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The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from a condemned Texas woman set to die for the slaying of a three-month-old child she was baby-sitting. The court rejected the appeal yesterday of 50-year-old Cathy Lynn Henderson, who faces execution April 18th for the 1994 beating death of Brandon Baugh. The baby's body was found stuffed in a wine cooler carton and buried in a field in Bell County, about 50 miles north of Henderson's Austin-area home. The discovery came nearly three weeks after the child was first reported missing.

HUNTSVILLE — Texas death row inmate Newton Anderson has been executed. The career burglar was sent to the Texas death chamber this evening for torturing and killing a retired couple during the break-in of their home eight years ago. Anderson, 30, who said he began stealing from homes even before he was a teenager, had been out of prison only about four months after serving four years for burglary when he was arrested for the slayings of Frank Cobb, 71, and his 61-year-old wife, Bertha, at their rural home near Tyler in Smith County. Anderson became the fifth Texas inmate...

BEIJING, Feb 9 (Reuters) - China has executed a Uighur activist in a far-northwestern city for attempting to "split the motherland" and possessing explosives, drawing condemnation from a human rights group which said the evidence was insufficient. Ismail Semed, who was deported to China from Pakistan in 2003, had told the court a confession had been coerced, but he was executed nevertheless on Thursday in Urumqi, capital of the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang, Radio Free Asia on Friday quoted his widow, Buhejer, as saying. "When the body was transferred to us at the cemetery I saw only one bullet...

(February 7, 2007)--Convicted killer James Jackson, 47, was executed just after 6 p.m. Wednesday in Huntsville for strangling his two stepdaughters in 1997 at their Houston-area home. Prosecutors say Jackson also killed his 39-year-old wife, Sharon. The younger victims were 19-year-old "Sonnie" Mayes and her 18-year-old sister, Ericka. Police say in his confession, Jackson said he and his wife had been arguing for several days over his unemployment and that she intended to divorce him. Jackson was the fourth condemned killer to be executed so far this year in Texas.

Terror suspects 'face execution over hearsay' By Tim Hall and agencies Last Updated: 8:51am GMT 19/01/2007 Terror suspects could be jailed for life and even executed on the basis of hearsay or coerced testimony under new rules put forward by the US. The Pentagon has drawn up a draft manual ahead of trials at Guantanamo Bay, which are expected to begin soon. The proposals will grant judges wide freedom in deciding what evidence to hear, including statements obtained under duress. Human rights groups say the regulations would allow evidence that would not be tolerated in civilian or military courtrooms. “No...

Iraqi court to sentence Saddam's deputy to death next week Press Trust of India Baghdad, January 17, 2007 Another deputy of former leader Saddam Hussein will be given the death penalty later this month after the appeals court ruled that his previous sentence of life in prison was too lenient, a spokesman has said. Raid Juhi, a spokesman for the Iraqi High Tribunal, said a session will be held on January 25 in which a judge will read the new verdict against former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan. On November 5, Ramadan was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to...

A self-described fascist who adopted the dark punk and Goth lifestyle was put to death just after 6 p.m. Wednesday in Huntsville. Thirty-two-year-old Johnathan Moore was sentenced to die for shooting San Antonio police Officer Fabian Dominguez to death 12 years ago. He was the second Texas death row inmate put to death this year and the second of five set to die this month in the nation's busiest capital punishment state. Authorities say Moore gunned Dominguez down after the officer interrupted him and two companions during the January 1995 burglary of a house in Dominguez's neighborhood. When he confronted...

LONDON (AFP) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman said that the way in which Saddam Hussein's half-brother was executed was "wrong", after it emerged his head was severed during hanging. Human rights groups criticised the punishment after the Iraqi government said "no violations" had occurred but confirmed that Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti's head was ripped from his body as he swung on the gallows. Speaking to reporters Monday afternoon, Blair's spokesman restated Britain's opposition to the death penalty and again said it recognised Iraq's right as a sovereign government to make its own decision on capital punishment. "However, we...

Iraq hanging video shown to reporters BAGHDAD, Iraq - The official video of hanging of Saddam Hussein's co-defendants screened for reporters Monday showed the former leader's half brother lying headless below the gallows, his severed head several yards away. The video shows Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother and former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, being hanged side by side. They wore red prison jumpsuits. As they reached the gallows, black hoods were put on their heads and five masked men surrounded them. After the trap doors opened, al-Bandar could be seen dangling from the...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas - A man convicted of the fatal stabbing of his girlfriend’s 3-year-old son has been executed. In a brief final statement, Carlos Granados, 36, expressed love to his family and others and addressed Katherine Jiminez, his former girlfriend and the mother of the child he killed more than eight years ago. "Kathy, you know I never meant to hurt you," he told the woman who also suffered 27 stab wounds during the attack. "I gave you everything and that’s what made me so angry. But I never meant to hurt you. I’m sorry." She stood up against the...

