[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

March 19




BARBADOS:

Mercy for victims' families too


It would be quite hard for any reasonable person to argue with any degree of 
strength that there is not significant merit in the suggestion of Director of 
Public Prosecutions (DPP) Charles Leacock QC on the way the Mercy Committee of 
the local Privy Council exercises its power in relation to murder convicts.

Just days after the release of Peter Bradshaw, the notorious killer of Francia 
Plantation owner Cyril Sisnett back in 1984; and Oliver Sinclair Archer, who 
was found guilty of manslaughter in relation to the killing of Andrea Williams 
in 2003 and sentenced to 25 years in prison, Leacock called for consultation 
with the victims' families before perpetrators are released early.

In essence, what we took from the DPP's submission is that there is tremendous 
value in balancing the success of the prison's rehabilitative programmes with 
the perpetrators and the sense among the families of the victims that justice 
has been served.

And in an environment where the imposition and execution of the death penalty 
are destined to become less frequently considered by those who administer the 
criminal justice system, it is very likely that the absence of consultation 
when the Mercy Committee is doing its work will lead to more frequent 
questioning of the process by the public.

We believe that as the society continues to evolve, acceptance back into the 
community of individuals who were imprisoned for the ultimate crime will be 
seen increasingly as a natural occurrence in our civilised environment. Indeed, 
it would be nothing less than hypocritical to expend resources on 
rehabilitating prisoners, have the experts certify their success, and then not 
be willing to release them back into the society.

But if the justification for each individual release can't at least be shared 
and discussed with the families of the victims, who themselves are victims, and 
their own concerns and reservations taken into consideration, then the value of 
early release will never be fully appreciated. We believe this is essential to 
the successful reintegration of released prisoners.

We also hold the view that while the family may not be a disinterested party in 
any such consideration or discussion, in many respects that family would 
constitute the nearest embodiment of the public's sentiment on such matters. 
And although there is no doubt that the individuals who make up the committee 
are honourable and respected members of the Barbadian community, it would be 
hard to equate them with the man in the street.

And it is that man in the street who would wish to be satisfied that all 
interests have been properly served when, for example, Oliver Sinclair Archer, 
who was given a life sentence in 1980 in Canada for killing Jennifer Wong, his 
girlfriend, was released early in 1988 on good behaviour and deported to 
Barbados 4 years later and then ended up being charged for 2 killings here, 1 
of them resulting in his 25-year sentence.

As far as we are aware that Mercy Committee is under no legal obligation to 
report to the public, but it certainly would make a positive difference to how 
Barbadians feel about its work if its procedures included some kind of 
interaction with the public, even if that "public" is restricted to the 
families of the victims.

We support limitations on the use of the death penalty, which we believe is a 
position being adopted by more Barbadians, but in the absence of carrying out 
the death penalty there is the possibility of more and more murderers being 
released back into the society eventually. It can't be unreasonable for those 
who will have to live with these supposedly rehabilitated murderers to know 
what factors guided the decision to release them early.

(source: Editorial, nationnews.com)






RUSSIA:

Putin says he needs someone to hang if Crimea bridge isn't built


President Vladimir Putin said he wants to identify an official who can be 
hanged if a bridge linking Crimea to Russia isn't built, as he complained that 
nobody wants to take charge of the project.

"There should be a specific person who can be hanged if it's not done," Putin 
said during a visit to Crimea to view construction work on Friday, the second 
anniversary of Russia's annexation of the peninsula from Ukraine. Officials 
keep passing responsibility for the work to colleagues in different ministries, 
he said.

Construction of the 19-kilometer (12 miles) bridge to end the peninsula's 
isolation is a "historical mission" for Russia that must be completed by Dec. 
18, 2018, Putin said. The span linking Crimea to Russia across the Kerch Strait 
will boost economic growth, he said.

