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OK, the story is all over the Old Media edifice: forty-one-year-old Teresa Lewis has become "the first woman to be executed in the U.S. in five years." Every news outlet from TV and cable, to newspapers, to radio, to the Internet is using this line, this "the first woman to be executed in the U.S. in five years" line. They are all playing the same narrative. So, here's the question I have. How exactly can anyone be the "first" anything "in five years"? Doesn't the whole "in five years" presuppose that someone else came first? See, the one "five years"...

Teresa Lewis, 41, was executed die by lethal injection. (AP) JARRATT, Va., Sept. 23 - Teresa Lewis, who plotted with a young lover to kill her husband and stepson for insurance money, became the first woman executed in Virginia in nearly 100 years Thursday night when she was killed by lethal injection. Authorities pronounced Lewis dead at 9:13 p.m. Lewis's case generated passion and interest across the world. The European Union asked Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) to commute her sentence to life, citing her mental capacity. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cited the case at an appearance in New...

Jarratt, Va. (CNN) -- Teresa Lewis, a 41-year-old grandmother, met with family members and a spiritual adviser Thursday, hours before she was scheduled to be the first woman executed in Virginia in nearly a century. Lewis is set to die by lethal injection at 9 p.m. ET at Greensville Correctional Center. The victims' family members are to witness the execution, state Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor said. The death row inmate pleaded guilty in the 2002 slayings of her husband and stepson in their rural home near Danville, Virginia, about 145 miles from Richmond.

RICHMOND, Va. -- Virginia was moving forward Thursday with its first execution of a woman in nearly a century amid appeals from the European Union and repercussions that reached as far away as Iran. SNIP Teresa Lewis, 41, was scheduled to die by injection at 9 p.m. at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt for the October 2002 hired killings of her husband and stepson. To procure the hit men, prosecutors said, she used sex, cash and a promised cut of the insurance benefits the killings would reap her. The U.S. Supreme Court and Gov. Bob McDonnell declined to intervene. All...

Virginia is slated to execute Teresa Lewis by lethal injection on Thursday, The Associated Press reported. The 41-year-old woman was sentenced to die after pleading guilty to capital murder for hiring two men to kill her husband and stepson so she could collect a $250,000 life insurance policy. Rodney Fuller and Lewis' lover, Matthew Shallenberger, entered her home on Oct. 30, 2002, and fatally shot Julian Clifton, Jr., 51, and Charles Lewis, 25. Teresa then rummaged through her husband's pockets for money while he was dying. She also waited nearly an hour before calling 911. The triggermen were sentenced to...

The sparsely furnished room with wood panelling and blue curtains could be an annex to any conference room. However the mundanity masks the dark secrets of one of the world's largest economies. For this is where Japan executes those condemned to death by its courts. The last two criminals for whom these walls were their final sight of the world were the killers Kazuo Shinozawa, 59, and Hidenori Ogata, 33, who were hanged last month. And for the first time, the public has been allowed to see the Tokyo Detention House because the country's Justice Minister Keiko Chiba, a known...

HUNTSVILLE – The legal saga that began several days after the horrifying murder of two teenage Houston girls in 1993 came to an end Tuesday night with the execution of Peter Anthony Cantu, a former gang leader who all but ordered the execution of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena. Cantu did not make a final statement. He was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m. The parents of Ertman and Pena, supported by other family members and friends, looked on as Cantu stared straight up toward the ceiling, taking one deep breath before he closed his eyes. He did not acknowledge the...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas - One of Houston's most notorious killers is expected to be executed Tuesday at 6 p.m. in Huntsville. 35-year-old Peter Cantu appears to have no appeals left. It will be the last of the executions related to the murders of 14-year-old Jennifer Ertman and 16-year-old Elizabeth Pena in 1993. Despite being the leader of the murderous gang, Cantu has lasted longer on death row than his co-defendants. Cantu has spent 17 years on death row; that is longer than either of his victims lived, and almost 7 years longer than the average stay on death row. Cantu was...

Relatively few people in the United States know of the horrible tragedies that are now being visited upon the people of Mexico by a war between drug cartels, and the government of Mexico.The US media does not report the full story, and the Government of Mexico has a press black out on much of what is happening in Mexico concerning the war between the Mexican Government, and the drug cartels who war among themselves. To complicate matters the drug gangs often wear federal uniforms while performing assaults on their victims. One anonymous web site operates a blog which receives posts,...

A death row inmate convicted of the 1985 torture and murder of a pizza deliveryman in Glendale asked a court Monday to strike down the state's newly revised execution procedures as illegal and likely to inflict excruciating pain if used on any of California's 700-plus condemned prisoners. The lawsuit filed by Mitchell Sims, 50, alleges that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation rushed through revisions of the lethal injection procedures and deliberately sought to shut the public out of the process. Corrections officials approved the changes one day before a May 1 deadline and sent them to the Office...

N.Korea's Ex-Railways Minister Executed A nationwide campaign is underway recently in North Korea to get rid of photos and publications of executed former senior officials, Radio Free Asia claimed Tuesday. This campaign was ordered by leader Kim Jong-il on July 2. The North's Press Censorship Bureau is reportedly destroying documents and materials collected from across the country. According to RFA, the campaign's targets include Pak Nam-gi, the former director of the North Korean Workers Party's Planning and Finance Department who was executed in March over the disastrous currency reform, and former railways minister Kim Yong-sam.

While we were celebrating our independence here in America over the weekend, a mother of two is preparing to be executed soon in Iran, in as horrific a fashion as one can imagine. It’s a death sentence ordered by the Muslim judicial system, stuck on 14th century barbarism. Can your voice and the voices of others around the world save her?

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...