UN human rights : Iran set to execute 7 Arabs Thursday, January 11, 2007 - ©2005 IranMania.com LONDON, January 11 (IranMania) - Three UN human rights investigators accused Iran of planning the imminent execution of seven Arabs sentenced to death after a trial held in secret, The Associated Press reported. In a joint statement released in Geneva, the investigators said family members of the seven Ahvazi Arabs were informed earlier this week that the executions would happen "in the next few days." The UN-appointed experts said the prisoners were part of a larger group of Arabs arrested in June 2006...

America's attachment to the death penalty is well-rooted but there are significant signs that US courts, politicians and public opinion may be turning against capital punishment. On Friday, the US Supreme Court agreed to set a new standard for when a death row prisoner is too mentally ill to be executed without violating the constitution. On Monday, the justices will consider whether to force attorneys representing death row prisoners to take extraordinary measures to persuade juries to spare their lives. And next week the court will hear three cases that could have a significant impact on the imposition of the...

The execution of Saddam Hussian has been made available for public viewing at http://larepublicans.com/Saddam.html

WASHINGTON -- Of the 6 billion people on this earth, not one killed more people than Saddam Hussein. And not just killed, but tortured and mutilated -- doing so often with his own hands and for pleasure. It is quite a distinction to be the pre-eminent monster on the planet. If the death penalty was ever deserved, no one was more richly deserving than Saddam Hussein. For the Iraqi government to have botched both his trial and execution, therefore, and turned monster into victim, is not just a tragedy, but a crime -- against the new Iraq that Americans are...

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's execution has had a mixed reaction in India. While the government expressed its disappointment over his execution, the Left and some sections of the Muslim community accused the US of masterminding the Iraqi leader's killing, and there were the Shiatte population in different Indian towns who expressed jubilation over the hanging. But nowhere, probably not even in Iraq did an ardent supporter of Saddam express his or her loyalty and sorrow over the execution by taking his or her own life. So it was quite surprising that a 15 year old girl from Kolkata's suburbs...

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, today renewed her call for restraint by the Government of Iraq in the execution of sentences of death imposed by the Iraqi High Tribunal. On 28 December 2006, alongside the confirmation of the death sentence of Saddam Hussein, the death sentences of two other co-defendants, Awad Hamad Al-Bandar and Barzan Ibrahim Al-Hassan, were also upheld on appeal. "International law, as it currently stands, only allows the imposition of the death penalty as an exceptional measure within rigorous legal constraints. The concerns that I expressed just days ago with respect to the fairness...

It's a pinch myself day when the lead news story is about recriminations and regrets that Saddam Hussein, a man who incarnates evil, was not treated more decently at his belated hanging. And the editorial hand-wringing is that this was revenge not justice. As though being nice to someone who put human beings in plastic shredders -- head first -- and boiled even his relatives in oil, would make us more civilized rather than less. Revenge is justice. Saddam should have been drawn and quartered. The best thing about his execution was the presence of Shi'ia muslims taunting him with...

THE White House today bluntly dismissed the international outcry over the way Saddam Hussein was executed as elevating his "last two minutes" above his brutal, bloody decades in power. "He got justice," spokesman Tony Snow said, amid criticisms of widely seen footage showing Saddam's Shiite captors mocking him during his last minutes alive and hailing an Iraqi Shi'ite cleric who leads a major militia. "There seems to be a lot of concern about the last two minutes of Saddam Hussein's life and less about the first 69 (years), in which he murdered hundreds of thousands of people. That's why he...

HITCHENS: "And it might be no bad thing if Americans, especially those who supported the breaking of his death grip on Iraqi society, found ways of conveying their distaste for this rushed and vindictive — and partial — version of a process of reckoning that ought to have been sober, meticulous and untainted." EARTHDWELLER: I admire Hitchen's premise but he is showing the kind of British out of touch elitism that kept Ireland in straits for centuries. In this instance let the American's, who tamed the wild wild west take care of the details of growing a civilized society...

The Iraqi regime's decision to hang Saddam Hussein was defended by a Church of England bishop yesterday.The Bishop of Lichfield, the Rt Rev Jonathan Gledhill, said that anyone who deliberately murdered another human being "immediately forfeited his or her right to life". The bishop said that there were good reasons to oppose the death penalty but Saddam's execution could not be criticised as unjust because he had been afforded a fair trial and an opportunity to appeal. It would "be wrong to encourage Iraqi democracy on the one hand and to interfere with their government and legal system on the...