[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 18



BOTSWANA:

Keganne Sentenced To Death


When Benson Keganne pulled the trigger of a pistol to kill Gloria Mahowe
in the morning of Saturday March 10, 2001 - eight years ago - in a bush
near Molapowabojang, little did he know that he was calling for an
appointment with the hangman.

The High Court has ruled that he killed the woman in cold-blood and he
deserved to be hanged by the neck until he dies. He stood still with a
blank facial expression as Justice David Newman delivered his ruling that
he killed a "Good Samaritan" execution-style, shooting her in the rear of
her neck leaving her in the bush to die.

Keganne, from Pitsane, and two South Africans from Madutle Village in the
North West Province - Kagiso Sebi and Amos Moloi - were also facing
charges of armed robbery with aggravating circumstances and the sentences
will be read tomorrow.

The men had pleaded guilty to all the charges. According to their
testimony, the 3 spent the previous night drinking beer and smoking dagga
at a bar in Madutle.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, they decided to walk to Pitsane
five kilometres away from where Keganne changed his clothes before they
went to the bus stop. Their mission to Botswana was to come and rob people
of their money, and they were armed with a pistol and a toy gun.

They got a lift from Mahowe at around 7am and on the way they took her car
over. Keganne then took to the steering wheel and they drove towards
Molapowabojang where they drove into a bush. They told the court that on
the way the deceased tried to escape, but they prevented her from doing
so.

When they arrived at a bush they looked for a rope to tie Mahowe to a tree
so that they could go and rob more people. They found no rope and decided
that they should kill her. Keganne took the woman and shot her in the neck
from behind, "execution-style", Justice Newman repeated.

He said that the two boys pulled the screaming woman under a tree and left
her to die. They claimed that they wanted to shield her from the sun.
After the murder, the three went to Mmathethe village where they robbed a
couple of their money and jewellery at gunpoint before fleeing to South
Africa with their loot. They dumped the stolen vehicle at the South
African border with Botswana.

The three, based their defence on the claim that they were drunk, which
Justice Newman dismissed as 'hogwash'. He said that the 3 walked a long
distance to Pitsane and they were aware of what was happening.

He said Keganne drove carefully from the spot where they hijacked the car
to the point where they killed Mahowe without causing any damage to the
vehicle. He pointed out that the 2 South Africans were lying when they
claimed that they pulled the dying woman under a tree for protection
saying they did that to avoid her being seen by people. Justice Newman
said the 3 committed the offence motivated by greed.

He identified as extenuating circumstance the ages of Sebi and Moloi. They
were 19-years-old, while Keganne was 26 at the time of the offence. He
also found that the roles the 2 played were not as extreme as Keganne's
although, there was no evidence that they were pressured into playing a
role. Justice Newman said that there were other means the men could have
used to disable the woman from disturbing them instead of taking her life.
Apparently, the deceased knew Keganne very well.

He reserved sentence for the 2 counts of armed robbery against Keganne.
The judge said he would deliver the sentence together with those for the 2
men for murder, and 2 counts of armed robbery.

Meanwhile, outside court, Gloria's widower, Peter Mahowe, welcomed the
sentence, but felt that the three should be forgiven and be slapped with a
life sentence. He lamented that his in-laws accused him of having a role
in the crime.

(source: Mmegi Online)






CANADA:

Lawyers tear into federal justice minister


Justice Minister Rob Nicholson appeared to be on a collision course with
members of the legal establishment Monday as he tried to promote the
Conservative government's aggressive law-and-order agenda.

Attending a meeting of the Canadian Bar Association, Nicholson was
challenged for failing to focus on dwindling legal aid, refusing to
protest death sentences imposed on Canadians abroad and axing legal
programs - including one that helped fund groups fighting for equality
rights.

"We do not need more minimum mandatory sentences. We need more resources
for the programs we have," said Victoria lawyer Susan Wishart, referring
to a contentious federal bill to impose automatic prison terms for
drug-related crimes.

Montreal lawyer Simon Potter, former president of the 37,000-member
association, chastised Nicholson for the Conservative government's policy
of not pleading for clemency for Canadians who face the death penalty when
they have been tried in countries deemed to be democratic.

Albertan Ronald Smith, for instance, is on death row in the United States,
and the government says it will not intervene.

"How do we expect Beijing to listen to our requests that Canadians not be
put to death in China when we will not even ask that Canadians not be put
to death in the United States?" asked Potter.

"When will we have a logically consistent policy on the death penalty
abroad?"

Nicholson calmly fielded questions for about 45 minutes. He faced the
strongest attacks from lawyers who appealed for federal intervention to
help Canadians who cannot afford legal fees.

While the provinces and Ottawa pay for legal aid in criminal cases, civil
legal aid is a rarity in Canada, and the bar association has pushed Ottawa
for years for national standards and increased funding.

Nicholson asserted that civil legal aid is a provincial responsibility,
with money provided by the federal Canadian Health and Social Transfer.

