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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...

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Monday denied the Justice Department's efforts to lift a temporary halt on four federal executions. The department had appealed a trial judge's ruling last month that ordered a stay of the executions while a separate legal challenge to the Trump administration's new lethal injection protocol plays out. The longest running of the four lawsuits was filed 16 years ago, and the cases went dormant during the Obama administration amid a shortage of lethal injection drugs. The first of the four executions was set for December 9. The only other federal death row...

Attorney General William Barr revealed Thursday he'd be willing to take the administration's fight to restart federal executions to the Supreme Court if necessary. Barr's comments to The Associated Press came after U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ruled Thursday to postpone four of five scheduled executions for next month; the fifth already had been halted. The Trump administration appealed the decision. The government has put to death only three defendants since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988, most recently in 2003, when Louis Jones was executed for the 1995 kidnapping, rape and murder of a young soldier.

President Trump addressed the nation Monday morning after two evil cowards carried out separate mass shootings over the weekend. During his remarks, the President called for action and issued a number of proposals and directives. 1) He's calling on the DOJ and FBI to investigate white supremecy and other forms of hate or terrorism on the internet, with help from social media companies.“The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate. In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America – hatred...

(PHNOM PENH, Cambodia) — Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the communist Khmer Rouge regime that destroyed a generation of Cambodians, died Sunday, the country’s U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal said. He was 93. Nuon Chea was known as Brother No. 2, the right-hand man of Pol Pot, the leader of the regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The group’s fanatical efforts to realize a utopian society led to the death of some 1.7 million people — more than a quarter of the country’s population at the time — from starvation, disease, overwork and executions. Researchers believe Nuon Chea was...

No one on federal death row has been executed since 2003, but on Thursday, William P. Barr, the attorney general, announced that the government was resuming executions, starting with five men convicted of killing children. The men, whose ages range from 37 to 67, have each been convicted of heinous crimes, and together have been involved in the slayings of 13 victims. The cases fell under federal jurisdiction because of how or where they were carried out. All five are being held at a high-security federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., where their executions are set for December and January....

Zheng Qiaozhi — we will call him George — still has nightmares. He was interning at China’s Shenyang Army General Hospital when he was drafted to be part of an organ-harvesting team. The prisoner was brought in, tied hand and foot, but very much alive. The army doctor in charge sliced him open from chest to belly button and exposed his two kidneys. “Cut the veins and arteries,” he told his shocked intern. George did as he was told. Blood spurted everywhere. The kidneys were placed in an organ-transplant container. Then the doctor ordered George to remove the man’s eyeballs....

In one of the most painfully awkward interviews in recent memory, progressive author Naomi Wolf appeared on the BBC 3 to promote her upcoming book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love — only to be informed by the interviewer that her soon-to-be-released work is entirely based on Wolf’s own misunderstanding of a dated legal term ..... During a radio interview with the BBC’s Matthew Sweet yesterday, Wolf — as well as the rest of the world — found out that her new book is wildly fallacious. The interview quickly went viral. “I found several dozen executions,” Wolf said...

President Trump on Wednesday blasted California Gov. Gavin Newsom for halting executions for the state’s 737 death row inmates. “Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!” Trump tweeted early Wednesday. The tweet comes hours before Newsom, a Democrat, is expected to sign an executive order that would halt all executions at San Quentin State Prison, closing a new execution chamber. The order would also withdraw lethal injection regulations. The order, though, would leave all convictions...

A group of conservative street artists hijacked a billboard in Hollywood on Friday morning and took aim at CNN, which so happened to be across the street. Known as The Faction, their latest project slammed CNN and its president Jeff Zucker for its coverage of this week’s summit in Hanoi, Vietnam between President Donald Trump and North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un. The billboard, which referred to CNN as “Communist News Network,” dawned the phrase “Keep Korea divided” with an asterisk that read “because OrangeManBad.” It also featured an image of Jeff Zucker, whose title was “CEO, CNNPC,” a reference...

Gov. Mike DeWine said Tuesday that he will propose an increase in the gasoline tax — and it could be a sizable one — to fix and improve Ohio’s crumbling roads and bridges. The first-year Republican would not reveal the size of the proposed hike. DeWine told reporters the recommended increase would maintain the status quo of highway maintenance and some major projects. That would require another $600 million per year, or an additional 14 cents a gallon — a 50 percent increase in the 28-cent tax — based on figures from the Department of Transportation. The elevation will be...

“At that time, [marching] from Tirtza, Menachem subdued Tiphsah and all who were in it, and its territory; and because it did not surrender, he massacred [its people] and ripped open all its pregnant women.” II Kings 15:16 President Trump held a conference call with 4,500 participants on Thursday in which he reportedly referred to late-term abortions as “execution.” During the invitation-only conference call, the president discussed recent attempts by Democratic lawmakers to advance a pro-abortion agenda. In particular, the president discussed a bill recently signed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo which allows abortions after 24 weeks if the...

US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell on Friday demanded an independent investigation into a German journalist who was caught making up key details in a series of reports for Der Spiegel news magazine. He said the revelations “are troubling to the US Embassy, particularly because several of these fake stories focused on US policies and certain segments of the American people.” He said he wrote to the editors of the respected news weekly calling for an “independent and transparent investigation.” He said it was clear the US had been the victim of institutional bias at the magazine, saying the outlet...

Archaeologists now know whodunnit — the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus — after uncovering a 2,000-year-old mass burial ground in the municipality’s backyard Evidence of a mass slaying, including cruel beheadings, committed during the bloody reign of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE) was recently uncovered in a courtyard next to the Jerusalem municipality during excavations of an ancient water cistern. “We removed from the pit more than 20 neck vertebrae which were cut by a sword,” said Dr. Yossi Nagar, an anthropologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). “We discovered in the pit, bodies and body parts of infants...

""ISIS leader responsible for infamous execution of downed pilot who was burned alive in a cage is captured"" The ISIS commander behind the brutal execution of a Jordanian pilot who was burned to death in a cage in 2015 is among the four senior ISIS leaders captured last week in Iraq. Saddam al-Jamal is one of the most senior ISIS commanders to be detained so far and was tipped as a future leader of the death cult. He gained a reputation for brutality as an ISIS commander with a taste for personally beheading prisoners.

Execution by cannon was a method of execution in which the victim was typically tied to the mouth of a cannon which was then fired. The prisoner is generally tied to a gun with the upper part of the small of his back resting against the muzzle. When the gun is fired, his head is seen to go straight up into the air some forty or fifty feet; the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, and fall at, perhaps, a hundred yards distance; the legs drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun;...