Free Republic

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — A 25-year-old man awaited a lethal injection Wednesday for the torture and slaying of a teenager who was forced to drink hydrochloric acid during a robbery of his home. It was to be the state's first execution in 60 years. Elijah Page, 25, gave up his appeals and asked to die for the 2000 murder of Chester Allan Poage, who was also stabbed, kicked and bashed with large rocks in a torture session that lasted two to three hours. Page was scheduled to be put to death at 10 p.m.

20 More Executions Under Way in Iran July 10, 2007 The New York Times Nazila Fathi TEHRAN -- The Iranian government confirmed Tuesday that a man was executed by stoning last week for committing adultery, and said that 20 more men would be executed in the coming days on morality violations. A judiciary spokesman, Alireza Jamshidi, told reporters on Tuesday that a death sentence by stoning had been carried out last week near the city of Takestan, west of Tehran, despite an order by the chief of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi, not to permit such executions. “The verdict was...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The mother of a US man whose 2006 execution took 86 minutes and involved sticking needles into him 19 times has sued the prison team which oversaw the execution for civil rights violations. ADVERTISEMENT On Monday Irma Clark filed suit in the Cincinnati, Ohio, district court, alleging her son Joseph Clark was exposed to "excessive suffering" violating the US constitution when he was put to death on May 2, 2006, at a state prison in Lucasville, Ohio, according to court documents. The suit claims that two prison administrators and 12 members of the execution team ignored the...

Toledo, Ohio (AP) -- The mother of a condemned inmate whose execution took an hour longer than is typical sued the head of Ohio's prisons Monday, asking the state to change the way it carries out death sentences. It took almost 90 minutes to execute Joseph Clark in May 2006; executions last 20 minutes on average. The lawsuit said the execution amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. Joining Irma Clark and her family at a news conference Monday was Michael Manning, whose brother David was killed by Clark in November 1984. "Nobody should have to die a horrible death,"...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Condemned prisoner Patrick Knight was executed Tuesday evening for the deaths of an Amarillo-area couple without delivering on a promise to tell a joke in his final statement. Patrick Knight has been soliciting jokes in the mail and on a Web site, sometimes receiving as many as 20 a day, saying his humor was intended to raise the spirits of other inmates. He said he received as many as 1,300 proposals. But when the moment came, Knight thanked God for his friends and asked for help for innocent men on death row. He named several he said...

ST. LOUIS To the very end, convicted killer Larry Griffin shouted his innocence to the world through court filings, in pleas to the governor and to nearly any reporter willing to listen. None of it helped. Griffin, strapped to a white gurney, was executed by injection. Now, 12 years later, St. Louis' chief prosecutor will soon release a report offering an opinion on whether Missouri put an innocent man to death. The report, two years in the making, has no legal weight but could have a powerful effect on the nation's death penalty debate. Nearly 1,100 people have been executed...

June 19, 1953 : Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951, are put to death in the electric chair. The execution marked the dramatic finale of the most controversial espionage case of the Cold War. Julius was arrested in July 1950, and Ethel in August of that same year, on the charge of conspiracy to commit espionage. Specifically, they were accused of heading a spy ring that passed top-secret information concerning the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs vigorously protested their innocence, but after a...

LANDI KOTAL (Khyber Agency), June 4: A woman and three men were publicly executed in Bara on Monday after a jirga found them ‘guilty of adultery’. Haji Jan Gul, a member of Sipah Eslahee Committee, told Dawn that acting on a tip, members of his committee had caught the four in a house in Alamgudar village. He said the four had been interrogated by the jirga before the verdict for their execution was issued. He said one of the men, Said Ras of Mardan, had told the jirga that he got the woman, who was his relative, into the business...

A condemned inmate wants to leave them laughing. Patrick Knight is collecting jokes and will pick the funniest one for his last statement before he is set to die June 26 for shooting his neighbors, Walter and Mary Werner, to death almost 16 years ago outside Amarillo. Randall County Sheriff Joel Richardson thinks the whole idea is insensitive. "This tells you a little bit about the guy's character, anyway," said Richardson, who was chief deputy at the time of the Werners' killings and plans to witness Knight's execution. Richardson said that the Werners' son, who has since moved out of...

It took two days for the young Muslim assassin to calm his nerves before the slaying. Then, Mohama Waekaji says, he walked one cool morning to a rice mill, carrying a knife and following orders from a guerrilla commander to behead the 72-year-old Buddhist owner. He asked the elderly man, Juan Kaewtongprakam, for some rice husks. As he turned to collect them, Waekaji says, he slashed the blade through the man's neck. --SNIP-- "These groups do take their cues from ... hardcore Islamic thought coming out of the Arab world. Beheading infidels not only shocks, but also demonstrates Islamic bona...

