Attendees at a silent candlelight vigil in honor of Prabagaran Srivijayan -- a Mayasian migrant worker who was executed for drug trafficking on July 14 -- have been notified that they are the subjects of a police investigation. Read the rest

Nebraska's hereditary billionaire GOP governor Pete Ricketts is furious that the state legislature keeps overriding his vetos -- that is, the elected lawmakers pass laws, he tries to block them, and they overturn him -- so he's made an election issue of the state's dormant death penalty, spending $400K to put it on the state ballot next week. Read the rest

An execution in Arizona turned torturous yesterday, with convicted murderer Joseph Wood taking almost two hours to die after he was injected with a secret mixture of drugs. Read the rest

The entire current issue of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review is given over to the tragic wrongful execution of Carlos DeLuna, an almost certainly innocent man who was murdered by the state of Texas on 8 December 1989. DeLuna's case is one where "everything that could go wrong did go wrong" in the words of Columbia law Professor James Liebman, who, with 12 students, wrote the 436-page issue. None of the evidence that would have exonerated DeLuna was considered by police or the prosecution, and the likely culprit, a man who was also named Carlos, and who was frequently mistaken for DeLuna, went free. It's a nightmarish account of a man whom the authorities "knew" to be guilty, who was killed despite his innocence. It's a chilling reminder where laws like the UK's stop-and-search rules (which allow police to stop and search without suspicion, if they "just know" there's something wrong) and the no-fly list (which allows for the arbitrary removal of the right to travel without any public airing of evidence or charge, when authorities "just know" you're not safe to fly) will inevitably end up.

From a Guardian story by Ed Pilkington:

From the moment of his arrest until the day of his death by lethal injection six years later, DeLuna consistently protested he was innocent. He went further – he said that though he hadn't committed the murder, he knew who had. He even named the culprit: a notoriously violent criminal called Carlos Hernandez.

The two Carloses were not just namesakes – or tocayos in Spanish, as referenced in the title of the Columbia book.

The BBC airs an hour-long documentary tonight about "Interviews Before Execution," a hit talk show in China in which host Ding Yu interviews prisoners on death row. Some 40 million viewers in China tune in to the show each week.

Days, hours, or minutes before they are killed, the host talks inside prison to those who have been condemned to die. The BBC doc combines clips from the show with "never-before-seen footage of China's death row," and includes an interview with a local judge who questions the future of the death penalty in China.

More about the documentary, from the BBC website: Read the rest