Search Results for: death penalty

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the arrest of Maria Margarita Rojas, a Houston-based midwife, for performing abortions and in the northwest Houston area. This marks the first known criminal arrest of an abortion provider since the Supreme Court  overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. Performing an abortion is a second degree felony in Texas. [...]

Last month, actor Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa were found dead in their Santa Fe home. Along with their bodies, one of the couple’s dogs, a 12-year-old Australian kelpie named Zinna, was also found dead. How they died matters, as in all cases of unexplained death. When death appears to be criminal, investigators [...]

Human beings rarely participate in world politics directly, but they do get involved as individual members of separate sovereign states. Normally, the expected costs and benefits of such indirect participation remain tangible expressions of secular considerations. Though far less decipherable and recognizable, these expressions may also include implicit promises of personal immortality. There is meaningful [...]

Women’s rights NGO Equality Now reported on Friday that despite some progress towards legal equality, there has been an “alarming rollback” of fundamental human rights relating to “women’s rights, LGBTQ+ protections, and democratic freedoms” 30 years after the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was adopted. According to Equality Now, important protections for democratic freedoms, [...]

South Carolina is set to carry out the first execution by firing squad in 15 years. The US Supreme Court denial Friday of an emergency petition to stay clears the way for the state to carry out the death penalty. The execution was delayed for 13 years due to the availability of supplies to perform [...]

On Friday, March 7, just ahead of the Jewish Sabbath, a South Carolina firing squad will shoot to death my longtime pen pal and friend Brad Sigmon. This will mark the first American firing squad execution to take place in 15 years. Accordingly, it will be the first since I co-founded the 3,800+-member-strong L’chaim! Jews [...]

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey commuted the death sentence of Robin “Rocky” Myers to life imprisonment on Friday over concerns about Myers’ possible innocence. Myers was convicted of capital murder in 1994 following the killing of Ludi Mae Tucker, his neighbor. Myers pleaded not guilty and claimed that he was not present at the crime scene [...]

Drug cartel boss Rafael Caro Quintero pleaded not guilty in a Brooklyn court on Friday to charges related to his involvement in the 40-year-old killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent. Caro Quintero was brought to federal court along with 28 other accused cartel members. He is facing charges for crimes committed as the [...]

Sharon Basch is a 3L at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law filing occasional dispatches from Washington DC this semester.  I made my way to the US Supreme Court press box for JURIST Monday morning to listen to oral arguments in Gutierrez v. Saenz, a case that could reshape the landscape of DNA testing [...]

Iran executed at least 975 people in 2024, marking a 17 percent increase from 2023, according to the seventeenth Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran released on Thursday. Jointly published by Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) and Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM), the report said the figure was the highest recorded rate in [...]