Free Republic

This is the moment an Afghan comedian continued mocking the Taliban as fighters from the insurgent group dragged him away from his home before later executing him by firing squad. In a viral video filmed at the end of July, Nazar Mohammad, better known as Khasha Zwan, can be seen in the back of a car with an insurgent on either side of him - one of them brandishing a Kalashnikov machine gun. The brave comic - known for his TikTok videos - continues making jokes about the group, causing the Taliban fighter to his right to begin slapping him...

As the leading executioner per capita in the world, it is perhaps appropriate that a notorious killer, known as ‘The Butcher of Tehran,’ has ascended to the presidency. Following his rigged election, Ebrahim Raisi was inaugurated as president on August 5th. Listed as an international terrorist in the USA, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for his indictment for violations of human rights and crimes against humanity. He has boasted of his role as a member of the ‘Death Commission’ appointed by the then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988, which oversaw the massacre of more than 30,000...

CNN’s Anna Coren reports from Kabul, Afghanistan, with new evidence of atrocities committed by the Taliban. Video has emerged of Afghan commandos being shot dead after an apparent surrender. The Taliban rejects the video, saying it is fabricated.

HORRIFIC VIDEO: Puerto Rican Couple Yanked From Their Car and Shot By Mob of Black Men in Chicago A man was killed, and a woman was critically injured in a shooting Saturday night in Humboldt Park. There has been crickets in the media about this possible hate crime. The shooting took place as people were leaving Chicago’s 43rd Annual Puerto Rican People’s Day Parade, which people from all over the country and Puerto Rico travel to the city to attend. The victims had a large Puerto Rican flag waving from their car when they were approached by a mob of...

COLUMBIA, S.C. (FOX 46 CHARLOTTE) – The U.S. District Court of South Carolina denied Friday an injunction filed by two death row inmates scheduled for execution starting next week. Death row inmates Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens asked the court to find the electric chair to be declared cruel and unusual punishment violating the 8th amendment to the U.S. constitution. The case stems from Governor McMaster adding firing squad to the state’s execution methods except the firing squad is yet to be created and lethal injection is arguably unavailable. So Sigmon and Owens are set to die by the only...

Texas on Wednesday carried out its first execution after a 10-month hiatus with the lethal injection of a man convicted of killing an 83-year-old relative over $30. State corrections officials pronounced Quintin Jones, 41, dead at 6:40 p.m. at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, The Texas Tribune reported. He was convicted 20 years ago of the 1999 murder of his great-aunt, Berthena Bryant. The lethal injection came hours after the U.S. Supreme Court declined a petition by Jones' lawyers seeking a stay of execution. The court documents said the state unconstitutionally denied his intellectual disability claim and used now-discredited...

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill into law over the weekend that would require death row inmates to choose their execution method if lethal injections are not available in the state.The measure will allow the state to restart executions after nearly a decade-long pause, adding firing squads as an alternative method. A bipartisan group of lawmakers pushed the bill forward earlier this year and voted 32–11 in favor on March 2.According to the new law, death row inmates will have to choose between the electric chair or the newly formed firing squad. The state Senate bill will keep...

Death by firing squad is poised to become an execution method in South Carolina as the state faces a lack of lethal-injection drugs. The state House passed a bill Wednesday, 66-43, approving the use of firing squads, two months after the state Senate approved the measure, 32-11. Condemned inmates will be able to choose between electrocution or firing squad if lethal injection drugs are unavailable. South Carolina can’t put anyone to death now because its supply of lethal-injection drugs expired and it has not been able to buy any more. Currently, inmates can choose between the electric chair and lethal...

ATLANTA — He has been one of the most vocal, visible and controversial critics of the integrity of Georgia’s election. Attorney Lin Wood filed lawsuits and held rallies, claiming people voted illegally in the 2020 presidential election. Now Channel 2 investigative reporter Justin Gray has learned that the state has launched an investigation into whether Wood himself was a legal Georgia voter. Gray confirmed Tuesday that the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office has launched an investigation into whether Wood was eligible to vote in Georgia, whether he broke the law by casting his ballot and whether he was actually a...

Lai Xiaomin, former chairman of China Huarong Asset Management Co., the country’s largest such firm, was executed by a court in Tianjin city on Jan. 29. The firm was founded in Beijing on Nov. 8, 1999. Since September 2012, Lai also served as the company’s Chinese Communist Party chief. Lai was first placed under investigation by China’s anti-corruption watchdog in April 2018. On Jan. 5, 2021, he was sentenced to death without reprieve by the Tianjin intermediate court, on charges of bribery, embezzlement, and bigamy. The court noted that most of the activity in question took place after the 18th...

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...