Tag: capital punishment

A Culture of Death and State Sanctioned Murder: Why The Government Doesn’t Have The Right To Kill

A government that claims the authority to kill persons after they have been subdued, disarmed, tried, convicted and confined in prison has made a startling claim about the nature of political power. It claims not merely the authority to protect the innocent from violence, but the authority to inflict violence when no immediate threat exists.

It claims that the taking of human life, which it rightly condemns when committed by private individuals, somehow becomes morally permissible when committed by government agents. This is the fundamental contradiction of the death penalty: Government killing the helpless protects the living.

The Declaration of Independence offers a radically different understanding of government. All human beings possess natural rights, and governments are instituted to protect those rights. Government’s just powers derive solely from the consent of the governed. Government is not the owner of our lives. It is our creature, established to protect rights that precede its existence. Its authority is limited, and it cannot legitimately claim powers that the people whom it governs do not themselves possess.

Individuals possess a natural right to defend themselves against an unlawful attack. They may use necessary and proportionate force to repel an aggressor. Because the people possess that right, they can delegate it to the government, including to a military for defensive purposes. Government’s legitimate authority to wage defensive war is a moral and legal derivation of the people’s preexisting right of self-preservation.

But what right does an individual possess to kill a defeated enemy who has surrendered, is disarmed and locked in a jail cell? What right does a private person possess to execute a prisoner who no longer presents an immediate threat? None. The right of self-defense does not include the right to kill a helpless captive as retribution for a past offense.

And if the people do not possess that right, how can they delegate it to government? The principle is straightforward: Government cannot legitimately acquire, through the consent of the governed, a power that the governed themselves do not possess.

Confinement protects society. Execution reveals the state’s claim to omnipotence.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plans to have a convicted defendant executed publicly and livestream the killing represent a particularly repulsive vision of state power. If implemented, such a spectacle would not demonstrate the strength of American civilization. It would advertise its moral depravity. It would turn the deliberate destruction of a human being into political entertainment, with the machinery of government serving as producer and promoter.

There is something profoundly disturbing about officials who would turn a human death into a public performance. What lesson would such a livestream teach? That the state is entitled to kill, that its violence deserves an audience, and that adults and children should watch with approval as the life of a powerless, wheelchair-bound prisoner is extinguished by military sharpshooters? That the proper response to wrongdoing is not the restraint of power but the celebration of its most lethal expression?

This is a cruel and unusual descent into barbarism, a glorification of government killing and an invitation to cultivate a culture of fear and death. Civilization advances when it restrains violence, even in response to terrible crimes. Barbarism advances when violence becomes an instrument of public spectacle and collective gratification.

The military’s involvement makes the proposal still more grotesque. The Department of Defense exists to defend the country against external threats, not to transform the execution of prisoners into a propaganda production. The armed forces should not be reduced to stagehands for a political morality play in which the government celebrates its power over a captive’s life.

A free society should be especially suspicious when government seeks to dramatize its capacity to kill. The Framers understood that all government power must be confined and limited, not worshiped. Publicly celebrated executions would encourage the opposite attitude: Reverence for the state’s ability to destroy rather than respect for its obligation to protect.

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Prosecutors Seek Death Penalty for Mom Accused of Murdering Twins Who Died 8 Days After Vaccines

Idaho prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Andrea Shaw, a young mother charged with murdering her twin toddlers, dramatically raising the stakes in a criminal case that has drawn national attention.

In a notice filed late last week in Idaho’s Third Judicial District Court, Payette County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Ryon Sirucek identified four statutory aggravating factors that prosecutors intend to use to justify capital punishment if Shaw is convicted of first-degree murder.

Under a law that took effect in July 2026, firing squads are Idaho’s primary method of execution. The legislation followed a botched 2024 attempt to execute a 73-year-old man by lethal injection.

