Free Republic

A top United Nations official is urging the governor of Texas to call off the execution of a Mexican national convicted of murder because he was not told of his right for diplomatic advice when he was arrested, according to Reuters. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay is calling for Gov. Rick Perry to commute the sentence to life in prison for Humberto Leal Garcia. Garcia was convicted of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl in February 1998. "The lack of consular assistance and advice raises concerns about whether or not Mr. Leal Garcia's right to a fair...

The Golden Rule of life also applies to the tricky business of international relations. What we do to non-Americans in our country we can reasonably expect to be done unto Americans in other countries. It is for that reason that Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles — both in the uncommon position of making a decision with international impact — should commute or postpone the death sentence of Humberto Leal, a Mexican raised in Texas, scheduled to die July 7 for the 1994 murder of Adria Sauceda, 16, in Bexar County. The key issue in...

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia on Friday beheaded a Sudanese man convicted of murdering a compatriot in the capital Riyadh, the interior ministry announced.

(Reuters) - An Ohio man was executed on Tuesday morning after the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, officials said. Daniel Lee Bedford, 63, was put to death by lethal injection Tuesday morning for a double homicide in Cincinnati in 1984, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. His defense attorneys had argued for clemency, citing dementia and mental retardation. A federal judge had granted Bedford a stay of execution Monday, but this was lifted by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal. Bedford was convicted of shooting...

Mississippi is set to execute later on Tuesday a man convicted in 1999 of slaying four people, the first inmate in the state to be put to death using a new drug as part of the lethal injection. Benny Joe Stevens is scheduled to be executed shortly after 6 p.m. local time on Tuesday, according to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. He will be executed using the drug pentobarbital, a sedative often used to euthanize animals, because of a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental. Several states have switched to pentobarbital because of the shortage.

South Carolina on Friday executed a man who strangled his cellmate, using a new combination of lethal injection drugs for the first time. Jeffrey Motts, 36, was declared dead at 6:17 p.m. He was given the sedative pentobarbital instead of sodium thiopental as part of the lethal three-drug combination because federal agents seized the state's supply as part of a nationwide investigation into whether prisons obtained the drugs legally from England. Motts was sentenced to death for killing his cellmate at a state prison in Greenville County in 2005. He was already serving a life sentence for killing two elderly...

On the eve of his execution, a Texas death row is saying that he does not want to be the state’s guinea pig for the use of a new drug for lethal injection. Cleve Foster, who is accused of murdering Sudanese refugee Nyaneur Pal in 2002, is set to be executed on Tuesday, but he doesn’t want to be the first Texan to be executed with the new drug pentobarbital.

A man convicted of killing two convenience store employees in a 1989 robbery was executed by the state of Arizona after he lost an appeal that raised questions about the drugs used in putting him to death by lethal injection. A jury convicted Eric John King in 1990 of two counts of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of convenience store clerk Ron Barman and the store's security guard, Richard Butts, during a robbery that netted the killer $72. King, 47, was executed at a state prison in Florence, Arizona, southeast of Phoenix, according to state Attorney General Tom Horne....

In the course of my inquiries into many of history's more recent controversies -- JFK, Waco, Vince Foster, Oklahoma City, Ron Brown, TWA Flight 800, 9/11, Obama's birth, the authorship of Obama's books -- I have come to see that when there are actual conspiracies afoot, they fall into two general categories, conspiracies of execution and conspiracies of concealment. Conspiracies of execution, at least on any kind of scale, are rare in American history. The nature of our national character and the openness of our political culture war against them. Conspiracies of concealment are another matter. When officials fail in...

Tucker Carlson says Michael Vick should have been killed for cruelty to dogs. On last night’s Hannity on FNC, Carlson was filling in for the vacationing Sean Hannity (going on two weeks, now) when the conversation turned to Vick during the "Great American Panel" segment. More specifically, the conversation centered on Barack Obama’s recent support to the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles for giving Vick a second chance. While that is an issue in and of itself, Carlson eventually took the conversation into no man’s land by saying that he wished Vick would have been executed for killing dogs. Interestingly,...

