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Tag: capital punishment

  • Jodi Arias Representing Herself in Court

    Convicted killer Jodi Arias will be allowed to represent herself in the sentencing phase of her capital murder trial.

    On June 4, 2008, Arias attacked her boyfriend Travis Alexander, and ended up stabbing him repeatedly, slitting his throat and shooting him in the forehead at his Mesa, Arizona home.

    Admitted killer Arias, 34, claimed she was acting in self-defense, but prosecutors were successful in convincing a jury that it was premeditated murder, brought on by a jealous rage after Alexander tried to end the affair.

    The case was adapted for a 2013 Lifetime made-for-TV Original entitled Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret, starring actress Tania Raymonde. Here is a teaser trailer:

    The murder received extensive media coverage, and there are hours of court proceedings, commentaries, interviews and other various detritus available surrounding the lurid case. Arias has clashed with her legal team throughout her trial, and her lawyers were denied after asking Judge Sherry Stephens to be dismissed from the case.

    Arias, who received her GED in prison, will have her lawyers on hand in an advisory capacity, to help her traverse whatever ideas and concepts she might conjure in time for what will surely be a virtuoso performance as she takes the stand.

    Apparently, Jodi has access to social media in prison, and had some words of wisdom:

    Other Twitter commentary regarding the latest courtroom development:

    Arias also set up the JAA Appellate Fund website, which accepts donations to pay for her appeals.

    The sentencing trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 8. If the second jury is unable to make a unanimous decision, the death penalty would be off the table. The judge would then sentence Arias to life imprisonment, or to be eligible for release after 25 years.

    Image via YouTube

  • Arizona Botches Execution, Inmate Gasps

    Arizona Botches Execution, Inmate Gasps

    Arizona death row inmate Joseph Wood died nearly two hours after his execution commenced Wednesday, and his attorney said that he gasped for breath for much of that time.

    Wood was convicted of murder in 1989, after killing his estranged girlfriend and her father. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said she was concerned with the amount of time it took for Wood to die, and ordered the Department of Corrections to review their process.

    In a statement, Brewer commented, “One thing is certain, however, inmate Wood died in a lawful manner and by eyewitness and medical accounts he did not suffer. This is in stark comparison to the gruesome, vicious suffering that he inflicted on his two victims – and the lifetime of suffering he has caused their family.”

    Wood’s execution began at 4:52 p.m. ET, and he was pronounced dead at 6:49 p.m. ET.

    Wood’s lawyer, Dale Baich, commented, “It took Joseph Wood two hours to die, and he gasped and struggled to breathe for about an hour and 40 minutes. We will renew our efforts to get information about the manufacturer of drugs as well as how Arizona came up with the experimental formula of drugs it used today.”

    Jeanne Brown, a relative of Wood’s victims, doesn’t share the same sympathy or concern as Baich. “I don’t believe he was gasping for air; I don’t believe he was suffering. It sounded to me like was snoring,” Brown said, adding, “You don’t know what excruciating is. What’s excruciating is seeing your dad laying there in a pool of blood, seeing you sister laying there in a pool of blood. This man deserved it. And I shouldn’t really call him a man.”

    The incident in Arizona comes after a similar mishap which occurred in Oklahoma in April. Condemned inmate Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack roughly 20 minutes after waking up during his execution mid-injection, due to faulty equipment. The scheduled execution of a second inmate for the evening was subsequently postponed.

    Baich commented, “Arizona appears to have joined several other states who have been responsible for an entirely preventable horror – a bungled execution.”

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Missouri Executes Man for Murdering 3

    Missouri Executes Man for Murdering 3

    Former small time methamphetamine dealer John Middleton, 54, was executed by lethal injection Wednesday for killing three people in rural northern Missouri in 1995, due to fear his victims would report his drug activities to authorities.

    Middleton died after being injected with pentobarbital, marking the sixth execution in Missouri so far this year. The execution was initially scheduled for Wednesday at 12:01 a.m., but a federal judge granted a stay of execution late Tuesday, to allow time to assess if Middleton was mentally competent. The stay was overturned by a federal appeals court, and the U.S. Supreme Court and the Missouri Supreme Court wouldn’t halt the injection. Middleton’s claim that he is innocent and his request for clemency from Governor Jay Nixon were also denied.

