Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Two people were executed in China this week for their role in the contaminated milk scandal which resulted in the deaths of six children and 300,000 falling ill, in another instance of the arbitrary application of the death penalty.
China is extremely unusual in having the death sentence for crimes other than murder and rape: 60 different offences merit the death penalty under Chinese law. Despite the six children who tragically died as a result of the contamination, Geng and Zhang were not convicted of homicide. Zhang was executed for the rather more innocuous sounding “endangering public safety by ...
Disappointed, but not surprised, was my first response to hearing President Barack Obama’s announcement on Wednesday that he would not make the January 22 deadline for closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay.
During attorney visits over the past few weeks, Reprieve’s clients in Guantanamo have expressed their doubts regarding whether President Obama can live up to his promise to close the prison within a year of assuming office. ‘What is he going to do,’ one man asked, “put 200 people on a plane on the 22nd?”
And it is true – the maths doesn’t work. Around 245 prisoners ...
In the government's desperate commitment to cover up British complicity in torture, the drip-drip-drip of evidence seeping out continues. The sixth opinion released by the high court in the case of Binyam Mohamed gives us another insight into the government's bizarre notion of the threat to national security that compels secrecy.
Today, the two judges reluctantly complied with David Miliband's demand that certain evidence of torture should remain secret, at least pending the government's appeal. They were nonplussed, however, at the foreign secretary's insistence that they redact one particular passage in their judgment.
It comes ...
Ohio has just announced plans to switch from the usual 3-drug cocktail used to execute inmates by lethal injection to a 1-drug method that has never used on humans before. The move comes only two months after an Ohio inmate, Romell Broom, walked away from a botched execution attempt.
The one drug method is currently used to euthanize pets or to sedate surgery patients. The plan is experiment with the unknown, on inmates, which is why the prison has a "back up plan": another lethal injection process involving not three drugs, nor one, but two. The hope is that one ...
On 14 November over 100 people gathered at a public hearing in Manchester in support of Danny Fitzsimons, the British soldier suffering from PTSD that is facing execution in Iraq.
Speaking at the event were members of Danny’s legal team, as well as medical experts and family members, who gave touching testimony about the problems Danny faced and how the events he witnessed whilst in the army and working in Iraq had altered him.
Please watch the statements given by Reprieve’s Director, Clive Stafford Smith and Danny’s step-mother, Liz Fitzsimons.
The Brian Dugan case in the US is probably one of the best examples of the absurdity of the death penalty.
It took over twenty five years to find him guilty and sentence him to death. Meanwhile, two innocents were each convicted twice and sent to their death before being exonerated. It led to the landmark malfeasance indictments of seven law-enforcement officials, which also led in turn to the death-penalty reform in Illinois. A third man was also charged, but fortunately never got convicted.
Rolondo Cruz, one of the two men who spent more than 10 years of his life ...
The shocking secret memos used to justify CIA torture tactics are revealed in an extraordinary new book, writes Philippe Sands QC.
The world is watching the United States’ efforts to come to terms with the abuse unleashed in the aftermath of 9/11. On the heels of a potentially far-reaching Spanish criminal investigation, in April 2009 the Barack Obama administration declassified more legal memos. this important volume brings together the newly released documents, together with some released in the summer of 2004, in the aftermath of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs.Whether these new documents allow the country ...
Russia has changed a great deal over the last two decades. One of the welcome changes was the introduction in 1996 of a moratorium on the death penalty.
In 1999 the anti-death penalty movement in Russia gained a further boost when the Constitutional Court ruled that no Russian Court could sentence an individual to death until all courts in Russia had switched to jury trials. This objective will be met on 1 January 2010 when Chechnya becomes the final Russian Republic to introduce trial by jury.
Once this happens there will no longer be any legal bars to resuming executions ...
On the night that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, 21-year-old Mohammed el Gharani was sitting in a segregation cell in Guantanamo Bay's high security Echo Block.
He remembers the excitement among his fellow prisoners at the prospect of an Obama presidency. "Everyone was very hopeful; people were saying he was going to change things, that he would close the prison," Gharani, who was released in June, says.
"Even the guards were telling us that if he won, things would improve for us."
They were to be disappointed. A year after Obama's election win, Al Jazeera has ...
The Italian court this week (4 November) convicted 21 CIA operatives and a US air force officer in the first successful European prosecution relating to the practice of “extraordinary rendition” or in plain English, kidnap.
The operatives were each sentenced to 5 years in prison and the former head of the CIA in Milan, Robert Seldon Lady, was given an 8 year sentence for the CIA’s role in the kidnapping of Abu Omar in 2003. All the Americans were tried in absentia and are now considered fugitives. The New York Times reports that Armando Spataro, the prosecutor, said he ...
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Zero DB