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Condemned Briton's 'Heartbroken' Family Beg For Compassion from China The family of Akmal Shaikh, the British man condemned to death in China, have made a last-minute appeal to the Chinese authorities to show mercy. By David Eimer in Beijing 28 Dec 2009 Akmal Shaikh, a British national who is facing the death penalty in China for possession of heroin Photo: AFP/GETTY Mr Shaikh is due to be executed in Urumqi at 10.30am Tuesday morning local time for heroin smuggling. "We're here to plead for clemency and we hope the Chinese government shows compassion. His life is in their hands now,"...

Northeast China's Liaoning province has become the first province in the country to make lethal injection the standard practice for all its death penalty convicts. The Higher People's Court of Liaoning announced on Wednesday that all cities in the province have adopted the method, which means execution by gunshot will no longer be used. "Lethal injection can reduce the fear and suffering experienced by criminals," the court said in a statement on its website. "It can also help preserve the body of the convicts after death. "It is a symbol of the progress of civilization, and it also serves to...

China yesterday executed the former manager of a securities company who embezzled millions of dollars - the first execution of an executive from the country's financial sector, Xinhua said. Some wanted Yang Yanming to be kept alive so he would explain where the 65 million yuan ($9.5 million) went, news reports said. Yang, 51, served as general manager of the Beijing securities trading department of China Great Wall Trust and Investment Corp from 1997 to 2003. He was sentenced to death in Dec, 2005.

Ohio executed a killer Tuesday by performing the nation's first lethal injection using a single drug, a supposedly less painful method than previous executions that required three drugs. Kenneth Biros was pronounced dead at 11:47 a.m. Tuesday, about 10 minutes after one dose of thiopental sodium began flowing into his veins at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. The U.S. Supreme Court had rejected his final appeal about two hours before. Experts predicted the thiopental sodium would take longer to kill the 51-year-old Biros than the convention three-drug cocktail, but the 10 minutes it apparently took him to die...

Ohio prison officials executed a death row inmate, Kenneth Biros, Tuesday with a one-drug intravenous lethal injection, a method never before used on a human. The new method, which involved a large dose of anesthetic, akin to how animals are euthanized, has been hailed by most experts as painless and an improvement over the three-drug cocktail used in most states, but it is unlikely to settle the debate over the death penalty. While praising the shift to a single drug, death penalty opponents argue that Ohio’s new method, and specifically its backup plan of using intra-muscular injection, has not been...

/begin my translation N. Korea: Two Executed by Firing Squad for Using Others to Swap Old Bills for New 2009.12.08 09:24 There is a report that two businessmen were executed by firing squad, which was carried out off the public view. They tried to get around (strict) rules for currency swapping. Quoting its source inside N. Korea, Open Radio for N. Korea, which broadcasts into N. Korea, reported on Dec. 7 that two businessmen in the city of Pyongsung, who had old bills totaling 11 million Won(N. Korean currency unit) from their sales, tried to convert them into new bills...

A 44-year-old Texas man was executed Thursday evening for raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl, despite pleas from his attorneys he was too mentally impaired to qualify for capital punishment.

<p>A 44-year-old Texas man was executed Thursday evening for raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl, despite pleas from his attorneys he was too mentally impaired to qualify for capital punishment.</p> <p>Bobby Wayne Woods received lethal injection about a half-hour after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt his punishment, which was delayed briefly until the high court ruled in his case. His lawyers had argued Woods was mentally impaired, making him ineligible for execution, and that previous appeals to spare Woods' life were unsuccessful because of shoddy work by his lawyer at the time.</p>

In a half-mile-long procession of motorcycles and patrol cars with their lights flashing, the Lakewood Police Department brought its four fallen officers home Tuesday morning. The bodies of the four officers slain Sunday morning were taken from the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s building at South 36th Street and Pacific Avenue to Mountain View Funeral Home on Steilacoom Boulevard in Lakewood. They had been brought to the Medical Examiner early Sunday evening from Parkland where they were shot by a similar escort of Lakewood officers.
Four Lakewood Fire Department Medic One units carried the bodies of Officers Mark Renninger, 39; Ronald...

Seattle, Washington (CNN) -- Investigators searching for the suspected killer of four Seattle-area police officers have rounded up several of his relatives and friends to keep them from helping him escape, a sheriff's spokesman said Monday. Police have brought in five or six relatives and other acquaintances of Maurice Clemmons, "and we expect that number to grow," Pierce County Sheriff's Department spokesman Ed Troyer said. Some of Clemmons' family and friends have been trying to help him elude police and seek treatment for a gunshot wound, and they have tried to divert investigators by calling in false leads, he said....