Putin annexed Crimea in March 2014 after the peninsula approved joining Russia 
in a referendum branded illegal by the United States and the European Union, 
which imposed sanctions. The vote took place after masked, armed men seized the 
parliament and government buildings in the Crimean capital, Simferopol, 
following the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February. 
Putin at first denied sending troops to Crimea, then later admitted that 
Russian servicemen had assisted local self-defense units.

It was unclear if Putin was speaking figuratively when he made his threat, 
though a moratorium on the death penalty in Russia has been in force since 
1996.

The Crimean peninsula is connected to Ukraine and has no land link to Russia. 
It was conquered by Russian Empress Catherine the Great in the 18th century and 
became part of Ukraine only in 1954 -- a gift of then-Soviet leader Nikita 
Khrushchev.

Ukraine has vowed to reclaim Crimea. French President Francois Hollande and 
German Chancellor Angela Merkel "reaffirmed that the EU does not recognize the 
occupation of Crimea by Russia," at talks Thursday in Brussels with President 
Petro Poroshenko, according to the Ukrainian presidential website.

Crimeans' decision to join Russia should be respected and the peninsula's 
status can't "be the subject of any negotiations," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry 
Peskov told reporters on a conference call Friday.

Russia's "illegal invasion" of Crimea won't be accepted "under any circumstance 
and Moscow eventually has to end its occupation of Ukraine's sovereign 
territory," U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said on a visit to the Ukrainian 
capital, Kiev, in December.

(source: Chicago Tribune)






UNITED ARAB EMIRATES:

Trial of U.S. Citizens Detained in UAE Resumes


On Monday, March 21 the trial resumes in the UAE's prosecution of American 
citizens Kamal and Momed Eldarat. Arrested in the UAE in August 2014, the 
Eldarats were held in secret, tortured, and denied access to legal counsel. 
Monday's hearing could determine whether or not the father and son will be 
convicted of trumped-up terrorism charges.

On January 18, 2016, after nearly 18 months of detention, the Eldarats were 
charged with supporting 2 alleged Libyan terrorist groups during the Arab 
Spring. Neither groups are recognized by the U.N. as terrorist organizations. 
The Eldarats deny any involvement with the Libyan groups, which splintered in 
the wake of the country's civil war. The only "evidence" the prosecution has to 
support its claims is the signed "confessions" of the Eldarats - obtained under 
torture.

On the 1st day of the trial, which began on February 15th, the judge adjourned 
the case for 2 weeks. When the trial resumed on February 29th, it was again 
postponed after 30 minutes to conduct a forensic medical assessment of the 
allegations of torture and to call additional witnesses. If the court finds 
Kamal and Momed guilty, the father and son could face the death penalty with no 
right to appeal.

During these fits and starts, international pressure for the UAE to free the 
Eldarats is mounting. The prosecution of the Eldarats has been widely condemned 
by human rights groups and the United Nation's Special Rapporteur on torture 
issued a statement in February citing credible evidence that the Eldarats were 
tortured and called for Kamal and Momed's unconditional release.

This international pressure, coupled with the expected testimony of Libyan 
officials, including the country's former president, bolsters the Eldarats' 
chances for release. Furthermore, on March 14, 2016, a UAE court found 2 other 
Libyan nationals also charged with aiding armed groups innocent and the case 
was dismissed. That outcome bodes well for the Eldarats and their family. Both 
trials share common characteristics, including fabricated terrorism charges, a 
prosecution based on coerced confessions, retroactive use of a law, and 
prolonged, unlawful imprisonment.

There is no guarantee that the medical examination, carried out by a court 
appointed physician, heeded international standards for the investigation of 
torture. According to family member Amal Eldarat, Kamal and Momed's respective 
examinations did not exceed 5 minutes. It is difficult to imagine how the 
extent of the abuse can be assessed in such superficial examinations.

U.S. support for the Eldarats is essential for a just resolution of the case. 
While U.S. embassy personnel attended the hearings in January and February and 
plan to attend Monday's, the State Department has spoken of the Eldarats far 
too infrequently during their lengthy detention. When asked if she thought the 
U.S. government believes the UAE's allegations against her father and brother, 
Amal Eldarat told the Huffington Post, "I don't think they think it's legit, 
but they're silent."

