hospital. He used the deputy's pistol to fatally shoot an unarmed security...

J.W. Ledford, who is schueduled to be executed Tuesday, has asked for a high-calorie last meal with three kinds of meat. The Department of Corrections on Thursday released Ledford’s requested menu: filet mignon wrapped in bacon with pepper Jack cheese, large French fries, 10 chicken tenders with sauce, fried pork chop, bloomin’ onion, pecan pie with vanilla ice cream, sherbert and Sprite. Ledford has filed a petition for clemency and the State Board of Pardons and Paroles will hear from his lawyers and advocates on Monday. He also has a complaint pending in federal court in Atlanta, saying a death...

Capital punishment in the US needs to be debated on its own merits and may eventually go the way of Canada. Until then, a humane society needs to choose the most humane method of employing it Lethal injection executions, back in the news, just aren’t working. For a variety of reasons. While they are bloodless (so is strangulation, starvation, and being broken on the wheel), it appears they often are not painless. They most certainly are not quick, sometimes taking hours. They arguably violate the Hippocratic Oath in having a doctor perform them, yet you hardly want an amateur to...

The Bible clearly supports the death penalty for those who commit cold-blooded murder. At one point, Arkansas was scheduled to put eight murderers to death in 11 days, before its lethal injection drug reaches its expiration date. Is this, as many are arguing, an unChristian thing to do? A piece in Christian Today includes this incendiary headline, “Christian campaigners horrified by Arkansas execution.” This headline is written as if that is the only acceptable “Christian” position to take. The article makes reference to “the state’s rush to the death chamber,” apparently mindless of the plain legal fact that these men...

A coalition of several groups opposed to the death penalty protested against 7 executions scheduled in the State of Arkansas. The rally was held at the Arkansas State Capitol on Friday April 14th. The 2 main guest speakers were West Memphis 3 suspect Damien Nichols and Movie Star Johnny Depp. Due to multiple lawsuits regarding the Death Penalty, executions by the state have been restricted to lethal injection and only with certain government approved drugs. Opponents of the death penalty claim that 1 and 10 criminals executed are innocent. Many activists also advocate for therapy of those on death row....

On Thursday night, Arkansas executed Ledell Lee—the state’s first execution in 12 years. Lee is one of eight men whom Arkansas originally planned to kill over 11 days before one drug in the three-drug lethal injection cocktail expires. Four of these men have received stays of execution, but Lee’s final plea to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected by a 5–4 vote. Justice Neil Gorsuch cast the deciding vote allowing Lee to die. It was his first vote cast as a justice of the court.

Human Rights Watch on Thursday condemned Hamas, after the terrorist group executed three men in Gaza who were accused of “collaborating” with Israel. In a statement quoted by AFP, the organization urged Hamas to stop the "barbaric" practice. The executions were carried out after Hamas vowed revenge for the killing last month of one of its top terrorists, Mazen Faqha, which it blamed on the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and its Palestinian "collaborators". The men who were hanged on Thursday were not implicated in the killing of Faqha but were accused of past acts of "treason and collaborating," a Hamas...

Three would-be robbers were shot and killed Monday when an Oklahoma homeowner's son opened fire on them with an AR-15, authorities said. Wagoner County sheriff's deputies were called to the home in Broken Arrow, southeast of Tulsa at around 12:30 p.m. local time. When they arrived, they found the three dead suspects and two uninjured residents.

The state of Arkansas plans to put to death eight inmates over a span of 10 days next month, a pace of executions unequaled in recent American history and brought about by a looming expiration date for a drug used by the state for lethal injections. The eight men facing execution — four black and four white — are among 34 death row inmates in Arkansas, where capital punishment has been suspended since 2005 over legal challenges and difficulty in acquiring the drugs for lethal injections. All eight men were convicted of murders that occurred between 1989 and 1999, and...

FULL TITLE: Arkansas plans execution spree with eight criminals set to be put to be death within ten days next month Arkansas is set to go on a killing spree in April after the state's Supreme Court cleared the way for eight Death Row inmates to be executed in the space of 10 days. Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said: 'It is past time for the victims' families to see justice for the horrible murders of their loved ones.' Arkansas has not executed an inmate since 2005 due to legal challenges and difficulties obtaining execution drugs. But in 2015 Arkansans elected...

