Free Republic

BEIJING (AP) - Chinese authorities executed 17 people on drug charges to mark International Anti-Drugs Day, state news media said Sunday. The executions were carried out Saturday in Shanghai and Chongqing and came a day after authorities announced 11 other executions scheduled to mark the day. Among those executed Saturday, Lin Shengfu was convicted of smuggling 1.8 kilograms of heroin from Myanmar to Shanghai in 2003, Xinhua News Agency said. Lin was among 78 drug convicts whose punishments were imposed in Shanghai on Saturday, Xinhua said. It didn't identify any of the others or give details of their cases. Other...

CALCUTTA, India (AP) - Rights activists and intellectuals are campaigning to halt capital punishment in India ahead of this week's scheduled execution of a man convicted of raping and murdering a teenager. The death penalty is rare in this country. Friday's scheduled execution of Dhananjay Chatterjee, 39, will be West Bengal state's first in 13 years. Two people were hanged in the eastern state in 1991. Chatterjee was arrested and charged with raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl in the state's capital, Calcutta, in 1990. He'd been working as a security guard at the building where she lived, and was...

Dhananjay Chatterjee, who was to be hanged on Friday for the rape and murder of a teenaged girl, got a brief respite because the President has sought the Union home ministry's opinion on his mercy petition. In Kolkata, West Bengal's Advocate-General Balai Roy told mediapersons that a communique from Rashtrapati Bhavan said, "The President is considering this application for clemency." Friends, relatives and some jail inmates have pleaded that Chatterjee's death sentence be changed to life imprisonment. The state had been asked to stay the execution until the President decides on the application. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has also stayed...

Korean Internet Users Launch Hacking Attacks on Ogrish.com Korean Internet users have launched "Hacking of Fury" attacks on a website, Ogrish.com, which is trying to obtain and spread the video of Kim Sun-il¡¯s decapitation. This site posted the unabridged video of Nicholas Berg¡¯s beheading in May. The site enraged Korean Internet users by posting an advertisement looking for video of Kim's decapitation when Kim was kidnapped. The site is posting a message on its main page that Kim has been decapitated and is asking people to send in videos or photos of Kim¡¯s decapitation if they have them. In regards...

KOLKATA: Tuesday morning was the first time in his life that Dhananjoy Chatterjee really knew he would die at the end of a rope. It was the day's newspapers that shattered what little hopes he nursed of escaping the hangman's death squeeze. No, he did not cry. But he showed he finally knew that his time was up; that he would have to pay with his life for a crime which shook even weather-beaten policemen and doctors. It was not Chatterjee's fault if he had started believing that he would get away with a natural death. The state government sat...

LONDON (AP) — Iraq could execute former leader Saddam Hussein after trying him, the director of the country's war crimes tribunal system said Sunday. Salem Chalabi, who is in charge of setting up a special tribunal to try members of the ousted regime, said that once the Iraqi government gains sovereignty on June 30, it will have the power to end U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer's suspension of the death penalty in Iraq. "The Iraqi government has to affirmatively take that step to lift the suspension," Chalabi told British Broadcasting Corp. television's "Breakfast with Frost" program. "If the suspension...

<p>Do words matter? Does it matter when we care enough to write to a TV anchor? Can we alter how history is reported? YES...and here's how it happened in one instance.</p> <p>My husband, and I happened to be watching San Diego?s Channel 7's news at 4:30 PM yesterday, when they ran the story about Paul Johnson's beheading. We heard about it earlier in the day, but this was the first newscast we saw on TV about it. We watched in amazement, as the anchor read the story as Mr. Johnson was executed today..... At 5 PM, Marty Levin repeated virtually the same written story as the 4:30 anchor - complete with text graphics on a picture also referring to his EXECUTION. At that point, my husband couldn't take it any longer, and wrote to Marty Levin about it.</p>

Thanks to Gov. Rick Perry, Texans can rest a little easier knowing we have been protected, once and for all, from the future dangerousness of Kelsey Patterson, the paranoid schizophrenic who went to his death in Huntsville last week despite his belief that he had been granted an amnesty by Satan himself. That....

http://www.talonnews.com/news/2004/may/0526_webb_comments_confirmed.shtml Webb: 'Should George Bush Get The Death Penalty? I Say Yes' By Jimmy Moore Talon News May 26, 2004 SEATTLE, WA (Talon News) -- The comments made by a liberal radio talk show host allegedly calling for the death of President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for "war crimes" have been confirmed by an audiotape of the original broadcast obtained exclusively by Talon News. As Talon News first reported last Thursday, a listener to The Mike Webb Show, which airs from 10:00 p.m.-1:00 a.m. on 710 AM KIRO in Seattle, Washington, said that Webb had...

Florida Inmate Who Wanted State to Kill Him Is Executed By Ron Word/Associated Press Associated Press Writer May 26, 2004 STARKE, Fla. (AP) - A man who said he killed a fellow prison inmate so the state of Florida would give him the death penalty was executed Wednesday. John Blackwelder, 49, received an injection of chemicals at Florida State Prison, a spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush said. Blackwelder was convicted in the May 2000 strangling of Raymond Wigley, 39, who was serving a life term for murder. At the time, Blackwelder faced life without parole for a series of sex...