The state of Oklahoma is planning to execute death row inmates with drugs intended for use on animals. Lawmakers want to switch away from the only brand of anaesthetic that has been used in the US for lethal injections because there is not enough to go around. The replacement is likely to attract controversy because it is currently used by vets to anesthetise animals for operations. Other states are watching closely and may well follow suit, but such a move is likely to face a challenge from human rights groups to ensure that it is safe to use.

The decision of the Iraqi war crimes tribunal to sentence Tariq Aziz to death is one that needs to be vigorously opposed for several reasons. Although it is true that, as Saddam Hussein's longtime henchman and deputy, he is morally tainted with some of the most appalling crimes in modern history, Aziz was not, in fact, condemned to execution for his part in the annexation of Kuwait, the destruction of the Marsh Arabs, or the attempted genocide against Iraq's Kurdish minority. (Indeed, there is some evidence that he advised his boss against the insane attack on Kuwait in 1990.) For...

The state of Arizona executed a convicted murderer on Tuesday night despite objections from attorneys that the state would use a non-approved drug from overseas for the lethal injection. Just hours before Jeffrey Landrigan's death, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to lift a stay issued by a federal judge to halt the execution. "There is no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug obtained from a foreign source is unsafe," the Supreme Court said Due to a U.S. shortage, the state turned to a non-FDA approved drug. It was later revealed that the source was the U.K., although...

A crack addict was found guilty today of carrying out a nightmare home invasion that lead to the brutal deaths of a mother and her two young daughters. Steven Hayes was convicted of six capital crimes, all of which are punishable by death. The 47-year-old career criminal was found guilty of 16 of 17 charges, including the murder of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters Hayley, seventeen, and Michaela, eleven.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- California officials on Wednesday called off the scheduled execution of a convicted murderer after setbacks in federal and state courts. The attorney general's office said in a court filing that it can no longer proceed with the lethal injection of Albert Greenwood Brown at 9 p.m. Thursday. It would have been California's first execution since 2006. "I'm relieved," said John Grele, one of Brown's attorneys. "This was a hastily designed plan." The announcement came after a California Supreme Court ruling made Friday the earliest possible day the state could execute Brown. But by then, the state's...

A federal appeals court in San Francisco late Monday ordered a trial judge to reconsider a ruling that allowed for a convicted murderer and rapist to be executed this week at San Quentin State Prison. Albert Greenwood Brown was scheduled to die at 9 p.m. Thursday for the 1980 killing of a 15-year-old Riverside girl. But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel erred by offering Brown a choice of a one-drug lethal injection or a three-drug cocktail.

BREAKING: Schwarzenegger delays California's first execution in nearly five years

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Some executions in the U.S. have been put on hold because of a shortage of one of the drugs used in lethal injections from coast to coast. Several of the 35 states that rely on lethal injection are either scrambling to find sodium thiopental - an anesthetic that renders the condemned inmate unconscious - or considering using another drug. But both routes are strewn with legal or ethical roadblocks. The shortage delayed an Oklahoma execution last month and led Kentucky's governor to postpone the signing of death warrants for two inmates. Arizona is trying to get...

On Sept. 23, 2010, in Jarrat, Virginia, 41 yr. old Teresa Lewis was executed by lethal injection in connection with the murder of her husband, Julian Lewis and her stepson Charles "C.J." Lewis in October 2002. Thousands of individuals petitioned VA Governor Robert F. McDonnell to change her sentence to "life in prison" to no avail. (SaveTeresaLewis.org) News reports around the nation mentioned the story citing details about female executions (the last one in the U.S. was here in Texas in 2005; of the current 10 TX females on death row, 4 are from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex - details)....

SAN FRANCISCO (KABC) -- A federal judge cleared the way for California's first execution since 2006 after the state revised its lethal injection procedures. Officials have scheduled the execution of Albert Greenwood Brown, a convicted rapist and killer, for next Wednesday.