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi lawmakers are advancing a proposal to add firing squad, electrocution and gas chamber as execution methods in case a court blocks the use of lethal injection drugs. House Bill 638 is a response to lawsuits filed by "liberal, left-wing radicals," said House Judiciary B Committee Chairman Andy Gipson, a Republican. The bill passed the House amid opposition Wednesday, and it moves to the Senate for more debate. Lethal injection is Mississippi's only execution method. The state faces lawsuits claiming the drugs it plans to use would violate constitutional prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. Mississippi...

Kuwait hanged seven prisoners in a mass execution on Wednesday, including a royal family member and a woman convicted of killing 58 women and children when she set fire to a wedding tent — the first death sentences carried out in several years in the oil-rich emirate. Those executed included a Bangladeshi, a Filipina, an Ethiopian, two Kuwaitis and two Egyptians, according to a statement carried on the state-run KUNA news agency. KUNA said that all had been convicted of murder except the Bangladeshi man, who was convicted of rape, kidnapping and theft. Kuwait's ruler, Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al...

GREENSVILLE COUNTY, Va. -- Ricky Javon Gray was put to death by lethal ejection at 9.42 p.m. Wednesday at the Greensville Correctional Center in Greensville County. Gray’s last appeal was denied hours before his execution when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Gray's request for a stay of execution. When officials asked Gray if he had any final words, he replied “nope,” according to CBS 6 reporter Jon Burkett, who observed the execution in the death chamber. Burkett reports Gray declined his final meal before the execution. Gray and his nephew Ray Dandridge shocked the Richmond community in January 2006 --...

340 N.Koreans Executed Since Kim Jong-un Came to Power December 30, 2016 08:22 North Korea has executed or purged 340 people over the past five years in leader Kim Jong-un's struggle to consolidate his rule. The Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank run by South Korea's National Intelligence Service, said Thursday executions of officials have steadily increased since 2012, with some 140 high-ranking officials purged or executed this year alone. Public executions of ordinary people are also becoming more common. The institute said more than 60 cases were recorded as of August this year, double the annual...

A Virginia inmate asked a federal court Wednesday to block the state's plans to execute him next month with lethal injection drugs from a secret compounding pharmacy, suggesting even a firing squad would be more humane. Attorneys for Ricky Gray said in a federal complaint that there is a serious risk that Virginia will "chemically torture" the man to death when it uses compounded drugs for his execution scheduled for Jan. 18. Although firing squads aren't permitted under Virginia law, his attorneys argue even that method would be a more humane alternative. "It is both more humane, quicker, more effective,...

— A man who killed an Alabama convenience store clerk more than two decades ago was put to death Thursday night, an execution that required two consciousness tests as the inmate heaved and coughed 13 minutes into the lethal injection. Ronald Bert Smith Jr., 45, was pronounced dead at 11:05 p.m., about 30 minutes after the procedure began at the state prison in southwest Alabama. Smith was convicted of capital murder in the Nov. 8, 1994, fatal shooting of Huntsville store clerk Casey Wilson. A jury voted 7-5 to recommend a sentence of life imprisonment, but a judge overrode that...

Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Senator Tom Cotton made an extraordinary revelation: Hillary Clinton’s staff discussed an Iranian nuclear scientist who was recently executed in emails found on Clinton’s private email server. The nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, was an expert in radioactive isotopes at Tehran’s Malek Ashtar University and reportedly gave information to the United States on Iran’s nuclear program.  According to Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’I, a former Iranian intelligence chief, “This person had obtained top secret information and established contacts with our number one sworn enemy, America, and passed on our country’s most crucial intelligence to the enemy.” According to the Washington Post, “Amiri...

Iran’s justice minister has said the country should execute fewer people and revise its death penalty laws, local media reported Sunday. “These last years, the quantity of executions has not been effective. As a result, there must be a revision of the death penalty law,” said Mostafa Pourmohammadi, according to the Tasnim news agency. “The judiciary as a whole shares this opinion,” he said. Pourmohammadi called for “alternative penalties,” but said it was not possible to abolish capital punishment entirely because “there are corrupt people in the country for whom there is no alternative but execution.”

ISIS has marked Eid by hanging prisoners upside down from meat hooks and 'butchering them like sheep' in a gruesome new execution video. In one sickening scene, men accused of being US spies are filmed having their throats cut in a slaughter house in Deir ez-Zor, north-eastern Syria. The video, named 'The Making of Illusion' was released on the first day of the Muslim holy time of Eid al-Adha and, bizarrely, features short clips showing actors Simon Pegg and Tom Cruise in the 2015 movie Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.