Meanwhile, such silence has allowed UAE officials, like Ambassador to the U.S. 
Yousef al Otaiba, to spin their own distorted version of events to the American 
public. In response to a Washington Post story on the Eldarat's ordeal, al 
Otaiba stated, "just as in the United States, the defendants received a 
hearing, were represented by legal counsel and were allowed to contact their 
families and U.S. diplomatic representatives."

It is neither in the interests of the UAE nor the United States to let the case 
against the Eldarats drag on. The publicity surrounding the Eldarats is 
increasing, bringing light to the wider problem of the UAE's brutal state 
security apparatus and raising questions about Washington's alliance with Abu 
Dhabi. As Obama prepares to meet with GCC leaders in Saudi Arabia next month, 
there is a risk that the United States may prioritize its relations with a 
repressive ally over the human rights of American citizens. The U.S. government 
should do everything in its power to prove this is not the case.

(source: Human Rights First)






INDONESIA:

3rd Wave of Executions to Be Realized Soon: AGO


Attorney General Muhammad Prasetyo said that a number of drug convicts would 
face the 3rd wave of executions soon. While the number of death row convicts 
increased, Prasetyo claimed that the executions were hampered by weather 
conditions.

"It's difficult [to conduct executions] during the rainy season. We'll see 
about that. I've never said that the executions will be canceled. It's just a 
matter of time," Prasetyo said on Friday, March 18, 2016, without revealing 
names of convicts on death row.

Prasetyo also dismissed a rumor saying that the Attorney General Office (AGO) 
had been pressured by foreign countries to postpone the executions.

"There's no such thing. This is our law enforcement. We will enforce our law in 
our own country, and Indonesian law still applies death sentence," Prasetyo 
explained.

Therefore, the AGO would stick to the execution schedule, although a human 
rights organization Imparsial was in communication with Prasetyo asking the AGO 
to postpone this year???s execution.

Earlier, the AGO announced its target to execute 14 convicts in 2016 during the 
budget plan discussion with House of Representatives' Commission III. In 2015, 
the AGO conducted 2 waves of executions: the 1st one on January 18, 2015 and 
the second one in April 29, 2015.

(source: tempo.co)






ITALY:

The Catholic Movement Against Capital Punishment


On February 21st, as Mario Marazziti prepared Sunday lunch at his apartment in 
Trastevere, he had the television on, turned to Rai Vaticano, the Italian state 
channel devoted to coverage of the Catholic Church. It showed an image of Pope 
Francis in the window of the papal apartments overlooking St. Peter's Square. 
There - a 15-minute walk from Trastevere, via the old pilgrim road - Francis 
was leading the faithful in a set of prayers known as the Angelus. The Pope 
usually speaks briefly when the prayers are finished, and, on this Sunday, 
Francis called for a global moratorium on the death penalty, as part of the 
Year of Mercy he initiated last fall.

"The commandment 'Do not kill' holds absolute value and applies to both the 
innocent and the guilty," Francis said. He called for politicians to work for 
the abolition of the death penalty, and went on, "And I propose to all those 
among them who are Catholic to make a courageous and exemplary gesture: may no 
execution sentence be carried out in this Holy Year of Mercy."

Popes have denounced capital punishment for four decades, drawing on a much 
longer history of religious revulsion toward the practice; but, by calling for 
a moratorium, Francis turned opprobrium for the death penalty into a simple 
step that governments and their executives can take.

Marazziti had hoped that Pope Francis would offer a statement of support for 
the moratoria. He and his compatriots in the Community of Sant'Egidio, a 
progressive Catholic movement based in Rome, were instrumental in bringing it 
about. They had asked Francis to consider making such a statement in advance of 
a conference against the death penalty they had planned for the coming week.

