Tag: capital punishment

Executions in Saudi Arabia hit record high under MBS as UN prepares to vote the country onto Human Rights Council this week

Saudi Arabia has carried out a record number of executions this year even as the UN gets set to vote on whether to grant the Kingdom a seat on the Human Rights council.

At least 208 people have been put to death in the Middle Eastern nation so far this year, outstripping the most recent high of 196 in 2022 with almost three months still remaining on the calendar. 

The shocking figure, which rights groups claim is still underreported, puts the Arab Gulf state firmly in the top five nations where the death penalty is most frequently used, despite Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) pledging to reduce the rate of executions.

Since taking on the role of Crown Prince in 2015, MBS has overseen at least 1,447 executions and, despite a mortarium on the use of the death penalty for minor offences in 2020, the instances of capital punishment reached a monthly record high of 41 in August and 32 last month. 

The harrowing figures comes as the UN gets ready to vote in two days on whether the Gulf state should be granted membership of the Human Rights council.

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Democrats Abandoned Their Anti-Death Penalty Stance. Those on Federal Death Row May Pay the Price.

When the Rev. Al Sharpton took the stage to introduce members of the Exonerated Five on the last night of the Democratic National Convention, it was, for the briefest moment, a nod toward a reality that the DNC had otherwise aggressively avoided: the myriad injustices of our criminal legal system.

“Thirty-five years ago my friends and I were in prison for crimes we didn’t commit,” Korey Wise said. As teenagers, Wise, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Antron McCray were wrongly arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned for the brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump notoriously spent tens of thousands of dollars on full-page ads in the New York Times calling to bring back the death penalty. “Our youth was stolen from us,” Wise said. “Every day as we walked into courtroom, people screamed at us, threatened us because of Donald Trump.”

“He wanted us dead,” Salaam, now a New York City Council member, said. Now in their late 40s and early 50s, the men once known as the Central Park Five stood as a living testament both to Trump’s cruelty and the futures he sought to crush.

The moment was powerful. But it also exposed a tension that had been present throughout the entire convention. All week, the criminal justice system — and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s role in it — had been cast as a force for good: a source of protection and justice for society’s vulnerable. Harris was praised by a parade of sheriffs, state attorneys general, and members of the U.S. security state as the leader who will keep Americans safe. “Crime will keep going down when we put a prosecutor in the White House instead of a convicted felon,” President Joe Biden said in his speech on Monday.

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Reality Check for ‘Queers for Palestine’ Delivered Directly From Palestinian Leaders-“Homosexuals Should Be Thrown Head First From The Rooftop Of The Tallest Building”

Since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks against civilians, groups like “Gays for Palestine” and “Queers for Palestine” have become a vocal and visible part of pro-Hamas rallies on American college campuses and in protests in the streets of American cities.

Recently, “Queers for Palestine” blocked the exit to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, while chanting“Free, free Palestine!” and holding up banners.

And while these groups may passionately and enthusiastically yell anti-Semitic genocidal chats like “From the River to the Sea,” perhaps they should take a beat and really listen to what prominent Palestinian Islamic, political, and cultural figures really think about them.

MEMRI shared a collection of statements from Palestinian leaders, which state, in the strongest terms, that the Palestinian people “will not accept a single homosexual” on the land of Palestine and that homosexuals “should be thrown head first from the rooftop of the tallest building.”

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Trump says death sentences for dealers will solve U.S. drug problem

Former President Donald Trump said soft sentences for drug dealers have helped fuel fentanyl overdose deaths in the U.S.

Trump, 77, is running against President Joe Biden in the presidential election this November.

“So many are dying where they think they’re getting something and going to have a little fun on a Friday night and all of sudden their dead,” Trump said on Fox News.

“You’ll never really solve the drug problem unless you do what other countries do – and that’s the death penalty for drug dealers,” Trump said during the interview. “A drug dealer on average will kill, during that person’s life, 500 people. Unless you have a death penalty. Right now, they don’t even get charged with anything.”

