[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----worldwide
July 5 BELARUS: Belarus Preserving Death Penalty at People's Will - President Lukashenko The Belarusian president, at the same time, expressed confidence that his country would gradually come to the solution of this issue. "We are called to abolish the death penalty. We are hearing the proposals. But not a single country can oppose the people's will, the overwhelming part of which voted at the referendum for its application," Lukashenko said at the official opening of the annual session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Minsk. Belarus is the only country in Europe where the capital punishment is applied. In 1996, the issue of death penalty abolition was put in Belarus to a national referendum, and almost 80.5 percent of its participants voted for its preservation. The existence of the death penalty is called the main obstacle to the restoration of Belarus in the status of a special guest in Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). (source: Sputnik News) MONGOLIA: Death penalty confined to history as new Criminal Code comes into effect Amnesty International welcomes the coming into force of the new Criminal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure in Mongolia as an historic milestone in the country's journey towards full enjoyment and protection of human rights. The new Criminal Code, which abolishes the death penalty for all crimes, became effective on 1 July 2017 after it was adopted by the Mongolian Parliament on 3 December 2015. Today Mongolia becomes the 105th country to have freed itself from the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. (source: Amnesty International) BANGLADESH: 3 to die for killing auto-rickshaw driver in Gazipur A Gazipur court has awarded death penalties to 3 persons, including 2 brothers, for murdering an auto-rickshaw driver in Kaliakoir upazila in 2013. Gazipur District and Session Judge AKM Enamul Haque passed the order on Wednesday, reports BSS. The convicts are Mehedi Hassan alias Babu, Md Alomgir Hossein and Delowar Hossein. Of the convicts, Delowar Hossein is still at large. According to the case, auto-rickshaw driver Hider Ali, an inhabitant of Lalmonirhat district used to live in Kaliakoir upazila. He went missing in the afternoon of December 26, 2013. Police recovered his body from Ratonpur area of the upazila on the following day. Hider's elder brother Shafiqul Islam had filed a murder case with Kaliakoir police station. (source: Dhaka Tribune) EGYPT: Egypt's Attorney General refers 41 suspects in organ trafficking network to criminal court Egypt's Attorney General Nabil Sadek referred on Tuesday 41 defendants involved in an organ transplant and trafficking network to the criminal court, state news agency MENA reported. Investigations in the case found that the defendants had performed illegal operations between January 2011 and December 2016 as an organised criminal group, exploiting poor Egyptians in need of money by paying for and removing their organs, mainly kidneys, and transplanting them into foreign recipients. These operations violate medical laws and were performed in unauthorized places. The prosecution charged the network members with profiteering, bribery, money laundering, dereliction of duty and causing permanent disabilities. The group's illegal operations resulted in the death of one of the victims and permanent disabilities in others, according to investigations. The suspects accused of running the illegal network -- including Egyptians and foreigners -- were arrested in December 2016. According to an official statement issued by the Ministry of Health, the network included university professors, doctors, nurses, medical centre owners and brokers involved in illegal organ trafficking. Organ trafficking is explicitly forbidden in Egypt according to article 60 of the country's 2014 constitution. Egyptian law incriminates the trade of organs and penalises traffickers with up to 7 years in jail. In March, the Egyptian State Council approved a draft law to further regulate organ transplant operations, which includes harsher sentences up to and including the death penalty if an illegal or forced operation resulted in the death of the victim. The Egyptian parliament is set to vote on the draft law. (source: ahram.org.eg) SRI LANKA: Death sentence handed in for journalist's murder A 39 year old suspect was found guilty over killing of journalist Mel Gunasekara and handed in death sentence by Colombo High Court today. High Court Judge Piyasena Ranasinghe held that the crime committed by the suspect who was employed as plumber was proven during the trial. In addition to the death penalty, the suspect was sentenced 30 years imprisonment for stealing victim's belongings after the murder. Late Ms Gunasekara was stabbed to death at her residence in
