Free Republic

Gov. Josh Shapiro Thursday boldly called on legislators to abolish Pennsylvania’s costly, ineffective and immoral death penalty. In urging legislators to act, an unprecedented move, Mr. Shapiro showed some sorely needed leadership from the governor’s office. Unless Mr. Shapiro engages the legislature, the death-penalty statute will endure. He needs to take the lead in persuading the Democrat-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate to approve bills that would repeal it. Former Gov. Tom Wolf refused to do that. In making his statement a month after his inauguration, Mr. Shapiro signaled that getting state government out of the business of killing people will...

The Myanmar junta handed out at least seven more death sentences this week, taking the tally of those on death row to 139, according to the United Nations. A junta spokesperson did not respond to calls from outside Myanmar seeking confirmation of the latest death sentences. The UN accused it of using capital punishment as a "tool to crush opposition". Myanmar has been in chaos since Aung San Suu Kyi's civilian government was toppled in a military coup in February 2021, ending the country's brief period of democracy. At least seven male university students were sentenced to death by a...

The Taliban returned to power last year - but have since failed to live up to their promises when it comes to women's rights.Large crowds gathered in Afghanistan to watch the first public flogging gathered at a football stadium in the country since the Taliban were ousted more than two decades ago. In scenes described by one commentator as “just history repeating itself”, three women and nine men were beaten in front of hundreds of spectators at the orders of the religious extremist organisation, which returned to power in August. The office of the governor of Logar province, south of...

Kabul (AFP) – Three women and 11 men were flogged Wednesday on the orders of an Afghan court after they were found guilty of theft and "moral crimes", a provincial official said. The lashings are the first to be confirmed since the Taliban's supreme leader ordered judges this month to fully enforce Islamic law, or sharia, saying corporal punishment was obligatory for certain crimes. Qazi Rafiullah Samim, head of information and culture for Logar province, told AFP the lashings were not administered publicly. "Fourteen people were given discretionary punishment, of which 11 were men and three were women," he said,...

As the mournful notes of the cello brought the four minutes of The Dying Swan to a close at The Hague on January 24, 1931, the audience was in tears. Throughout the performance, there had been no dancer — only a moving spotlight emphasizing the absence of Anna Pavlova, the ballerina the world loved. She had died the day before, of a mysterious lung infection that began almost immediately after her train had left Paris. She'd told doctors she suspected she'd been poisoned. Unable to reach a diagnosis, they treated her symptoms but failed to save her. For Soviet émigrés...

It was morning in East Africa. The day was May 26, 1886, and along the shore of Lake Victoria the mist still hung thickly in the jungle undergrowth, although the sun had risen well above the horizon. The night-time cacophony of wildlife had long since subsided, and the land was quiet except for the buzzing of insects and the murmur of hushed voices.In a wide clearing on a hill above the lake, a dramatic scene unfolded. Uganda's King Mwanga was holding court in the open-air gathering place in front of his temporary residence, his royal palace being under repair after...

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — ​​South Carolina has given the greenlight to firing-squad executions, a method codified into state law l ast year after a decade-long pause in carrying out death sentences because of the state’s inability to procure lethal injection drugs. The state Corrections Department said Friday that renovations have been completed on the death chamber in Columbia and that the agency had notified Attorney General Alan Wilson that it was able to carry out a firing-squad execution. Lawmakers set about tweaking state law to get around the lethal injection drug situation. Legislation that went into effect in May made...

Saudi Arabia on Saturday executed 81 people convicted of crimes ranging from killings to belonging to militant groups, the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history. The number of executed surpassed even the toll of a January 1980 mass execution for the 63 militants convicted of seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, the worst-ever militant attack to target the kingdom and Islam's holiest site. It wasn't clear why the kingdom choose Saturday for the executions, though they came as much of the world's attention remained focused on Russia's war on Ukraine —...

The large town of Ostfildern in the district of Esslingen near Stuttgart in Germany issued a “general decree” on January 26, 2022, according to which peaceful walkers can now also be shot if they take part in protests against the leftwing government's Corona measures.In order to ensure that the ban on assembly in Germany is observed, the use of direct coercion, i.e. physical violence or the use of weapons, have been ordered. After weighing up the conflicting interests, this is “proportionate and necessary” because there are no other means that would discourage potential anti-vaccine participants from walking, the decree states.This...