Prosecutors must prove at least one statutory aggravating circumstance before Shaw can be considered eligible for the death penalty. If Shaw is convicted, a jury would determine whether those circumstances exist.

According to the filing, prosecutors identified four aggravating circumstances: that Shaw allegedly committed two murders at the same time; that the murders were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, manifesting exceptional depravity”; that she exhibited “utter disregard for human life”; and that her conduct demonstrates a propensity to commit murder that would make her a continuing threat to society.

Shaw was indicted by a grand jury and arrested on June 30 for allegedly deliberately suffocating her twins, who died on May 1, 2025. Prosecutors allege Shaw killed the children while they were sharing a bed. Her trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 11, 2027.

Shaw, who pleaded not guilty, has consistently denied the allegations. She suggested that her twins’ deaths may have been caused by the vaccines they received at a routine doctor’s appointment just over a week before they died.

According to court documents filed by her defense, Shaw took the twins to the emergency room on April 24, 2025, the day after they received routine vaccinations, because they were lethargic and their lips had turned blue.

The treating emergency room physician diagnosed both children with a “post-immunization reaction,” the filing states.

The children remained ill in the days leading up to their deaths, and Shaw repeatedly sought medical advice.

Neither the police nor the prosecution have publicly outlined the evidence they believe supports their claim that Shaw deliberately killed her toddlers. The grand jury indictment is sealed and not publicly available, and the coroner reports have not been released.

Shaw’s bail was initially set at $2 million. A district judge in Payette County, Idaho, later revoked the bail, which is discretionary in capital cases.

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America’s Sordid History of Filming Executions as Entertainment

Earlier this month, Acting Secretary of the Army Adam R. Telle signed an order scheduling the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major who was convicted of killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. Two days later, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth made a startling announcement. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth told the conservative Real America’s Voice News network, as the interviewer raised his eyebrows. The Department of War’s official “Rapid Response” Twitter account promptly promoted the clip.

Hegseth’s plan apparently won’t come to fruition. Amid outcry about the barbarity and optics of streaming the planned execution by firing squad — scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood — President Donald Trump on Thursday called off the broadcast. “I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump posted on his social media website.

Some news outlets, such as The New York Times, framed the planned killing as an aberration, claiming that “such a broadcast has little precedent, and releasing video of executions is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State.” This narrative, however, overlooks a forgotten American cultural history in which filmed executions turned government killings into spectacle.

The practice of filming executions in America is effectively as old as cinema itself.

In 1897, a few years after the first motion pictures began to be exhibited in the United States, a Missouri farmhand named William Carr was convicted of murdering his daughter and sentenced to death by hanging. Filmmaker Frederick Guth, of the American Phonographic Company, who had previously recorded an interview with Carr in prison, opted to film the execution as well — marking a grim milestone as history’s first filmed execution. The resulting motion picture, “The Hanging of William Carr” (1897), was first exhibited in Kansas City and St. Louis, then screened around the country.

The following year saw the nationwide premiere of “An Execution by Hanging,” otherwise known as “Execution of Negro at County Jail, Jacksonville, Fla” (1898). It showed the hanging of Edward Heinson, who was convicted and sentenced to death for criminal assault of a 14-year-old white girl. Illustrating racist views that have long shaped the American criminal legal system and the death penalty, the catalog of the film’s production company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, teased the film as depicting “a very ghastly, but very interesting subject.”

As these early films were distributed across the nation, they were met with interest and outcry. The journal Phonoscope at the time described the filming of Carr’s execution as “revolting,” while the Cleveland Leader cautioned that the film may have “brutalizing effects” on viewers. Some newspapers even claimed that during the hanging of Carr, Guth had hired people to storm the gallows to create added pandemonium.

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America Abandoned Public Executions for a Good Reason

President Donald Trump on Thursday called off plans to livestream the December 3 military execution of Nidal Hasan after the announcement generated widespread disgust.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that the U.S. government would livestream the firing-squad execution of Hasan, a former Army major who shot and killed 13 people at the Fort Hood Army base in 2009. A court-martial jury sentenced Hasan to death in 2013.

