THE HUMANITARIAN THEORY OF PUNISHMENT [ARTICLE ON THE DEATH PENALTY OF THE WEEK ~ SUNDAY NOVEMBER 17, 2013 TO SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23, 2013]

November 21, 2013, 8:03 am

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NOTICE: The following article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to violate their copyright. I will give some information on them. One of my favourite writers, C.S. Lewis passed away on this date, 22 November 1963. I will post one of his articles to remember the 50^th anniversary of his death.

ARTICLE TITLE:The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment

DATE: 1949

AUTHOR: C.S. Lewis

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly called C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, and Christian apologist. Born in Belfast, Ireland, he held academic positions at both Oxford University (Magdalen College), 1925–1954, and Cambridge University (Magdalene College), 1954–1963. He is best known both for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. Both authors served on the English faculty at Oxford University, and both were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the "Inklings". According to his memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis had been baptized in the Church of Ireland (part of the Anglican Communion) at birth, but fell away from his faith during his adolescence. Owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, at the age of 32 Lewis returned to the Anglican Communion, becoming "a very ordinary layman of the Church of England". His faith had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.

In 1956, he married the American writer Joy Davidman, 17 years his junior, who died four years later of cancer at the age of 45. Lewis died three years after his wife, from renal failure, one week before his 65th birthday. Media coverage of his death was minimal; he died on 22 November 1963—the same day that U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the same day another famous author, Aldous Huxley, died. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis will be honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularized on stage, TV, radio, and cinema.

URL:http://www.angelfire.com/pro/lewiscs/humanitarian.html

http://www.olena.com/edu/downloads/intro-philosophy/pchapter-7.pdf

C. S. Lewis

In England we have lately had a controversy about Capital Punishment. I do not know whether a murderer is more likely to repent and make good on the gallows a few weeks after his trial or in the prison infirmary thirty years later. I do not know whether the fear of death is an indispensable deterrent. I need not, for the purpose of this article, decide whether it is a morally permissible deterrent. Those are questions which I propose to leave untouched. My subject is not Capital Punishment in particular, but that theory of punishment in general which the controversy showed to be called the Humanitarian theory. Those who hold it think that it is mild and merciful. In this I believe that they are seriously mistaken. I believe that the “Humanity” which it claims is a dangerous illusion and disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end. I urge a return to the traditional or Retributive theory not solely, not even primarily, in the interests of society, but in the interests of the criminal.

According to the Humanitarian theory, to punish a man because he deserves it, and as much as he deserves, is mere revenge, and, therefore, barbarous and immoral. It is maintained that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter others by example or to mend the criminal. When this theory is combined, as frequently happens, with the belief that all crime is more or less pathological, the idea of mending tails off into that of healing or curing and punishment becomes therapeutic. Thus it appears at first sight that we have passed from the harsh and self-righteous notion of giving the wicked their deserts to the charitable and enlightened one of tending the psychologically sick. What could be more amiable? One little point which is taken for granted in this theory needs, however, to be made explicit. The things done to the criminal, even if they are called cures, will be just as compulsory as they were in the old days when we called them punishments. If a tendency to steal can be cured by psychotherapy, the thief will no doubt be forced to undergo the treatment. Otherwise, society cannot continue.

My contention is that this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being.

The reason is this. The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust. I do not here contend that the question ‘Is it deserved?’ is the only one we can reasonably ask about a punishment. We may very properly ask whether it is likely to deter others and to reform the criminal. But neither of these two last questions is a question about justice. There is no sense in talking about a ‘just deterrent’ or a ‘just cure’. We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.

The distinction will become clearer if we ask who will be qualified to determine sentences when sentences are no longer held to derive their propriety from the criminal’s deservings. On the old view the problem of fixing the right sentence was a moral problem. Accordingly, the judge who did it was a person trained in jurisprudence; trained, that is, in a science which deals with rights and duties, and which, in origin at least, was consciously accepting guidance from the Law of Nature, and from Scripture. We must admit that in the actual penal code of most countries at most times these high originals were so much modified by local custom, class interests, and utilitarian concessions, as to be very imperfectly recognizable. But the code was never in principle, and not always in fact, beyond the control of the conscience of the society. And when (say, in eighteenth-century England) actual punishments conflicted too violently with the moral sense of the community, juries refused to convict and reform was finally brought about. This was possible because, so long as we are thinking in terms of Desert, the propriety of the penal code, being a moral question, is a question n which every man has the right to an opinion, not because he follows this or that profession, but because he is simply a man, a rational animal enjoying the Natural Light. But all this is changed when we drop the concept of Desert. The only two questions we may now ask about a punishment are whether it deters and whether it cures. But these are not questions on which anyone is entitled to have an opinion simply because he is a man. He is not entitled to an opinion even if, in addition to being a man, he should happen also to be a jurist, a Christian, and a moral theologian. For they are not question about principle but about matter of fact; and for such cuiquam in sua arte credendum. Only the expert ‘penologist’ (let barbarous things have barbarous names), in the light of previous experiment, can tell us what is likely to deter: only the psychotherapist can tell us what is likely to cure. It will be in vain for the rest of us, speaking simply as men, to say, ‘but this punishment is hideously unjust, hideously disproportionate to the criminal’s deserts’. The experts with perfect logic will reply, ‘but nobody was talking about deserts. No one was talking about punishment in your archaic vindictive sense of the word. Here are the statistics proving that this treatment deters. Here are the statistics proving that this other treatment cures. What is your trouble?

The Humanitarian theory, then, removes sentences from the hands of jurists whom the public conscience is entitled to criticize and places them in the hands of technical experts whose special sciences do not even employ such categories as rights or justice. It might be argued that since this transference results from an abandonment of the old idea of punishment, and, therefore, of all vindictive motives, it will be safe to leave our criminals in such hands. I will not pause to comment on the simple-minded view of fallen human nature which such a belief implies. Let us rather remember that the ‘cure’ of criminals is to be compulsory; and let us then watch how the theory actually works in the mind or the Humanitarian. The immediate starting point of this article was a letter I read in one of our Leftist weeklies. The author was pleading that a certain sin, now treated by our laws as a crime, should henceforward be treated as a disease. And he complained that under the present system the offender, after a term in gaol, was simply let out to return to his original environment where he would probably relapse. What he complained of was not the shutting up but the letting out. On his remedial view of punishment the offender should, of course, be detained until he was cured. And or course the official straighteners are the only people who can say when that is. The first result of the Humanitarian theory is, therefore, to substitute for a definite sentence (reflecting to some extent the community’s moral judgment on the degree of ill-desert involved) an indefinite sentence terminable only by the word of those experts—and they are not experts in moral theology nor even in the Law of Nature—who inflict it. Which of us, if he stood in the dock, would not prefer to be tried by the old system?

It may be said that by the continued use of the word punishment and the use of the verb ‘inflict’ I am misrepresenting Humanitarians. They are not punishing, not inflicting, only healing. But do not let us be deceived by a name. To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of ‘normality’ hatched in a Vienese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors hav succeeded or I grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success—who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared—shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust—is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard.

If we turn from the curative to the deterrent justification of punishment we shall find the new theory even more alarming. When you punish a man in terror em, make of him an ‘example’ to others, you are admittedly using him as a means to an end; someone else’s end. This, in itself, would be a very wicked thing to do. On the classical theory of Punishment it was of course justified on the ground that the man deserved it. That was assumed to be established before any question of ‘making him an example arose’ arose. You then, as the saying is, killed two birds with one stone; in the process of giving him what he deserved you set an example to others. But take away desert and the whole morality of the punishment disappears. Why, in Heaven’s name, am I to be sacrificed to the good of society in this way?—unless, of course, I deserve it.

But that is not the worst. If the justification of exemplary punishment is not to be based on dessert but solely on its efficacy as a deterrent, it is not absolutely necessary that the man we punish should even have committed the crime. The deterrent effect demands that the public should draw the moral, ‘If we do such an act we shall suffer like that man.’ The punishment of a man actually guilty whom the public think innocent will not have the desired effect; the punishment of a man actually innocent will, provided the public think him guilty. But every modern State has powers which make it easy to fake a trial. When a victim is urgently needed for exemplary purposes and a guilty victim cannot be found, all the purposes of deterrence will be equally served by the punishment (call it ‘cure’ if you prefer0 of an innocent victim, provided that the public can be cheated into thinking him will be so wicked. The punishment of an innocent, that is, an undeserving, man is wicked only if we grant the traditional view that righteous punishment means deserved punishment. Once we have abandoned that criterion, all punishments have to be justified, if at all, on other grounds that have nothing to do with desert. Where the punishment of the innocent can be justified on those grounds (and it could in some cases be justified as a deterrent) it will be no less moral than any other punishment. Any distaste for it on the part of the Humanitarian will be merely a hang-over from the Retributive theory.

It is, indeed, important to notice that my argument so far supposes no evil intentions on the part of the Humanitarian and considers only what is involved in the logic of his position. My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.

In reality, however, we must face the possibility of bad rulers armed with a Humanitarian theory of punishment. A great many popular blue prints for a Christian society are merely what the Elizabethans called ‘eggs in moonshine’ because they assume that the whole society is Christian or that the Christians are in control. This is not so in most contemporary States. Even if it were, our rulers would still be fallen men, and, therefore neither ver wise nor very good. As it is, they will usually be unbelievers. And since wisdom and virtue are not the only or the commonest qualifications for a place in the government, they will not often be even the best unbelievers.