<p>A Pierce County sheriff's spokesman says authorities believe the man sought in the slaying of four police officers is still alive and has been aided by a network of friends and family.</p> <p>Spokesman Ed Troyer said Monday night that police have questioned several people who had provided assistance to Maurice Clemmons since the Sunday morning shootings. Troyer says investigators now think Clemmons is on his own.</p>

Note: Video included. # November 29, 2009 "4 officers shot dead in Wash. coffee shop 'ambush'" CNN.com SNIPPET: "LAKEWOOD, Wash. — SNIPPET: "A $10,000 reward was offered for information leading to an arrest, he said. Police are looking for one man and possibly a second person in the attack, which occurred about 8 a.m., Troyer said. The suspect is described as an African-American man, between 5 feet 7 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, wearing a black coat and blue jeans, with a "scruffy" appearance, he said. The man is believed to have fled the coffee shop on foot,...

PARKLAND, Wash. - Four Lakewood Police officers were shot and killed Sunday morning in what authorities called a targeted ambush at a coffee shop. Pierce County Sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer says the officers - four male and one female - were in full uniform and wearing bulletproof vests, sitting in Forza coffee shop near 116th Street and Steele Street on the east side of the Air Force base at about 8:30 a.m. Troyer says the officers were preparing for their shift when a suspect or suspects "walked in with a handgun, opened fire multiple times and then fled the scene,"...

A legal team is going to New York to prevent the use of evidence provided by Germany in seeking a death penalty. Berlin wants to ensure that promises made by the US are kept if the suspects are found guilty. Germany, which does not have a death penalty, provided evidence for the trial on the condition that it could not be used to support a death sentence. Several members of the al Qaeda cell that planned and executed the attacks of September 11 were previously based in the northern German city of Hamburg.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Inmate Robert Lee Thompson was executed Thursday evening for his part in a fatal Houston store holdup after the Texas governor rejected a parole board's recommendation to spare him because he wasn't the gunman. Thompson, 34, was an accomplice to triggerman Sammy Butler who gunned down 29-year-old store clerk Mansoor Bhai Rahim Mohammed 13 years ago. Butler received life in prison. A jury gave Thompson death. Thompson's lawyer told the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles Thompson's punishment wasn't fair and the panel voted 5-2 Wednesday to recommend his sentence be commuted to life. Gov. Rick Perry...

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) on Tuesday rejected clemency for Larry "Bill" Elliott, a former military intelligence officer who killed a Woodbridge couple in their home in 2001, paving the way for his execution at 9 p.m. Tuesday. Elliott was twice convicted of killing Robert Finch, 30, and Dana Thrall, 25, who were shot several times in their townhouse. Prosecutors argued that Elliott was obsessed with Finch's ex-girlfriend and that Elliott killed him as a way to win her over. Thrall, who was living with Finch, walked in on his slaying and was then beaten and killed. A first jury's...

"The General Assembly today adopted... a moratorium on executions to be established in all States that still maintain the death penalty..." United Nations. "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death... I feel... obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed." Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, appointed by President Nixon and author of the Roe v Wade decision. "I cannot say it more eloquently than Justice Blackmun... I must act... today I am commuting the sentences of all death row inmates... I will sleep well knowing I made the right decision."...

RICHMOND, Va. - John Allen Muhammad was executed Tuesday night for the sniper attacks in 2002 that left 10 dead and spread such fear people were afraid to go shopping, cut grass or pump gas. The three-week killing spree in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., was carried out with a teenage accomplice who is serving life in prison without parole. Muhammad, 48, died by injection at 9:11 p.m. EST after he exhausted his court appeals and Gov. Tim Kaine denied clemency. Muhammad's attorneys earlier had asked Kaine to commute his sentence to life in prison because they said he was...

JARRATT, Va. -- John Allen Muhammad, the sniper who kept the Washington region paralyzed by fear for three weeks as he and a young accomplice gunned down people at random, was executed Tuesday night by lethal injection.

Here is video of a Virginia Prison Spokesman giving a detailed preview of the upcoming execution of D.C. Sniper Mastermind John Allen Muhammad, who will be executed tonight at 9:00 PM ET. . . . (VIDEO)