Thirty-four countries apply the death for some drug crimes, according to a 2023 report from Harm Reduction International. The report noted that Pakistan removed the death penalty as a possible punishment for certain violations of its Control of Narcotics Substances Act.

Illicit fentanyl killed nearly 38,000 Americans in the first six months of 2023, according to a 2024 DEA report. Synthetic opioids were involved in 74,225 deaths in 2022 – 68% of the total 111,036 deaths that year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Condemned inmate could face ‘surgery without anesthesia’ if good vein is elusive, lawyers say

Missouri’s execution protocol allows for “surgery without anesthesia” if the typical process of finding a suitable vein to inject the lethal drug doesn’t work, lawyers for a death row inmate say in an appeal aimed at sparing his life.

Brian Dorsey, 52, is scheduled for execution Tuesday for killing his cousin and her husband at their central Missouri home in 2006. His attorneys are seeking clemency from Gov. Mike Parson and have several appeals pending.

A federal court appeal focuses on how Missouri injects the fatal dose of pentobarbital. The written protocol calls for insertion of primary and secondary intravenous lines. But it offers no guidance on how far the execution team can go to find a suitable vein, leaving open the possibility of an invasive “cutdown procedure,” Dorsey’s attorneys say.

The procedure involves an incision that could be several inches wide and several inches deep. Forceps are used to tear tissue away from a vein that becomes the injection point.

“It’s surgery,” said Arin Brenner, a federal public defender and one of the attorneys representing Dorsey. “It would be surgery without anesthesia.”

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JUST IN: Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Will Not Be Extradited to US for Now

A UK court ruled on Tuesday that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will not be extradited to the United States for now.

The UK court is requesting assurances from the US around Assange’s First Amendment rights, and that he would not receive the death penalty by the US government for leaking classified documents.

This is strange, since the Biden family can hold and release classified material to business associates but not Julian Assange?

If the US fails to give assurances, Assange, an Australian citizen, will be able to appeal his extradition in May.

CBS News reported:

A U.K. court has ruled that Julian Assange will not be immediately extradited to face charges in the United States, giving the U.S. government three weeks to “offer assurances” that the American justice system will abide by several specific tenets in its handling of the WikiLeaks founder’s case.

The British court said Assange “has a real prospect of success on 3 of the 9 grounds of appeal” he has argued. Specifically, the court demanded that U.S. justice officials confirm he will be “permitted to rely on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (which protects free speech), that he is not prejudiced at trial (including sentence) by reason of his nationality, that he is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen and that the death penalty is not imposed.”

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Three top nitrogen gas manufacturers in US bar products from use in executions

Three of the largest manufacturers of medical-grade nitrogen gas in the US have barred their products from being used in executions, following Alabama’s recent killing of the death row inmate Kenneth Smith using a previously untested method known as nitrogen hypoxia.

The three companies have confirmed to the Guardian that they have put in place mechanisms that will prevent their nitrogen cylinders falling into the hands of departments of correction in death penalty states. The move by the trio marks the first signs of corporate action to stop medical nitrogen, which is designed to preserve life, being used for the exact opposite – killing people.

The green shoots of a corporate blockade for nitrogen echoes the almost total boycott that is now in place for medical drugs used in lethal injections. That boycott has made it so difficult for death penalty states to procure drugs such as pentobarbital and midazolam that a growing number are turning to nitrogen as an alternative killing technique.

Now, nitrogen producers are engaging in their own efforts to prevent the abuse of their products. The march has been led by Airgas, which is owned by the French multinational Air Liquide.

The company announced publicly in 2019 that supplying nitrogen for the purposes of execution was not consistent with its values. The move followed Oklahoma becoming the first state to adopt nitrogen hypoxia as a capital punishment protocol in 2015.

“Airgas has not, and will not, supply nitrogen or other inert gases to induce hypoxia for the purpose of human execution,” the company said in a statement.

Nitrogen hypoxia involves forcing a prisoner to breathe nitrogen, and nitrogen alone, through an airtight gas mask. The procedure leads to oxygen deprivation and death.

