[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 23



EUROPEAN UNION:

EU Press Release after TX 400th execution

Press release - 550(2007)

Execution of Johnny Ray Conner in Texas a 'macabre milestone', says PACE
President

Ren van der Linden, President of the Council of Europe Parliamentary
Assembly (PACE), and as such representing a 47-nation "death-penalty-free
zone" in Europe, strongly condemned todays execution of Johnny Ray Conner
in Texas.

"This 400th execution since Texas resumed the death penalty in 1982, after
an 18-year moratorium, is a macabre milestone in the state's history," Mr
van der Linden said.

Texas Governor Rick Perry's reply to the EU appeal to halt executions and
consider a moratorium on the death penalty was unacceptable, he said. "The
death penalty is not, as Governor Perry put it, 'a just and appropriate
punishment'. Death is not justice and never will be."

"Despite the potential unpopularity of the measure, capital punishment
must be totally removed in all countries which strive to uphold democracy,
the rule of law and human rights", he added.

Mr van der Linden finally recalled that, as a country with observer status
in the Council of Europe, the United States is violating the commitment of
all observers to share the Council's basic values.

Note to editors

The Assembly President will participate, on 9 October in Lisbon
(Portugal), in an international conference marking the establishment of an
annual European Day against the Death Penalty on 10 October. The
conference is jointly organised by the Council of Europe, the European
Union and its Portuguese Presidency.

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

PACE President strongly condemns the execution of 3 death row inmates in
Japan

Press release - 552(2007)

PACE President strongly condemns the execution of 3 death row inmates in
Japan

Following his statement concerning an execution in Texas, Council of
Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) President Ren van der Linden today
also strongly condemned the execution of 3 death row inmates in Japan.

Mr van der Linden expressed regret that according to the information
available, current Justice Minister Jinen Nagase has signed execution
orders for 10 death row inmates since taking office - and did not pursue
the direction taken by his predecessor, Seiken Sugiura, who refused to
sign execution orders during his term - thus ending a de facto moratorium.

Mr van der Linden said that PACE finds it unacceptable that the Assembly's
appeals to Japan and the United States - which have both enjoyed observer
states with the 47-member organisation since 1996 - for an immediate
moratorium on executions have gone unheeded and that both countries
continue to apply the death penalty. "By doing so, they violate their
fundamental commitment to share the Council of Europe's core values  the
principles of democracy, the rule of law and the enjoyment by all persons
within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms," he
said.

"The death penalty has no legitimate place in the penal systems of modern
civilised societies, and its application constitutes torture and inhuman
or degrading punishment within the meaning of Article 3 of the European
Convention on Human Rights," said the PACE President.

He added that PACE is also very concerned about conditions on "death row",
both in Japan and in the United States, exacerbating the mental anguish
known as the "Death Row phenomenon", which was expressly declared a
violation of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights in 1989.
He urged the authorities concerned to immediately improve conditions on
"Death Row", in particular by ending all secrecy surrounding executions
and unnecessary limitations on rights and freedoms as well as broadening
access to post-conviction and post- appeal judicial review.

(source for both: EU Parliamentary Assembly Communication Unit)






IRELAND:

Sunny Jacobs has found a new life in the West of Ireland following her
release from death row


2 YEARS ago I interviewed the most remarkable woman I have met in a long
career in newspapers. Her name is Sunny Jacobs and she was a dead woman
walking - walking free, that is, after being incarcerated for 17 years, 5
of them on death row in Florida, for 2 murders she did not commit.

In 1976, Sunny and her common-law husband Jesse Tafero were convicted of
the fatal shooting of two Florida police officers, based on the false
testimony of the real killer.

The profoundly shocking story of Sunny, then a 28-year-old mother of 2,
who suffered an isolation from family, friends and society that is beyond
recompense, was 1 of 6 death row tales - all miscarriages of justice -
told in the award-winning play, The Exonerated, a scorching indictment of
capital punishment, which came to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2005.

Like scores of other innocent men and women wrongly convicted and
sentenced to death in the US, Sunny was eventually released. That happened
in 1992, when the man who had committed the murders, Walter Rhodes,
confessed to the double shooting.

What was so unusual about Sunny - one of the most life-enhancing, joyous
people I know - was her complete lack of rancour, her ability to find
forgiveness in her heart for those who had so shamefully wronged her,
especially Rhodes and also the police who managed to lose and then
fabricate evidence against her and Tafero, the father of her 10-month-old
baby daughter, Tina. It was his misguided, trusting friendship with Rhodes
that led to him and Sunny witnessing the killings.

