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Obama backs end to death penalty? By Dave McKinney Sun-Times Media Last Modified: Mar 4, 2011 09:18PM President Barack Obama has appeared to tip his hand on Illinois’ bill to end the death penalty, which Gov. Pat Quinn is expected to act upon within the week. During a recent encounter with Quinn at the White House last week, the president praised the bill as well as Illinois’ legalization of civil unions, said state Sen. Kwame Raoul (D-Chicago), a lead legislative backer of the death penalty bill and Obama’s successor in the Illinois Senate. Raoul spoke with Quinn after Quinn returned...

Snips from Excerpt only website: An Afghan physiotherapist will be executed within three days for converting to Christianity. Said Musa, 45, has been held for eight months in a Kabul prison were he claims he has been tortured and sexually abused by inmates and guards. He claims he was visited by a judge who told him he would be hanged within days unless he converted back to Islam.

Mexican authorities have found the bodies of seven young men killed in three separate attacks across Tijuana -- a spate of violence that runs counter to what officials have described as an improving security situation. The bodies, two of them decapitated and strung from a highway overpass, were discovered within an eight-hour period between Sunday evening and early Monday morning, according to the Baja California state prosecutor’s office. Law-enforcement officials in Tijuana and Baja California and Mexico’s federal military have made some visible progress working together against drug-related violence afflicting several regions of the country. Brazen shootouts and gruesome killings...

Sign in street announcing Public Execution The enlarged sign reads: (loose translation) ..... Carrying out of death sentence..........

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Lacking enough of the anesthetic essential to the cocktail of lethal drugs administered during executions, several US states are being forced to postpone the procedure until early next year. At the heart of the drug supply problem is Hospira, the only pharmaceutical company that produces the anesthetic sodium thiopental. "We are working to get it back on the market and we anticipate we will by 2011," Hospira spokesman told AFP. The US Food and Drug Administration does not approve the drug's use in lethal injections and Hospira does not sell it for that purpose, though prison officials...

MEXICO CITY — An anonymous, twentysomething blogger is giving Mexicans what they can't get elsewhere — an inside view of their country's raging drug war. Operating from behind a thick curtain of computer security, Blog del Narco in less than six months has become Mexico's go-to Internet site at a time when mainstream media are feeling pressure and threats to stay away from the story. Many postings, including warnings and a beheading, appear to come directly from drug traffickers. Others depict crime scenes accessible only to military or police. The undifferentiated content suggests that all sides are using the blog...

Long ago, executions of convicts were carried out in public view. Then they were carried out of public sight, in chambers and prisons, with a red lamp glowing to indicate that an execution is taking place. I have started this thread because I want to ask this question: Should prisoner executions be televised live?Yes or No?

Anti-death penalty movement wooing conservatives LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Roy Brown seems like a rarity — a conservative who's against the death penalty. But to Brown, a state senator and the 2008 Republican nominee for governor of Montana, the philosophy aligns perfectly with conservative ideology. He's one of the more high-profile figures reaching out to other social and fiscal conservatives, hoping to create a bipartisan movement against capital punishment. "I believe that life is precious from the womb to a natural death," Brown said. The Roman Catholic church has long been an organized and vocal critic of the death penalty, but...

The state released its revised lethal injection guidelines Tuesday, inching one step closer to resuming executions in California, beginning with Stockton's Michael Angelo Morales. The changes follow a June public hearing when death penalty foes from around the world converged on Sacramento to speak out against the procedure. They also mailed in more than 8,000 letters addressing the protocol. The public now has until Jan. 20 to comment on the changes. The 25-page document indicates small revisions, from defining a "chaplain" and the "lethal injection room" to clarifying that the curtains remain open in the execution chamber until after the...

<p>Outraged New Yorkers said yesterday that admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other terrorists deserve to be put to death -- and some even volunteered for the job.</p> <p>"Kill them without a trial. Just a bullet in the head and say goodbye. Why waste taxpayer money?" said Thomas Pland, 70, a truck driver from Astoria, Queens.</p>

"Somali jihadists forcing civilians to watch executions" SNIPPET: "Movies and television? No way. Executions? Bring the whole family -- or else! "Somalis 'made to view executions'," by Mary Harper for BBC News, October 25:" SNIPPET: "Hundreds of people in Somalia have been forced to watch Islamist militants executing two people accused of spying. People in Merca said al-Shabaab militia patrolled the town with loudspeakers, demanding they attend the executions. The militants also ordered schools to close for the day as they were keen for children to watch the two men being shot dead by a firing squad. Most of those...

BAGHDAD (AP) — Execution-style killings, not headline-grabbing bombings, have been the leading cause of death among civilians in the Iraq war, a study released Wednesday shows. The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, point to the brutal sectarian nature of the conflict, where death squads once roamed the streets hunting down members of the rival Muslim sect. Estimates of the number of civilians killed in Iraq vary widely. The study was based on the database maintained by Iraq Body Count, a private group that among other sources uses media reports including those of The Associated Press. The...

PHOENIX (Reuters) – Hit men dressed in fake police tactical gear burst into a home in Phoenix, rake it with gunfire and execute a man.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas – Texas is wasting little time claiming its annual notoriety as the nation's most active capital punishment state. Convicted killer Curtis Moore, condemned for killing three people during a drug-related robbery in 1995 in Fort Worth, is set for lethal injection this week – the first execution in the U.S. in 2009. It's the first of eight scheduled executions this month in the U.S., all but two of them in Texas. Moore, 40, is set to die Wednesday. Two more executions are set for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit next week, then three more the...

... I introduced myself by giving my first name, surname, my father’s name, birth certificate number, place of birth and occupation, and then the following exchange took place....

Formal statistics are impossible to come by as killing of officers and non-commissioned members of the late-Shah's military and security forces were not centrally ordered. We have tried to gather numbers that are as reliable as possible but they are, at best, estimates. Usually very accurate estimates but we believe we have understated actual numbers. Here are some figures in no particular order, other than as they came in. 144 Air Force Pilots including the Nojeh attempted counter-revolution by the Air Force. (Nojeh is still a not fully told story we will write up as time permits. We have have...

A state appeals court Friday ensured further delays in California's already inert death penalty system, finding that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration did not follow proper procedures when it attempted to revise the state's lethal injection method to get executions back on track. In a 14-page ruling, the San Francisco-based 1st District Court of Appeal upheld last year's decision by a Marin County judge who found state officials failed to provide public scrutiny of plans to overhaul California's execution method. The appeals court ruling, if it stands, would force the state to go back to the drawing board in its efforts...

Cynthia McKinney says 5000 executed Katrina used as cover. News Type: Event — Tue Sep 30, 2008 Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney announced for the first time on Sunday that she has received information that some 5000, mostly male, possibly prisoners were killed execution style, by single gunshot to the head, using the tragic events of hurricane Katrina as a cover. Candidate McKinney made the announcement at a conference in Oakland, Ca, for the Critical Resistance 10 on Sunday. While speaking she informed the audience that she has received information from a sources that were involved in the clean-up and disposal...

The news from Barbara Wagner's doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing. Barbara Wagner(Paul Carter/Register-Guard) The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay. What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50. "It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter in the mail that basically...

An illegal immigrant from Honduras who claimed his treaty rights were violated when he was arrested for a robbery-murder near Dallas lost his appeal ... at the U.S. Supreme Court, clearing the way for his execution. In the second case of its kind this week in Texas, lawyers for condemned killer Heliberto Chi went to the nation's highest court claiming Chi should have been told he could get legal assistance from the Honduran consulate when he was arrested in California and extradited to Texas to face charges for killing his former boss at a men's clothing store during a robbery...