The practical problem of Christian politics is not that of drawing up schemes for a Christian society, but that of living as innocently as we can with unbelieving fellow-subjects under unbelieving rulers who will never be perfectly wise and good and who will sometimes be very wicked and very foolish. And when they are wicked the Humanitarian theory of punishment will put in their hands a finer instrument of tyranny than wickedness ever had before. For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. For our masters will not be using the concepts of Desert and Punishment but those of disease and cure. We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient to government, what is to hinder government from proceeding to ‘cure’ it? Such ‘cure’ will, of course, be compulsory; but under the Humanitarian theory it will not be called by the shocking name of Persecution. No one will blame us for being Christians, no one will hate us, no one will revile us. The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact as compulsory as the tunica molesta or Smithfield or Tyburn, all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ are never heard. And thus when the command is given, every prominent Christian in the land may vanish overnight into Institutions for the Treatment of the Ideologically Unsound, and it will rest with the expert gaolers to say when (if ever) they are to re-emerge. But it will not be persecution. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. In ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are ‘treatment’, not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.

This is why I think it essential to oppose the Humanitarian theory of punishment, root and branch, wherever we encounter it. It carries on its front a semblance of mercy which is wholly false. That is how it can deceive men of good will. The error began, with Shelley’s statement that the distinction between mercy and justice was invented in the courts of tyrants. It sounds noble, and was indeed the error of a noble mind. But the distinction is essential. The older view was that mercy ‘tempered’ justice, or (on the highest level of all) that mercy and justice had met and kissed. The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and pardon in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and ill-desert in the recipient. If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannot be pardoned. How can you pardon a man for having a gumboil or a club foot? But the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it. This means that you start being ‘kind’ to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which no on but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. You have overshot the mark. Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice; transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety. But we ought long ago to have learned our lesson. We should be too old now to be deceived by those humane pretensions which have served to usher in every cruelty of the revolutionary period in which we live. These are the ‘precious balms’ which will ‘break our heads’.

There is a fine sentence in Bunyan: ‘It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his House, he would sell me for a Slave.’ There is a fine couplet, too, in John Ball:

‘Be war or ye be wo; Knoweth your frend from your foo.’

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

-C. S. Lewis

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IN LOVING MEMORY OF C.S. LEWIS (THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH) [PRO DEATH PENALTY QUOTE OF THE WEEK ~ SUNDAY NOVEMBER 17, 2013 TO SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23, 2013]

November 21, 2013, 8:03 am

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C.S. Lewis on Objective Morality (PHOTO SOURCE: http://blamethe1st.deviantart.com/art/C-S-Lewis-on-Objective-Morality-325374473)

 

Public Domain, U.S. Army hangman John C. Woods (at left with rope) hangs Nazi war criminal Justus Gerstenberg on September 12, 1946. Gerstenberg was a former Wehrmacht soldier who had been convicted of murdering allied airmen shot down over Germany.

QUOTE:“Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment – even to death. If you had committed murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.”[Mere Christianity Book 3 Chapter 7: Forgiveness]

AUTHOR: Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly called C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, and Christian apologist. Born in Belfast, Ireland, he held academic positions at both Oxford University (Magdalen College), 1925–1954, and Cambridge University (Magdalene College), 1954–1963. He is best known both for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. Both authors served on the English faculty at Oxford University, and both were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the "Inklings". According to his memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis had been baptized in the Church of Ireland (part of the Anglican Communion) at birth, but fell away from his faith during his adolescence. Owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, at the age of 32 Lewis returned to the Anglican Communion, becoming "a very ordinary layman of the Church of England". His faith had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.

In 1956, he married the American writer Joy Davidman, 17 years his junior, who died four years later of cancer at the age of 45. Lewis died three years after his wife, from renal failure, one week before his 65th birthday. Media coverage of his death was minimal; he died on 22 November 1963—the same day that U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the same day another famous author, Aldous Huxley, died. In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis will be honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularized on stage, TV, radio, and cinema.

THE OZZIE RABBIT: LEE HARVEY OSWALD ( TO NOVEMBER 24, 1963)

November 23, 2013, 9:58 am

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≪ Previous: IN LOVING MEMORY OF C.S. LEWIS (THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH) [PRO DEATH PENALTY QUOTE OF THE WEEK ~ SUNDAY NOVEMBER 17, 2013 TO SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23, 2013]

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            50 years ago on this date, November 24, 1963, The Ozzie Rabbit A.K.A as Lee Harvey Oswald was shot dead by Jack Ruby. Oswald was arrested in connection to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I will post the information from Wikipedia. 

  

Lee Harvey Oswald. Photo taken in Minsk. Commission Exhibit No. 2892

Born	October 18, 1939 New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Died	November 24, 1963 (aged 24) Parkland Memorial Hospital Dallas, Texas, U.S.
Cause of death	Abdominal gunshot wound
Resting place	Rose Hill Cemetery Fort Worth, Texas 32.732455°N 97.203223°W
Nationality	American
Criminal charge	Murder of President John F. Kennedy and Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit
Spouse(s)	Marina Oswald (née Prusakova) (m. 1961–1963, his death)

Lee Harvey Oswald (October 18, 1939 – November 24, 1963) was, according to five government investigations, the sniper who assassinated John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.

Oswald was a former U.S. Marine who defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. He lived in the Soviet Union until June 1962, at which time he returned to the United States. Oswald was initially arrested for the murder of police officer J. D. Tippit, who was killed on a Dallas street approximately 45 minutes after President Kennedy was shot. Oswald would later be charged with the assassination of President Kennedy as well, but denied involvement in either of the killings. Two days later, while being transferred from police headquarters to the county jail, Oswald was shot and killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby in full view of television cameras broadcasting live.

In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy, firing three shots. One shot apparently missed the limousine entirely, another struck Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally, and another struck Kennedy in the head. This conclusion was supported by prior investigations carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and Dallas Police Department.

Despite forensic, ballistic, and eyewitness evidence supporting the lone gunman theory, public opinion polls taken over the years have shown that a majority of Americans believe that Oswald did not act alone, but conspired with others to kill the president and the assassination has spawned numerous conspiracy theories. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy, but differed from previous investigations in concluding that "scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy". The House Select Committee's acoustical evidence has since been discredited.

Early life

Childhood

Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on October 18, 1939 to Robert Edward Lee Oswald, Sr. and Marguerite Frances Claverie. Robert, Sr. died of a heart attack two months prior to Lee's birth. Oswald had two older siblings—brother Robert Edward Lee Oswald, Jr. and half-brother John Edward Pic.

In 1944, Oswald's mother moved the family from New Orleans to Dallas, Texas. Oswald entered the 1st grade in 1945 and over the next half-dozen years attended several different schools in the Dallas and Fort Worth areas through the 6th grade. Oswald took an IQ test in the 4th grade and scored 103; "on achievement tests in [grades 4 to 6], he twice did best in reading and twice did worst in spelling."

As a child, Oswald was described by several people who knew him as withdrawn and temperamental. In August 1952, when Oswald was 12, his mother took him to New York City where they lived for a short time with Oswald's half-brother, John Pic. Oswald and his mother were later asked to leave after an argument in which Oswald allegedly struck his mother and threatened Pic's wife with a pocket knife.

Oswald attended the 7th grade in the Bronx, New York but was often truant, which led to a psychiatric assessment at a juvenile reformatory. The reformatory psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, described Oswald as immersed in a "vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which [Oswald] tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations." Dr. Hartogs detected a "personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies" and recommended continued treatment. In January 1954, Oswald's mother returned to New Orleans, taking Oswald with her. At the time, there was a question pending before a New York judge as to whether Oswald should be removed from the care of his mother to finish his schooling, although Oswald's behavior appeared to improve during his last months in New York.

In New Orleans, Oswald completed the 8th and 9th grades. He entered the 10th grade in 1955 but quit school after one month. After leaving school, Oswald worked for several months as an office clerk and messenger in New Orleans. In July 1956, Oswald's mother moved the family to Fort Worth, Texas and Oswald re-enrolled in the 10th grade for the September session at Arlington Heights High School in Fort Worth. A few weeks later in October, Oswald quit school at age 17 to join the Marines (see below); he never received a high school diploma. By the age of 17, he had resided at 22 different locations and attended 12 different schools.

Though the young Oswald had trouble spelling and writing coherently, he read voraciously. By age 15, he claimed to be a Marxist, writing in his diary, "I was looking for a key to my environment, and then I discovered socialist literature. I had to dig for my books in the back dusty shelves of libraries." At 16 he wrote to the Socialist Party of America for information on their Young People's Socialist League, saying he had been studying socialist principles for "well over fifteen months." However, Edward Voebel, "whom the Warren Commission had established was Oswald's closest friend during his teenage years in New Orleans...said that reports that Oswald was already 'studying Communism' were a 'lot of baloney.'" Voebel said that "Oswald commonly read 'paperback trash.'"

As a teenager, in 1955, Oswald attended Civil Air Patrol meetings in New Orleans. Oswald's fellow cadets recalled him attending C.A.P. meetings "three or four" times, or "10 or 12 times" over a one- or two-month period.

