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Clemency Wells on 01 June 2011
Jared Lee Loughner, the young man facing a death sentence for the now infamous shootings in Tuscon, Arizona in the USA earlier this year, was ruled incompetent to stand trial earlier this week. There is a good discussion on the issue from NPR. Competency is a fascinating and disturbing issue in the US death penalty system. Here at Reprieve we are big fans of Slate and their US legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick and I recommend checking them out for stories on US judicial issues, including an article on Loughner earlier this year.
If you’ve been paying attention to the ...
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Donald Campbell on 31 May 2011
Pharmaceutical company Lundbeck - best known these days for supplying drugs used in the execution of prisoners in the US - is apparently looking for a new public relations manager
Whether this indicates that the scale of the PR problem - you can read about it in the media around the world, from the FT to the AP - means that they now need extra staff, or that the manager of Lundbeck’s communications has simply had enough and left, is not clear.
Either way, we’ve had a quick read through the summary of the job description, and suggest that, for the sake ...
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Emmanuelle Purdon on 31 May 2011
My name is Nicole Baltus and I am from Germany. I was the close Friend of Mister Cary Kerr, in Texas, for nearly 3 years.
Cary was executed on May 3rd, 2011, by the State of Texas. Texas could do it, because Texas had got the lethal injection drug from your company Lundbeck.
On Wednesday April 27, 2011 I started my trip to Texas. I wanted to spend the last days and hours with my best friend Cary.
No one, not even Cary's attorneys have really thought that Cary will be executed. So we had all of the big ...
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on 24 May 2011
Clive Stafford Smith is among those to have received correspondence from the non-existent Mrs E Adams of 10 Downing St - of Have I Got News For You and BBC News fame...
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Matthew Leidecker on 20 May 2011
Edward Earl Johnson was executed in a Mississippi gas chamber 24 years ago today, on 20 May 1987.
Edward, a young African American convicted of the murder of a white police officer, spent 7 years on the Mississippi state penitentiary’s death row before he was executed at the age of 26. He protested his innocence to the end, claiming that his confession had been forced out of him by police, who took him to the woods to question him and threatened to kill him on the spot.
The award-winning documentary Fourteen Days in May tells the story of the ...
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Olly Holland on 19 May 2011
An Afghan detainee in Guantánamo Bay has died in what the US is calling an “apparent suicide”. He is the eighth person to die and one of the last to enter Guantanamo since its opening.
Inayatullah was a 37-year-old who had been captured in Afghanistan and transferred to Guantánamo in September 2007. According to a press release from the US military’s Sothern Command he was found dead by guards following routine checks. The release states that guards “found the detainee unresponsive and not breathing.”
The release goes on to state that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service “has initiated an ...
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Clemency Wells on 11 May 2011
Cause for cheer in Connecticut but bad news from Bahrain in the latest installment of all the recent death penalty news from around the globe...
First to the Middle East where the ‘Arab Spring,’ as it is becoming known, has produced lots of troubling human rights issues. In Bahrain, four opposition protestors have been given the death penalty by a military court for allegedly murdering two police officers during the uprisings. Speaking on behalf of the European Union, which opposes the death penalty in all circumstances, Foreign Affairs Chief Baroness Ashton said that she was ‘deeply concerned’ about those people ...
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Clare Algar on 05 May 2011
This article first appeared on the Guardian's Comment is Free on 5 May 2011
Claims that the torture of detainees was directly responsible for the intelligence that tracked down Osama bin Laden are fanciful at best and cynically manipulative at worst.
Leave aside for a moment the moral repugnance of torturing people, the thousands of innocents who were detained and mistreated alongside the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the clear evidence that brutal behaviour on this scale is more effective as a recruiting sergeant for extremism than anything else.
Even with these fairly significant exceptions, it is still ...
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Donald Campbell on 28 April 2011
Early reports of President Obama’s shake-up of
his defence and security team suggest it will be good news for the likes of
Predator manufacturer General Atomics and bad news for
anyone who’s not a fan of drone strikes.
Subject to Senate confirmation, CIA Director Leon Panetta will head to the
Pentagon, with his post taken in turn by General David Petraeus, currently
commanding forces in Afghanistan.
Panetta famously described CIA drone strikes in Pakistan as 'the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership'. Petraeus, too, is ‘seen as
a ...
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Clemency Wells on 21 April 2011
Legislators in North Carolina are trying to repeal the ground breaking Racial Justice Act. Act now to help prevent them from doing so.
It is a commonly heard tale, the familiarity of which makes it no less shocking. In 1992 Kenneth Bernard Rouse was sentenced to death for the murder of a woman. Rouse is African-American. The woman, Hazell Broadway, was white. Rouse was convicted by a 12-member jury. All were white. After the trial, as is standard practice, Kenneth’s lawyers interviewed members of the jury. One said: “black men rape white women so that they can brag to ...
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