[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

NOTE----I will next be posting items on Tuesday, Nov. 20




GLOBAL:

Tutu Backs Global Ban on Death Penalty


Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu called for a global ban on the
death penalty in a commentary featured in The Guardian newspaper on
Tuesday.

The former archbishop of Cape Town wrote the piece ahead of a vote at the
United Nations General Assembly on a draft resolution calling for a
moratorium on executions with the ultimate goal of banning the practice
later this month, according to Agence France-Presse.

"I am delighted that the death penalty is being removed from the globe,"
Tutu wrote, referring to the increasing number of countries abolishing the
death penalty either in law or practice.

"The death penalty  says that to kill in certain circumstances is
acceptable, and encourages the doctrine of revenge.

"If we are to break these cycles, we must remove government-sanctioned
violence."

He called capital punishment a violation of fundamental human rights and
called the practice to be abolished worldwide.

According to the human rights group Amnesty International, 133 countries
have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, while 64 countries
and territories still retain the practice.

"In country after country, it (capital punishment) is used
disproportionately against the poor or against racial or ethnic
minorities," Tutu wrote in The Guardian.

"It is often used as a tool or political repression. It is imposed and
inflicted arbitrarily. It is an irrevocable punishment, resulting
inevitably in the execution of people innocent of any crime."

"It is a violation of fundamental human rights," said the former South
African archbishop.

The draft resolution on the death penalty was co-sponsored by 72 countries
earlier this month, ahead of a vote by the full 192-member assembly,
Italy's U.N. mission counselor Giuseppe Manzo said to AFP.

"The time has come to abolish the death penalty worldwide," Tutu wrote.

"The case for abolition becomes more compelling with each passing year."

(source: Christian Post)

****************************

The doctrine of revenge----I have seen the horror of the death penalty and
the violence it propels. It is time for a global ban


For most of the 20th century the majority of the world's nations used the
death penalty. But, as the millennium approached, many societies
questioned whether killing their citizens through the judicial system
served a positive purpose. I am delighted that the death penalty is being
removed from the globe. To a Christian whose belief system is rooted in
forgiveness, the death penalty is unacceptable. Either in law or in
practice, 130 countries have now abolished the death penalty. And since
1990, 50 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Last
year only 25 countries carried out executions.

So strong is the global sentiment against the death penalty - with some
notable exceptions, such as the United States, China and Singapore - that
a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions and the abolition of
capital punishment is scheduled to go before the United Nations general
assembly tomorrow. The world community will decide its view on the
morality of capital punishment.

I have experienced the horror of being close to an execution. Not only
during the apartheid era of South Africa, when the country had one of the
highest execution rates in the world, but in other countries as well.

And I have witnessed the victims of the death penalty the authorities
never speak of - the families of those put to death. I remember the
parents of Napoleon Beazley, a young African-American man put to death in
Texas after a trial tainted by racism. Their pain was evident as the
killing of their son by the state to which they paid taxes approached. I
can only imagine the unbearable emotional pain they went through as they
said their final goodbye to their son on the day of his execution.

It is often asked by those favouring the death penalty: "What if your
child was murdered?" And it is a natural question. Rage is a common
reaction to the homicide of a loved one, and a wish for revenge is
understandable. But what if the person condemned to death was your son? No
one raises a child to be a murderer, yet many parents suffer the grief of
knowing their child is to be killed. In 1988, the parents of those on
death row in South Africa wrote to the president, saying: "To be a mother
or father and watch your child going through this living hell is a torment
more painful than anyone can imagine." We must not put these children to
death. It is to inflict horrific and unacceptable suffering upon them, and
their mothers and fathers.

Retribution, resentment and revenge have left us with a world soaked in
the blood of far too many of our sisters and brothers. The death penalty
is part of that process. It says that to kill in certain circumstances is
acceptable, and encourages the doctrine of revenge. If we are to break
these cycles, we must remove government-sanctioned violence.