Despite his innocence, Tafero was sent to the electric chair, in 1990, in
one of the most botched procedures in the history of the American
executions. The chair malfunctioned and the executioner had to pull the
switch 3 times. It took Jesse more than 13 minutes to die - his head
actually bursting into flames.

Yet Sunny is a woman without a bitter bone in her body, a woman who
survived by meditating and practising yoga while held in the brutal
American penal system. There she made many lasting and loving friendships
with other prisoners. She once told me: "They took away my name and I
became a number. I was in there 17 years; I'm not gonna give them one more
minute of my life."

Why didn't she write a book, I asked, after she revealed how she had kept
a journal even in prison, written in minute script on scraps of toilet
paper, tissues, anything she could salvage. She didn't think she could
write, she said, and asked if I would help either edit or ghost-write her
story. She e-mailed me 6 different opening chapters, saying: "I don't know
where to begin."

"They came for me in the middle of the night," was the gripping opening
sentence of one version, telling how she was taken to the Correctional
Institute for Women, in Ocala, to a specially built death row because she
was the only woman in the state of Florida under sentence of death at the
time.

I read those opening words and called her, saying: "Sunny, you are a
writer." Now we have proof positive - her moving, redemptive memoir Stolen
Time: The Inspiring Story of a Woman Condemned to Death, which is very
much all her own work. It opens with that sentence and ends with this
courageous woman looking up at the sky over her home in Connemara, where
she now lives, and thanking the universe "for this amazing life. I love
life. I love my life. Thank you for this gift of life!"

Already embarked on her second book, which she's co-writing with her
67-year-old Irish partner, Peter Pringle, also a death row exoneree, she
says: "Whenever I get stuck with my writing I think, 'They came for me in
the middle of the night' - and what you said to me about being a real
writer. Those words have become my mantra."

Tiny and slender, with gamine features and an impish, sunny smile, Sunny
(her given name is Sonia) will be 60 tomorrow. On Saturday she returns to
Edinburgh - she was here two years ago, sometimes playing herself in The
Exonerated, and being garlanded with awards - to appear at the Book
Festival.

As she relates in Stolen Time, she was a young hippy mum, with one son,
Eric, then nine years old, when she met Tafero. The daughter of nice
Jewish middle-class parents, she grew up in New York. Her first marriage
to her childhood sweetheart, the father of her son, had already broken
down.

She was a totally nave 24-year-old, "a vegetarian, a flower child into
peace and love", when she fell in love with the gentle, soft-spoken
Tafero, who it emerged had a police record. They had been together for
three years and had their baby daughter, although the relationship was
already in trouble, when they made the mistake of taking a lift with
Rhodes.

When his car was stopped by two highway patrolmen, Rhodes shot them,
kidnapped Sunny, Tafero and the children, then drove off in the police
car. He then stole another vehicle, while holding the little family at
gunpoint. A high-speed chase with helicopters ensued. But Rhodes knew how
to play the system. After they were apprehended and charged, he took a
plea bargain, fingering Sunny and Tafero for the murders.

Now a grandmother of 3, Sunny spent 5 years in solitary confinement before
her death sentence was commuted to life and she was introduced into the
prison population. A decade later, she was finally released. She hasn't
received a penny in compensation.

There is something infinitely girlish about Sunny - "you don't grow in
prison, you stay the age you were when you went in, because you don't have
the experiences on which you grow," she says simply - as well as great
dignity.

"Although I'd revisited my story often in The Exonerated, telling it in my
own words, those words were like a protective shield for me. So I never
had to dig down really deep, into my innermost being. However, whenever I
played myself on stage, I was never able to do so without feeling real
pain," she confides.

"But writing Stolen Time has been doubly hard for me. I had to live
through everything that has happened to me again and again, and although
it's some time ago, a lot of it is still very raw. I had never spoken
before about what else had happened to me, about how my children suffered,
how they were robbed of their childhood with their mom. I had never spoken
about my deepest feelings about Jessse's terrible execution, or about what
my parents went through." In fact, while she was till in prison, her
parents were killed in a plane crash in 1982.

"It was years before I could speak about all of this to anyone, let alone
write about it," says Sunny. "I just kept it to myself, like some awful
festering thing. I didn't want to go back there. But, you know, people
face challenges all the time in their lives - my story is just a bit more
dramatic than most, I guess.

"I didn't think people would identify with my story, but they do. I have
toured in England and Ireland and Australia speaking about the book and
about the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. People have come up to
me and said, 'If you can forgive, I can forgive...' and then they tell me
their stories. It's a precious thing to be given these stories."

