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Sometime after midnight Friday, Ronnie Lee Gardner is to be strapped into a chair in the execution chamber at the state prison in Draper, Utah. A black hood is to be slipped over the bald head of the 49-year-old convicted killer, if he wishes. A small circular target will be pinned over his heart. It has been 14 years since rifles were last fired in a state execution. Barring a last-minute reprieve, Gardner will be only the third person to die before a firing squad in Utah  or anywhere else in the nation  since the death penalty was...

The rows of officers snapped to attention, arms raised in a salute, at 4:35, when a van pulled up to deliver the seven members of Ablanedo’s family who will witness Powell’s execution. For four minutes, they held the salute as Bruce and Judy Mills, Ablanedo’s 87-year-old mother Betsy and other family members were greeted by hugs from Acevedo. After reviewing the assembled officers, sometimes waving, the family was led inside the unit. Once the doors closed, the officers broke ranks and milled around, talking and mopping their brows. Suddenly, the protesters fired up their microphone: “We are here because in...

Salt Lake City, Utah (CNN) -- The executioner says he was eager to join the firing squad. Not because he was familiar with the 1996 case, or felt the need to deliver justice for a raped and murdered little girl. It wasn't even because his high school classmate was raped and killed just before graduation. So why did he do it? Why choose to join four other men in executing a convicted murderer? "How often does this come along?" he says, "... 100 percent justice." It's been more than 14 years since guns were last fired in Utah's execution chamber....

DRAPER, Utah (AP) - After two days of testimony about a condemned Utah man's journey from a life of violence to reformation, his lawyer said Friday that fairness should compel a state parole board to stop his execution by firing squad. "He came from a family that exuded criminality and violence, and that is what he was," Ronnie Lee Gardner's lawyer, Andrew Parnes, told the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole. "He's changed, he's overcome that." Gardner wants the board to reduce his death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A television documentary team has pieced together details surrounding the case of a 16-year-old girl, executed two years ago in Iran. On 15 August, 2004, Atefah Sahaaleh was hanged in a public square in the Iranian city of Neka. Her death sentence was imposed for "crimes against chastity".

Chris Matthews goes off the deep end discussing the oil spill...

Five Hanged in Secret, Twenty Seven others Facing Hangman’s Noose (9 May 2010) The sudden execution of five Iranian political prisoners today appears to signal a government policy of relying on politically-motivated executions to strengthen its position vis-à-vis its opposition through terror and intimidation, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said. The Campaign condemned the execution of five political prisoners, including Farzad Kamangar, a 34-year-old teacher and social worker, who was charged with Moharebeh (taking up arms against God), convicted and sentenced to death in February 2008, after a seven-minute long trial in which “zero evidence” was presented....

China's hidden policy of executing prisoners of the forbidden quasi-Buddhist group Falun Gong and harvesting their organs for worldwide sale has been expanded to include Tibetans, "house church" Christians and Muslim Uighurs, human rights activists said Monday. In a news conference on Capitol Hill, several speakers, including attorney David Matas of B'nai Brith Canada and Ethan Gutmann of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said their investigations have unearthed a grisly trade in which an estimated 9,000 members of Falun Gong have been executed for their corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys and skins. They likened the practice to the Nazi...

SALT LAKE CITY -- Utah is set to execute a convicted killer by firing squad after a judge agreed Friday to the inmate's request for the method, renewing a debate over what critics see as an antiquated, Old West-style of justice. Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, was given the choice of being killed by lethal injection or shot by a five-man team of executioners firing from a set of matched rifles, a rarely used relic that harkens back to Utah's territorial history. "I would like the firing squad, please," Gardner told State court Judge Robin Reese Friday morning, after Reese told...

North Korea has executed a ruling party official blamed for a botched currency reform, in a desperate attempt to quell public unrest... The execution by firing squad in Pyongyang last week of Pak Nam-ki, Labour Party chief for planned economy, was for the crime of "a son of a bourgeois conspiring to infiltrate the ranks of revolutionaries to destroy the national economy..." The unrest, triggered by sharp price increases in the marketplace amid confusion caused by the late November currency revaluation, forced the North to take some steps to roll back its effect. Analysts said that showed the North was...