Japan hanged three death-row inmates on Tuesday, its first executions in two years, amid growing criticism by human rights groups of the country's use of the death penalty. One of the three, Yasutaka Fujishiro, was convicted of killing seven people and setting fire to their house in 2004, while the other two, Tomoaki Takanezawa and Mitsunori Onogawa, were convicted in the 2003 killings of two pinball parlor employees. Executions are carried out in high secrecy in Japan, where prisoners are not informed of their fate until the morning they are hanged. Two death-row inmates recently filed a lawsuit against the...

An event horribly underscoring the heartlessness of the brass against frail flesh in their ghastly war of machines, this shooting succeeded a surprise German attack on November 27 whose short-lived push into the French line momentarily drove part of the 298th Regiment to fall back out of their forward trench, before the French rallied and retook their own position to restore the status quo ante. The whole back-and-forth spanned mere minutes — just another snapshot of the trench war stalemate that would become so grindingly familiar to all belligerents in the years ahead. French commanders in the earliest months of...

The secret US Army operation to dispose of the bodies of the war criminals executed at Nuremberg.Nuremberg Executions 1946 - What Happened to the Bodies? 10mins

The Taliban executed some 900 people in six weeks in just one province as its fighters overran government troops, a police chief has claimed Targets included police officers, tribal elders, civil activists, and even a popular comedian who were dragged from their homes and killed in southern Kandahar province, the region's former head of police Tadin Khan said. Islamist fighters have now recaptured much of the province and have laid siege to the regional capital - also named Kandahar - as they push to retake control of the country following US troop withdrawal.

The South Carolina House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that allows for firing squads to carry out death penalty sentences and makes electrocution a more likely means of execution.Difficulties finding the required drugs have essentially paused executions in many states. The bill changes the default method of execution to electrocution if lethal injections cannot be given.

The U.S. Department of Justice held a news conference Tuesday with acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin and FBI Washington Field Office ADIC Steven D'Antuono discussing charges and arrests made in connection with last Wednesday's riot at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. According to the DOJ officials, there are more than 170 active subject files seeking individuals identified as potential persons that committed crimes, a number that is expected to swell into the "hundreds" in coming weeks. The DOJ has launched investigations into serious felony charges of "sedition and conspiracy," as well as a "mind-blowing" number of crimes related to...

The crime for which Lisa Montgomery was sentenced to death is about as horrific as one can imagine. In December 2004, she strangled a pregnant dog breeder, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, having pretended to be interested in buying one of her puppies, and used a kitchen knife to cut her baby out of her belly, whom she then passed off as her own. Montgomery had told friends and family she was pregnant, but was arrested a day later and the baby girl was returned alive and healthy to the victim’s husband. One might well conclude that no woman in her right...

Attorney General William P. Barr today directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to schedule the executions of four federal death-row inmates who were convicted of murdering children in violation of federal law and who, in two cases, raped the children they murdered. In July 2019, Attorney General Barr directed the BOP to revise the Federal Execution Protocol to provide for the use of a single-drug, pentobarbital — similar to protocols used in hundreds of state executions and repeatedly upheld by federal courts, including the Supreme Court, as consistent with the Eighth Amendment. A district court’s preliminary injunction prevented BOP...

Doctors across the country are deciding whether to adopt standard policies for not resuscitating patients with coronavirus in an effort to curb possible virus exposure for medical staff. In Chicago, the Northwestern Memorial Hospital has been debating how to implement a universal do-not-resuscitate policy for infected patients. The policy would void the wishes of the patient or their family members. The death toll for Covid-19 in the United States has risen to 823 with more than 60,000 confirmed cases, and the burden of the pandemic continues to intensify in hospitals across the country. ... Similar discussions around not resuscitating have...

Two executions have been postponed in Texas this month, and it's possible the coronavirus pandemic could disrupt several more, which one expert says could reduce the dwindling support for the death penalty in the United States. With many non-essential public spaces shut down to try to contain the virus' spread, lawyers for two condemned men sought and received 60-day stays of execution. The Court of Criminal Appeals approved the stays for John Hummel on Monday and Tracy Beatty on Thursday. They were on the schedule to be executed March 18 and March 25, respectively. Robert Dunham, director of the Washington,...

There were no champagne corks popping, no crystal balls dropping in Wang Yi's new year. The pastor of Early Rain Covenant Church was in prison, spending his second January 1st in a dark cell, charged with a crime Americans commit every day: worshipping Jesus. The actual allegations were much more subtle -- things like "illegal business activities" or "inciting subversion of state power." But in China, government officials need no excuse. Christians, like Uyghurs, Falun Gong, and any other men and women of faith, are fair game. "Where are you taking my husband?" a woman pleads on a cell phone...