Texas: executions resume

HUNTSVILLE, Texas – A man convicted of murdering three people during a night of robberies more than 13 years ago in Fort Worth was put to death Wednesday evening in the nation's first execution of the year.

In a brief final statement, Curtis Moore, 40, thanked a woman who administers to the spiritual needs of death row inmates.

"I want to thank you for all the beautiful years of friendship and ministry," he told Irene Wilcox as she watched through a window a few feet from him. Moore never acknowledged a man who survived his attacks or five relatives of the three who died.

He was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m.

He exhausted his appeals in the courts and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles earlier this week refused a clemency petition that said he could be mentally retarded and ineligible for the death penalty. Courts earlier rejected similar mental retardation claims.

Moore was the first of six prisoners scheduled to die this month in Texas, the nation's most active death penalty state.

He was condemned for the fatal shootings of Roderick Moore, 24, who was not related to him, and Roderick Moore's girlfriend, LaTanya Boone, 21, both of Fort Worth. The two were found shot to death in a roadside ditch across from a Fort Worth elementary school in November 1995.

That same night, firefighters summoned to put out a car fire found Darrel Hoyle, 21, of Fort Worth, and Henry Truevillian Jr., 20, of Forest Hill, shot and burned.

Truevillian, robbed of $5, was dead. Hoyle, robbed of $150, survived and helped lead police to the arrest of Moore and his nephew, Anthony Moore, then 17.

Testimony at Curtis Moore's trial showed the shootings followed a drug ripoff, that he doused Hoyle and Truevillian with gasoline and ignited them as they were bound and in the trunk of a car.

Moore blamed his nephew, who pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in exchange for two life prison terms, for the slayings and contended he tried to rescue the victims from the burning car. But he acknowledged holding them at gunpoint and ordering them hogtied and stuffed into the trunk of the car.

Source: Associated Press, January 15, 2009

Singapore: Harvesting organs from death row donors

In his 12 years of practice, urologist Dr Lim (not his real name) has harvested kidneys from death row inmates a total of 6 times.

As 1 of the 15 doctors in the Ministry of Health's renal transplant team, he is occasionally rostered for duty whenever there are cadaveric kidneys to be harvested.

While most of the kidneys come from brain-dead stroke patients in hospitals, members of the renal transplant team are sometimes required to make a trip to Changi Prison to harvest the kidneys of a prisoner to be hanged.

The harvesting is a voluntary service and doctors do not get paid, he said. If a doctor is not available, he will be replaced by another assigned by a transplant coordinator.

Since hangings at Changi Prison take place on Fridays at 6am sharp, the 2 renal transplant surgeons - a junior and senior doctor rostered - will have to be at the prison by 5.30am.

Said Dr Lim, who was last rostered for duty a year ago: 'By 6am, the whole place will be very solemn and the gates will be closed. There is minimal movement in the prison complex. I'm not sure if this is out of respect for the person to be hanged.'

Also present will be the transplant coordinator and a team of nurses who would have with them the necessary surgical instruments.

If the prisoner wants to donate other organs, an eye doctor for the corneas, a plastic surgeon for the skin and an orthopaedic surgeon for the long bones will also be present.

While waiting for the hanging to take place, the group of doctors will wait in the prison cafeteria and have an early breakfast of roti prata and coffee, said Dr Lim.

Once the hanging has taken place, a flurry of activity will follow.

According to doctors, inmates who have been hanged must be pronounced dead and can be harvested for their organs only after cardiac death, or when their heart stops beating.

When this happens, blood and oxygen will no longer be circulating in the body and the organs will become damaged quickly. In hospitals, on the other hand, organs can be harvested after brain death.

Once the prison doctor has checked the inmate and pronounced him dead, the inmate will be taken from the noose, wrapped in a piece of cloth and put on a stretcher.

Prison guards will carry the body to an operating room nearby, a new feature in the new Changi prison complex.

Said Dr Lim: 'At the old Changi prison, we operated from an air-conditioned container room. It had two little operating tables, a changing area and a wash basin.'

Sometimes, when there is more than one hanging in the same morning, the doctors can be harvesting organs from 3 bodies at one go.

Once the body is laid on the operating table, the 2 urologists will be the first to 'rush in' because kidneys are most susceptible to damage, said Dr Lim. The heart and liver are usually not harvested as they get damaged very quickly after cardiac death.

The kidney surgeons are followed by the eye surgeon, then the plastic surgeon, and last will be the orthopaedic surgeon who will harvest the long bones, which are any of the several elongated bones from the limbs that contain marrow.

Said Dr Lim: 'Sometimes, the eye doctor will come in and we would harvest the organs simultaneously. There is a hive of activity in the operating room.'

He said he tries not to look at the face of the dead inmate when the face mask is removed. Most of the time, the face will look flushed from the hanging and sometimes, the tongue will stick out, he said.

Kidney surgeons are usually done extracting the organs within 20 minutes. The kidneys are individually and carefully packed into two ice boxes which are then passed to waiting courier vehicles. They are then delivered to the hospitals where the recipients will be waiting.

In the past, doctors had to deliver the kidneys to the hospitals themselves using their own cars, said Dr Lim.

'The junior doctor will usually be the driver. But we made noise. We have already done our job harvesting the kidneys and after that we still have to deliver them,' he said.

The courier service was brought in to perform the task about 2 years ago.

When asked if he was ever traumatised by the task of harvesting organs from death row donors, Dr Lim said: 'It is not a very difficult or complicated job. We are just like technicians, cutting and removing.'