The time has come to abolish the death penalty worldwide. The case for
abolition becomes more compelling with each passing year. Everywhere
experience shows us that executions brutalise both those involved in the
process and the society that carries them out. Nowhere has it been shown
that the death penalty reduces crime or political violence. In country
after country, it is used disproportionately against the poor or against
racial or ethnic minorities. It is often used as a tool of political
repression. It is imposed and inflicted arbitrarily. It is an irrevocable
punishment, resulting inevitably in the execution of people innocent of
any crime. It is a violation of fundamental human rights.

(source: Commentary;Desmond Tutu is a former archbishop of Cape Town and a
Nobel peace laureate--The Guardian)

**************************

Sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit: the men who lived to
tell the tale----Ex-prisoners recount their stories ahead of UN meeting to
discuss a global ban on capital punishment


3 men, 3 extraordinary stories. One spent 18 years in prison in Uganda for
having murdered a neighbour later found to be alive. Another survived 34
years facing execution in Japan. The 3rd became the 100th prisoner on
death row to be found innocent and freed in the US.

Amnesty International brought the men together in New York before a
hearing of the human rights committee of the UN tomorrow that will call
for a moratorium on executions around the world as a first step towards
abolishing the death penalty. It is the ultimate argument, the campaign
believes - the testimony of individuals who managed to survive the system,
but who came close to being killed despite their innocence.

Venezuela became the first country to remove the death penalty in 1853,
and the abolition movement has grown, with 133 states members. Britain
abolished the penalty in 1967. As countries drop away, attention focuses
on the remaining practitioners.

Last year at least 1,591 people were put to death in 25 nations, but 91%
of those were executed in six countries: China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq,
Sudan and the US. China is known to have executed more than 1,000
prisoners in 2006, but the real figure may be closer to 8,000. Twelve US
states put a total of 53 people to death last year, but the practice has
fallen to its lowest level in a decade after the supreme court decided to
hear arguments about the humanity of the lethal injection method.

The UN resolution, backed by 72 countries including the 27-nation EU, has
no power to enforce a moratorium, but it is seen by campaigners as a
chance to apply pressure for reform on those countries teetering on
abolition.

Amnesty's death row expert, Piers Bannister, said the men's stories
"provide graphic evidence that the death penalty is administered by flawed
systems that put innocent people at risk".

Edward Edmary Mpagi

Mpagi spent 18 years on death row in Uganda. The hardest moments were when
fellow inmates were taken away from their cells, leaving him to wonder if
it would be his turn next. He counted 52 men who were taken for execution,
often in batches of 10 or 11 at a time. The first thing prisoners would
know would be a feeling in the air, what Mpagi calls "something fishy".
Then the prison guards would take an inmate away. The other prisoners
would shout "So-and-so is going!" and the condemned man would cry: "I am
going! I am going to meet my Lord!" Then there would be a three-day period
while the condemned men were allowed to prepare themselves for death and
take their last rites from a priest. Mpagi would hear the men singing to
keep up their spirits.

At the end of the 3 days, he would hear them being led to the execution
chamber, and then the thud of the body as it fell from the gallows.

Finally, the sound of nails being knocked into coffins. Only then, when
all the men had been hanged, would he be able to relax. "You think, 'It
could be me. Maybe this time I am going'. Only when the exercise is over
does your heart come back. Until then, there is great fear."

He was arrested, aged 27, in 1981 and sentenced to death the next year for
the murder of a neighbour in Masaka. Mpagi thought he saw the dead man,
George William Wandyaka, standing at the back of the court during the
trial.

A few years later, further sightings were made of the man in Jinja, in
eastern Uganda. It transpired that Wandyaka's parents had carried a grudge
against Mpagi's parents, and had staged the murder to hurt them.

In 1989, the authorities in Masaka confirmed that Wandyaka was alive, and
informed the attorney general, though Mpagi remained on death row for a
further 11 years. Since coming off death row he has dedicated himself to
campaigning against executions. A devout Christian, he says he has
forgiven all those involved with what happened to him, even Wandyaka who
died in 2002 before Mpagi had the chance to meet him.

