Death penalty

A serial killer who targeted older gay men during an eight-month killing spree is set to be executed Thursday evening in a Florida state prison.

Former Congressman Beto O’Rourke said Monday he did not support the death penalty for the El Paso mass shooter.

An Arizona court made official this week that the illegal alien charged with murdering 21-year-old Grant Ronnebeck will not face the death penalty because of his alleged “intellectual disability.”

Louisiana prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for a woman who they say ordered her girlfriend to murder her six-year-old son.

CLAIM: Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) “blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so.” VERDICT: Mostly true.

Former Vice President Joe Biden may now be opposed to the death penalty, but his decades-long advocacy in favor of capital punishment is taking center stage as the Department of Justice (DOJ) readies the execution of five criminals.

After the Trump administration announced Thursday that it would resume applying the death penalty at the federal level, 2020 Democrat presidential hopefuls rushed to voice their opposition.

Kamala Harris opposed Trump’s decision to restart the federal death penalty. First on the list of those to be executed is a white supremacist who killed an eight-year-old girl and her family.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday morning that it is resuming the federal death penalty, starting with the execution of five death row inmates who have been convicted of murdering children.

Attorney General William Barr on Thursday issued a directive paving the way for the federal government to resume the use of the death penalty for the first time in nearly two decades, the Department of Justice announced. 

China’s government media hailed Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte as a “model for cooperation” with China in a column Tuesday responding to Duterte’s annual State of the Nation address, where he adamantly refused to confront China for illegally occupying Philippine territory.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is abandoning his decades-long support for the federal death penalty as he seeks the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“White Nationalist violence has killed more people on American soil than any other source of terrorism,” he told voters.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg unveiled his “Douglass Plan,” which he said is for “restoration” of the black community from the effects of racism.

The Supreme Court added five new cases to its term for fall 2019, including racial discrimination, the environment, the death penalty, and international child abduction. On the same day, the Court refused to dive into declaring new legal rights for Islamic terrorists held by the U.S. military.

A court in Thailand has sentenced three Thai men to death in the murder of a British expatriate and his Thai wife whose brother allegedly ordered the killings.

The Massachusetts state legislature is debating a bill that would impose the death penalty on people convicted of murdering a police officer.

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg took a jab at President Trump on Monday while delivering a speech in South Carolina, saying America’s past “was never as great as advertised.”

Amnesty International (AI) on Wednesday published the 2018 edition of its annual report on the death penalty. The report found a 31 percent decrease in executions compared to 2017, “the lowest number of executions that Amnesty International has recorded in the past decade.”

South Bend Mayor and 2020 Democrat presidential contender Pete Buttigieg on Thursday called for capital punishment to be abolished in the United States, describing it as something that “has always been a discriminatory practice.”

An illegal alien charged with murdering four Americans over the course of a week in Nevada did so in order to steal money to buy methamphetamine, a police detective alleges.

Attorney General Jeff Landry (R-LA) said the “far left” seeks to destabilize America’s justice system by banning the death penalty.

California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom declared, “The intentional killing of another person is wrong,” as he imposed a moratorium on the death penalty.

California voters rejected a repeal of the death penalty as recently as 2016, in the same election where Hillary Clinton carried the state over Donald Trump by more than 3.4 million votes.

France’s Minister of Justice has announced that the government will intervene should French Islamic State members be sentenced to death in Iraq for their activities.

Pope Francis said Wednesday that the Catholic Church’s vision of the death penalty has “matured” to the point that it now considers it to be a “grave violation of the right to life that every person has.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Wednesday shrugged off the international outcry against the death sentence abruptly imposed on accused Canadian drug smuggler Robert Schellenberg, insisting that China is “not worried in the slightest” about criticism from Ottawa or anywhere else.

The Canadian government issued a travel advisory on Tuesday warning citizens about the “arbitrary enforcement of local laws” in China, a reference to the unusual death sentence given to Canadian citizen Robert Lloyd Schellenberg on Monday.

The Dalian Intermediate People’s Court in China’s Liaoning Province sentenced Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg to death on Monday. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately condemned the sentence as “arbitrary” and said the Schellenberg case is “of extreme concern to us as a government.” Many observers speculated the swift and severe judgment is related to China’s ongoing dispute with Canada over the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.

Saudi Arabian prosecutors opened the trial for eleven suspects in the October murder of Jamal Khashoggi on Thursday by seeking the death penalty for five of the defendants and complaining about Turkey’s refusal to hand over evidence in the case, presumably because Turkey wants the defendants extradited to face trial there.