Free Republic

A best-selling author and critic of Islam says he can't understand why U.S. President Barack Obama and the United Nations are not expressing more outrage over the execution-style murder of three Christian missionaries in Yemen, apparently by al Qaeda. According to a spokesman from the Yemeni Embassy in Washington, nine foreign nationals -- four German adults, three small German children, a British man, and a South Korean woman -- were abducted on June 12 after they ventured outside the city of Saada without their required police escorts. Days later the bodies of German nurses Rita Stumpp and Anita Gruenwald, and...

A man who fatally stabbed a convenience store clerk during a robbery 23 years ago apologized repeatedly to her relatives and to his mother before he was executed Tuesday. "I know I hurt you very bad," Michael Lynn Riley said to his victim's relatives, including her two daughters and husband. "I want you to know I'm sorry." Brandy Oaks said she accepted Riley's apology and was pleased to hear it. She was 4 when her mother, Wynona Harris, was killed. "This is a difficult day and there are no winners on either side," Oaks said. "Her spirit will live on...

McALESTER — Proclaiming his innocence and saying he would see his victim in heaven, a man convicted of battering his girlfriend's 8-year-old son and stuffing the dead body in an abandoned freezer was executed Thursday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.--snip--Gilson became the second person to be executed this year in Oklahoma. Gilson was convicted of first-degree murder in 1998. The boy's remains were found in an abandoned freezer outside a mobile home in rural Cleveland County. An autopsy showed two fractures to the boy's skull, a tooth missing from his right jaw and fractures to his collarbone, shoulder blades, ribs,...

Thirty years ago this week, philanthropist Habib Elghanian became the first Jew executed by Iran’s radical Islamic regime after he was falsely charged and convicted of spying for Israel. His death by firing squad on May 9, 1979, sent shockwaves through Iran’s tight-knit Jewish community, which once lived in relative peace under the Shah. It prompted scores of Iran’s nearly 80,000 Jews to immediately sell off or abandon their assets and flee the country. At least 13 Jews have been executed in Iran since Elghanian. This week, as local Iranian Jews commemorate Elghanian’s death, The Journal spoke with family members,...

COLUMBIA, S.C. — An Alabama man convicted of killing a police officer has been executed in South Carolina, after cutting himself with a razor Friday. Thomas Treshawn Ivey was put to death by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. Friday in the state's death chamber in Columbia. The 34-year-old made no final statement. Prison officials said Ivey removed a blade from a disposable razor earlier and suffered non-life-threatening wounds when he cut himself on the neck. They strapped him to a chair, until he was strapped down for the lethal injection.

(05-08) 15:31 PDT Columbia, S.C. (AP) -- An Alabama man convicted of killing a police officer has been executed in South Carolina.Thomas Treshawn Ivey was put to death by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. Friday in the state's death chamber in Columbia. The 34-year-old made no final statement. Ivey had been awaiting execution since 1995, when he was convicted of killing Tommy Harrison. Prosecutors said Ivey shot the 38-year-old Orangeburg police sergeant in 1993 after trying to pass a bad check.

NINE people, including a 30-year-old woman, have been hanged in Iran, state media reported yesterday. The state-run daily newspaper Iran said four of the nine including the woman were convicted of murder in separate cases and were hanged on Wednesday. The woman was found guilty of killing her husband with a hammer, it said.

Iran has hanged a young woman who was convicted of murder when she was a minor, her lawyer said Saturday, drawing condemnation from international human rights groups who have sought to end capital punishment for juvenile offenders. Authorities executed the 23-year-old woman Friday in northern Iran without informing her lawyer or allowing the family to be present, said the lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei. She was 17 at the time the crime was committed, in 2003.

JACKSON, Ga. (AP) - A Georgia man convicted of murdering 1 of the followers of his white supremacist group insisted that he was not to blame for the killing shortly before he was put to death Wednesday evening.

...Really, what do you do with a captured pirate? Make him walk the plank? Is that even legal? Traditionally, English Admiralty law allowed for the summary execution of a captured pirate. Indeed, in medieval times, he could be hanged, drawn and quartered...Since last year, however, the Foreign Office has advised the Royal Navy not to detain pirates of some nationalities because, facing the death penalty at home, they could then claim asylum in Britain. The resurgence of piracy is hardly surprising when you consider the disparity between the average income of a Somali with a boat, and the vast amounts...

