[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide
July 30 ZIMBABWE: Our hope is on Mnangagwa I remember it was in 2013 in Bulawayo in Cowdray Part Surbub at Mukitika Primary School on a Sunday. The COPAC had announced that they will hold a public hearing on the proposed Zimbabwe Constitution. Although the meeting was supposed to be attended by Cowdray Park residence ZANU PF bussed people from nearby plots and farms with an obvious aim to disrupt the hearings. Thanks for the Honourable legislators who were chairing the meeting progressed without any incidence. After the meeting had been officially opened deliberations started. We first discussed the Bill of Rights. There was a rare unity between ZANU PF and MDC supporters on the Bill of Rights. All people present unanimously agreed that every Zimbabwean must have a right to life. We agreed that no one must be allowed to take away someone's life for whatever reasons. Christians contended that nobody have a right to take anybody's life except God the life giver. MDC ZANU PF Christians we unanimously agreed on that. We then moved to the issue of the death penalty or death sentence whether it must be maintained in the constitution or total be removed. There was a contestation of ideas here. It seemed the majority wanted the death sentence to be maintained. Suddenly people changed. It looks like they had completely forgotten what we had agreed under the Bill of Rights. Speaker after speaker stood up to support the idea of maintaining the death sentence in the constitution. I was given a chance to speak. I advocated for the removal of the death sentence reminding the gathering what we had just agreed under the Bill of Right. Unfortunately I was in the minority. When the issue was finally put to vote we lost. People wanted the death sentence to be retained in the New Constitution of Zimbabwe. It was sad. The death sentence had always a controversial topic. Some people are in support of it some are against it.However, it must be noted that people are being killed throughout the world almost every day, a number are still on death row. Some people are being killed for trivial crimes like "who you sleep with, in others it is reserved for acts of terror and murder." (Amnesty International) The author is of the view that Zimbabweans made a great mistake in retaining the death sentence in the new constitution which we voted for in 2013.The author advocate for the total removal of the death sentence from our constitution and laws. According to Amnesty International the death penalty is unfair because before anyone is executed he or she is made to wait for years on the death row. Certain Japanese man was made to wait for 46 years not knowing when his time was to come. In Zimbabwe we have people who are still on the death raw for more than 10 years now. It's unfair. The death penalty is also cruel, inhuman and degrading. According to Salil Shelty "The death penalty is a symptom of a culture of violence, not a solution to it." Execution methods includes beheading, electrocution, hanging, lethal injection, shooting in the back of the head or shooting by a firing squad. It's so chilling, ruthless, cruel and violent. The other issue is humans can make errors and judges are not an exception. Let's say someone is erroneously charged and erroneously convicted and sentenced to death and then killed immediately. If at a later stage it is found out that the person was erroneously convicted, it is not possible to reverse the killing of an innocent person. I had also pointed it out in one of my recent articles that long jail sentences do not deter crime. The idea that long jail terms deter crime hasn't been proven anywhere this includes the death sentence, it doesn't deter crime in any way. Life sentences are rather better than the death sentence in serious crimes. The death penalty is also discriminatory. The Amnesty International says it is the poor belonging to a "wrong "race, ethnic group, religious minority group, or political party that end up facing the gallows. In Zimbabwe the discrimination is quite glare, it is men only who can be given the death sentence women are spared. We were not told the reasons for this discriminatory nature of sentencing. We all know that 52% of Zimbabwean population are women then why kill the few and spare the majority. Is there any motive to extinguish men in Zimbabwe? The death penalty breaches two essential human rights: the right to life and right to live a life free from torture. Both rights are protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, according to Amnesty International. Zimbabwe is a member of United Nations, why are we then killing people violating their rights? Since 1948 the momentum to ban the death sentence globally is growing. As of 2016 104 countries had totally banned the death penalty including the majority of countries in Southern Afr
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, FLA., OHIO, UTAH, ARIZ.