Ray Krone

In 2002 Ray Krone became the 100th death row prisoner to be freed in the
US. He was your model citizen at the time of his arrest on New Year's Eve,
1991, aged 35. He had served in the US Air Force for six years and had a
spotless criminal record. "I was the kind of guy who, if you had broken
down in your car in the middle of the night, you could call up and I would
come."

Then it all went wrong. A barmaid was stabbed to death in the CBS Lounge
where he used to drink near his home in Phoenix, Arizona. Someone said
that he had been having a relationship with the woman, which was not true,
and a medical examiner matched his teeth to a bite mark found on the
victim's arm. He was put on death row after a trial lasting barely 3 days.

For the first few months he was in despair. "You keep thinking, 'Why me'?,
beating yourself up, you think you can't live through this."

But over time he came to realise that if he was to fight the system he had
to understand how it worked. He managed to get hold of legal books and
study, and he kept pressing his case with the prison authorities. In 2001
the state of Arizona made it easier for prisoners to gain access to DNA
testing, and when the victim's clothing was analysed, police databases
threw up the name of a convicted sex offender who had been on parole at
the time of the murder and staying at his mother's house next to the CBS
Lounge. Krone was released the following year.

Before his arrest he supported the death penalty. "I saw it as the end of
the line, the just deserts for those who commit heinous crimes," he says.
Now he campaigns against it. "If they can do it to me, they can do it to
anybody."

Sakae Menda

34 years after he was sentenced to death for the murder of 2 people in
Kumamoto, the southern Japanese island, Sakae Menda became the 1st
prisoner on death row to be exonerated. The authorities had the evidence
they needed to prove that he was innocent, including a firm alibi and a
statement from a witness saying that she had lied under duress, but he had
to wait decades for them to act on it. "Japanese law is very arbitrary,"
Menda says.

He was 22 in 1949 when his world caved in. He was staying at a motel that
he discovered to be a brothel and got talking to a working girl who told
him that her mother and a corrupt police officer had forced her into
prostitution at the illegally young age of 16. When the officer found out,
he decided to remove Menda as a potential threat by having the unrelated
murder of two people pinned on him. He forced a confession out of him.

Menda expected to be executed within six months. Under the Japanese
system, death row inmates, unless they are involved in legal appeals, can
be taken away for execution at any time, with little notice. He was ready
to give up hope, until a Catholic priest encouraged him to seek a retrial.
"It's harder to live than to die," the priest told him. From that day he
never felt like giving up again. "Whenever I saw inmates being taken away
for execution - and there were about 35 of them during my time on death
row - I would feel even stronger in my fight for my freedom."

That freedom came in 1983. Japan's death row remains in place and Menda
continues to campaign against it. "So long as people stand in judgment
over others, mistakes will be made and innocent men will die," he says.

(source: The Guardian)






JAPAN:

Embarassing Times Ahead for Retentionists


After weathering weeks of controversy at home, Japan's vocal capital
punishment lobby is bracing itself to face more embarrassment, this time
on the international stage, as the U.N. prepares to vote on a worldwide
moratorium on executions.

Japan is now conspicuously the only major rich industrialised nation with
a fully-operational capital punishment system.

In Sep., the United States Supreme Court agreed to review the legality of
lethal injections, the country's main execution method. Except for one
execution which went ahead because a Texas judge refused to keep her court
house open after 5 pm to hear an appeal, the court has been able block all
other planned executions in the country until it rules.

This means a moratorium on executions is now in place in the U.S.,
although this could be short-lived if the apex court rules, sometime early
next year, that lethal injection is not a "cruel and unusual" punishment.

The 6 other members of the G8 grouping, responsible for 65 % of the world
economy, abandoned the death penalty years ago. Most are likely to canvass
strongly for the rest of the less wealthy world to follow their example
and vote for the U.N. moratorium resolution when it is tabled in the
General Assembly in mid-December.

"Murderers should realize that their lives are not guaranteed," Japanese
justice minister Kunio Hatoyama said on Oct. 29. "It is not only my
opinion but more than 80 % of the Japanese people also think that way."