"The federal government says 'Talk to the provinces,' and the provinces
say 'Talk to the feds,' " said lawyer Susan McGrath, from Iroquois Falls,
Ont.

"In the meantime, every day that passes, people are losing their children,
people are being evicted, people are being put out on the street because
they are wrongly cut off disability benefits," she said.

"As the minister responsible nationally for justice issues, including
civil justice issues, what are you going to do to ensure civil legal aid
is separately carved out of the social transfer and is separately funded?"

Other lawyers took Nicholson to task for the Conservative government's
2006 cancelling of the Law Commission of Canada, a legal research body,
and the Court Challenges Program, a Trudeau-era program that helped fund
individuals and groups fighting government laws on Charter of Rights
grounds.

It was Nicholson's 1st appearance at the annual gathering of the bar
association and praise for his government's justice policies was virtually
non-existent.

Nicholson also announced Monday that the federal government will renew and
increase money for the aboriginal justice strategy, a cost-share
initiative with provincial governments to fund community-based programs,
mainly one dealing with intervention for young people who run afoul of the
law.

The government will increase funding by $40 million, bringing the total to
$85 million annually by 2012.

(source: Canwest News Service)






SOUTH KOREA:

Son fights to clear name of executed 'seductress spy'

Kim Soo-im was accused of passing military secrets to communists in N.
Korea

She was executed in 1950 by the South Korean military for espionage

Wonil Kim, son of Kim Soo-im and a U.S. colonel, is on a quest to bury the
myths


She was "The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America," a Seoul socialite
said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, an American
colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea. Kim
Soo-im was executed in 1950 for espionage. Declassified documents suggest
she was innocent.

In late June 1950, as North Korean invaders closed in on this panicked
city, Kim Soo-im was executed by the South Korean military, shot as a
"very malicious international spy." Her deeds, thereafter, only grew in
infamy.

In 1950s America, gripped by anticommunist fever, one TV drama told
viewers Kim's "womanly wiles" had been the communists' "deadliest weapon."
Another teleplay, introduced by host Ronald Reagan, depicted her as Asia's
Mata Hari. Coronet magazine, under the "seductress" headline, reviled her
as the Oriental queen of a vast Soviet "Operation Sex."

Kim Soo-im and her love triangle are gone, buried in separate corners of a
turbulent past. But in yellowing U.S. military files stamped "SECRET,"
hibernating through a long winter of Cold War, the truth survived. Now it
has emerged, a half-century too late to save her.

The record of a confidential 1950 U.S. inquiry and other declassified
files, obtained by The Associated Press at the U.S. National Archives,
tell a different Kim Soo-im story:

Col. John E. Baird had no access to the supposed sensitive information.
Kim had no secrets to pass on. And her Korean lover, Lee Gang-kook, later
executed by North Korea, may actually have been an American agent.

The espionage case, from what can be pieced together today, looks like
little more than a frame-up.

Her colonel could have defended her, but instead Baird was rushed out of
Korea to "avoid further embarrassment," the record shows. She was left to
her fate -- almost certainly, the Americans concluded, to be tortured by
South Korean police into confessing to things she hadn't done.

Historians now believe the Seoul regime secretively executed at least
100,000 leftists and supposed sympathizers in 1950. This one death, for
one American, remains a living, deeply personal story.

Wonil Kim -- son of Kim Soo-im and Col. Baird -- is on a quest to bury the
myths about his mother, a woman, he says, "with a passion for life, a
strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil, and drowned."

The son, a theology professor at California's LaSierra University, was the
first to discover the declassified U.S. documents. Now he has also found
an ally, Seoul movie director Cho Myung-hwa, who plans a feature film on
Kim Soo-im.

"He betrayed her," Cho said of Baird. "He could have testified. But he
just flew back stateside to his American family."

The soft-spoken theologian, 59, and the veteran moviemaker, 63, both say
that to grasp the Kim Soo-im story one must understand that young,
educated Koreans of the 1930s and 1940s largely favored recasting their
feudal country in a leftist mold once rid of their Japanese colonial
rulers. But the U.S. Army's Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, taking charge in
southern Korea at World War II's end, vowed to "stamp out" the communists.

Kim Soo-im, born in 1911, was among the educated elite. An orphan, she was
schooled by American missionaries, eventually graduating from Seoul's
prestigious Ewha women's college.

In 1936, as a female office administrator, she was featured in a Seoul
magazine article on the new generation of liberated young women. Smart and
fashionable, with a circle of sophisticated, politicized friends, she
later met an older married man, Lee Gang-kook, a German-educated
intellectual active in Seoul's leftist movement.

She became his lover, and Lee rose to political prominence after Japan's
defeat. But within a year of the U.S. takeover, he faced arrest as an
alleged security risk and fled to communist-run northern Korea.

Kim Soo-im's fluent English, meanwhile, had made her valuable to the U.S.
occupation. She was hired as an assistant by Baird, the Americans'
56-year-old, Irish-born military police chief. Baird secured a house for
her and took to spending nights there, according to Korean and American
witnesses in the declassified record.

