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AUSTIN, Texas - (KRT) - With its criminal justice system the subject of intense scrutiny for a crime lab scandal and a series of wrongful convictions, a Texas state Senate committee heard testimony Tuesday about the possibility that Texas had experienced the ultimate criminal justice nightmare: the execution of an innocent person. Fourteen months after Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in the nation's busiest death chamber, a renowned arson expert and Willingham's lawyer told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee that they believed Willingham might well have been innocent but found nobody willing to listen to their claim in the days...

 Works for me.... 

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq's most powerful Shiite bloc wants Saddam Hussein put to death if he is convicted of war crimes by a special tribunal, and the interim president should resign if he refuses to sign the execution order, an alliance spokesman told The Associated Press on Monday. Ali al-Dabagh, a lawmaker from the clergy-led United Iraq Alliance, which received the most votes in Jan. 30 national elections, said everyone in his party believes Saddam should be sentenced to death if convicted of war crimes against Iraqis. "We feel he is a criminal. He is the No. 1 criminal in...

As many as four of every 10 prisoners put to death in the United States might receive inadequate anesthesia, causing them to remain conscious and experience blistering pain during a lethal injection. Researchers in Florida and Virginia drew this conclusion after reviewing levels of anesthetic in the blood of 49 inmates after they were executed. "I approached this as a physician," said the study's lead author, Dr. Leonidas Koniaris, chairman of surgical oncology at the University of Miami. "We were asking: Is there a possibility of awareness during an execution? Is there a large degree of pain and suffering associated...

Health - HealthDay U.S. Executions by Lethal Injection May Not Be Humane 1 hour, 3 minutes ago Health - HealthDay THURSDAY, April 14 (HealthDay News) -- Prisoner executions by lethal injection in the United States may not be painless or humane, and may not even meet veterinary standards for putting down animals. So claims a research letter in this week's issue of The Lancet. The authors concluded that prisoners executed by lethal injection may have experienced awareness and unnecessary suffering as they died because they weren't properly sedated. Anesthesia during lethal injection is essential to minimize the prisoner's suffering. Lethal...

Jim Robinson is the founder and operator of FreeRepublic.com. He posted this editorial on Terri Schiavo, Sunday April 3rd. I said it was wrong to kill her. That is my opinion. Nothing can change it. No list of "facts" will ever change it. And I put "facts" in quotes because most of the so-called "facts" posted here were in fact "opinion." Whether it was a poster's opinion, a reporter's opinion, her husband's opinion, a relative's opinion, a supporter's opinion, a detractor's opinion, a politician's opinion, a lawyer's opinion, a doctor's opinion, the president's opinion, the governor's opinion, or even...

The execution of Terri Schiavo -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: April 4, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Terri Schiavo is dead. She did not die a natural death, unless you believe a court order to cut off food and water to a disabled woman until she dies of starvation and thirst is natural. No, Terri Schiavo was executed by the state of Florida. Her crime? She was so mentally disabled as to be unworthy of life in the judgment of Judge George Greer. The execution was carried out at Woodside Hospice. An autopsy will reveal that Terri's vital organs...

URGENT ACTION USA (Georgia): Death penalty / Legal concern, Terry Mincey PUBLIC AI Index: AMR 51/150/2001 EXTRA 70/01 Death penalty / Legal concern 16 October 2001 USA (Georgia) Terry Mincey, white, aged 40 Terry Mincey is scheduled to be executed in Georgia on 25 October. He has spent more than 19 years - almost half his life - on death row. He was sentenced to death for the murder of Paulette Riggs in 1982. Paulette Riggs was shot dead on 12 April 1982 during a robbery of the store in Macon where she worked. A second person, Russell Peterman, was...

S. Korea bars secret video of the North A tape of a public execution, smuggled into South Korea, is kept off the air. By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - On a bleached and scratchy video image smuggled out of Kim Jong Il's closed regime, blindfolded prisoners are tied to white posts on a rocky landscape, shot three times, and dragged away. The rare video footage of summary executions in North Korea - a practice considered routine in the North but never captured on film - was taken by hidden camera March...