The minister's explicit advocacy of the death penalty was especially
significant coming before the U.N. moratorium vote. Made to the foreign
press at a luncheon at the foreign correspondents club in Tokyo, it left
no doubt that however the U.N. General Assembly eventually voted on the
moratorium, Hatoyama's government had no intention of joining the global
trend towards death penalty abolition.

A week earlier, Hatoyama showed no sign of wavering on the death penalty
issue when he addressed a parliamentary committee. His only unease
appeared to be about hanging as the most suitable execution method.

"I honestly wonder if there isn't a more tranquil way of doing this," he
told parliamentarians in apparent distaste.

Hatoyama's comments alarmed human rights activists who fear he might want
to switch from hanging to lethal injection, a method under attack in the
U.S. for failing to live up to claims that it was the most modern,
compassionate and least painful of all forms of state killing.

Earlier, on Sep. 25, Hatoyama suggested that Japan's death penalty system
could continue in an improved way. Prisoners should be automatically
hanged after their sentences without the justice minister needing to sign
an order, he said.

"No one wants to put his signature on an execution order," he said. But he
thought executions should take place quickly after the sentencing, "like
on a conveyor belt".

His comments provoked shock waves of criticism across the country.

According to the criminal procedure code of Japan, the justice minister
should order an execution within 6 months of a final sentence. The
half-year period is to give the minister time to examine possibilities of
a retrial, pardon or the mental health of the convict.

In practice more than seven years pass between a final death sentence and
execution. Today, Japan has 102 inmates lined up on death row.

Some justice ministers have been quick to sign execution orders. Hatoyamas
immediate predecessor, Jinen Nagase, signed ten execution orders in a
space of five months during his year in office.

But other ministers have refused to sign execution orders on religious or
other grounds. Before Nagase a Buddhist justice minister, Seiken Sugiura,
refused to sign execution orders for 15 months.

Hatoyama's ministry has set up a research team to come up with alternative
execution procedures which do not require the ministers signature,
according to reports.

Anti-death penalty groups and human rights activists have seized on
Hatoyama's recent controversial remarks to press home their cause,
especially as the U.N. prepares to vote on an execution moratorium.

Shizuka Kamei, who heads a 70-member league within the Japanese Diet
(parliament) for the death penalty abolition, has publicly accused
Hatoyama of inhumanity and being the least appropriate person to hold such
a delicate post.

Kamei has suggested that the justice ministers should sign their execution
orders at the gallows to bring them face to face with the issues.

Kameis league has proposed a 2-year study of the death penalty by a
parliamentary research committee. In the meantime, Japan should introduce
a moratorium on executions, he has said.

On October 10, the World Day against the Death Penalty, a coalition of 49
Japanese rights organizations issued a protest calling on Hatoyama to
withdraw his call for execution without a ministerial signed order.

"We are filled with horror to see a man heading the justice ministry  who
is willing to take lives of people automatically," their statement read.
"Now that the world is moving towards the abolition of the death penalty
and we are asking for a review of the Japanese system," it added.

Joining the protest was Sakae Menda, 81, 1 of 4 former death-row prisoners
in Japan who have been released from death row after being proven
innocent.

But anti-death penalty activists recognise that the majority of Japanese
public opinion is in favour of capital punishment. According to a
government survey in 2005, only 6 % of the public were abolitionists.

"The lack of disclosure of information  is one reason for little public
interest in the reality of the death penalty," said Akiko Takada, a
leading member of the Forum 90 for the Ratification of the International
Treaty of Death Penalty Abolition, a national league of 5,000 anti-death
penalty activists.

Japanese death row inmates are kept isolated from journalists and
anti-death penalty campaigners. They are permitted family visits and
exchange of letters but prison officials have the right to stop these if
they wish. No information on executions is given to the press. Only an
inmates family is informed.

"A reversal of public support for the death penalty may not be possible,
but Japan could still abolish capital punishment if we had good political
leadership as in other countries," Takada said.

(source: IPS News)