    After several drug suspects were arrested on June 10, 1995 in rural northern Missouri, Middleton allegedly told a friend, “The snitches around here are going to start going down.” He was eventually convicted of killing Randy “Happy” Hamilton and Stacey Hodge, and then Alfred Pinegar several days later.

    Middleton and his girlfriend met Hamilton and Hodge on a gravel road, where Middleton shot and killed the two and placed their bodies in the trunk of Hamilton’s car. Fellow meth dealer Pinegar was shot in the face on June 23, 1995. Middleton left his body in a field near Bethany. Middleton then told acquaintances that he shot the three, and eyewitnesses saw him buying ammunition just hours before Pinegar’s death.

    Middleton was convicted of triple homicide in 1997, and his girlfriend and accomplice, Maggie Hodges, is serving life in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in all three deaths.

    An anonymous criminal informant had said in February that Middleton accused him of being a snitch, and drove him out to see Pinegar’s corpse, and told him, “there’s already been three people killed. You want to be number four?” The witness signed an affidavit stating that he was then beaten unconscious with a baseball bat and his girlfriend was raped.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Kim Jong-Un’s ‘Executed’ Ex-Girlfriend Seen Alive

    North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un reportedly ordered the execution of an ex-girlfriend last summer over a sex tape she was involved in, though now the formerly presumed-deceased pop singer Hyon Song-Wol was seen on state television delivering a speech at a national art workers rally in Pyongyang on Friday.

    Song-wol, who was a lover of Jong-un when they both were teenagers, had incurred the disdain the 31-year-old Supreme Leader’s wife Ri Sol-ju, after the pop star was involved in a sex scandal. Jong-un was initially forced to separate from Song-wol years before, at the command of his late father, Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.

    It was reported last August by the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo that Song-wol and eleven other well-known entertainers had been caught making a sex tape, and then executed by firing squad. Though on Friday, Hyon conveyed gratitude for Jong-un’s leadership and pledged to work harder to “stoke up the flame for art and creative work.”

    In North Korea, a “sex tape” could be something considered to be G-rated in the Western world. Here is the clip which supposedly put Hyon in hot water:

    Here is Hyon Song-wol’s rock video for Excellent Horse Like Lady (A Girl in the Saddle Of A Steed) from 2005, which appears to extol the graces of maintaining equine-like stamina in the workplace:

    Hyon’s band, the Unhasu Orchestra, had performed a string of patriotic hits in North Korea, including Footsteps of Soldiers, I Love Pyongyang, She is a Discharged Soldier and We are Troops of the Party. Hyon’s popularity peaked with Excellent Horse-Like Lady.

    It’s not clear if other members of the Wangjaesan Light Band and Moranbong Band, who were also said to be executed for violated North Korean pornography laws are still alive, after it was reported that they were killed by machine guns while their families watched. It was also reported that said families were then sent to prison camps for “guilt by association.”

    Executions in North Korea are said to be particularly fast and brutal, with prisoners force-fed liquor and gagged, before being killed with no chance for reprieve.

    In related news, Jong-un now has his own video game called Glorious Leader!, in which he battles drones, entire armies and the Statue of Liberty, with the help of his flaming unicorn and Dennis Rodman.

    Here is the trailer:

    Image via YouTube

  • Florida Execution Leaves ‘Old Sparky’ Unemployed

    Florida executed a man on Wednesday who was convicted of murdering two relatives in 1990, marking the 85th instance of capital punishment for the state, and the fourth so far this year.

    Robert Hendrix, 47, was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Starke, shortly after a lethal injection procedure began. He remained silent, offering no final words.

    Hendrix was convicted of killing his cousin Elmer Scott and his wife Michelle, to prevent them from testifying against him the following day during a burglary trial. Scott had been an accomplice of Hendrix, but reached a plea deal in exchange for his testimony. Hendrix shot, beat and stabbed his cousin, and then cut the throat of Scott’s wife, before shooting her.

    Florida was the first state to reintroduce the death penalty after the Supreme Court of the United States struck down all capital punishment statutes nationwide in the 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision. All Floridian executions are carried out at Florida State Prison, which houses the sole remaining death chamber statewide. At present, 396 inmates are awaiting execution in Florida, and sixteen inmates have been administered lethal injections since Governor Rick Scott took office in 2011.