The four states that currently have nitrogen hypoxia on their books – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma – claim it is a quick and humane death. But when Alabama became the first state to carry out an execution using this method in January, witnesses recounted how the prisoner, Smith, writhed and convulsed on the gurney for several minutes.

“His took deep breaths, his body shaking violently with his eyes rolling in the back of his head,” a reporter from the Montgomery Advertiser said.

Two other major nitrogen manufacturers have also confirmed to the Guardian that they are restricting sales of their gas. Air Products said that it had established “prohibited end uses for our products, which includes the use of any of our industrial gas products for the intentional killing of any person (including nitrogen hypoxia)”.

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Botched execution of serial killer in Idaho puts focus on capital punishment secrecy laws

In 2012, two Idaho prison officials chartered a private plane and flew to Washington state with thousands of dollars in cash.

They met with a pharmacist behind closed doors and bought the drug for a convicted murderer’s lethal injection.

Only a years-long public records lawsuit revealed the pharmacist’s name, the pharmacy and other details of the exchange. After prison officials said the pharmacist’s exposure had scared away other lethal drug suppliers, Idaho lawmakers barred such information from getting out again.

Idaho tried and failed Wednesday to execute Thomas Eugene Creech, a 73-year-old serial killer who had been in prison for 50 years. Neither his attorneys nor the public knew where the state obtained the drug or the exact qualifications of his executioners.

Opponents say secrecy laws are are a significant hurdle to accountability and make it hard to ensure that the procedures aren’t unconstitutionally painful, whether the deaths are carried out successfully — as Texas did Wednesday in the case of Ivan Cantu — or botched like Creech’s.

Idaho long kept the identities of execution team members and drug suppliers secret but judges were still able to force disclosure of the information if it was relevant to lawsuits or appeals. The new law prohibits state officials from disclosing the information, even if under court order.

The law also prevents professional licensing boards from taking disciplinary action against people for participating in executions.

Such secrecy is typical among states that impose capital punishment, including Texas, where lawmakers passed a similar measure in 2015 to ensure drug suppliers did not face retaliation or harassment for cooperating with executions.

“States are saying, ‘We don’t need to show you the information about … how we find or drugs or the training of the prison staff,’” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that tracks executions. “And then, when things go wrong, they can’t be held accountable.”

Creech was convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more. He has been in custody since 1974 and was already serving a life term when he beat a fellow inmate, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, to death in 1981 — the crime for which he was to be executed.

When his appointed hour came at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Creech was wheeled into the execution chamber and strapped to a table. Medical personnel poked and prodded at his arms, legs, hands and feet for nearly an hour, making eight attempts, but they couldn’t find a vein they thought would hold up long enough to deliver the fatal dose. He was returned to his cell.

It is unclear whether or when the state might try again, or how. Like other states concerned about the availability of lethal injection, Idaho recently passed a law allowing for firing squads as a backup, but the state has yet to write protocols for using that method or build a facility where it could shoot people to death. It has not approved the use of nitrogen gas, a method used for the first time early this year in Alabama.

Creech’s execution team comprised volunteers who, according to Idaho execution protocols, were required to have at least three years of medical experience, such as having been a paramedic, and to have “current venous access proficiency.” They were not necessarily doctors, who famously take an oath to “do no harm” — though Idaho Department of Correction Director Josh Tewalt later told lawmakers that the executioners regularly use their IV skills to save lives in their day jobs. They wore white balaclava-style coverings to conceal their faces.

Tewalt defended the state’s approach, saying the department ensures execution drugs are acquired lawfully, provides test results showing their authenticity, and ensures medical members of the execution team meet or exceed required qualifications.

“I would argue we are very transparent about any information that speaks to the integrity of the process,” said Tewalt. “What we won’t do is tell you their names.”

Tewalt also disagreed with characterizing the attempt as “botched” — stopping the execution after the failed IVs prevented the process from truly going awry, he said.