She sees Stolen Time as her chance to give back the ability to find
forgiveness. "I was given that gift," she says softly. "I hope I can share
that with other people. Many people have told me that they have bought the
book to give as a gift to someone they know who is troubled. Isn't that a
wonderful thing? To be able to help other people!

"When I'm told that my book is being given as a gift, I always say that
that is the spirit in which it was written."

Life has dealt further cruel blows. After Sunny was released from prison,
she was mown down in a car accident in LA and still suffers dreadful back
pain. She says: "Anger would strike many times, especially when I
discovered what tough times my children had had and the difficulties we
had coming together again. Sure, I felt angry about what happened to me
and what I suffered. But I refused to become a victim.

"I grieve, though. I grieve not only for what I lost but for what will
never be. All the possible futures I might have had with my children, all
the futures that they will never have, stolen from them too. I could get
angry all over again, but you grieve and then you get on with it. If you
don't, then depression hits you and that becomes a gnawing sickness inside
- and there's no hope for you then. I believe in hope. It really does
spring eternal. It's not about where you are but who you are that matters
- and what's inside yourself."

 Stolen Time by Sunny Jacobs is published by Doubleday at 14.99. Sunny
Jacobs is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 25 August at
7pm.

The death sentence: "After they sentence you to death they tell you
exactly how they are going to do it. They say they are going to send 2,200
volts of electricity through your body until you are dead - and then they
ask if you've anything to say!"

Survival: "If you sit there, rubbing 2 sticks together and crying on your
sticks, they're never going to make a spark. But if you stop feeling sorry
for yourself, just because you are determined not to believe in
hopelessness, then a spark happens, and then you keep fanning that wee
spark until you've got a flame."

Living in Ireland: "When I first came to Ireland I felt an incredible
sense of connection. After my release I didn't belong anywhere, but I felt
I belonged here. A place that's about peace; that is more interested in
healing than vengeance; where it's constitutionally not allowed to bring
back the death penalty; a place that's never gone to war; never colonised
another country. This is the perfect place for me."

(source: Jackie McGlone, The Scotsman)






IRAQ:

Court in 'Chemical Ali' trial hears testimony on executions


A former top aide to Saddam Hussein had 2 men tied to concrete blocks and
thrown from a helicopter into deep water in 1991, according to testimony
on Thursday, the 3rd day in the trial of Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as
Chemical Ali, and 14 co-defendants on charges of crimes against humanity.

The mother of the executed men, Leila Khadem Nasser, 56, said she had
found out about their fate after her brother and nephew, who had been
detained at the same time, were released.

"I asked them about my 2 sons," she said. "They said that they were
executed. My nephew told me that they tied concrete blocks to their feet
and threw them out of a helicopter in the Shatt al-Arab. That was nine
days after their detention."

She added, "My nephew said Ali Hassan al-Majid was the one who ordered
their execution."

Majid and 14 co-defendants are accused of crimes against humanity in the
brutal suppression of an uprising by Shiites in southern Iraq in 1991
after Saddam's forces withdrew from Kuwait, having been routed by an
American-led coalition.

Majid is known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing Kurdish villages in
the north, for which he received multiple death sentences. He has appealed
in that case.

Also on Thursday, Sunni Arab militants repelled an attack by Al Qaeda in
Mesopotamia north of Baghdad, in a battle that left at least 32 people
dead, news services reported, citing the police. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia
retaliated by kidnapping 15 women and children. The fighting underscored
the growing split between Sunni Arab militant groups and the Islamic
extremist group, a division that U.S. forces have sought to exploit.

In Baghdad on Thursday, American forces detained nine Iraqi policemen on
suspicion of involvement in a roadside bomb attack near a police
checkpoint, the U.S. military said, according to Reuters.

At the trial of Majid, the defendant himself cross-examined Khadem, asking
whether her brother had corroborated her nephew's story.

She said: "He didn't tell me anything. Every time he asked me about my 2
sons he started to cry. Maitham, my nephew, is the one who told me the
story, and he was tortured and beaten on his head."

Majid said that although he did not doubt the woman's account of what her
nephew told her, her testimony was based entirely on hearsay.

Another witness, testifying anonymously, said Thursday that he was
tortured in prisons in Basra and Baghdad. In the Basra prison, he said, he
was ordered to stand on a chair with a rope around his neck while officers
asked him to confess. They kicked out the chair from under him and let him
hang by the neck until he passed out, then they took him to another room
where he regained consciousness.

The witness said he saw a girl who had been serving tea to officers at the
prison forced into an adjoining room, and then he heard her screaming. He
realized that she had been raped when another officer congratulated the
officer who had taken her into the next room, telling him: "You have
married twice now. Good for you."

(source: International Herald Tribune)