    While lethal injection has been the preferred method of execution in Florida since 2000, inmates can still request the use of “Old Sparky,” the nickname of the electric chair in the states of Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, New York, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and Virginia. Hendrix opted to stay clear of Old Sparky, as botched execution attempts in this manner are not unheard of, and have a chance of becoming an extremely gruesome form of cruel and unusual punishment.

    Last June Governor Rick Scott signed the Timely Justice Act of 2013. The statute is designed to accelerate the capital punishment process. The law forces death row inmates to be quicker about making appeals and post-conviction motions.

    Image via WIkimedia Commons

  • Wyoming Firing Squad: Lawmaker’s Execution Proposal Won’t Be Considered

    Wyoming lawmaker Bruce Burns sponsored a bill to make death by firing squad an option in his state, but the state senate voted against considering the bill on Tuesday. Burns proposed this alternate method to carry out a capital punishment sentence last month. Now that the firing squad option is off the table in Wyoming, Missouri is the only other state trying to pass this method of execution.

    Capital punishment is legal in 32 states, with lethal injection being the most common method of executing a death row inmate. A few other states have backup execution options, should the drugs needed to carry out lethal injection be unavailable, should legal issues arise or should an inmate request at alternate method of death. Death by hanging, electrocution and the gas chamber are options in other states, and two states have death by firing squad as an option–Oklahoma and Utah.

    Burns, a state senator from Sheridan, sought to make death by firing squad an option in Wyoming since the state doesn’t currently have a gas chamber, which is their backup option. “The state of Wyoming doesn’t have a gas chamber currently, an operating gas chamber, so the procedure and expense to build one would be impractical to me,” Burns said.

    “One of the reasons I chose firing squad as opposed to any other form of execution is because frankly it’s one of the cheapest for the state,” Burns said. “The expense of building a gas chamber I think would be prohibitive when you consider how many people would be executed by it, and even the cost of gallows.”

    Not only does Burns consider the costs involved in building a gas chamber to be wasteful, the senator also thinks that a gas chamber is cruel and unusual punishment. “I consider frankly the gas chamber to be cruel and unusual, so I went with firing squad because they also have it in Utah,” Burns said.

    After Burns proposed the bill, the Wyoming senate voted against considering it 17 to 13. Burns needed two-thirds of the vote to have the bill considered. Since Wyoming has only executed one inmate since 1992 and has only one inmate on death row right now, it isn’t likely that the issue of the state not having a backup to lethal injection will arise anytime soon.

    Image via YouTube

  • Suzanne Basso Executed in Texas For 1998 Murder

    Suzanne Basso’s life came to a quiet end today, standing in stark contrast against the atrocities the woman and a few other people dealt to a mentally disabled man by the name of Louis “Buddy” Musso.

    Basso convinced Musso to live with her and then proceeded to take over his social security benefits. She then took out insurance policies for him, making herself the beneficiary. After all this, Basso and five other people brutally tortured Musso for days before finally killing him and dumping his body. Basso filed a missing person’s report shortly after the terrible incident, attempting to separate herself from the crime. Thankfully, this attempt was futile, and Basso was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death.

    Since her arrest and incarceration in 1998, Basso has proved an interesting, if not disturbing case for the officials overseeing her punishment. Just a month ago, a Texas state judge upheld findings that Basso had a tendency to lie to authority figures and manipulate results on psychological tests. Basso’s court appearances often included her acting out in strange ways to garner attention and sympathy, such as speaking in the voice of a little girl or pretending to be deaf, blind, or otherwise disabled.

    Colleen Barnett, the former Harris County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Basso, was quoted on the topic as saying,”It was challenging, but I saw her for who she was. I was determined I was not going to let her get away with it.”

    After a last day appeal to the Supreme Court where Basso’s lawyers claimed that she was mentally unfit for execution ended in failure, with the judges rejecting the appeal just an hour before Basso was sentenced to die. As such, today, at 7:26 PM, Basso was declared dead, with the cause being lethal injection by the state. This makes Basso the 14th woman to ever be executed by the state in American history.

    Basso went quietly enough. When asked for a final statement, she said “No, sir,” with a tearful look in her eyes. She reportedly looked to a couple of friends positioned behind a window and “mouthed a brief word to them and nodded.” As the drug began to take hold, she began to snore deeply; the snoring slowed and eventually halted and, eleven minutes after the injection, she was declared dead.