Creech, according to his attorneys, suffers from several conditions that could have made vein accessibility challenging: Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and edema. It can also be more difficult for older people to have IVs inserted, as their veins can be less stable.

“This is precisely the kind of mishap we warned the State and the Courts could happen when attempting to execute one of the country’s oldest death-row inmates in circumstances completely shielded in secrecy,” Creech’s attorneys, with the nonprofit Federal Defender Services of Idaho, said in a written statement.

Among the arguments they made in their unsuccessful last-minute petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court was that the secrecy violated Creech’s due-process rights and could constitute cruel and unusual punishment if the lethal drug, the sedative pentobarbital, was of poor quality and caused unnecessary pain or complications.

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Beheadings, crucifixions and heads on spikes: Inside Saudi Arabia’s ‘relentless killing spree’ of medieval-style executions – including 81 in one day – that has seen record numbers put to death under Crown Prince MBS

Brutal executions are on the rise in Saudi Arabia under the reign of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with human rights activists calling the score of beheadings and crucifixions a ‘relentless killing spree’.

The Saudi authorities have killed hundreds in capital punishments since the Crown Prince’s tenure started in 2015, hitting a new milestone that Amnesty International said reveals the kingdom’s ‘chilling disregard for the right to life’. 

Despite bin Salman promising he would limit the use of capital punishments, the number nearly doubled since he took the throne, according to NGO Reprieve. From 2010 to 2014 there was an average of 70.8 executions per year but from 2015 to 2022 there was an average of 129.5 executions per year – a rise of 82 per cent. 

Last year, the kingdom carried out at least 172 executions, despite renewed promises from bin Salman to limit the scope of capital punishment. 

Saudi Arabia even beheaded 81 people in a single day in March 2022 as part of the 193 executions Amnesty International said were carried out in the country – despite authorities saying it had been just 147.

The majority of state executions in Saudi Arabia are still carried out by sword decapitation – sometimes followed by the crucifixion of the body as the heads are displayed on a stick – but there have also been reports of prisoners sentenced to death by stoning.

Beheadings are only carried out by Saudi Arabia and the Taliban and can be used for a variety of crimes including murder, apostasy (abandoning Islam), homosexuality, witchcraft or sorcery, and ‘waging war on God’.

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Alabama Attorney General vows to use nitrogen gas executions AGAIN as he doubles down on ‘textbook’ controversial death with 43 Alabama death row inmates set to die just like Kenneth Eugene Smith

Alabama‘s Attorney General has vowed to keep using nitrogen gas to execute inmates despite harrowing reports from witnesses to Kenneth Eugene Smith’s execution.

Steve Marshall even offered to assist other states in procuring the previously-untested method, brushing off claims the killer writhed and shook in agony as he was slowly suffocated to death in a 22-minute ordeal on Thursday night. 

‘What occurred last night was textbook,’ Marshall said Friday, contrasting allegations from many, including Smith’s spiritual advisor who said it was ‘torture’ and the ‘worst thing’ he had ever seen. 

‘When they turned the nitrogen on, he began to convulse, he popped up on the gurney over and over again, he shook the whole gurney,’ spiritual advisor Jeff Hood, who was in the chamber, said immediately after the execution.  

In the face of the controversy, nitrogen hypoxia has opened a new avenue for US prisons to continue the practice of executions, with some states going years without amid a nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs. 

Marshall cited this in his remarks Friday, praising how nitrogen gas executions are ‘no longer an untested method – it is a proven one.’ 

Officials insisted for months leading up to the execution that it would be humane and painless for Smith, who had a previous execution in 2022 called off after prison staff tried and failed to insert an IV line for several painful hours. 

Following the failed execution in 2022, Smith sought his subsequent execution to be carried out via nitrogen hypoxia – in an apparent gamble that officials wouldn’t follow through with the untested method.

However, Marshall said of the 165 inmates on Alabama’s death row, 43 prisoners have opted to be executed via nitrogen hypoxia over lethal injection when their time comes. 

‘We’ll definitely have more nitrogen hypoxia executions in Alabama,’ he concluded. 

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