Oswald when he served in the US Marine Corps

Marine Corps

Oswald enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on October 24, 1956, just after his seventeenth birthday. He idolized his older brother Robert; and a photograph taken after Lee Harvey's arrest by Dallas police shows him wearing his brother's Marine Corps ring. One witness testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald's enlistment may also have been an escape from his overbearing mother.

Oswald's primary training was radar operation; a position requiring a security clearance. A May 1957 document states that he was "granted final clearance to handle classified matter up to and including CONFIDENTIAL after careful check of local records had disclosed no derogatory data." In the Aircraft Control and Warning Operator Course he finished seventh in a class of thirty. The course "...included instruction in aircraft surveillance and the use of radar." He was assigned first to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in July 1957, then to Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan in September as part of Marine Air Control Squadron 1.

Like all Marines, Oswald was trained and tested in shooting and he scored 212 in December 1956, slightly above the requirements for the designation of sharpshooter. In May 1959 he scored 191, which reduced his rating to marksman.

Oswald was court-martialed after accidentally shooting himself in the elbow with an unauthorized .22 handgun, then court-martialed again for fighting with a sergeant who he thought was responsible for his punishment in the shooting matter. He was demoted from private first class to private and briefly imprisoned in the brig. He was later punished for a third incident: while on night-time sentry duty in the Philippines, he inexplicably fired his rifle into the jungle.

Slightly built, Oswald was nicknamed Ozzie Rabbit after the cartoon character; he was also called Oswaldskovichbecause he espoused pro-Soviet sentiments. In November 1958, Oswald transferred back to El Toro where his unit's function "...was to serveil for aircraft, but basically to train both enlisted men and officers for later assignment overseas." An officer there said that Oswald was a "very competent" crew chief and was "brighter than most people."

While in the Marines, Oswald made an effort to teach himself rudimentary Russian. Although this was an unusual endeavor, in February 1959 he was invited to take a Marine proficiency exam in written and spoken Russian. His level at the time was rated "poor."

Adult life and early crimes

Defection to the Soviet Union

In October 1959, just before turning 20, Oswald traveled to the Soviet Union, a trip he planned well in advance. On September 11, 1959, he received a hardship discharge from active service, claiming his mother needed care, and was put on reserve. Along with his self-taught Russian, he had saved $1,500 of his Marine Corps salary, obtained a passport, and submitted several fictional applications to foreign universities in order to obtain a student visa. Oswald spent two days with his mother in Fort Worth, then embarked by ship from New Orleans on September 20 to Le Havre, France, then immediately proceeded to the United Kingdom. Arriving in Southampton on October 9, he told officials he had $700 and planned to remain in the United Kingdom for one week before proceeding to a school in Switzerland. However, on the same day, he flew to Helsinki, where he was issued a Soviet visa on October 14. Oswald left Helsinki by train on the following day, crossed the Soviet border at Vainikkala, and arrived in Moscow on October 16. His visa, valid only for a week, was due to expire on October 21.

Almost immediately after arriving, Oswald told his Intourist guide of his desire to become a Soviet citizen. When asked why by the various Soviet officials he encountered—all of whom, by Oswald's account, found his wish incomprehensible—he said that he was a communist, and gave what he described in his diary as "vauge answers about 'Great Soviet Union'". On October 21, the day his visa was due to expire, he was told that his citizenship application had been refused, and that he had to leave the Soviet Union that evening. Distraught, Oswald inflicted a minor but bloody wound to his left wrist in his hotel room bathtub soon before his Intourist guide was due to arrive to escort him from the country, according to his diary because he wished to kill himself in a way that would shock her. Delaying Oswald's departure because of his self-inflicted injury, the Soviets kept him in a Moscow hospital under psychiatric observation until October 28, 1959.

According to Oswald, he met with four more Soviet officials that same day, who asked if he wanted to return to the United States; he insisted to them that he wanted to live in the Soviet Union as a Soviet national. When pressed for identification papers, he provided his Marine Corps discharge papers.

On October 31, Oswald appeared at the United States embassy in Moscow, declaring a desire to renounce his U.S. citizenship. "I have made up my mind," he said; "I'm through." He told the U.S. embassy interviewing officer, Richard Snyder, "...that he had been a radar operator in the Marine Corps and that he had voluntarily stated to unnamed Soviet officials that as a Soviet citizen he would make known to them such information concerning the Marine Corps and his specialty as he possessed. He intimated that he might know something of special interest." (Such statements led to Oswald's hardship/honorablemilitary discharge being changed to undesirable.) The Associated Press story of the defection of a U.S. Marine to the Soviet Union was reported on the front pages of some newspapers in 1959.

Though Oswald had wanted to attend Moscow University, he was sent to Minsk to work as a lathe operator at the Gorizont Electronics Factory, which produced radios, televisions, and military and space electronics. Stanislau Shushkevich, who later became independent Belarus's first head of state, was also engaged by Gorizont at the time, and was assigned to teach Oswald Russian. Oswald received a government subsidized, fully furnished studio apartment in a prestigious building and an additional supplement to his factory pay—all in all, an idyllic existence by working-class Soviet standards, though he was kept under constant surveillance.

But Oswald grew bored in Minsk. He wrote in his diary in January 1961: "I am starting to reconsider my desire about staying. The work is drab, the money I get has nowhere to be spent. No nightclubs or bowling alleys, no places of recreation except the trade union dances. I have had enough." Shortly afterwards, Oswald (who had never formally renounced his U.S. citizenship) wrote to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow requesting return of his American passport, and proposing to return to the U.S. if any charges against him would be dropped.

In March 1961, Oswald met Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, a 19-year-old pharmacology student; they married less than six weeks later in April. The Oswalds' first child, June, was born on February 15, 1962. On May 24, 1962, Oswald and Marina applied at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow for documents enabling her to immigrate to the U.S. and, on June 1, the U.S. Embassy gave Oswald a repatriation loan of $435.71. Oswald, Marina, and their infant daughter left for the United States, where they received no attention from the press, much to Oswald's disappointment.

APARTMENT BUILDING IN WHICH LEE HARVEY OSWALD LIVED BRIEFLY

Dallas-Fort Worth

The Oswalds soon settled in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, where Lee's mother and brother lived. Lee began a manuscript on Soviet life, though he eventually gave up the project. The Oswalds also became acquainted with a number of anti-Communist Russian and East European émigrés in the area. In testimony to the Warren Commission, Alexander Kleinlerer said that the Russian émigrés sympathized with Marina, while merely tolerating Oswald, whom they regarded as rude and arrogant.

Although the Russian émigrés eventually abandoned Marina when she made no sign of leaving Oswald, Oswald found an unlikely friend in 51-year-old Russian émigré George de Mohrenschildt, a well-educated petroleum geologist with international business connections (a native of Russia, de Mohrenschildt later was to tell the Warren Commission that Oswald had a "...remarkable fluency in Russian"). Marina, meanwhile, befriended Ruth Paine, a Quaker who was trying to learn Russian, and her husband Michael who worked for Bell Helicopter.

In July 1962, Oswald was hired by Dallas' Leslie Welding Company; he disliked the work and quit after three months. In October, he was hired by the graphic-arts firm of Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall as a photoprint trainee. A fellow employee at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall testified that Oswald's rudeness at his new job was such that fights threatened to break out, and that he once saw Oswald reading a Russian language publication. Oswald was fired during the first week of April 1963. Some have suggested that Oswald might have used equipment at the firm to forge identification documents.

Edwin Walker assassination attempt

In March 1963, Oswald purchased a 6.5 mm caliber Carcano rifle by mail-order, using the alias "A. Hidell", as well as a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver by the same method.

The Warren Commission concluded that on April 10, 1963, Oswald attempted to kill retired U.S. Major General Edwin Walker, firing his rifle at Walker through a window, from less than 100 feet (30 m) away, as Walker sat at a desk in his home; the bullet struck the window-frame and Walker's only injuries were bullet fragments to the forearm. (The United States House Select Committee on Assassinations stated that the "evidence strongly suggested" that Oswald carried out the shooting.)

General Walker was an outspoken anti-communist, segregationist, and member of the John Birch Society. In 1961, Walker had been relieved of his command of the 24th Division of the U.S. Army in West Germany for distributing right-wing literature to his troops.

Walker's later actions in opposition to racial integration at the University of Mississippi led to his arrest on insurrection, seditious conspiracy, and other charges. He was temporarily held in a mental institution on orders from President Kennedy's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but a grand jury refused to indict him.

Marina Oswald testified that her husband told her that he traveled by bus to General Walker's house and shot at Walker with his rifle. She said that Oswald considered Walker to be the leader of a "fascist organization." A note Oswald left for Marina on the night of the attempt, telling her what to do if he did not return, was not found until ten days after the Kennedy assassination.

Before the Kennedy assassination, Dallas police had no suspects in the Walker shooting, but Oswald's involvement was suspected within hours of his arrest following the assassination. The Walker bullet was too damaged to run conclusive ballistics studies on it, but neutron activation analysis later showed that it was "extremely likely" that it was made by the same manufacturer and for the same rifle make as the two bullets which later struck Kennedy.