    Image via this YouTube clip.

  • Larry Flynt on Shooter: “I Don’t Want to Kill Him”

    While some people would want nothing more than to see the person who made an attempt on their life die, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt feels quite differently.

    Flynt has spoken out about the pending death of the man who shot and paralyzed him from the waist down in 1978. Flynt wrote about the assassination attempt and his shooter’s upcoming lethal injection in a guest column, and it is quite clear that Flynt does not want the shooter, Joseph Paul Franklin, to die.

    While Flynt speaks out against the death penalty, he does say that he would like an hour by himself with Franklin. Read part of Larry Flynt’s column from The Hollywood Reporter:

    In all the years since the shooting, I have never come face-to-face with Franklin. I would love an hour in a room with him and a pair of wire-cutters and pliers, so I could inflict the same damage on him that he inflicted on me. But, I do not want to kill him, nor do I want to see him die.

    As far as the severity of punishment is concerned, to me, a life spent in a 3-by-6-foot cell is far harsher than the quick release of a lethal injection. And costs to the taxpayer? Execution has been proven to be far more expensive for the state than a conviction of life without parole, due to the long and complex judicial process required for capital cases.

    Joseph Paul Franklin, whose death sentence is scheduled to be carried out on November 20 at Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri, admitted to shooting Flynt after being arrested for other crimes. The attempt on Flynt’s life was hardly the only violent crime Franklin has confessed to committing.

    Franklin has been convicted of six murders, but confessed to eight, and the Mobile, Alabama man is suspected to be involved in up to 20 murders. Franklin went on a murder spree from 1976 to 1980 (the year he was arrested) in an effort to “cleanse the world” of people he considered inferior. Franklin was involved in a number of hate crimes, including shooting civil rights activist Vernon Jordan and fire-bombing multiple synagogues.

    After Franklin was arrested, he told investigators of plans he had to try to kill President Jimmy Carter and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, plus he admitted to trying to kill Flynt and others. The reason Franklin gave for trying to kill Flynt was because his magazine displayed images of interracial sex.

    After Larry Flynt’s column was published, he also posted his thoughts concerning Franklin’s upcoming death on Twitter.

    [Image via Twitter]

  • Jessica Ridgeway: Teen Guilty in Child’s Death, No Death Penalty

    In October 2012 in Colorado, the parents of 10-year-old Jessica Ridgeway were delivered the devastating news that their daughter had been kidnapped on the way to school. Just a few days later, parts of her body were found in a field.

    Then 17-year-old Austin Sigg confessed to murdering Jessica and has now pleaded guilty to kidnapping, murdering, sexually assaulting and dismembering the young girl. Since Sigg was 17 when he committed the crimes, he isn’t eligible for the death penalty.

    Sigg first confessed murdering and dismembering Jessica to his mother, who called 911 and made the report. “I made the phone call, and he turned himself in. That’s all I have to say,” Mindy Sigg said. During the 911 call, Sigg could be heard saying, “I murdered Jessica Ridgeway, I have proof that I did. I’m giving myself up completely, there will be no resistance whatsoever.”

    In addition to the brutal murder of Jessica Ridgeway, Sigg also confessed to another violent crime that occurred just months before the young girl’s death. Sigg told a 911 dispatcher that he was responsible for the attack on a jogger in a park near his home in May 2012. “The only other thing that I have done was the Ketner Lake incident where the woman got attacked. That was me,” Sigg said.

    The Colorado teen told detectives the same thing he told his mom and was charged with kidnapping, murder, sexual assault of a child and other charges. Despite the confessions, Sigg initially pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his attorney worked to have his confessions excluded from the trial, saying he was too young to understand his decision.

    Against the advice of his attorney, Sigg changed his plea to guilty on all charges on Tuesday. “The writing was on the wall,” Jefferson County District Attorney Peter Weir said. “In this case, there has been justice for Jessica.”

    Despite the horrific nature of the crimes, Sigg may be eligible for parole in 40 years, something prosecutors are trying to make sure doesn’t happen. Sigg will be sentenced on November 8, and prosecutors have asked Judge Stephen Munsinger to make him serve consecutive sentences, which would ensure he spends the rest of his life behind bars.

    Main image via YouTube; Article picture via YouTube