Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.
£40,000 per juvenile on death row in Iran: cheap at twice the price?
A human rights lawyer in Iran has launched an appeal to raise the necessary financial compensation to save the lives of four juvenile offenders facing execution in Iran. Under Iranian law (based on the Sharia code), families of the victim can pardon the convicted person in return for a sum of ‘blood money’.
The amounts of money asked for the victims’ family are no nominal figures. It is extremely rare that death row prisoners can be pardoned in this manner, because of the vast sums involved ...
On October 8, seven Sahrawi human rights defenders were arrested by Moroccan police at the Mohamed V Airport in Casablanca, Morocco and remain in an undisclosed location, according to the Association Sahraouie des Victimes des Violations Graves des Droits Humains (ASVDH). The human rights defenders were returning from a trip to Algeria where they visited Sahrawi refugee camps in the southwest of the country. The group was arrested immediately after their plane landed at the airport in Casablanca.
This arrest was overseen by several security agencies, led by the military intelligence service, called: DGED, according to the sources of the ...
A report just released by the Death Penalty Information Center concludes that states are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on the death penalty, draining state budgets during the economic crisis and diverting funds from more effective anti-violence programs.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 41 of the 50 states have had either no executions or an average of less than 1 execution per year. Of the remaining 9 states, only 5 have averaged more than 2 executions per year and only 1 (Texas) averaged more than 3.
Meanwhile, the extra costs of the death penalty, beyond life ...
John Thompson was 40 years old when he walked out of the Angola State Penitentiary in 2003 after spending nearly 18 years on death row for murder.
A jury acquitted him of all charges after a stunning disclosure from Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick’s office.
In 1995, lead prosecutor Jerry Deagan told fellow prosecutor Mike Riehlmann he was dying of liver cancer and had a confession — he had concealed blood evidence that could possibly prove Thompson’s innocence. After Deagan died, Riehlmann said nothing of his friend’s confession for five years while Thompson sat in a cell ...
"Please don't allow them to kill me for a crime that I know I did not commit."
These are the words of Linda Carty, a British grandmother sentenced to death in 2001 for the kidnap and murder of a young mother in Texas.
They were spoken in a recorded message broadcast to London's Trafalgar Square in September. It was the last throw of the dice for Carty's legal team, a publicity stunt designed to raise awareness of her plight in the hope that the UK might ask for her sentence to be commuted.
It made no difference ...
At long last, two High Court judges have told the Government what any sane person already knew.
Issuing yet another judgment in Binyam Mohamed’s case, the judges said that no rational person can argue that evidence of torture qualifies as intelligence.
“It cannot be suggested,” the judges wrote, “that information as to how officials of the US Government admitted treating [Binyam] during his interrogation is information that can in any democratic society governed by the rule of law be characterised as ‘secret’ or as ‘intelligence’.”
No indeed. The material at stake relates to Binyam’s “allegation that he had ...
Extra--David Miliband is not happy over today's loss in the Binyam Mohamed case. He's just vowed a brave battle all the way up to the ramparts of the High Court to save the "inviolable principle" of opacity in intelligence sharing.
For those tuning in, this fuss is over all of seven paragraphs. I haven't read them, but the British Court has been absolutely clear what the paragraphs contain. They do not out an agent; they do not crack a code. What they do, apparently, is recite some of the abuse meted out on poor Binyam by US ...
I find it hard to understand the logic of Dalia Grybauskaitė, Lithuania’s President and it is not just because I don’t speak Lithuanian. On Tuesday Grybauskaitė wrote to President Obama congratulating him on winning the Nobel Peace Prize, saying in her letter to him, “Your call for the new beginning where America leads, but also works together with each and everybody to achieve what is a common goal has been answered.”
But when it comes to closing Guantánamo Bay, Grybauskaitė appears to be letting the beleaguered President’s calls for help reverberate through the Lithuanian forests with no ...
Torturing people doesn't keep us safe. MI5 should stop making policy by anecdote and condemn those who abuse prisoners
Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, told an audience at Bristol University yesterday that we have to consort with people who torture, and that we can do so while keeping our own hands pristine clean.
Evans stressed that MI5 is "an accountable public organisation." Since it is generally neither accountable nor public, his speech should be seen as a welcome foray into the public arena. Reading the full text of his speech, most was entirely unobjectionable. But it is sad ...
Someone diagnosed with bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression) may swing from moods of deep depression to periods of overactive, excited behaviour known as mania. Between these severe highs and lows can be stable times.
Stephen Fry talks about his own experiences with bipolar disorder: having discovered how serious an illness it is, he decided to speak out about it and find out more. In a documentary that can be watched here, he investigates bi-polar disorder and meets with the singer Robbie Williams and the actress Carrie Fischer who have suffered from those disorders too.
In its most severe ...
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