[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Oct. 12



SAUDI ARABIA:

2 Saudis beheaded for murder


2 Saudi men were beheaded by the sword on Sunday after they were convicted
of murdering two compatriots, the Saudi interior ministry said.

Musaed bin Attiyah al-Ruwaili was executed in the northern town of Ar'ar
after he was found guilty of "detaining, beating and electrocuting Ahmad
bin Obaid al-Anzi until he passed away," the ministry said in a statement
carried by the official SPA news agency.

Badr bin Hmoud al-Khumaisi was executed in the western Jeddah region after
he was found guilty of fatally shooting Shayem bin Saleh al-Rashidi
following a dispute, the ministry said.

The beheadings bring to 74 the number of executions announced by Saudi
Arabia this year.

Last year, a record 153 people were executed in the oil-rich Gulf kingdom,
which applies a strict version of Sharia, or Islamic law. This figure
compared with 37 in 2006 and the previous record number of 113 executions
in 2000.

Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking can all carry
the death penalty in the ultra-conservative country, where executions are
usually carried out in public.

(source: The Times of India)






SOMALIA:

3 Somalis sentenced to death


A Somali court yesterday handed death sentences to 3 men convicted of
kidnapping a British national working for a Canadian oil firm in the
breakaway region of Puntland, an official said.

"The 3 defendants were sentenced to death after they were found guilty of
being kidnappers," said Mohamed Abdi Aware, head of the supreme court in
the Puntland port town of Bosasso.

A 4th suspect was handed a 15-year prison term in absentia for assisting
the trio in kidnapping Carl Fletcher, who worked for Africa Oil
Corporation, in Puntland on Wednesday. Security forces freed him hours
later.

Puntland usually executes its death row convicts by firing squad.

Armed gangs in Puntland and elsewhere in Somalia have carried out scores
of kidnappings in recent months, often targeting foreigners or Somalis
working with international organisations to demand ransoms.

The self-declared state of Puntland in the north has been largely spared
the latest violence, but it has been used by pirates seizing foreign
vessels and gangs smuggling goods, arms and people across the Gulf of
Aden.

(source: Agence France Presse)



NIGERIA:

Govt to Make Kidnapping Capital Offence


In a bid to stem the alarming and embarrassing spate of kidnappings in
Abia State, the government has said it would soon make the offence attract
a capital punishment, just like armed robbery.

The new anti-kidnapping measure was made known by the state attorney
general and commissioner for justice, Mr. Okey Amechi, while speaking at
this year's Legal Year celebration held at the Michael Okpara auditorium
Umua-hia.

He said a bill has already been sent to the State House of Assembly and
once passed into law and assented to by the governor kidnappers in Abia
State would face the same music as convicted armed robbers.

The commissioner, who was represented at the event by the director of
civil litigation Mrs. Scholastica Chioma, noted that efforts geared at
reforming the administration of the justice system in the country cannot
yield fruits until the Bar and Bench come to agreement.

He specifically called for collective synergy between the Bar and the
Bench in order to institutionalise an efficient justice delivery system as
nothing could be achieved in the face of myriads of dichotomy existing
between the bench an the bar.

Amechi therefore called for more cooperation between the Bar and the
Bench, saying the Practice Direction guidelines issued by the Chief Judge
of the state on assumption for quick disposal of cases in courts, would
suffer serious setbacks without the co-operation of the 2 legal bodies.
The Commissioner for Justice lamented the rising cases of professional
misconducts in the bar including bribery, fraudulent activities and
embezzlement of clients money and urged that members of the bar should
adhere strictly to ethics of the legal profession.

In his speech the Chief Judge, Justice Sunday Imo, said a total of 6, 374
criminal and civil matters were brought before the High Courts in the
state in the preceding year and that a total of 1, 238 of them were
disposed.

Governor Theodore Orji, represented by his deputy, Comrade Chris Akomas,
pledged to bring more succour to the state judiciary, saying that he was
aware that those who sit in judgement must be insulated from avarice and
corruption so as to discharge their duties effectively.

(source: This Day)






UGANDA:

Abolish death penalty - European Union


THE European Union (EU) has urged the Government to abolish the death
penalty and devise viable alternatives to capital punishment.

"The EU is the leading institutional actor in contesting the death penalty
worldwide and its actions in this area represent a key priority of its
external human rights policy," said Ambassador Vincent de Visscher.

He was speaking at the launch of a book titled: "Towards Abolition of the
Death Penalty in Uganda," at the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative
(FHRI) head offices in Nsambya on Friday.

Visscher said: "The EU considers capital punishment to be a cruel and
inhuman punishment, which fails to provide deterrence to criminal
behaviour and represents an unacceptable denial of human dignity and
integrity."

"It is impossible to become a member of the EU without first abolishing
the death penalty."

