最高法院18日裁定，因為阿拉巴馬州一名死刑犯的律師在關鍵時刻「遺棄」這名犯人，他有權獲得重審。
梅寶斯(Cory Maples)1995年以行刑方式，謀殺兩名男子，因而被定罪。代表他的律師為紐約Sullivan and Cromwell律師樓。該律師事務所未拆開通知梅寶斯上訴的信件，並把該信件退回法院，而法院書記官也沒有採取進一步行動，使梅寶斯錯失上訴的機會。
A convicted murderer who tried but failed to kill himself three weeks ago in prison was put to death by lethal injection on Thursday in Oklahoma in the country's first execution of 2012.
Gary Roland Welch, sentenced to death for the fatal stabbing of Robert Dean Hardcastle during a drug dispute in 1994, was declared dead at 6:10 p.m. on Thursday at the state prison in McAlester, prison spokesman Jerry Massie said.
Welch was the first U.S. inmate executed this year, and the first in Oklahoma since January 2011, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks death penalty data. He was 49 years old.
The Mongolian parliament’s approval of a bill which aims to scrap the death penalty is a vital step towards full abolition of the death penalty in Mongolia, Amnesty International said today.
Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island took a principled position when he refused an order from a federal court to transfer a prisoner to federal custody for prosecution because that would expose the prisoner to the death penalty. As Mr. Chafee said in a statement, that is “a penalty consciously rejected by the State of Rhode Island, even for those guilty of the most heinous crimes.”
