Death Penality

Virginia is one of the US states with the most executions, but that could soon come to an end. The Virginia Senate passed a bill on Wednesday that would end the death penalty.

Twenty-one senators voted in favor of the bill, 17 senators against, which is in line with the majority of the Democrat-controlled Senate. Now the House of Representatives is also expected to confirm the bill, where the Democrats also have a majority over the Republicans. Democratic Governor Ralph Northam has also said he supports the bill.

The Democratic State Rep. Athena Salman has published a series of tweets shedding light on legislation draft "HB 2650" handed in by multiple Republican State Representatives.

If the legislation would pass, all abortions would be classified as first degree murder and a "class 1 felony" which "is punishable by death or life imprisonment".

The President of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has signed parliamentary ratification and with this committed the country to abolish the death penalty. This follows a freeze on capital punishment for nearly 20-years.

The Trump administration has executed Death row inmate Brandon Bernard on Thursday after a petition for a delay was denied by the Supreme Court. Bernard was involved in the killing of an Iowa religious couple in 1999. The couple was shot by his accomplice Christopher Vialva and later burned in their car by Bernard. Bernard was 18 at the time of the crime and people have argued that he should not be executed due to his young age and the fact that he didn't shoot the victims.

His lawyers further argued that Bernard should be given life in prison without parole and Kim Kardashian West called for Trump to grant him a commutation, as he maintained a good record and worked with outreach programmes to stop people from getting involved in crime during his time in jail.

"I'm sorry. That's the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day," Bernard said shortly before being executed. He died at 9:27pm local time.

Two Chinese courts in the Guangdong province have sentenced two Canadian citizens to death in two days.

The Canadian Xu Weihong had been tried in front of the Guangzhou Municipal Intermediate Court, while the now sentenced Ye Jianhui had been tried in front of the Foshan Municipal Intermediate Court for the manufacturing and transportation of drugs.

The police had previously seized around 218 kilograms of MDMA in the form of white crystals from a room that had been used by Ye Jianhui and Lu Hanchang. The latter one has been sentenced to jail time together with three other people involved in the operation. They received between seven years and a life sentence.

In total, four Canadian citizens have been sentenced to death in the past two years.

Daniel Lewis Lee has been executed by the United States after the Supreme Court had rejected a last-minute appeal by family members to postpone the execution.

The Supreme Court had decided in a 5-4 vote that the Justice Department can go forward with carrying out the death penalty and rejected the appeal stating that "The plaintiffs in this case have not made the showing required to justify last-minute intervention by a federal court".

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has decided that the United States Department of Justice can proceed with its plan to carry out the first federal death sentence in 17 years. Daniel Lewis Lee had been sentenced to death for a family murder of three in 1996. Some of his family members had sued the Department of Justice arguing that couldn't safely travel to witness the execution because of the ongoing pandemic. A federal judge in Indiana initially suspended the execution plans only to be overruled by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

The family has stated that they are planning to appeal to the Supreme Court.