NEW LONDON (AP) -- When Superior Court Judge Patrick Clifford ruled in December that serial killer Michael Ross was mentally competent to accept his death sentence, he relied on the report of a state psychiatrist. When a second competency hearing is held next month, he will hear from four doctors: two working for special counsel Thomas Groark, one for Ross and one working at Clifford's request. Clifford and the attorneys in the case want to avoid a repeat of January's attempted execution, which was abruptly halted amid questions over Ross' competency. In February, Clifford appointed Groark to investigate and argue...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - Texas' highest appeals court stopped the scheduled execution Wednesday of a man about five hours before he could have been put to death in the 1989 slaying of a restaurant manager. Steven K. Staley, 42, won the reprieve after lawyers argued that instructions given to jurors at his 1991 trial were unclear when they were deciding whether he should get the death penalty. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sent the case back to a trial court. "This is good news," said Jack Strickland, one of Staley's attorneys. Staley was condemned for the 1989 slaying of...

Campaign To end The Death Penalty. Join Efforts to End State Sponsored Killing in the USA Encourage Worldwide Abolition Around 118 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. On average, in the past decade more than three countries a year have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Despite international human rights standards, some nations still execute people. Around the world, the death penalty is used as a tool of political repression and a means to forever silence political opponents or eliminate politically "troublesome" individuals. Learn more » - China, Iran, the United States, and Viet Nam...

Euthanasia advocates claim it is not a crime to kill as long as the victims cannot speak for themselves. Michael Schiavo married his wife, Terri, "until death do us part." Unfortunately, Michael wants to hurry that moment along. Normally, there would be outrage, not to mention criminal charges, against a husband who wanted to kill his wife. But because Terri has been brain-damaged since 1990, Michael's efforts have attracted euthanasia proponents who claim Terri's disablement entitles her to a mercy killing — though it is debatable how merciful it would be to remove her feeding tube so that she dies...

BEIJING -- When police executed a man named Nie Shubin in 1995, nobody bothered to tell his parents. His father learned of his son's death a day later, when he tried to bring a package of food and clothes to prison. In his home village, south of Beijing, his neighbors were shocked when the shy 20-year-old man was accused of raping and murdering a woman. They knew him as a polite and gentle youth who stuttered when he spoke. He was so meek that he was unable to kill a rooster when his mother wanted to make chicken soup. Now,...

N. Korea: Public Execution Video Now Available Click Here for Viewing Summary 0:00 brief intro by anchors first video shot 0:50: video starts 3:25: verdict read 4:50: execution proceeds second video shot - same general content a narrator describes the scene in hushed voice comments by anchors brief interview with a man who was involved in the operation. more background information identifying landmarks using a known photo of the place defectors identify landmarks. more analysis of scene for authenticating the location more comments and interviews ...... a female N. Korean defector broke down, seeing the execution video. near the end,...

Court approved plans to starve a brain damaged Florida woman to death later this month have prompted no outrage from human rights groups - even though, under international law, forced starvation is considered a form of torture. A Lexis Nexis search on the case of Terri Schiavo, whose starvation-execution will begin when her feeding tube is removed on March 18, failed to turn up a single reference to complaints by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The two groups have vehemently protested what they say is the abuse of terrorist suspects detained at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, calling tactics...

MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. - A man who spent nearly a quarter century on death row for killing a couple and their two children was executed early Thursday. Donald Ray Wallace, 47, died by injection at 12:23 a.m. at the Indiana State Prison. He was convicted in 1982 of slaying the Gilligan family - Patrick, Theresa, 5-year-old Lisa and Gregory, 4 - two years earlier during robbery at their Evansville home. "I hope everyone can find peace with this," Wallace said in a final statement, according to Java Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the Indiana Department of Correction. Wallace had declined to...

The Palestinian Authority has decided to resume executions of prisoners on death row for the first time since August 2002, with 15 due to be carried out by the end of the month, a senior PA official in the Gaza Strip announced Thursday. At least half of the inmates were convicted of "collaboration" with Israel, while the others were found guilty of murder in criminally-motivated offences. Saeb al-Kidwa, head of the PA military courts, said 15 prisoners currently on death row "will be executed during this month." He said PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was expected to approve the executions soon...

Do you agree with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to forbid execution in juvenile crime? Yes 71 (37%) No 119 (63%) Total Votes: 190

<p>These girls were charged of fomenting a rebellion among ethnic Tibetans, and sentenced to death by Chinese.</p>