A bill to repeal the Maryland death penalty failed in the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee Thursday when the committee members tied in a 5-5 vote. Swing vote Sen. Alex X. Mooney (R) voted against the bill after unsuccessfully lobbying for an exemption for prisoners who kill again while serving a jail term. Bill sponsor [...]
Italy has asked the Italian Constitutional Court to cancel the indictments of 34 American and Italian intelligence officials in connection with the 2003 kidnapping and rendition of Egyptian cleric and suspected terrorist Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr from Italy. Lawyers for the state say prosecutors exceeded their authority by using evidence that was protected by the [...]
The Supreme Judicial Council of Pakistan Friday removed all restrictions on the liberty of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry , suspended for misconduct last week by President Pervez Musharraf . Chaudhry appeared in front of the Council for an initial hearing Tuesday and returned Friday to hear its ruling as hundreds of lawyers and political opponents [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled en banc Thursday that Robert Comer, an inmate on death row, "is competent to waive further proceedings… has chosen to do so voluntarily," paving the way for Comer's desire to allow his execution in Arizona to proceed. Comber, who was convicted in 1988 of one [...]
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed testified Saturday at a military status hearing at Guantanamo Bay that he personally "decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in Karachi," according to a statement initially withheld from Wednesday's release of the hearing transcript to allow the notification of Pearl's family. The statement, which [...]
A French court convicted a doctor for the poisoning death of a terminally ill cancer patient Thursday. Dr. Laurence Tramois was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence for prescribing a fatal dose of potassium chloride that resulted in the death of Paulette Drualis in August 23, 2003. The case has stirred debate over the [...]
The Japanese government has found no evidence that so-called Korean and Chinese "comfort women" were forced into sexual slavery during World War II, according to a cabinet statement provided to a Japanese lawmaker Friday. According to the statement, the government has not come across evidence that "directly shows so-called 'coercion' on the part of the [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University School of Law says the sweeping Guantanamo "confessions" of al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed rival the scope of those made in the Stalinist purge trials of the 1930s, and should equally prompt us to question the legal process in which they were made… Students of the [...]
The Chinese National People's Congress on Friday approved a landmark law protecting private property by a 2799-52 vote. Chinese lawmakers have been considering the bill for over 13 years, and the final version grants equal protections to both public and private property and states that the "property of the state, the collective, the individual and [...]
International police organization Interpol Thursday agreed to issue arrest notices for six men thought to be connected with the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. Argentina had initially sought to have a number of high ranking Iranian officials, including former Iran President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani arrested, but [...]