George de Mohrenschildt testified that he "knew that Oswald disliked General Walker." Regarding this, De Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne, recalled an incident that occurred the weekend following the Walker assassination attempt. The De Mohrenschildts testified that on April 14, 1963, just before Easter Sunday, they were visiting the Oswalds at their new apartment and had brought them a toy Easter bunny to give to their child. As Oswald's wife, Marina was showing Jeanne around the apartment, they discovered Oswald's rifle standing upright, leaning against the wall inside a closet. Jeanne told George that Oswald had a rifle, and George joked to Oswald, "Were you the one who took a pot-shot at General Walker?" When asked about Oswald's reaction to this question, George de Mohrenschildt told the Warren Commission that Oswald "smiled at that." When George's wife, Jeanne was asked about Oswald's reaction, she said, "I didn't notice anything"; she continued, "we started laughing our heads off, big joke, big George's joke." Jeanne de Mohrenschildt testified that this was the last time she or her husband ever saw the Oswalds.

Magazine Street, Uptown New Orleans. 4900 block, lake side. In 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina lived in an apartment on the right side of this building (in wing almost completely obscured by fence and foliage), renting from landlord Jessie James Garner.

New Orleans

Oswald returned to New Orleans on April 24, 1963. Marina's friend, Ruth Paine, drove her by car from Dallas to join Oswald in New Orleans the next month in May. On May 10, Oswald was hired by the Reily Coffee Company whose owner, William Reily, was a backer of the Crusade to Free Cuba Committee, an anti-Castro organization. Oswald worked as a machinery greaser at Reily, but he was fired in July "...because his work was not satisfactory and because he spent too much time loitering in Adrian Alba's garage next door, where he read rifle and hunting magazines."

On May 26, Oswald wrote to the New York City headquarters of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, proposing to rent "...a small office at my own expense for the purpose of forming a FPCC branch here in New Orleans." Three days later, the FPCC responded to Oswald's letter advising against opening a New Orleans office "at least not ... at the very beginning." In a follow-up letter, Oswald replied, "Against your advice, I have decided to take an office from the very beginning."

As the sole member of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Oswald ordered the following items from a local printer: 500 application forms, 300 membership cards, and 1,000 leaflets with the heading, "Hands Off Cuba." According to Lee Oswald's wife Marina, Lee told her to sign the name "A.J. Hidell" as chapter president on his membership card.

On August 5 and 6, according to anti-Castro militant Carlos Bringuier, Oswald visited him at a store he owned in New Orleans. Bringuier was the New Orleans delegate for the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), an anti-Castro organization. Bringuier would later tell the Warren Commission that he believed Oswald's visits were an attempt by Oswald to infiltrate his group. On August 9, Oswald turned up in downtown New Orleans handing out pro-Castro leaflets. Bringuier confronted Oswald, claiming he was tipped off about Oswald's leafleting by a friend. A scuffle ensued and Oswald, Bringuier, and two of Bringuier's friends were arrested for disturbing the peace. Before leaving the police station, Oswald asked to speak with an FBI agent. Agent John Quigley arrived and spent over an hour talking to Oswald.

A week later, on August 16, Oswald again passed out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets with two hired helpers, this time in front of the International Trade Mart. The incident was filmed by WDSU—the local TV station. The next day, Oswald was interviewed by WDSU radio commentator William Stuckey, who probed Oswald's background. A few days later, Oswald accepted Stuckey's invitation to take part in a radio debate with Carlos Bringuier and Bringuier's associate Edward Butler, head of the right-wing Information Council of the Americas (INCA).

One of Oswald's Fair Play for Cuba leaflets had the address "544 Camp Street" hand-stamped on it, apparently by Oswald himself. The address was in the "Newman Building" which, from October 1961 to February 1962, housed the militant anti-Castro group, the Cuban Revolutionary Council. Around the corner but located in the same building, with a different entrance, was the address 531 Lafayette Street—the address of "Guy Banister Associates", a private detective agency run by former FBI agent Guy Banister. Banister's office was involved in anti-Castro and private investigative activities in the New Orleans area (a CIA file indicated that in September 1960, the CIA had considered "...using Guy Banister Associates for the collection of foreign intelligence, but ultimately decided against it").

In the late-1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigated the possible relationship of Oswald to Banister's office. While the committee was unable to interview Guy Banister (who died in 1964), the committee did interview his brother Ross Banister. Ross "...told the committee that his brother had mentioned seeing Oswald hand out Fair Play for Cuba literature on one occasion. Ross theorized that Oswald had used the 544 Camp Street address on his literature to embarrass Guy."

Guy Banister's secretary, Delphine Roberts, told author Anthony Summers that she saw Oswald at Banister's office, and that he filled out one of Banister's "agent" application forms. She said, "Oswald came back a number of times. He seemed to be on familiar terms with Banister and with the office." The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated Roberts' claims and said that "because of contradictions in Roberts' statements to the committee and lack of independent corroboration of many of her statements, the reliability of her statements could not be determined."

Oswald's 1963 New Orleans activities were later investigated by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, as part of his prosecution of Clay Shaw in 1967–1969. Garrison was particularly interested in an associate of Guy Banister—a man named David Ferrie and his possible connection to Oswald, which Ferrie himself denied. Ferrie died before Garrison could complete his investigation. Charged with conspiracy in the JFK assassination, Shaw was found not guilty.

The Warren Commission examined Oswald's involvement with a New Orleans Civil Air Patrol troop he briefly attended in 1955 with high school friend Edward Voebel. Several witnesses testified that David Ferrie was the Civil Air Patrol unit's commander during at least some of the time that Oswald attended C.A.P. meetings. However, the FBI interviewed Ferrie shortly after the assassination and concluded there was no relationship of significance in regards to Oswald. A more extensive investigation was done by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which interviewed several of Oswald's former fellow cadets and others, none of whom recalled Ferrie and Oswald interacting. These fellow cadets said that Oswald attended some 8 to 10 C.A.P. meetings over a two-month period. In 1993, the PBS television program Frontline obtained a photograph taken in 1955 showing Oswald and Ferrie at a C.A.P. cookout with other cadets.

Oswald passing out "Fair Play for Cuba" leaflets in New Orleans, August 16, 1963

Oswald's mugshot following his arrest in New Orleans, August 9, 1963

Mexico

Marina's friend, Ruth Paine, transported Marina and her child by car from New Orleans to the Paine home in Irving, Texas, near Dallas, on September 23, 1963. Oswald stayed in New Orleans at least two more days to collect a $33 unemployment check. It is uncertain when he left New Orleans; he is next known to have boarded a bus in Houston on September 26—bound for the Mexican border, rather than Dallas—and to have told other bus passengers that he planned to travel to Cuba via Mexico. He arrived in Mexico City on September 27, where he applied for a transit visa at the Cuban Embassy, claiming he wanted to visit Cuba on his way to the Soviet Union. The Cuban embassy officials insisted Oswald would need Soviet approval, but he was unable to get prompt co-operation from the Soviet embassy.

While in Mexico City, Oswald attended a twist party that was also attended by some individuals working for the Cuban embassy in Mexico and some pro-Castro Mexican citizens.

After five days of shuttling between consulates—that included a heated argument with an official at the Cuban consulate, impassioned pleas to KGB agents, and at least some CIA scrutiny, —Oswald was told by a Cuban consular officer that he was disinclined to approve the visa, saying "a person like [Oswald] in place of aiding the Cuban Revolution, was doing it harm." Later, on October 18, the Cuban embassy approved the visa, but by this time Oswald was back in the United States and had given up on his plans to visit Cuba and the Soviet Union. Still later, eleven days before the assassination of President Kennedy, Oswald wrote to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., saying, "Had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana, as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business."

While the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had visited Mexico City and the Cuban and Soviet consulates, questions regarding whether someone posing as Oswald had appeared at the embassies were serious enough to be investigated by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Later, the Committee agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald had visited Mexico City and concluded that "the majority of evidence tends to indicate" that Oswald in fact visited the consulates, but the Committee could not rule out the possibility that someone else had used his name in visiting the consulates.

 

Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was an employee

Return to Dallas

On October 2, 1963, Oswald left Mexico City by bus and arrived in Dallas the next day. On October 14, a neighbor told Ruth Paine that there was a job opening at the Texas School Book Depository. Mrs. Paine informed Oswald, who was interviewed at the Depository and was hired there on October 16. Oswald's supervisor Roy Truly, said that Oswald "did a good day's work" and was an above average employee. During the week, Oswald stayed in a Dallas rooming house (under the name "O.H. Lee"), but he spent his weekends with Marina at the Paine home in Irving. Oswald did not drive, but commuted to and from Dallas on Mondays and Fridays with his friend and co-worker, Wesley Frazier. On October 20, the Oswalds' second daughter was born.

FBI agents twice visited the Paine home in early November, when Oswald was not present, and spoke to Mrs. Paine. Oswald visited the Dallas FBI office about 2 to 3 weeks before the assassination, asking to see Special Agent James Hosty. When he was told that Hosty was unavailable, Oswald left a note that, according to the receptionist, read: "Let this be a warning. I will blow up the FBI and the Dallas Police Department if you don’t stop bothering my wife" [signed] "Lee Harvey Oswald." The note allegedly contained some sort of threat, but accounts vary as to whether Oswald threatened to "blow up the FBI" or merely "report this to higher authorities". According to Hosty, the note said, "If you have anything you want to learn about me, come talk to me directly. If you don't cease bothering my wife, I will take the appropriate action and report this to the proper authorities." Agent Hosty said that he destroyed Oswald's note on orders from his superior, Gordon Shanklin, after Oswald was named the suspect in the Kennedy assassination.