It would have been the first public execution in the United States since a hanging in Missouri in 1937, though the last well-known public execution occurred a year earlier in Kentucky. Rainey Bethea, a black man, was hanged before a crowd of roughly 20,000 people in Owensboro. Kentucky became the last state to outlaw public executions two years later.

The plan to livestream Hasan’s execution drew comparisons to the Taliban. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called it “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death.” Writing at The Lamp, an orthodox Catholic journal, Matthew Walther noted that it would be the “first ever government-sanctioned snuff film in American history.”

However, Trump and Hegseth didn’t trip over just liberal and religious pieties, but a deep-rooted American aversion to bloody displays of state power that goes back to the colonial era.

Lynn Novick, the director of Ken Burns’ upcoming PBS documentary series Crime and Punishment in America, tells Reason that public executions “haven’t been a regular part of American life since the Colonial time in the early years of the Republic, and there’s really good reasons for that.”

One of American colonists’ many complaints about oppressive British rule was England’s expansive criminal code, known derisively as the “bloody code” because it contained more than 200 capital crimes.

“In Colonial America, [an execution] was an everyday occurrence,” Novick says. “There were executions all the time, and one of our scholars told us that most people would have seen someone executed in their lifetime.”

Excessive capital punishment also ran contrary to emerging theories by leading Enlightenment thinkers that punishment should be proportional to the crime and not driven by revenge or bloodlust.

Perhaps more importantly, public executions were disorderly affairs that, rather than reinforce the power of the state, inflamed the passions of the mob to a dangerous degree. “In many cases, crowds would become very boisterous, riotous, angry, excited,” Novick says. “There were sometimes violent outbursts at these events.”

As a result, many of the Founding Fathers saw frequent public executions as disruptive to the fragile social order. The early American republic’s move away from sanguinary spectacle was driven by a desire to create a stable, virtuous citizenry and sever itself from the European continent’s tradition of public torture and execution.

As Reason described in a recent cover story, the result of this was the invention of the American penitentiary in the early 1800s, which was sold as a humane and rehabilitative replacement for the whipping post and gallows.

States transitioned from public to private hangings behind their newly built prison walls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before switching to the use of the electric chair. This was not done out of entirely humanitarian concerns, especially in the South, where public executions often became quasi-religious ceremonies, with the condemned declaring their ultimate victory over death (and the state) through Jesus Christ.

“Executions had contested meanings,” Michael Ayers Trotti wrote in The End of Public Execution. “They were moments of justice, of state power; but they were also moments of religion, exceptional moments that transcended normal life.”

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CCP Sentences Crime Bosses to Death Before They Can Name Names

Good news, everyone! The Chinese Communist Party is cracking down on crime. Of course there’s no crime in China, since China is very, very safe thanks to the CCP. But there’s crime in other countries, you see.

On Tuesday, a court in southeastern China sentenced three members of the “Wei family criminal gang” to death and sent dozens more to prison. The Wei clan is one of the so-called “four families” that ran criminal syndicates in Kokang, a region of northern Myanmar right on the Chinese border. State broadcaster CCTV called them the “most violent criminal force in northern Myanmar.”

According to the court, the gang ran drug trafficking, prostitution, illegal casinos, and telecom fraud. They also murdered at least two Chinese citizens. CCTV says they operated 14 large-scale scam compounds and lured Chinese job seekers across the border with fake promises of high wages. Once there, many people ended up trapped in prison-like compounds, forced to scam for their captors. The gang reportedly pulled in more than $1.8 billion.

But these gangs operated in the open, for years, under the protection of Myanmar’s military junta. Experts say the junta looked the other way because scam profits flowed to its militia allies, the same militias it needs to fight rebels. Back in January, the CCP executed 11 members of the rival Ming family. The Mings weren’t just gangsters. They belonged to a militia aligned with the junta.

