Even for China, the sentence is an unusually harsh one. In the wake of international scandals over contamination of food products shipped from China, the former head of the country’s…
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a federal judge’s decision to deny an evidentiary hearing to a death-row inmate who refused to allow mitigating evidence at his trial.
In a move that could be influential elsewhere, New Jersey legislators will start considering this week whether to abolish the state’s death penalty and may well do so. If that…
Texas is a state known for its aggressive prosecution of death penalty cases and frequent executions, but even here some feel proposed legislation to provide for capital punishment of child…
On this day in 1886, someone among 200 or so workers at a labor rally near Chicago’s Haymarket Square threw a bomb into a group of 176 police officers. Police…
On this day in 1792, the guillotine reportedly was first used in France to execute a highwayman, Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier. At the time, despite its subsequent notoriety as a means of…
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy provided the crucial swing vote yesterday in three Supreme Court cases striking down the death sentences of Texas inmates, a New York…
On this day in 1800, President John Adams approved a then-hefty $5,000 appropriation to establish the Library of Congress, 20 percent of which went for law books (mainly on British…
On Wednesday, the lawyer for a Texas death-row inmate will argue before the U.S. Supreme Court that his client should not be executed because he cannot understand the link between…