Fla. Plans to Mark Death Penalty's Return By RON WORD/Associated Press May 22,2004 STARKE, Fla. (AP) -- When the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, Florida had no executioner, no written procedure on how to conduct an execution and had not used the electric chair in 15 years. Despite those problems, on May 25, 1979, John Spenkelink, a drifter convicted of killing a traveling companion, became the first man put to death in Florida since the court's ruling. Now the state is again facing scrutiny as it plans to execute a man on the 25th anniversary of Spenkelink's...

FADP Calls Tuesday's Execution: 'Suicide by Governor' on Historic Anniversary; '25 Years of Blood on All Our Hands' 5/21/2004 4:24:00 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: State Desk Contact: Abe Bonowitz Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, 561-371-5204 GAINESVILLE, Fla., May 21 /U.S. Newswire/ -- As we approach the 25th anniversary of the resumption of executions in Florida, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP) calls on Governor Jeb Bush to stop the state-assisted suicide of John Blackwelder, and to take steps towards abolition of the death penalty. Members of FADP will protest the execution at Florida State Prison and...

Speaking Ill of the Dead--The Media Treatment of Nick Berg and Pat TillmanPosted by Doc Farmer Wednesday, May 19, 2004 My column last week was written before the news about the horrific slaughter of Nick Berg, an innocent American contractor. I had commented on the stupidity and cowardice of the mainstream (see also: lib/dem/soc/commie) media, their fear of us doing anything remotely discomforting in this, or any, war. However, Mr. Berg’s tragic demise brought into focus the true problem of the media. Their complicity with the enemies of America. I’ve seen the video. I made a point to watch it....

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - A mentally ill killer was executed Tuesday evening after Gov. Rick Perry rejected a parole board's highly unusual recommendation to commute his death sentence or delay the execution. Kelsey Patterson, 50, also lost an appeal to the Supreme Court in the hour before he was put to death. A diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Patterson was condemned for a double slaying almost 12 years ago. His lethal injection renewed the legal quandary of whether it is proper to execute someone who is mentally ill when the Supreme Court says it is unconstitutional to execute someone who is mentally...

I once enjoyed an hour-long debate with Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz – with whom I often disagree. But I thoroughly agree with his April 22 statement that killing terrorists is legal. He writes: I challenge Jack Straw to distinguish Israel's killing of Rantisi from the targeting of Al-Sadr, Saddam's sons, or Osama bin Laden. The United States Army was recently given a highly specific military order. According to the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the mission is to kill radical Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. This order to target al-Sadr for extrajudicial killing is perfectly...

It's easy to say he should not have been in Iraq, but Nicholas Berg was a type familiar to all danger zones: an adventurous and naïve young man who was perhaps keen to do a bit of business, but keener yet to test himself; old enough to understand the danger, but young enough to defy it. It is impossible not to feel grief, and horror, at his terrible end. The claim of this young American's murderers that they were retaliating for the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is a cruel ruse. They killed him out of the same madness that drove...

For those who are avoiding the video of Nicholas Berg's Execution, I say, "All Americans should watch...and remember." I watched it yesterday. I didn't want to watch it: I derive no sense of voyeuristic pleasure from such things. Yet I forced myself to watch it because I want to know our enemies. I don't want to understand them; I want to know them, so that I know who they are and what they are. I want to know those who will brutally kill us without hesitation or remorse. I want these ugly and horrifying images burned into my memory so...

Kristinn just called me and asked me to post this thread. He just called CBS Evening News and asked them if they were going to show the militant Islamists' video of the beheading of American Nick Berg.The woman who answered the phone said that they were going to do a story on it, but they were NOT going to show the full video.He asked them, "Why not, since you had no problem showing the pictures of the Iraqis being abused by our guys in the prison. Don't you think turnabout is fair play?"The woman got mad and said, "Thank you...

DUBAI, May 6 (Reuters) - Dubai-based Al Arabiya television aired on Thursday what it said was a videotape showing an American engineer working for the Pentagon held hostage in Iraq. The network said it had received the tape from a group calling itself The Islamic Rage Squadrons which said it had kidnapped the man on May 3. He was shown blindfolded with a chequered Arab head scarf and wearing an olive green jacket.

Arabiya TV Airs Videotape of 'American Hostage' Thu May 6, 2004 08:51 AM ET DUBAI (Reuters) - Dubai-based Al Arabiya television aired on Thursday what it said was a videotape showing an American engineer working for the Pentagon held hostage in Iraq. The network said it had received the tape from a group calling itself The Islamic Rage Squadrons which said it had kidnapped the man on May 3. He was shown blindfolded with a checkered Arab scarf and wearing a jacket. "My name is Aban Elias from Denver, Colorado," an Arabiya transcript quoted the man as saying. "I am...