A neighbor in a suburban Austin neighborhood appeared to be the perfect babysitter for Eryn Baugh's infant son and his 2-year-old sister. "She's the most sweet, endearing person in the world and put forward this good Christian front," Baugh said of Cathy Lynn Henderson, who lived two blocks away. "She could sell snow to an Eskimo." But just weeks after Henderson started working for the Baughs, 3-month-old Brandon was dead and Henderson had fled the state. The infant's body was found buried 60 miles away with his skull crushed, wrapped in his yellow-trimmed white blanket and stuffed into a box...

Killer who shunned appeals is executed May 23, 2007 FLORENCE, Ariz. – A condemned killer who fought to drop his appeals, saying he owed it to his victims, was executed yesterday by injection. Robert Charles Comer, 50, was the first inmate put to death in Arizona since 2000. He had been convicted for a 1987 crime spree in which he killed a camper east of Phoenix and raped a woman in front of her boyfriend. Comer was quiet as he lay strapped to a gurney before his execution. He looked around at the more than 20 witnesses. When the warden...

Despite organized medicine's efforts to keep doctors away from the death chamber, judicial tussles draw them into the process. Organized medicine repeatedly has declared it unethical for doctors to participate in capital punishment. Still, some federal judges, politicians and prison officials largely have disregarded these ethical statements, saying doctor participation is necessary for lethal injection to withstand constitutional scrutiny. The death penalty is on hold in 13 of the 38 states where it is allowed. In 11 of those states, the stays are related to questions over whether lethal injection protocols could sometimes leave the condemned conscious as paralytic and...

New Jersey to consider abolishing death penalty Tue May 8, 2007 2:43PM EDT By Jon Hurdle PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - New Jersey lawmakers will consider abolishing the death penalty this week, starting a process that could see the liberal state become the first to scrap capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976. On Thursday, the judiciary committee of the state Senate will consider two bills calling for New Jersey to replace execution with life imprisonment without parole. Capital punishment in the state is already suspended under a moratorium passed by legislators in late 2005. Sen. Ray Lesniak,...

HUNTSVILLE — A street gang member convicted of fatally shooting an Amarillo couple during a botched beer theft at their grocery store more than a dozen years ago was executed this evening. Ryan Dickson, 30, spoke rapidly when asked if he had anything to say, expressing love to his family and apologizing to the relatives of his victims. No witnesses from his family or the victims' family attended the execution. "I am sorry for what I did, and I take responsibility for what I did," said Dickson, the 13th prisoner to be executed this year in the nation's busiest capital...

(April 26, 2007)--A man whose criminal record dated back to a bicycle theft at age nine was put to death Thursday evening in Huntsville. Ryan Dickson, 30, was sentenced to die for the murder of 61-year-old Amarillo grocery clerk Carmelo Surace in 1994. Also killed the attempted beer theft was Surace's 60-year-old wife, Marie. Dickson was the 13th Texas inmate put to death this year in the nation's busiest capital punishment state. Dickson's lawyer, Ronald Spriggs, launched "a last-minute effort" court effort to block the execution, but the appeals failed. He contended Dickson might have been mentally retarded and ineligible...

Inmates executed by lethal injection may in some cases die by "chemical asphyxiation" while conscious but unable to move, according to a new analysis of California and North Carolina executions released Monday. The study appearing in the online edition of PLoS Medicine -- a San Francisco-based medical journal -- was authored by the same team of doctors and death penalty opponents who raised similar concerns about the procedure in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2005. That earlier study, which said sub-potent amounts of the anesthetic sodium pentothal were found in the corpses of executed inmates, helped to propel...

Inmates executed by lethal injection may in some cases die by "chemical asphyxiation" while conscious but unable to move, according to a new analysis of California and North Carolina executions released Monday. The study appearing in the online edition of PLoS Medicine -- a San Francisco-based medical journal -- was authored by the same team of doctors and death penalty opponents who raised similar concerns about the procedure in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2005. That earlier study, which said sub-potent amounts of the anesthetic sodium pentothal were found in the corpses of executed inmates, helped to propel...

California has been quietly building a larger death chamber at San Quentin Prison to meet a federal judge's criticism of its execution process. The new facility is about twice the size of the current one, The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. It includes three rooms for witnesses, more space for the official preparing the lethal injection and a cell where condemned prisoners can meet with spiritual advisers immediately before their executions

(April 11, 2007)—James Lee Clark, 38, was executed just after 6 p.m. Wednesday in Huntsville for the 1993 slaying of a 17-year-old high school honor student. Denton High School student Catherine Crews was raped and shot to death just days after Clark was released on parole after serving a burglary sentence. Also killed was a 16-year-old classmate of Crews, Jesus Garza. Clark was charged but never tried for Garza's death.