Kennedy and Tippit shootings

Main articles:Assassination of John F. Kennedy and Lone gunman theory

In the days before Kennedy's arrival, several newspapers described the route of the presidential motorcade as passing the Book Depository. On November 21 (a Thursday) Oswald asked Frazier for an unusual mid-week lift back to Irving, saying he had to pick up some curtain rods. The next morning (Friday) he returned to Dallas with Frazier; he left behind $170 and his wedding ring, but took with him a paper bag. Frazier reported that Oswald told him the bag contained curtain rods, The evidence demonstrated that the package actually contained the rifle used by Oswald in the assassination.

Oswald's co-worker, Charles Givens, testified to the Commission that he last saw Oswald on the sixth floor of the Depository with a clipboard in his hand, and that Oswald asked him to close the elevator gate and to send the elevator back up to him. He believed that his encounter with Oswald took place at 11:55 a.m.—35 minutes before the assassination. The Commission report stated that Oswald was not seen again "until after the shooting." However, in an FBI report taken the day after the assassination, Givens said that the encounter took place at 11:30 a.m. and that he later saw Oswald reading a newspaper on the first floor at 11:50 a.m. Oswald's boss, William Shelley, also testified that he saw Oswald on the first floor between 11:45 and 11:50 a.m. Janitor Eddie Piper also testified to seeing Oswald on the first floor at 12:00 p.m. Another co-worker, Bonnie Ray Williams was on the sixth floor of the Depository eating his lunch and was there until at least 12:10 p.m. He said that during that time he did not see Oswald, or anyone else, on the sixth floor and felt he was the only one up there. However, he also said that some boxes in the southeast corner may have prevented him from seeing deep into the "sniper's nest."

According to several government investigations, including the Warren Commission, as Kennedy's motorcade passed through Dallas's Dealey Plaza about 12:30 p.m. on November 22, Oswald fired three rifle shots from the sixth-floor, southeast corner window of the Book Depository, killing the President and seriously wounding Texas Governor John Connally. Bystander James Tague received a minor facial injury from a small piece of curbstone that fragmented when struck by one of the bullets. According to the investigations, after shooting the President, Oswald hid and covered the rifle with boxes and descended using the rear stairwell. About ninety seconds after the shooting, in the second-floor lunchroom, Oswald encountered police officer Marrion Baker accompanied by Oswald's supervisor Roy Truly; Baker let Oswald pass after Truly identified him as an employee. According to Baker, Oswald did not appear to be nervous or out of breath. Truly said that Oswald appeared "startled" when Baker aimed his gun at him. Mrs. Robert Reid—clerical supervisor at the Depository, returning to her office within two minutes of the assassination—said that she saw Oswald who "was very calm" on the second floor with a Coke in his hands. As they walked past each other, Mrs. Reid said to Oswald, "The President has been shot" to which he mumbled something in response, but Reid did not understand him. Oswald is believed to have left the Depository through the front entrance just before police sealed it off. Oswald's supervisor, Roy Truly, later pointed out to officers that Oswald was the only employee that he was certain was missing.

At about 12:40 p.m., Oswald boarded a city bus but (probably due to heavy traffic) he requested a transfer from the bus driver and got off two blocks later. Oswald took a taxicab to his rooming house, at 1026 North Beckley Avenue, arriving at about 1:00 p.m. He entered through the front door and, according to his housekeeper Earlene Roberts, immediately went to his room, "walking pretty fast". Roberts said that Oswald left "a very few minutes" later, zipping up a jacket he was not wearing when he had entered earlier. As Oswald left, Roberts looked out of the window of her house and last saw him standing at the northbound Beckley Avenue bus stop in front of her house.

At approximately 1:15 p.m., the Warren Commission concluded, Dallas Patrolman J. D. Tippit drove up in his patrol car alongside Oswald, presumably because he resembled the police broadcast description of the man seen firing shots at the presidential motorcade, near the corner of East 10th Street and North Patton Avenue. (This location is about nine-tenths of a mile (1.4 km) southeast of Oswald's rooming house—a distance that the Warren Commission said, "Oswald could have easily walked".) Tippit pulled alongside Oswald and "apparently exchanged words with [him] through the right front or vent window.""Shortly after 1:15 p.m.", Tippit exited his car and was immediately struck and killed by four shots. Numerous witnesses heard the shots and saw Oswald flee the scene holding a revolver, nine positively identified him as the man who shot Tippit and fled. Four cartridge cases found at the scene were identified by expert witnesses before the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee as having been fired from the revolver later found in Oswald's possession, to the exclusion of all other weapons. However, the bullets taken from Tippit's body could not be positively identified as having been fired from Oswald's revolver as the bullets were too extensively damaged to make conclusive assessments.

Witness Howard Brennan photographed in the same position where he was on November 22, 1963 across from the Texas School Book Depository. Circle "A" indicates where he saw a man fire a rifle at the presidential motorcade

Lee Harvey Oswald arrested at the Texas Theatre, Dallas, Texas, 22 November, 1963.

Capture

Shoe store manager Johnny Brewer testified that he saw Oswald "ducking into" the entrance alcove of his store. Suspicious of this activity, Brewer watched Oswald continue up the street and slip into the nearby Texas Theatre without paying. He alerted the theater's ticket clerk, who telephoned police at about 1:40 pm.

As police arrived, the house lights were brought up and Brewer pointed out Oswald sitting near the rear of the theater. Police Officer Nick McDonald testified that he was the first to reach Oswald and that Oswald seemed ready to surrender saying, "Well, it is all over now." However, Officer McDonald said that Oswald pulled out a pistol tucked into the front of his pants, then pointed the pistol at him, and pulled the trigger. McDonald stated that the pistol did not fire because the pistol's hammer came down on the webbing between the thumb and index finger of his hand as he grabbed for the pistol. McDonald also said that Oswald struck him, but that he struck back and Oswald was disarmed. As he was led from the theater, Oswald shouted he was a victim of police brutality.

At about 2 p.m., Oswald arrived at the Police Department building, where he was questioned by Detective Jim Leavelle about the shooting of Officer Tippit. When Captain J. W. Fritz heard Oswald's name, he recognized it as that of the Book Depository employee who was reported missing and was already a suspect in the assassination. Oswald was formally arraigned for the murder of Officer Tippit at 7:10 p.m., and by the end of the night (shortly after 1:30 a.m.) he had been arraigned for the murder of President Kennedy as well.

Soon after his capture Oswald encountered reporters in a hallway. Oswald declared, "I didn't shoot anybody" and, "They've taken me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union. I'm just a patsy!" Later, at an arranged press meeting, a reporter asked, "Did you kill the President?" and Oswald—who by that time had been advised of the charge of murdering Tippit, but had not yet been arraigned in Kennedy's death—answered, "No, I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question." As he was led from the room the question was called out, "What did you do in Russia?" and, "How did you hurt your eye?"; Oswald answered, "A policeman hit me."

 

Fake Selective Service System (draft) card in the name of "Alek James Hidell", found on Oswald when arrested. "A. Hidell" was the name used on both envelope and order slip to buy the alleged murder weapon (see CE 773), and "A. J. Hidell" was the alternate name on the New Orleans post office box rented June 11, 1963, by Oswald. Both the alleged murder weapon and the pistol in Oswald's possession at arrest had earlier been shipped (at separate times) to Oswald's Dallas P.O. Box 2915, as ordered by "A. J. Hidell".

Police interrogation

Oswald was interrogated several times during his two days at Dallas Police Headquarters. He denied killing Kennedy and Tippit; denied owning a rifle; said two photographs of him holding a rifle and a pistol were fakes; denied telling his co-worker he wanted a ride to Irving to get curtain rods for his apartment (he said that the package contained his lunch); and denied carrying a long, bulky package to work the morning of the assassination. Oswald also denied knowing an "A. J. Hidell". Oswald was then shown a forged Selective Service System card bearing his photograph and the alias, "Alek James Hidell" that he had in his possession at the time of his arrest. Oswald refused to answer any questions concerning the card, saying "...you have the card yourself and you know as much about it as I do."

The first interrogation of Oswald was conducted by FBI Special Agent James Hosty and Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz on Friday, November 22. Asked to account for himself at the time of the assassination, Oswald replied that he was eating his lunch in the first floor lounge (known as the "domino room"). He said that he then went to the second-floor lunchroom to buy a Coca-Cola from the soda machine and was drinking it when he encountered a police officer. Oswald said that while he was in the domino room, he saw two "Negro employees" walking by, one he recognized as "Junior" and a shorter man whose name he could not recall. Junior Jarman and Harold Norman confirmed to the Warren Commission that they had "walked through" the domino room around noon during their lunch break. When asked if anyone else was in the domino room, Norman testified that somebody else was there, but he could not remember who it was. Jarman testified that Oswald was not in the domino room when he was there. During his last interrogation on November 24, according to postal inspector Harry Holmes, Oswald was again asked where he was at the time of the shooting. Holmes (who attended the interrogation at the invitation of Captain Will Fritz) said that Oswald replied that he was working on an upper floor when the shooting occurred, then went downstairs where he encountered a policeman.