Although the death sentence is still law in Uganda, the Constitutional
Court has recently ruled that it was not mandatory to pass the sentence.

Livingstone Ssewanyana, the FHRI executive director, said there was need
for solutions and alternatives like life-imprisonment, which are more
viable than death.

(source: The New Vision)





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RUSSIA----book review:

In search of ... 'The Lost Spy'


On the night of Feb. 20, 1939, three Soviet secret policemen knocked on a
door at the Hotel Moskva in the Russian capital. They demanded to see the
(fake) passport of its occupant, gave him a few minutes to gather some
belongings and whisked him away to the notorious Lubyanka prison. Charged
with espionage, he was questioned for almost a year before being sentenced
to eight years in Norilsk, a mining center hundreds of miles above the
Arctic Circle and one of the bleakest islands in the Gulag Archipelago.

So far, so routine. Something like this happened to millions of Russians
during Stalin's paranoid regime. But this arrestee was different. He was
an American citizen named Isaiah Oggins. And he was not spying for his
native land. Since the 1920s, he had been a Russian spy, working in
several countries, including his own. Andrew Meier's a biography of
Oggins, "The Lost Spy," is, necessarily, a little vague on those matters.
Putting it mildly, it is not in the nature of a secret agent's work to
leave an easily documented record of his clandestine activities.

Nevertheless, "The Lost Spy" is utterly fascinating, a sad and sinuous
study of true belief carried beyond all reason by a man who committed
himself to the labyrinthine way without once, so far as Meier can
determine, openly discussing what motivated him or offering an ideological
rationale. That makes him, in some sense, a perfect spy, a guy who took
his secrets with him to his unmarked grave.

In retrospect, it is easy to imagine Cy -- the name he formally adopted --
Oggins leading an entirely different life. The son of Russian Jewish
immigrants, he was born in Willimantic, Conn., where his father was a
shopkeeper. Meier, a former Moscow correspondent for Time magazine,
speculates that his radicalization may have begun when the Industrial
Workers of the World attempted to organize the American Thread Co.,
Willimantic's dominant employer, during the radical agitations that
preceded America's entry into World War I.

Maybe so, but Cy entered Columbia University in 1917 intent upon becoming
a historian. He probably supported the antiwar movement and was certainly
influenced by the oppressive campaign against radicals in the postwar
years. But one suspects it was his courtship and marriage to Nerma Berman,
a tiny, noisy, radical firebrand, that completed his conversion to
communism. Still, for a time he pursued his doctorate at Columbia, while
Nerma worked and studied at the Rand Institute, then the nation's most
famous leftist school. When his money ran out, he took an editorial job at
Yale University Press. By 1928, the couple were in Berlin, working for the
Soviets.

There, they rented a house the Russians used as headquarters for decoding
and disseminating stolen documents. Later, they were in Paris, keeping an
eye on a Romanov relative active in resistance to the Soviets. Still
later, Cy was in Manchuria, helping to manage a rather wonky aircraft
business but actually keeping an eye on Japanese expansion in the region.
His work was very hush-hush but quite low-level.

It's hard to see what of import Cy accomplished in these posts. Indeed,
it's hard to determine what any spy did then that changed the world. They
may have played a sometimes deadly game, but it was largely a feckless
one.

Espionage, however, seems almost incidental to Meier's book. What it
offers that is more interesting is a tour of the more public world of
left-wing intellectuals at the time. At Columbia, Cy knew Charles Beard
(he of the Constitution's economic interpretation) and Whittaker Chambers.
At Rand, Scott Nearing, the golden throat of American radicalism,
twitterpated Nerma. The couple were close with Sidney Hook -- beginning
his famous journey from left to right --who had the clearest, earliest eye
for the monstrousness that lay behind Soviet propaganda.

The portrait Meier paints is of a deeply shadowed world, where even the
politicians and public intellectuals largely prated nonsense, befuddled by
the contrast between the heroic party line and the true horrors of the
Soviet police state.

Despite the stumbling efforts of the State Department to secure his
release, it never happened. By 1947, when his prison term was up, the
Russians suspected, possibly rightly, that he would spill such secrets as
he had to Sen. Joe McCarthy and his burgeoning ilk. They executed Oggins
in a particularly painful manner, by lethal injection.

One wishes that Meier might have found more eyewitnesses to this story,
more revelatory documents, for there are times when his "must have, might
have" constructions irritate. Still, he's done what he can. The history of
Communist Russia is one of huge, sickening and infinitely deadly
betrayals, so perhaps Cy Oggins' story is only a minor one. Or perhaps
not. You could as well argue that it tells us all we really need to know
about how the totalitarian spirit perfected itself in the middle of the
20th century.

(source: Richard Schickel, Los Angeles Times)