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, PENN., S.C., FLA., USA
July 5 TEXAS: My grandfather was a death row doctor. He tested psychedelic drugs on Texas inmatesAn Austin-based writer's quest to learn his grandfather's story leads to death row - and a little-known series of experiments that involved giving hallucinogens to inmates in the early 1960s. [In this special contribution to The Texas Tribune, Austin writer Ben Hartman tells the story of his search for the truth about his late grandfather, a prison psychiatrist on Texas' death row who performed little-known medical experiments on inmates in the 1960s.] Eusebio Martinez was polite - even happy - as he entered the death chamber that August night in Huntsville in 1960. He may not have understood his time was up. A few years earlier, Martinez had been convicted of murdering an infant girl whose parents had left her sleeping in their car while they visited a Midland nightclub. He???d been ruled "feeble-minded" by multiple psychiatrists and had to be shown how to get into the electric chair. As he was strapped in, a priest leaned in and coached him to say "gracias" and a simple prayer. Just before the first bolt knifed through his brain, Martinez grinned and waved at the young Houston doctor who would declare him dead a few minutes later. That doctor was my grandfather. For 3 years at the end of his life, Dr. Lee Hartman worked as a resident physician and psychiatrist at Huntsville's Wynne Unit. From 1960 to 1963, he witnessed at least 14 executions as presiding physician, his signature scrawled on the death certificates of the condemned men. All of them died in the electric chair - "Ol' Sparky" - a grisly method that left flesh burned and bodies smoking in the death chamber as my grandfather read their vital signs. I had always known from my father that his dad, who died before I was born, worked for the prison system as a psychiatrist. But I had no idea that he'd worked in the death chamber, witnessing executions. Or that he'd been involved in testing psychedelics on prisoners to see if drugs like LSD, mescaline and psilocybin could treat schizophrenia. Or that he'd been hospitalized repeatedly during his lifelong struggle with depression. And I didn't know the truth about his death at age 48, when he was found on the staircase of his house in Houston's exclusive River Oaks neighborhood. My obsession with my grandfather's life grew from my father's sudden death from a stroke at his Austin home in 2014. Last summer, I came back to Austin after 14 years overseas and began searching for clues about my grandfather - in the state archives, in Huntsville and in boxes of old family keepsakes kept by my aunts. I reported on crime and police and prisons for several years as a journalist in Israel, and now I wanted to investigate a mystery in my own family tree. I wanted to learn about the man whose story had always seemed more literary than real - a Jewish orphan from the Deep South who fought in World War II, sang in operas and became a successful doctor before tragedy cut the story short. I wanted to know the man my father was named for, and to use the search as a way to beat a path through my grief over my own father's death. Through my grandfather's personal papers, newspaper clippings and long-buried state records, I found a man - brilliant, thoughtful and sensitive - who witnessed great human drama and suffering in the Death House, and in the process became a determined opponent of capital punishment. He outlined his thoughts in a collection of diary entries and a 19-page handwritten treatise I found in my grandmother's old keepsakes. "The death penalty," he wrote in 1962, "is irreparable." My grandfather was born in Greenville, Miss., in 1916, 1 of 2 twin boys placed in foster care after their father died of yellow fever and their mother moved away. The boys ended up at the New Orleans Jewish Children's Home and attended the elite Newman School down the street, just like hundreds of other Jewish orphans of their day. My grandfather and his brother went on to graduate from Louisiana State University's medical school. Along the way, my grandfather trained as an opera singer, met my grandmother, started a family, served in the Army Air Corps as a flight surgeon during World War II, then returned home to his family and started his medical career. For a decade he worked as a small-town general practitioner in Louisiana and East Texas. In 1957, he moved to Houston and enrolled in the Baylor College of Medicine to study psychiatry, a major mid-life career move that, according to my father, was partly motivated by my grandfather's desire to understand his own battles with depression. Within a few years, he had gone to work in Huntsville as part of a contingent of Baylor College of Medicine psychiatrists sent to the Wynne Treatment Center, a diagnostic unit for mentally ill inmates that had opened the previous year. It was