Oswald asked for legal representation several times while being interrogated, as well as in encounters with reporters. But when representatives of the Dallas Bar Association met with him in his cell on Saturday, he declined their services, saying he wanted to be represented by John Abt, chief counsel to the Communist Party USA, or by lawyers associated with the American Civil Liberties Union. Both Oswald and Ruth Paine tried to reach Abt by telephone several times Saturday and Sunday, but Abt was away for the weekend. Oswald also declined his brother Robert's offer on Saturday to obtain a local attorney.

During an interrogation with Captain Fritz, when asked, "Are you a communist?", he replied, "No, I am not a communist. I am a Marxist."

Ruby about to shoot Oswald who is being moved by Dallas police

Death

On Sunday, November 24, Oswald was being led through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters in advance of his transfer to the county jail. At 11:21 a.m., Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby stepped from the crowd and shot Oswald in the chest, the bullet striking several organs, penetrated his stomach, and tore his vena cava and aorta. Oswald was rushed unconscious to Parkland Memorial Hospital—the same hospital where doctors tried to save President Kennedy's life two days earlier. Oswald died at 1:07 p.m. An autopsy was performed by the Dallas County Medical Examiner at 2:45 p.m. the same day. The stated cause of death in the autopsy report was "hemorrhage secondary to gunshot wound of the chest."

A network television camera, there to cover the transfer, was broadcasting live, and millions witnessed the shooting on television as it happened. The event was also captured in several well-known photographs.

Ruby's Motive

Ruby later said he had been distraught over Kennedy's death and that his motive for killing Oswald was "...saving Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial." Others have hypothesized that Ruby was part of a conspiracy. G. Robert Blakey, chief council for the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1977 to 1979, said: "The most plausible explanation for the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby was that Ruby had stalked him on behalf of organized crime, trying to reach him on at least three occasions in the forty-eight hours before he silenced him forever."

Grave of Lee Harvey Oswald at the Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Park in Fort Worth, Texas.

Burial

Oswald was buried on November 25 in Shannon Rose Hill Memorial Burial Park in Fort Worth. Reporters present to report on the burial were asked by officials to act as pallbearers. A marker inscribed simply Oswald replaces the stolen original tombstone, which gave Oswald's full name, and birth and death dates. His mother was buried beside him in 1981.

A claim that a look-alike Russian agent was buried in place of Oswald led to his exhumation on 4 October 1981. Dental records confirmed that it was Oswald's body in the grave and he was reburied in a new coffin. In 2010 his original coffin was auctioned for over $87,000.

In 1975, the burial plot adjacent to Oswald (#258) was purchased, and remained unmarked until 1996, when a granite marker inscribed "NICK BEEF" was placed. Speculation about the owner of the plot, and their motive was finally quelled in August 2013, when Beef (given name - Patric Abedin), a writer, was revealed as the owner of the plot. Beef had seen President Kennedy in person the day before he was killed and had visited Oswald's grave with his mother several times during his childhood.

Official investigations

Warren Commission

The Warren Commission, created by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination, concluded that Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy (this view is known as the lone gunman theory). The Commission could not ascribe any one motive or group of motives to Oswald's actions:

It is apparent, however, that Oswald was moved by an overriding hostility to his environment. He does not appear to have been able to establish meaningful relationships with other people. He was perpetually discontented with the world around him. Long before the assassination he expressed his hatred for American society and acted in protest against it. Oswald's search for what he conceived to be the perfect society was doomed from the start. He sought for himself a place in history—a role as the "great man" who would be recognized as having been in advance of his times. His commitment to Marxism and communism appears to have been another important factor in his motivation. He also had demonstrated a capacity to act decisively and without regard to the consequences when such action would further his aims of the moment. Out of these and the many other factors which may have molded the character of Lee Harvey Oswald there emerged a man capable of assassinating President Kennedy.

The proceedings of the commission were closed, though not secret, and about 3% of its files have yet to be released to the public, which has continued to provoke speculation among researchers.

Ramsey Clark Panel

In 1968, the Ramsey Clark Panel examined various photographs, X-ray films, documents, and other evidence, concluding that Kennedy was struck by two bullets fired from above and behind him, one of which traversed the base of the neck on the right side without striking bone, and the other of which entered the skull from behind and destroyed its right side.

House Select Committee

Main article: United States House Select Committee on Assassinations

Further information:Dictabelt evidence relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy

In 1979, after a review of the evidence and of prior investigations, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) largely concurred with the Warren Commission and was preparing to issue a finding that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy. However, late in the Committee's proceedings a dictabelt recording was introduced, purportedly recording sounds heard in Dealey Plaza before, during and after the shots were fired. After an analysis by the firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman appeared to indicate more than three gunshots, the HSCA revised its findings to assert a "high probability that two gunmen fired" at Kennedy and that Kennedy "was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy." Although the Committee was "unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy," it made a number of further findings regarding the likelihood or unlikelihood that particular groups, named in the findings, were involved. Four of the twelve members of the HSCA dissented from this conclusion.

The acoustical evidence has since been discredited. Officer H.B. McLain, from whose motorcycle radio the HSCA acoustic experts said the Dictabelt evidence came, has repeatedly stated that he was not yet in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination. McLain asked the Committee, "‘If it was my radio on my motorcycle, why did it not record the revving up at high speed plus my siren when we immediately took off for Parkland Hospital?’”

In 1982, a panel of twelve scientists appointed by the National Academy of Sciences, including Nobel laureates Norman Ramsey and Luis Alvarez, unanimously concluded that the acoustic evidence submitted to the HSCA was "seriously flawed", was recorded after the President had been shot, and did not indicate additional gunshots. Their conclusions were later published in the journal Science.

In a 2001 article in the journal Science & Justice, D.B. Thomas wrote that the NAS investigation was itself flawed. He concluded with a 96.3 percent certainty that there were at least two gunmen firing at President Kennedy and that at least one shot came from the grassy knoll. In 2005, Thomas' conclusions were rebutted in the same journal. Ralph Linsker and several members of the original NAS team reanalyzed the timings of the recordings and reaffirmed the earlier conclusion of the NAS report that the alleged shot sounds were recorded approximately one minute after the assassination. In 2010, D.B. Thomas challenged in a book the 2005 Science & Justice article and restated his conclusion that there were at least two gunmen.

Image CE-133A, one of three known "backyard photos," the same image sent by Oswald (as a first-generation copy) to George de Mohrenschildt in April 1963, dated and signed on the back. Oswald holds two Marxist newspapers, The Militant and The Worker, and a Carcano rifle, with markings matching those on the rifle found in the Book Depository after the assassination.

Lee Harvey Oswald's Carcano rifle, in the US National Archives

Other investigations and dissenting theories

Main article: John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories

Some critics have not accepted the conclusions of the Warren Commission and have proposed several other theories, such as that Oswald conspired with others, or was not involved at all and was framed.

In October 1981, with Marina's support, Oswald's grave was opened to test a theory propounded by writer Michael Eddowes: that during Oswald's stay in the Soviet Union he was replaced with a Soviet double; that it was this double, not Oswald, who killed Kennedy and who is buried in Oswald's grave; and that the exhumed remains would therefore not exhibit a surgical scar Oswald was known to carry. Dental records positively identified the exhumed corpse as Oswald's, and the scar was present.

Public opinion

A 2003 Gallup poll reported that 75% of Americans do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy. That same year an ABC News poll found that 70% of respondents suspected that the assassination involved more than one person. A 2004 Fox News poll found that 66% of Americans thought there had been a conspiracy while 74% thought there had been a cover-up. A Gallup Poll in mid-November 2013, showed 61% believed in a conspiracy, and only 30% thought Oswald did it alone.

Fictional trials

Several films have fictionalized a trial of Oswald. The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (1964); The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald(1977); and On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald (1986) have fictionalized a trial of Oswald. In 1988, a 21-hour unscripted mock trial was held on television, argued by lawyers before a judge, with unscripted testimony from surviving witnesses to the events surrounding the assassination; the jury returned a verdict of guilty.

Oswald and Marina in Minsk

Backyard photos

Main article: John F. Kennedy assassination rifle

The "backyard photos", taken by Marina Oswald probably around March 31, 1963 using a camera belonging to Oswald, show Oswald holding two Marxist newspapers—The Militant and The Worker—and a rifle, and wearing a pistol in a holster. Shown the pictures after his arrest, Oswald insisted they were forgeries, but Marina testified in 1964 that she had taken the photographs at Oswald's request—testimony she reaffirmed repeatedly over the decades. These photos were labelled CE 133-A and CE 133-B. CE 133-A shows the rifle in Oswald's left hand and newspapers in front of his chest in the other, while the rifle is held with the right hand in CE 133-B. Oswald's mother testified that on the day after the assassination she and Marina destroyed another photograph with Oswald holding the rifle with both hands over his head, with "To my daughter June" written on it.

The HSCA obtained another first generation print (from CE 133-A) on April 1, 1977 from the widow of George de Mohrenschildt. The words "Hunter of fascists—ha ha ha!" written in block Russian were on the back. Also in English were added in script: "To my friend George, Lee Oswald, 5/IV/63 [April 5, 1963]" Handwriting experts for the HSCA concluded the English inscription and signature were by Oswald. After two original photos, one negative and one first-generation copy had been found, the Senate Intelligence Committee located (in 1976) a third backyard photo (CE 133-C) showing Oswald with newspapers held away from his body in his right hand.