No coercion

Prisoners on death row are not forced to donate their organs. Neither is the idea put to them by prison officers.

It is understood that those who request to donate their organs do so of their own initiative. The prison will then act as a facilitator. It will inform the health authorities about the prisoner's request, and the rest of the procedure will be arranged by the Ministry of Health.

Prisoners also have to declare which organs they wish to donate. The One-Eyed Dragon, for example, chose to donate his kidneys, liver and 1 good eye.

Source: Asia One, January 14, 2009

California: We all pay the price for death penalty

GOV. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared that we are facing "financial Armageddon," yet California continues to waste hundreds of millions of dollars on a dysfunctional death penalty.

This year's budget already makes deep cuts to drug treatment, struggling schools and mental health programs.

The very real prospect of a $40 billion budget deficit by June 2010 may require even more cuts. This puts every one of us at risk. We are cutting the very programs that help reduce violent crime and without them, violent crime may well increase.

Meanwhile, we continue to waste more than $250 million on an ineffective and broken death penalty, and it's a price we can no longer afford.

In these times of unprecedented budget shortfalls and financial crisis, it's important to understand how the state is spending that $250 million on the death penalty:

- $117 million is for the extra costs of death row housing, attorneys for the prosecution and defense, and court costs. These are the extra expenses we pay every year to have the death penalty in California-expenses that would disappear if we replaced the death penalty with permanent imprisonment (which has no opportunity for parole), but expenses that are required as long as we have a death penalty.

- $136 million is to begin construction of a new death row facility. We are forced to build a new death row because our current facility is overcrowded and broken down. The total estimated cost for completing the project is now $400 million and the costs for running the facility are estimated at $1 billion for the first 20 years.

While we waste more than $250 million on a death penalty that everyone agrees is flawed, we are slashing funding for education and vital services for the neediest Californians. Our escalating budget deficit and the failing economy will undoubtedly lead to even deeper cuts.

These budget cuts hit the programs that we most need to prevent violent crime: funding for struggling schools, drug treatment, mental health services, and assistance to the working poor; programs to reduce methamphetamine use and prevent domestic violence; programs that seek to protect our children from lead poisoning and the effects of parental drug use.

We are cutting programs that actually do result in fewer murders and reduce violent crime by protecting and assisting the most vulnerable: poor children. The impact of these cuts will last for a generation or more.

But we have a choice: If we simply replace the failing death penalty with condemning the worst offenders to permanent imprisonment, we could restore funding for all of these programs. That's right, all of these programs.

In tight budget times, we must all make tough choices. This choice should be easy. Do we pay $250 million this year for a death penalty that does no good, or do we provide food and health care to poor children, treatment to drug addicts and the mentally ill, support for struggling families and protection for the elderly?

For Californians who want to live in safe and healthy communities, the answer is clear. The time has come to replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment.

Source: Opinion, Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, represents Marin in the state Senate. He is chairman of the senate Public Safety Committee; Marin Independent Journal

Saudi man beheaded

January 11, 2009: Authorities in Saudi Arabia beheaded a Saudi man convicted of killing a fellow national after a dispute.

An Interior Ministry statement says Khaled Ahmad was executed in the northern town of Arar.

He was convicted of stabbing to death his compatriot Sultan al-Ruwaili in an argument. The statement did not explain the nature of the dispute.

Source: Ap, 11/01/2008

Saudi Arabia: former policeman executed

January 9, 2009: A traffic police officer in Riyadh was executed after he was convicted of kidnapping an expatriate man, raping him and taking away his money at gunpoint, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

The ministry identified the criminal as Ibrahim bin Abdul Aziz bin Mohammed Al-Oqail, who used the ministry's vehicle for the purpose. He was also accused of taking the mobile phone of the expatriate and driving under the influence of liquor, the statement said.

During investigation, Al-Oqail acknowledged the crimes he had committed and was then passed to the Shariah Court to give its verdict. The court decided to execute the man as a deterrent and lesson to others while the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Judiciary Council ratified the verdict, which was carried in Riyadh in presence of a number of witnesses.

The Interior Ministry said it would not allow anybody to undermine the Kingdom's security and stability and would punish those who try to attack or kill peaceful people or violate their honor by applying Shariah.

Source: Arab News, 10/01/2009

Iran: two public hangings

January 8, 2009: Two men have been hanged in public in the Chamran square of Jahrom (in Fars province, southern Iran), reported the local news website Jahromnews.

This site indicated the hanging might have taken place on January 7.

The men were convicted of murder according to the report.

Jahromnews published pictures from the hanging and according to this site the men who were hanged were identified as Mojtaba Roozgar (age not given) and Mohammad Hossein Roozgar , 24, convicted of a murder 5 years ago.

Source: Iran Human Rights, 13/01/2009

Child rapist re-sentenced to life

GRETNA (AP) — A man whose conviction led the U.S. Supreme Court to ban the death penalty for child rape last year has been re-sentenced and will spend life in prison.

During a brief hearing Wednesday, 44-year-old Patrick Kennedy appeared in shackles before state District Judge Ross Ladart to receive the mandatory life term.

Kennedy, of Harvey, had been convicted of aggravated rape of a juvenile under age 12 and was sentenced to die under a Louisiana law that allowed such punishment for that crime. The U.S. Supreme Court considered whether the death penalty is a disproportional punishment for child rape. Its 5-4 decision, handed down June 25, banned the punishment, effectively eliminating Louisiana’s statute as well as similar ones in five other states.

Source: theadvertiser.com, January 13, 2009