And who’s the junta’s biggest backer? The CCP.

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Trump calls for death penalty for anyone convicted of killing a firefighter

Addressing a gathering of law enforcement officers and firefighters at a White House Rose Garden luncheon, President Donald Trump announced that he has directed the Department of Justice (DOJ) to seek the death penalty in cases involving the murder of a firefighter.

This directive expands upon his previous calls to mandate capital punishment for individuals convicted of killing police officers.

While the president signaled a firm federal stance on violence against first responders, the implementation of such a policy across all jurisdictions remains limited, as federal capital charges generally apply only to specific federal offenses or crimes committed within federal jurisdiction, while state-level homicide prosecutions remain governed by individual state laws.

“They’re shot at [while] going up ladders,” Trump said. “They get shot up in some neighborhoods….”

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The Politics of Denial: When Americans Stop Seeing the Warning Signs

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live

The spectacle of public executions. Deadly military strikes on foreign countries. Innocent civilian lives lost to war. Aggressive ICE raids. Government officials accused of using their powers to intimidate political opponents. Public office increasingly entangled with private financial interests. Government leaders who glorify violence, spew hatred, stir up racial prejudice, provoke civil unrest, and stoke discontent.

This is what it looks like when a nation loses its way.

When cruelty is mistaken for courage, vengeance for justice, and the taking of human life for a demonstration of strength.

When government officials tell you not to believe your own eyes and ears about the state of the world around you, when they insist that the truth is a lie and the lie is truth, you’ve stumbled into a dystopian reality in which, as John Lennon rightly concluded, the government is “being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”

When so-called Christians and self-professed defenders of morality insist that we must accept the lesser of two evils based on exaggerated fears of what might happen if their political opponents gain power, rather than confront the abuses unfolding before our eyes, remember this: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

This is not simply about Donald Trump.

The machinery of the American police state has been assembled over decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Presidents have expanded executive authority, waged undeclared wars, authorized drone killings, built surveillance networks, militarized domestic policing, and invoked national security to justify extraordinary powers.

What makes the present moment so troubling is the extent to which the public is encouraged to accept increasingly aggressive exercises of government power as necessary demonstrations of strength and resolve.

The Constitution was never intended to protect only the innocent, the popular, the patriotic, or the politically acceptable. Its restraints on government power matter most when the government is dealing with people whom society has already condemned.

Yet what happens when the public becomes so accustomed to government overreach, corruption and brutality that it no longer recognizes them as warning signs? What becomes of a constitutional republic when its leaders and citizens stop asking whether government actions are lawful, justified or necessary, and concern themselves only with whether those actions punish their enemies, advance their political interests or preserve their sense of security?

We are witnessing a political culture in which demanding due process for an accused criminal is treated as defending criminality, questioning a military strike is equated with sympathy for the enemy, and opposing government cruelty is portrayed as weakness.

The government doesn’t have to abolish the Constitution outright when it can persuade the public that certain people should no longer be entitled to its protections.

That is how constitutional rights cease to be rights at all and become privileges granted or withdrawn at the government’s discretion.

And that is how a population becomes conditioned to accept the unacceptable.

We’re living in two worlds.

There’s the world we see—or are made to see—and then there’s the one we sense and occasionally catch a glimpse of, which bears little resemblance to the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by those in power and amplified through an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

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Outrage over plan to livestream US military firing squad execution

The Pentagon’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of a convicted military base mass shooter has met widespread condemnation, with the UN saying it would amount to torture and US lawmakers from both parties slamming the move.

Nidal Hasan’s execution – which is scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood, Texas, where he gunned down 13 people in 2009 – is set to be the first by US military firing squad since 1945.

Representative Austin Scott, a member of US President Donald Trump’s Republican Party, said he supported executing Hasan but that “livestreaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that.”

Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said broadcasting the execution would be “a barbaric spectacle” that would give Hasan “more attention and more control” and “a global platform to amplify his hateful, anti-American message”.

Reed added: “This is a gift to anti-American terrorist recruiters.”

Trump on Friday backed the execution – saying Hasan “deserves it” and branding him a “maniac” – but did not comment on the livestreaming.

A Pentagon official told AFP the previous day that the execution would be streamed live, after US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said “we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public”.

Later, Hegseth wrote “correct” when retweeting a media report about the planned livestream.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the move, telling AFP yesterday that “the livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture”.

Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said it was a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered”.

Hegseth said it would be the military’s first firing squad execution since World War II – a reference to Eddie Slovik, who was put to death for desertion in 1945.

Hegseth said: “People need to understand that … there’s serious consequence for these types of things.

“I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was win, which was understand when the enemy attacks you, you need to stand your ground.”

The last US military execution was in 1961, when John Bennett was hanged for rape and attempted murder.

The Death Penalty Information Centre says that 135 soldiers have been executed by the US military since 1916.

According to rights group Amnesty International, at least 17 public executions are known to have been carried out in 2025 – six in Afghanistan and 11 in Iran.

Amnesty’s Justin Mazzola said on Friday that the death penalty is “a violation of human rights”, and that streaming Hasan’s execution “would only compound the cruelty”.

Twelve of the 13 people Hasan killed and 30 of those he wounded were soldiers. He was shot and partially paralysed by a civilian police officer who responded to the attack.

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Trump admin firing squad will be first military execution in 65 years

The planned December execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted in 2013 of murdering 13 people at a military base and trying to kill many more, is set to be highly unusual.

Not only will the Dec. 3 death sentence be livestreamed for the very first time in American history, according to an Oct. 8 announcement by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, but it will also be the first military execution in the United States in about 65 years.

Hegseth confirmed on social media his plan to offer a live viewing feed of the killing – an announcement that has sparked bipartisan criticism and comparisons to public executions carried out by authoritarian regimes.

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Hasan was an army psychiatrist who opened fire on fellow service members on Nov. 5, 2009, inside the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, at Fort Hood, Texas, where soldiers were preparing for deployment. He was shot several times by responding officers and is now paralyzed from the waist down. His victims included soldiers and one civilian employee.

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Popular Egyptian Show Host Sentenced to Death by Hanging Over Drug Trafficking Gang Involvement

A Cairo criminal court sentenced television host Sarah Khalifa, 39, and 11 other defendants to death by hanging on Saturday after convicting them of forming an organized gang that imported materials used to manufacture synthetic drugs for trafficking.

Khalifa has more than two million followers on social media.

Nine co-defendants received life sentences. Seven of the 28 people charged were acquitted.

State newspaper Al-Ahram said the death sentences were unanimous and issued after Egypt’s Grand Mufti gave the opinion required by law.

Prosecutors said more than 750 kilograms of narcotics and materials were seized.

They cited statements from 20 witnesses and electronic evidence including messages, photos, and video.

Khalifa was arrested in Cairo in April 2025. She has denied the drug charges and shouted that she was innocent when the verdict was read.

Al Jazeera reports:

Khalifa denied the charges and told investigators she had “never smoked a cigarette in my life” and declared her innocence.

Egyptian media reported that she was weeping and crying during the session, asking the court for mercy: “Please listen to me, sir. My parents raised me well; they are people who pray, and I don’t need drug money”

Prosecutors said the gang imported raw materials from abroad to manufacture synthetic drugs, storing them in residential properties. Members divided roles between procurement, manufacturing and distribution, authorities said. Investigators seized unlicensed firearms and ammunition alongside the narcotics.

The prosecution said the group used a residential property to store the materials and manufacture the drugs.

Khalifa hosted the Al-Mehwar crime and security program Mission Impossible. She also operated a cosmetic clinic and an events company.

Her lawyers said they will appeal.

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