These photos, widely recognized as some of the most significant evidence against Oswald, have been subjected to rigorous analysis. Photographic experts consulted by the HSCA concluded they were genuine, answering twenty-one points raised by critics. Marina Oswald has always maintained she took the photos herself, and the 1963 de Mohrenschildt print bearing Oswald's signature clearly indicate they existed before the assassination. Nonetheless, some continue to contest their authenticity. In 2009, after digitally analyzing the photograph of Oswald holding the rifle and paper, computer scientist Hany Farid concluded that the photo "almost certainly was not altered."

Oswald arrest card, Dallas

PLEASE CHECK THESE TWO VIDEOS TO SEE JACK RUBY SHOOTING OSWALD DEAD:

Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald (raw footage)

VIDEO SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv_viK8qOfw

Oswald Shooting - Digitally Remastered [HD & SlowMo]

VIDEO SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n9VQ-dXrwQ

                 

THE UNHOLY TRINITY: ADRIAN LIM AND HIS HOLY WIVES (ALL EXECUTED BY HANGING IN SINGAPORE ON 25 NOVEMBER 1988)

November 24, 2013, 1:02 pm

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            On this date, 25 November 1988, Adrian Lim and his two Holy wives were executed by hanging in Changi Prison, Singapore. They were convicted of murdering two children in their Toa Payoh flat. I will post information about them from Wikipedia. 

Adrian Lim conned many women into offering him money and sex, and killed children in an attempt to stop police investigations against him.

The Toa Payoh ritual murders took place in Singapore in 1981. On 25 January the body of a nine-year-old girl was found dumped next to the lift of a block of flats in the Toa Payoh district and, two weeks later, a ten-year-old boy was found dead nearby. The children had been killed, purportedly as blood sacrifices to the Hindu goddess Kali. The murders were masterminded by Adrian Lim, a self-styled medium, who had tricked scores of women into believing he had supernatural powers. His victims offered money and sexual services in exchange for cures, beauty, and good fortune. Two of the women became his loyal assistants; Tan Mui Choo married him, and Hoe Kah Hong became one of his "holy wives". When the police investigated a rape charge filed by one of Lim's targets, he became furious and decided to kill children to derail the investigations. On each occasion, Hoe lured a child to Lim's flat where he or she was drugged and killed by the trio. Lim also sexually assaulted the girl before her death. The trio were arrested after the police found a trail of blood that led to their flat. Although the case name suggested ritualistic murders, the defendants said they did not conduct prayers, burning of joss sticks, ringing of bells, or any other rituals during the killings.

The 41-day trial was the second longest to have been held in the courts of Singapore at the time. None of the defendants denied their guilt. Their appointed counsels tried to spare their clients the death sentence by pleading diminished responsibility, arguing that the accused were mentally ill and could not be held entirely responsible for the killings. To support their case they brought in doctors and psychologists, who analysed the defendants and concluded that they had exhibited schizophrenia, and depressions of the psychotic and manic order. The prosecution's expert, however, refuted these testimonies and argued that they were in full control of their mental faculties when they planned and carried out the murders. The judges agreed with the prosecution's case and sentenced the trio to death. While on death row, the women appealed to the Privy Council in London and pleaded for clemency from the President of Singapore to no avail. Lim did not seek any pardons; instead, he accepted his fate and went smiling to the gallows. The three were hanged on 25 November 1988.

The Toa Payoh ritual murders shocked the public in Singapore, who were surprised by such an act taking place in their society. Reports of the trio's deeds and the court proceedings were closely followed and remained prominent in the Singaporean consciousness for several years. Twice, movie companies tried to capitalise on the sensation generated by the murders by producing motion pictures based on the killings; however, critics panned both films for indulging in gratuitous sex and violence, and the movies performed poorly at the box office. The actions and behaviour of the three killers were studied by academics in the criminal psychology field, and the rulings set by the courts became local case studies for diminished responsibility.

Whoever says Singapore is boring and antiseptic ignores our hard-to-surpass crime spine tinglers starring inimitable rogues such as ... the very incarnation of Evil — Adrian Lim ...

- Sonny Yap, The Straits Times, 15 July 1995

Singaporean society in the 1980s

Early in the nineteenth century, immigrants flooded into Peninsular Malaysia, colonising the Straits Settlements including the island city of Singapore. Migrants and natives held differing beliefs, but over time the boundaries between those belief systems blurred. Most of the population believed in spirits that inhabit the jungles, and in gods and devils that hover around, capable of benevolence and mischief. Certain people claimed that they could communicate with these supernatural beings. Through rituals in which they danced and chanted, these spirit mediums—tang-kees and bomohs—invited the beings to possess their bodies and dole out wisdoms, blessings, and curses to their believers. As time passed and the cities grew, the jungles gave way to concrete structures and the mediums' practices moved deeper into the heartland of communities.

By 1980, 75% of the residents in Singapore were living in public housing. Government-built high-rise blocks of flats clustered in the population centres, of which the Toa Payoh district was typical. Although a high density of people lived in each block, the residents mostly kept to themselves, valuing their privacy and tending to ignore what was happening around their homes. During this time, Singapore was a relatively peaceful society—a stark contrast to the prevalence of secret societies, triadsand gang warfare during the pre-independence days. The low crime rate, brought on by strict laws and tough enforcement, gave citizens a sense of security. Nonetheless, the government warned against complacency and lectured in its local campaigns, "Low crime doesn't mean no crime". In 1981, three Singaporeans committed a crime that shocked the nation.

A photo taken alongside Toa Payoh Lorong 7, Singapore: Block 12, where the murders took place, is smaller block on the right. The flat itself is highlighted in red. Blocks 10 and 11 had been demolished and reconstructed as the taller flats and multi-storey carpark as seen on the left and centre.

Two murders, three arrests

For several years, a medium in Block 12, Toa Payoh Lorong 7, had been performing noisy rituals in the middle of the night. The residents complained several times to the authorities, but the rituals would always resume after a short time. On the afternoon of 24 January 1981, nine-year-old Agnes Ng Siew Hock (simplified Chinese: 黄秀叶; traditional Chinese: 黃秀葉; pinyin: Huáng Xìuyè) disappeared after attending religious classes at her church in Toa Payoh. Hours later, her body was found stuffed in a bag outside a lift in Block 11, less than a kilometre (five-eighths of a mile) from the church. The girl had been smothered to death; the investigation revealed injuries to her genitals and semen in her rectum. Although the police launched an intensive investigation, questioning more than 250 people around the crime scene, they failed to obtain any leads. On 7 February ten-year-old Ghazali bin Marzuki was found dead under a tree between Blocks 10 and 11. He had been missing since the previous day, after being seen boarding a taxi with an unknown woman. Forensic pathologists on the scene deemed the cause of death as drowning, and found on the boy suffocation marks similar to those on Ng. There were no signs of sexual assault, but burns were on the boy's back and a puncture on his arm. Traces of a sedative were later detected in his blood.

The police found a scattered trail of blood that led to the seventh floor of Block 12. Stepping into the common corridor from the stairwell, Inspector Pereira noticed an eclectic mix of religious symbols (a cross, a mirror, and a knife-blade) on the entrance of the first flat (unit number 467F). The owner of the flat, Adrian Lim, approached the inspector and introduced himself, informing Pereira that he was living there with his wife, Tan Mui Choo, and a girlfriend, Hoe Kah Hong. Permitted by Lim to search his flat, the police found traces of blood. Lim initially tried to pass the stains off as candle wax, but when challenged claimed they were chicken blood. After the police found slips of paper written with the dead children's personal details, Lim tried to allay suspicions by claiming that Ghazali had come to his flat seeking treatment for a bleeding nose. He discreetly removed hair from under a carpet and tried to flush it down the toilet, but the police stopped him; forensics later determined the hair to be Ng's. Requesting a background check on Lim, Pereira received word from local officers that the medium was currently involved in a rape investigation. Lim overheard them and became agitated, raising his voice at the law enforcers. His ire was mimicked by Hoe as she gestured violently and shouted at the officers. Their actions further raised the investigators' suspicions that the trio were deeply involved in the murders. The police collected the evidence, sealed the flat as a crime scene, and took Lim and the two women in for questioning.

Perpetrators

Adrian Lim

Born on 6 January 1942, Adrian Lim (simplified Chinese: 林宝龙; traditional Chinese: 林寶龍; pinyin: Lín Bǎolóng) was the eldest son of a middle-class family. Described at the trial by his sister as a hot-tempered boy, he dropped out of secondary school and worked a short stint as an informant for the Internal Security Department, joining the cable radio company Rediffusion Singapore in 1962. For three years, he installed and serviced Rediffusion sets as an electrician before being promoted to bill collector. In April 1967, Lim married his childhood sweetheart with whom he had two children. He converted to Catholicism for his marriage. Lim and his family lived in rented rooms until his 1970 purchase of a three-room flat—a seventh floor unit (unit number 467F) of Block 12, Toa Payoh.