"She had a baby by Col. Baird," Kim's friend Nancy Kim would later tell
U.S. interrogators. "We all knew. He slept in the house many times. The
baby looks like the father."

When the U.S. occupation army withdrew in 1949, succeeded by an advisory
corps, Baird shifted to assisting the national police, and his American
wife joined him in Korea.

Finally, on March 1, 1950, Kim, no longer U.S.-employed, was arrested by
South Korean police, joining thousands of others ensnared in President
Syngman Rhee's roundups of leftists.

"It was witch-hunting," said historian Jung Byung-joon, who has studied
the case. "The South Korean police and prosecutors hated her because she
was the lover of Lee Gang-kook, and then of Col. Baird, and nobody could
touch her. They waited for their chance."

On June 14, 1950, 9 days after Baird sailed from Korea, Kim Soo-im faced a
5-judge South Korean military court and a long list of alleged crimes,
including obtaining vehicles from the colonel that she lent or sold to
"communist" friends, and transporting Lee Gang-kook to the northern border
in 1946 with a U.S. Army jeep.

The most serious charge accused her of eliciting the classified 1949 U.S.
withdrawal plans from Baird, and relaying them to the northern communists.

As her court-appointed lawyer noted, the government presented neither
material evidence nor witnesses to back up the charges. But on the trial's
3rd day, according to a summary in the declassified U.S. file, Kim Soo-im
confessed and was sentenced to death.

Just weeks after her execution, however, and across the Pacific, U.S.
military investigators reviewing Baird's role were hearing confidential
testimony from Army officers indicating Kim's conviction was a contrivance
of the Seoul authorities.

On point after point -- alleged illicit use of jeeps, an Army truck, a
radio and other items for "communistic activities" -- Baird denied such
dealings with Kim, and the Army inspector general's office repeatedly
found that "the evidence does not substantiate the allegation," according
to the long-secret record.

On the espionage count, officers up to Gen. Hodge himself testified Baird
had no access to classified details of the troop withdrawal. Besides, the
withdrawal's outlines had been reported in Stars and Stripes, the military
newspaper available to all.

The investigators concluded there was only a "remote possibility" Kim
Soo-im used Baird as alleged -- one that couldn't be fully disproved,
since she was dead.

Col. William H.S. Wright, head of the Korea advisory group, testified that
her confession was probably forced through "out and out torture," probably
near-drowning, or waterboarding, as it's now known.

A Korean source backs this up. In a 2005 Seoul TV report on Kim Soo-im,
longtime government propagandist Oh Jae-ho said he learned from a police
official that the defendant had to be carried into the courtroom to
confess.

Wonil Kim believes his mother gave in because otherwise "they would send
her right back to the torture chamber."

The year-old orphaned boy was adopted by a church administrator and his
wife, a head nurse at the hospital where Kim gave birth. In 1970, the
Korean family moved to the United States, where Wonil Kim eventually
earned a Ph.D. in Old Testament studies.

He was told about his birth mother as a teenager, and her old friends
later informed him about his father, to whom he bears a strong
resemblance. The painful legacy never left his mind.

Not long before Baird died in 1980, at age 90, Wonil tracked the old
colonel down at a Rhode Island nursing home. Baird rejected his
illegitimate son, speaking instead of a "Mr. Smith" as the father, Wonil
Kim said. But after his death, Baird's family was "very warm and
accepting."

Crucial questions remain unanswered in the declassified files -- about the
mysterious Lee Gang-kook, for example.

A profile drafted by Army intelligence in 1956 said Lee reportedly was
employed by the CIA. And, in fact, the North Koreans executed Lee as an
"American spy" after the Korean War ended with a 1953 armistice.

Historian Jung, who discovered that declassified profile at the National
Archives in College Park, Maryland, still believes with other historians
that North Korean leader Kim Il Sung had Lee and other southerners
executed to eliminate potential rivals.

The isolated document remains a puzzle, nonetheless. Wonil Kim suspects
that his mother, entrusted with a U.S. military vehicle, did help her
lover Lee get to northern Korea in 1946, a time when it was still easy for
intelligence operatives to cross the 38th Parallel. Was Lee somehow linked
to the Americans?

This June his quest for the truth led Wonil Kim to a surprising figure, a
feeble, 88-year-old Seoul lawyer who as a young army officer was one of
five judges who sent Kim Soo-im to her death.

After meeting the son, elderly ex-soldier Kim Tae-chung spoke briefly with
the AP, defending the long-ago verdict, but saying he'd told Wonil that
Kim Soo-im "to me didn't look like a bad person."

Was she tortured? the AP asked. "All I know is what happened in the
courtroom," Kim Tae-chung protested.

Wonil Kim said he found the old judge "a very gentle kind of soul" who
"believes he did the right thing." Their hour together proved "cathartic"
for both men, he said.

And for a son on a sad, dutiful mission, it proved essential.

"I just needed to be with someone who was in the courtroom with her," he
said -- to talk about his mother, to summon up the memory of Kim Soo-im,
before that memory slips finally, forever into the grave.

(source: Associated Press)