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Japan | Hakamada found religion, but then felt under attack by ‘the devil’

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Editor's note: This is the last in a four-part series on letters that Iwao Hakamada wrote while on death row. About a decade after cursing God, Iwao Hakamada was baptized Catholic at the Tokyo Detention House on Dec. 24, 1984. “Since I have been given the Christian name Paul, I am keenly feeling that I should be aware of the greatness of Paul.” (June 1985)

Papua New Guinea: Death penalty by lethal injection given go-ahead

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April 9, 2014: the National Executive Council has given the green light for work to proceed in establishing necessary policies to enable the implementation of the death penalty through lethal injection.

On 7 March 2014, a government committee had recommended that lethal injections be the method of executing prisoners sentenced to death.

The death chamber will be set up within the new maximum security prison which will be built at Bomana, on the outskirts of Port Moresby.

Training for those who will be responsible for carrying out the death penalty will also be carried out by experts to be recruited by the government.

A highly placed government officer said thirteen prisoners on death row would be given the chance to exhaust all avenues of appealing their sentences.

Source: pngedge.com, April 9, 2014
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Every few years, from childhood until my late teens, my granddad would take me along with him to the small Texas town where he grew up—Normangee, population 522—to visit old relatives and even older graves. The drive took us up I-45, beyond the Houston sprawl, past pine forests, and eventually through Huntsville, epicenter of the state prison system. One of the city’s seven prisons was just off the interstate, and as we passed by I’d stare at the guard towers and barbed wire before turning my attention across the street to the Texas Prison Museum, which had its own mock guard towers in the parking lot. (“Prison” and “museum” were words that never seemed to go together.) Later, I learned that the museum’s central attraction was the wooden electric chair the state used for executions until 1964.
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20 Minutes to Death: Witness to the Last Execution in France

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Saudi authorities agree to postpone execution of Kenyan national

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Tennessee | New law allows death penalty for child rape

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