Kristie Reed was on the basement floor, her throat and wrists slashed. Her older sister, Stacie, was upstairs, dead from a stab wound to the heart. When police reached Kristie, who was then 14 years old, an officer leaned in and asked who had done this to her. Kristie mouthed two words: "Paul Powell." On Thursday night, more than 11 years later, Paul Warner Powell, 31, was executed in Virginia's electric chair. He was declared dead at 9:09 p.m. The Jan. 29, 1999, murder of one sister and the rape and near-slaying of the other in Manassas were among the...

/begin my excerpts Sources: N. Korea' Park Nam-ki Shot by Firing Squad...Blamed for Currency Reform Fiasco Accused of deliberate destruction of economy, but few believe it Similar to Seo Kwan-hi execution during 'March of Suffering'(great famine) in 90's (Seoul-Yonhap News) Choi Sun-young & Chang Yong-hoon: Park Nam-ki, the N. Korea's former Director of the Planning and Financial Department of the Central Committee, was shot by firing squad in Pyongyang last week, blamed for the failed currency reform, according to sources. On Mar. 18, sources told Yonhap News, "N. Korean authorities executed the former director Park last week at the firing...

RICHMOND, VA (WWBT) - Governor Bob McDonnell issued the following statement today on the scheduled execution of Paul Warner Powell. "On January 15, 2003, Paul Warner Powell was convicted in Prince William County Circuit Court of the brutal capital murder and attempted rape of sixteen year old Stacie Lynn Reed. Powell was previously convicted of the rape and attempted murder of Stacie's fourteen year-old sister. "On May 8, 2003, the trial court, in accordance with the jury's verdict and recommendation, sentenced Powell to death. Powell admitted to the murder and attempted rape, and thus Powell's guilt is not at issue....

Texas Thursday executed Joshua Maxwell for the robbery and murder of Bexar County, Texas, Sheriff's Sgt. Rudolfo Lopes. Maxwell and his girlfriend at the time, Tessie McFarland, killed Lopes and an Indiana man, Robby Bott, during a 2000 crime spree that began in Indiana and ended following a shootout with police in San Francisco, the San Antonio News-Express said. McFarland, 30, is serving a life sentence. Before he was put to death in Huntsville, Texas, Thursday, Maxwell apologized to his victims and their families. "I hurt a lot of people with the decisions I made," he said. "I can't be...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (Associated Press) -- The state of Texas has executed a Dallas-area man convicted of fatally shooting a Brazilian engineer. Thirty-two-year-old Michael Sigala received a lethal injection Tuesday night for the August 2000 fatal shooting of 28-year-old Kleber Santos, whose job had brought him to Texas shortly after he was married. Santos' wife was also killed in the attack at their apartment in the Dallas suburb of Plano. Sigala was charged with the wife's slaying but was not tried.

CLEARWATER - Martin Grossman is scheduled to enter the death chamber at Florida State Prison just before 6 p.m. today and utter his final words to a gathering that includes relatives of the woman he killed. The family of wildlife officer Peggy Park has waited more than 25 years for this. "We need to see that it's finally finished, it's over and we can move on," said Betsy Park, the victim's younger siste

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Tuesday it will soon execute nine more convicted rioters in connection with unrest that erupted after the June presidential vote, a senior judiciary official was reported as saying.

Accused Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried and convicted and is likely to be executed, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Sunday. Interviewed on CNN's "State of the Union," show, Gibbs said: "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to meet justice and he's going to meet his maker. He will be brought to justice and he's likely to be executed for the heinous crimes he committed." Gibbs did not confirm reports that the Obama administration has begun looking for places other than the heart of New York City to prosecute self-professed mastermind Mohammed and four accused co-conspirators...

This is a link to a video blog: Synopsis: Bill O'Reilly and infobabes justify execution of American citizens without due process. They refer to an executive order as a "statute," completely driving by separation of powers. Next they shift topics and justify CPS harassment over joke pics on Facebook or raising a fat kid.

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- The Australian government wants the death sentence an Afghan court has handed a former Australian soldier overturned, a government spokesman said Wednesday. A spokesman for Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said his government will do everything it can to see that Robert Langdon, 38, is not executed, The Times of London reports. Langdon, who worked for the U.S. security contractor Four Horsemen, was convicted last October of fatally shooting an Afghan colleague and trying to blame the man's death on the Taliban. The incident occurred last May while Langdon was part of...