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Death penalty

Song for Wuornos

Arts, Culture & Media

Last year the movie Monster told the brutal, horrific story of the real life hooker Aileen Wuornos, who was executed by the state of Florida for killing 7 of her clients. One of the artists who spoke out against her execution was the avant-garde singer Diamanda Galas. Galas dedicated several of her songs to Aileen […]

Asa Hutchinson

A federal judge halts six executions in Arkansas, citing ‘cruel and unusual punishment’

Justice
Jacques Fesch was arrested in Paris on February 25, 1954 after having committed a hold-up at a currency exchange stand. While fleeing the scene, he killed a policeman and wounded three persons.

Jacques Fesch killed a cop in the 1950s. Here’s why the French Catholic Church wants to make him a saint.

Belief
The execution chamber at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Florence is shown.

A former executioner has become a leading advocate for ending the death penalty

Conflict
An inmate stands against a fence at the Adjustment Center yard during a media tour of California's death row at San Quentin State Prison, California, December 2015.

2015 saw the highest number of recorded death-row executions. Which country tops the list?

Justice
Inmates wait before they are released from Thanh Xuan prison outside Hanoi on Aug. 29, 2010.

Here’s one way to escape death row in Vietnam: Get pregnant

Justice

Vietnamese newspaper Thanh Nien News reported Hue paid a 27-year-old male inmate at the jail 50 million Vietnamese dong, or roughly $2,300, to supply her with his semen and syringes. She then successfully impregnated herself.

The death chamber at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas is seen through steel bars from the viewing room.

Prisons enter a sketchy world to obtain drugs to kill death row inmates

Justice

Lethal injections don’t happen without specific drugs, but when a favorite drug of the prison system became harder to get, prisons went looking abroad and found the product through sketchy dealers and by lying to drug companies.

President Barack Obama talks to Cardinal Sean O'Malley during an interfaith memorial service for Boston Marathon bombing victims at Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross on April 18, 2013.

Does God want Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to get the death penalty?

Belief

People of faith have looked to scripture and religious tradition to argue against putting the admitted Boston Marathon bomber on death row. But capital punishment, even for those guilty of murder, is a complex and divisive issue for all three major monotheistic religions.

Israel's Ofer Prison, located near Jerusalem.

Why Israeli courts refuse the death penalty for terrorists

Justice

Israel courts have only allowed the death penalty once in the country’s history, for concentration camp mastermind Adolf Eichmann. But many families of terrorism victims want the state to start imposing the death sentence on the people who killed their loved ones.

Accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is shown in a courtroom sketch on the first day of jury selection at the federal courthouse in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 5, 2015.

Massachusetts isn’t OK with the death penalty, but Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s jurors had to be

Justice

The state of Massachusetts doesn’t allow the death penalty, and most of the state’s residents are against it. But for the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the jurors who decided his fate in a federal trial had to allow for that possibility.