It's the sort of request that Marazziti has made of public figures many times. 
He is a founder of the World Coalition against the Death Penalty, an alliance 
of more than 150 N.G.O.s, unions, bar associations, and other groups, which 
emerged out of a conference held at Sant'Egidio???s headquarters, in Rome, in 
2002. Meanwhile, the Community of Sant'Egidio has made the Colosseum - where 
Christians were thrown to the lions - a symbol of resistance to capital 
punishment, arranging for it to be lit up especially brightly at night each 
time a government renounces the practice. Marazziti and the movement he 
represents have created a patchwork consensus against the death penalty, and, 
in countries that still have the death penalty, such as the United States - 
retentionist countries, the movement calls them - it is a consensus that 
politicians are finding harder and harder to resist.

He sat down to lunch with his family: wife, mother-in-law, son, 
daughter-in-law, grandson. They talked about what they had just seen and heard. 
After the meal, he sent an e-mail to several thousand people with whom he has 
made common cause over the years (myself among them). "I am very happy," he 
said, and summarized Francis's message: "No Death Penalty, no executions, 
during Mercy???s Year. And never again."

Marazziti, who is 63, with thick, straight hair, travels light, bringing one 
change of clothes, a Moleskine knapsack full of late-model mobile devices, and 
gifts from Italy, for friends, wherever he is going. He worked for 3 decades as 
a television producer with RAI. After Silvio Berlusconi's ouster from electoral 
politics, Marazziti and several dozen other non-politicians stood for election 
in an attempt to infuse the government with fresh life from civil society. Now 
he is a member of Italy's lower house of parliament, the Camera dei Deputati, 
and the president of its social-affairs commission. The February conference - 
called A World Without the Death Penalty - was held in the body's chambers.

His true workspace, though, is out in the world, where he has travelled 
cheerfully and tirelessly since his late twenties, on efforts ranging from 
conflict mediation to AIDS relief to simple friendship. Most of his work is 
with the Community of Sant'Egidio, which emerged in Rome after the student 
uprisings of 1968 and now counts sixty thousand members worldwide (albeit only 
a few dozen of us in the United States). Its members fit humanitarian efforts 
into the space around their day jobs, and do so without compensation. Marazziti 
was long known as the Community of Sant'Egidio's "portavoce," or spokesman. As 
an elected official he has dropped the job description, which never suited him. 
What is he? "Humanitarian" is too starchy, "activist" too strident, "organizer" 
too prosaic. He is a person who goes places and does good things, making the 
impossible seem obvious. "Mario and Sant'Egidio walk the talk like none other," 
Lance Lindsey, the administrative director of the California Appellate Project 
and a longtime activist against the death penalty in that state, told me.

"On the global scene, no one has worked harder with me to abolish the death 
penalty than this man," Sister Helen Prejean, whose efforts were recounted in 
the book and film "Dead Man Walking," said last year. In addition to helping 
found the World Coalition, Marazziti has befriended men on death row, some 
plainly guilty, others later exonerated; made "Dominique's Story,", a 
documentary (narrated by John Turturro) about death row in Texas; and written a 
book, in English, called "13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty." (I 
contributed an afterword to the book.) And he has helped persuade several 
governors to bring about the abolition of the death penalty in their states - 
notably, Bill Richardson, in New Mexico, and Pat Quinn, in Illinois. "Mario and 
Sant'Egidio are very good at mixing policy and politics - and a little 
marketing," Richardson told me. "He made the trip to New Mexico. He promised a 
ceremony at the Colosseum if I signed the bill, and he delivered on it. An 
audience with the Pope [Benedict XVI]: well, that was just icing."