WALLA WALLA, Wash. (AP) -- Four people designated to administer lethal injections to death-row inmates at the Washington State Penitentiary have resigned, apparently worried that their identities could become public in court. The Seattle Times reported Thursday that the four resigned Tuesday for fear that their names would become known as a result of litigation on whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment..... Full article: HERE

A Georgia man expressed remorse for killing his "good friend" shortly before he was executed Tuesday for the murder of a neighbor he stabbed to death after the 27-year-old woman spurned his sexual advances. Robert Newland, 65, was put to death by lethal injection at the state prison at Jackson and was pronounced dead at 7:35 p.m. Newland was the first person executed in Georgia this year. "I'm sorry this happened. I wish I could go back to that day," he said. "I have no grudges against anybody. I still don't remember what happened, but what happened happened." A few...

On October 11, 1997, after a night filled with marijuana, cocaine, and drinking, Luis Salazar claims he thought he was back home in his own house, and that the person he stabbed to death was an intruder. Instead, Salazar was in the home of Martha Sanchez, 28, and her three children, one of whom Salazar also stabbed in the chest after killing their mother. Evidence shows that Salazar knew what he was doing: Evidence, however, showed the telephone wires at the home next door to where Salazar previously lived had been cut and Sanchez’s injuries indicated Salazar had tried to...

JACKSON, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia man was executed Tuesday for stabbing a neighbor to death who had spurned his sexual advances. Robert Newland, 65, was put to death by lethal injection at the state prison at Jackson and was pronounced dead at 7:35 p.m. by authorities. He was the first person executed in Georgia this year. Newland was convicted in 1987 and sentenced to death for the slaying of Carol Sanders Beatty, a 27-year-old former state and national amateur diving champion. Authorities say Newland went to the woman's duplex on St. Simons Island in May 1986 after a drinking...

After decades of moral arguments reaching biblical proportions, after long, twisted journeys to the nation's highest court and back, the death penalty may be abandoned by several states for a reason having nothing to do with right or wrong: Money. Turns out, it is cheaper to imprison killers for life than to execute them, according to a series of recent surveys.

WEST PALM BEACH — A federal jury this afternoon convicted two men in the 2006 murders of a family of four along Florida's Turnpike. The verdicts mean either life in prison or death for Ricardo Sanchez and Daniel Troya, both 25. The 12-member jury after four days of deliberations also convicted Danny Varela, 28, and Liana Lee Lopez, 20, on charges related to the drug ring the four ran from a luxury Briar Bay home in 2006. Jose Luis Escobedo worked as a drug connection for the group. He, his wife Yessica and their 3 and 4-year-old sons Luis Damian...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A man blamed for numerous killings and rapes has been executed in Texas for the murder of a woman who was raped, beaten and left to die on a Houston street. Fifty-one-year-old Johnny Ray Johnson was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m. Thursday. A Harris County jury sent Johnson to death row for the 1995 murder of 41-year-old Leah Joette Smith. According to court documents, her murder was one of at least five rape-slayings in Houston and Austin that were linked to the former truck and taxi driver. He also was linked at least eight other rapes...

ARLINGTON – Police Detective Tommy Le Noir remembers the alarm that gripped this city in 1996 after two young women were found strangled in the bathtubs of their east Arlington apartment complex. "There was a lot of fear in the community and in the Police Department," Le Noir said. "The fear is that you don't want this to happen again. At that time there was some incredible panic in those apartment complexes. People moved out in masses. It was just an incredible time." Tuesday night, almost 13 years after the crimes, the state plans to execute 35-year-old Dale Devon Scheanette...

A man convicted of murdering three people during a night of robberies more than 13 years ago in Fort Worth was put to death Wednesday evening in the nation's first execution of the year. In a brief, final statement, Curtis Moore, 40, thanked a woman who administers to the spiritual needs of death row inmates. "I want to thank you for all the beautiful years of friendship and ministry," Moore told Irene Wilcox as she watched through a window a few feet (meters) from him. Moore never acknowledged a man who survived his attacks or five relatives of the three...

A 20-year-old Ghanaian has been sentenced to death in Singapore for trafficking 2.6 kilograms (5.73 pounds) of cannabis, the Straits Times reported Saturday. The High Court convicted and sentenced Chijioke Stephen Obioha on Tuesday after a 21-day trial held last year, it said. Under Singapore's tough anti-drug laws, the death penalty is mandatory for anyone caught trafficking more than 15 grams of heroin, 30 grams of cocaine or 500 grams of cannabis. The death penalty is carried out by hanging. Narcotics officers arrested Obioha in April 2007 following a surveillance operation. He had come to Singapore in 2005 to try...