July 30 TEXAS: Book details history of hangings in Texas -- Brazos County included Before lethal injections and electric chairs, the preferred method of death-penalty execution in Texas was hanging, conducted by local sheriffs at their county jails, not at prison facilities. Such is the subject of a new book, Death on the Gallows: The Encyclopedia of Legal Hangings in Texas, by West Gilbreath, captain of the criminal investigation division at the University of North Texas Police Department. Gilbreath, who published a similar book in 2002 about New Mexico's legal hangings, said he decided to compile the executions for a book so future historians could have a more reliable source of information than the internet. "I was trying to come up with a better resource for researchers and historians," Gilbreath, adding that the book is for anyone who is interested in true crime or Old West or Texas histories and wants to read eyewitness accounts of the men and women who stood on the gallows or their last words spoken to the crowd before they were hanged. Gilbreath's book details 467 legal executions conducted between 1834 and 1923, the year Texas authorized the use of the electric chair for executions conducted by the state in Huntsville; of those, he found 2 in Brazos County. Authorities executed the `st man, Ezekiel Bradley, on May 2, 1879. In Gilbreath's recounting, Bradley had been drinking and gambling on Christmas Day in 1878 before going with his friend Shep Wilson to a Steele's store, about 15 miles west of Bryan, to buy more whiskey. At the shop, Wilson began arguing with a man named Buck Pollock, who eventually struck Wilson in the face. Drunk, Bradley rushed to help his friend, pulling out a concealed pistol and shooting Pollock in the mouth, killing him. According to a story published in the Galveston Daily News on May 3, 1879, Bradley told the paper on the day before his execution that he had "been a drinking and quarrelsome boy all my life," and that he greatly regretted having killed Pollock. "I have lain down and wept at the thought of having killed a man who never done me harm or injury, and whom I had not known," Bradley told the reporter. Gilbreath said that between 4,000 and 6,000 people came to Bryan -- far more than lived there at the time -- to see Bradley's execution on May 2. "The entertainment value of an execution was a big deal," said Bill Page, library associate II at Texas A&M University's Evans Library. The same Galveston Daily News story notes that a doctor offered up prayers before Bradley's execution. After praying, "the sheriff pulled the drop and the prisoner was launched into eternity." The 6-foot fall dislocated his neck, and he struggled for 5 minutes before the doctor pronounced him dead almost 12 minutes after his hanging began. Gilbreath said the 2nd man executed in Brazos County, Bob Ballard, died in a more private setting on Nov. 22, 1901, a year after the law changed, requiring sheriffs' to take precautions to make executions as private as possible. Public sentiment, Gilbreath said, had changed to thinking that executions "shouldn't be a carnival or public spectacle." Gilbreath said Ballard shot two men Nov. 7, 1900, a little more than a year before he would be executed. An article in The Eagle published on Nov. 8, 1900, states that Ballard shot "2 Bohemians at Smetana yesterday." One man, Jacob Shramek, a postmaster, survived after being shot in the chest, but Joe Blazek, shot "in the lower part of his body," died. "The tragedy," The Eagle reported the next day, "caused bitter feelings among the Bohemians and there were some indications that violence might possibly be resorted to." The sheriff at the time, fearing a violent mob, took Ballard to another jail in Houston, according to the a story published on Nov. 16, 1900, in the Houston Daily Post. Page said Ballard had been "denied due process" and received an unjust death sentence. "Officials didn't want a lynching on their hands, so they arranged to have him found guilty and sentenced to death," Page said of the jury's verdict, which originally was for life imprisonment but changed after the judge and district attorney indicated the ruling had to be the death penalty. Page sent a document to The Eagle in which he wrote Ballard had been "essentially lynched under a veneer of law." Page said that some immigrant whites new to the U.S. participated in lynchings to "establish their own whiteness," and that Ballard's stepfather had been a county commissioner, so it's possible the whites who lived in his precinct resented him for being a successful, powerful black man. Gilbreath said he's still finding new hangings he'd missed before publishing his book. Currently, he's reviewing around 20, which he may publish in a second volume or a revised edition of his book. One such case is Frank Hammond, executed on May 21, 1875. An a