Sant'Egidio's members knew Jorge Mario Bergoglio when he was the Archbishop of 
Buenos Aires, and since Bergoglio was elected Pope, in March, 2013, they've 
maintained a bond of friendship and mutual trust. Andrea Riccardi and Marco 
Impagliazzo - the movement's founder, and its current president - met with Pope 
Francis before Sant'Egidio's annual Prayer for Peace, held in Tirana, Albania, 
last September - 2 weeks before Francis's speech to a joint session of 
Congress, where he spoke approvingly of the prospect of the global abolition of 
the death penalty. "Albania is one of the last countries in Europe to have 
abolished the death penalty, but we did not speak of this issue," Impagliazzo 
told me. They also rescheduled a November, 2016, conference on the death 
penalty for February, so as to tie it to the Year of Mercy, and asked Cardinal 
Reinhard Marx, of Munich - 1 of Francis's "group of 8" cardinal-advisers - to 
be a speaker. "We sent information about it through the Segreteria di Stato, 
well knowing the attention of Pope Francis to this issue and his longing for a 
world without the death penalty, asking for a message or whatever he may have 
thought more useful," Impagliazzo told me. He decided not to send a message to 
the conference but to send it worldwide, through the Angelus. He could not have 
been clearer."

"There was no arrangement, no deal," Marazziti said. "But we were pretty 
hopeful that it would happen. The Pope decides, and he decided to do it. I 
think he wrote his own remarks." (The papal spokesman, Federico Lombardi, S.J., 
did not answer a request for comment.)

In a moratorium, a government's legislature or head of state makes a pledge 
that the state will refrain from capital punishment for a period of time, 
although the death penalty remains on the books as a legal option. At the turn 
of the millennium, activists against the death penalty were divided between 
those seeking moratoria and those who would not work for anything less than 
full abolition. Marazziti favored the step-by-step approach. After the World 
Coalition was founded, in 2002, he organized a call for a resolution against 
the death penalty in the United Nations General Assembly, and it passed in 
December, 2007. (The United States voted against it.) "Although the Resolution 
was non-binding, it set an international moral standard," he explained in his 
book, "asserting that the death penalty was a question of human rights, not 
just one of internal justice. Capital punishment became an issue for the 
international community, and not just the 'good souls' at the NGO's."

The step-by-step approach to ending the death penalty is clearly working, both 
abroad and in the United States. During the conference in Rome, Marazziti 
summarized its progress: When the Helsinki Conference on Security and 
Cooperation in Europe took place, in 1975, 16 countries had abolished the death 
penalty. When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, 35 had done so. In 2016, 105 
countries have abolished the death penalty, and another 60 have not used it in 
a decade. Fewer than 30 countries have carried out executions in the past few 
years: among them China, Japan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, and 
the United States. Last year 28 people were executed in the U.S., the lowest 
number in 25 years.

The death penalty is on the defensive even in states where it enjoys robust 
popular support - and Marazziti and his associates have had a hand in this, 
too. In Oklahoma, for some years, executions were performed by lethal injection 
with a cocktail of 3 drugs. Through activists with the anti-death-penalty group 
Reprieve, Marazziti learned that 1 of the drugs - sodium thiopental - was 
manufactured in Liscate, near Milan, by an Italian subsidiary of the drug 
company Hospira, which is based in Lake Forest, Illinois. Because capital 
punishment is against the law in Italy, and because the drug was clearly being 
used for non-therapeutic purposes, Marazziti and activists with the European 
abolition movement Hands Off Cain concluded that the export of the drug was 
illegal. Hands Off Cain wished to denounce Hospira. Marazziti, instead, reached 
out to Italy's minister of justice and minister of health, and then entered 
into dialogue with representatives of Hospira. A week later, the company ceased 
to produce the drug in Italy. As The Atlantic has reported, Reprieve undertook 
a similar effort in England, and sodium thiopental became exceedingly hard to 
obtain, even on the black market. "This was the 1st crisis of the 
lethal-injection system in the U.S," Marazziti said.

Challenged in the courts in the United States, the death penalty is dying in 
the people's court of human rights, with Pope Francis's call for moratoria on 
capital punishment just the latest strike against it. I asked Marazziti what he 
saw as the practical effect of Francis's statement. "It creates a context in 
which politicians in difficult circumstances can do the hard thing, whether in 
Uzbekistan or the United States - to work for abolition, and to deal with 
public opinion," he said. "And it enables us to accompany them."

(source: The New Yorker)