Lim started part-time practice as a spirit medium in 1973. He rented a room where he attended to the women—most of whom were bargirls, dance hostesses, and prostitutes—introduced to him by his landlord. Lim's customers also included superstitious men and elderly females, whom he cheated only of cash. He had learned the trade from a bomoh called "Uncle Willie" and prayed to gods of various religions despite his Catholic baptism. The Indian goddess Kali and "Phragann", which Lim described as a Siamese sex god, were among the spiritual entities he called on in his rituals. Lim deceived his clients with several confidence tricks; his most effective gimmick, known as the "needles and egg" trick, duped many to believe that he had supernatural abilities. After blackening needles with soot from a burning candle, Lim carefully inserted them into a raw egg and sealed the hole with powder. In his rituals, he passed the egg several times over his client while chanting and asked her to crack open the egg. Unaware that the egg had been tampered with, the client would be convinced by the sight of the black needles that evil spirits were harassing her.

Lim particularly preyed on gullible girls who had deep personal problems. He promised them that he could solve their woes and increase their beauty through a ritual massage. After Lim and his client had stripped, he would knead her body—including her genitals—with Phragann's idol and have sex with her. Lim's treatments also included an electro-shock therapy based on that used on mental patients. After placing his client's feet in a tub of water and attaching wires to her temples, Lim passed electricity through her. The shocks, he assured her, would cure headaches and drive away evil spirits.

Tan Mui Choo assisted Lim in his medium practice, reaping the benefits.

Tan Mui Choo

Catherine Tan Mui Choo (simplified Chinese: 陈梅珠; traditional Chinese: 陳梅珠; pinyin: Chén Méizhū) was referred to Lim by a fellow bargirl, who claimed the spirit medium could cure ailments and depression. Tan, at that time, was grieving the death of her grandmother to whom she had been devoted. Furthermore her estrangement from her parents weighed on her mind; having been sent away at the age of 13 to a vocational centre (a home mostly for juvenile delinquents), she felt unwanted by them. Tan's visits to Lim became regular, and their relationship grew intimate. In 1975 she moved into his flat on his insistence. To allay his wife's suspicions that he was having an affair with Tan, Lim swore an oath of denial before a picture of Jesus Christ. However, she discovered the truth and moved out with their children a few days later, divorcing Lim in 1976. Lim quit his Rediffusion job and became a full-time medium. He enjoyed brisk business, at one point receiving S$6,000–7,000 (US$2,838–3,311) a month from a single client. In June 1977, Lim and Tan registered their marriage.

Lim dominated Tan through beatings, threats, and lies. He persuaded her to prostitute herself to supplement their income. He also convinced her that he needed to fornicate with young women to stay healthy; thus, Tan assisted him in his business, preparing their clients for his pleasure. Lim's influence over Tan was strong; on his encouragement and promise that sex with a younger man would preserve her youth, Tan copulated with a Malay teenager and even with her younger brother. The boy was not her only sibling to be influenced by Lim; the medium had earlier seduced Tan's younger sister and tricked her into selling her body and having sex with the two youths. Despite the abuses, Tan lived with Lim, enjoying the dresses, beauty products and slimming courses bought with their income.

Hoe Kah Hong steadfastly believed in Lim, conscientiously executing his orders.

Hoe Kah Hong

Born on 10 September 1955, Hoe Kah Hong (simplified Chinese: 何家凤; traditional Chinese: 何家鳳; pinyin: Hé Jiāfèng) was eight years old when her father died; she was sent to live with her grandmother until she was fifteen. When she returned to her mother and siblings she was constantly required to give way to her elder sister Lai Ho. Under the perception that her mother favoured her sister, Hoe became disgruntled, showing her temper easily. In 1979 her mother brought Lai to Lim for treatment, and became convinced of Lim's powers by his "needles and egg" trick. Believing that Hoe's volatile temper could also be cured by Lim, the old woman brought her younger daughter to the medium. After witnessing the same trick, Hoe became Lim's loyal follower. Lim desired to make Hoe one of his "holy wives", even though she was already married to Benson Loh Ngak Hua. To achieve his goal, Lim sought to isolate Hoe from her family by feeding her lies. He claimed that her family were immoral people who practiced infidelity, and that Loh was an unfaithful man who would force her into prostitution. Hoe believed Lim's words, and after going through a rite with him she was declared by the medium as his "holy wife". She no longer trusted her husband and family, and became violent towards her mother. Three months after she had first met Lim, Hoe moved from her house and went to live with him.

Loh sought his wife at Lim's flat and ended up staying to observe her treatment. He was persuaded by her to participate in the electro-shock therapies. In the early hours of 7 January 1980, Loh sat with Hoe, their arms locked together and their feet in separate tubs of water. Lim applied a large voltage to Loh, who was electrocuted, while Hoe was stunned into unconsciousness. When she woke, Lim requested her to lie to the police about Loh's death. Hoe repeated the story Lim had given her, saying that her husband had been electrocuted in their bedroom when he tried to switch on a faulty electric fan in the dark. The coroner recorded an open verdict, and the police made no further investigations.

Despite her antipathy towards Loh, Hoe was affected by his death. Her sanity broke; she started hearing voices and hallucinating, seeing her dead husband. At the end of May she was admitted to the Woodbridge Hospital. There, psychologists diagnosed her condition as schizophrenia and started appropriate treatments. Hoe made a remarkably quick recovery; by the first week of July, she was discharged. She continued her treatment with the hospital; follow-up checks showed that she was in a state of remission. Hoe's attitude towards her mother and other family members began to improve after her stay in the hospital, although she continued to live with Lim and Tan.

Altar found in Adrian Lim's flat: gods of various religions were arrayed on it. Idols and pictures of Kali, Buddha, and Phragann are on it.

Rape and revenge

With Hoe and Tan as his assistants, Lim continued his trade, tricking more women into giving him money and sex. By the time of his arrest, he had 40 "holy wives". In late 1980 he was arrested and charged with rape. His accuser was Lucy Lau, a door-to-door cosmetic salesgirl, who had met Lim when she was promoting beauty products to Tan. On 19 October, Lim told Lau that a ghost was haunting her, but he could exorcise it with his sex rituals. She was unconvinced, but the medium persisted. He secretly mixed two capsules of Dalmadorm, a sedative, into a glass of milk and offered it to her, claiming it had holy properties. Lau became groggy after drinking it, which allowed Lim to take advantage of her. For the next few weeks, he continued to abuse her by using drugs or threats. In November, after Lim had given her parents a loan smaller than the amount they had requested, Lau made a police report about his treatment of her. Lim was arrested on charges of rape, and Tan for abetting him. Out on bail, Lim persuaded Hoe to lie that she was present at the alleged rape but saw no crime committed. This failed to stop the police enquiries; Lim and Tan had to extend their bail, in person, at the police station every fortnight.

Frustrated, Lim plotted to distract the police with a series of child murders. Moreover, he believed that sacrifices of children to Kali would persuade her supernaturally to draw the attention of the police away from him. Lim pretended to be possessed by Kali, and convinced Tan and Hoe that the goddess wanted them to kill children to wreak vengeance on Lau. He also told them Phragann demanded that he have sex with their female victims.

On 24 January 1981, Hoe spotted Agnes at a nearby church and lured her to the flat. The trio plied her with food and drink that was laced with Dalmadorm. After Agnes became groggy and fell asleep, Lim sexually abused her. Near midnight, the trio smothered Agnes with a pillow and drew her blood, drinking and smearing it on a portrait of Kali. Following that, they drowned the girl by holding down her head in a pail of water. Finally, Lim used his electro-shock therapy device to "make doubly sure that she was dead". They stuffed her body in a bag and dumped it near the lift at Block 11.

Ghazali suffered a similar fate when he was brought by Hoe to the flat on 6 February. He, however, proved resistant to the sedatives, taking a long time to fall asleep. Lim decided to tie up the boy as a precaution; however, the boy awoke and struggled. Panicking, the trio delivered karate chops to Ghazali's neck and stunned him. After drawing his blood, they proceeded to drown their victim. Ghazali struggled, vomiting and losing control of his bowels as he died. Blood kept streaming from his nose after his death. While Tan stayed behind to clean the flat, Lim and Hoe disposed the body. Lim noticed that a trail of blood led to their flat, so he and his accomplices cleaned as much as they could of these stains before sunrise. What they missed led the police to their flat and resulted in their arrest.

 

The murder case was heard in Courtroom No. 4 of the old Supreme Court Building.

Trial

Two days after their arrest, Lim, Tan and Hoe were charged in the Subordinate Court for the murders of the two children. The trio were subjected to further interrogations by the police, and to medical examinations by prison doctors. On 16–17 September, their case was brought to the court for a committal procedure. To prove that there was a case against the accused, Deputy Public Prosecutor Glenn Knight called on 58 witnesses and arrayed 184 pieces of evidence before the magistrate. While Tan and Hoe denied the charges of murder, Lim pleaded guilty and claimed sole responsibility for the acts. The magistrate decided that the case against the accused was sufficiently strong to be heard at the High Court. Lim, Tan, and Hoe remained in custody while investigations continued.

Judiciary, prosecution, and defence

The High Court was convened in the Supreme Court Building on 25 March 1983. Presiding over the case were two judges: Justice Thirugnana Sampanthar Sinnathuray, who would deliver judgment on serial murderer John Martin Scripps 13 years later, and Justice Frederick Arthur Chua, who was at the time the longest serving judge in Singapore. Knight continued to build his case on the evidence gathered by detective work. Photographs of the crime scenes, together with witness testimonies, would help the court to visualise the events that led to the crimes. Other evidence—the blood samples, religious objects, drugs, and the notes with Ng and Ghazali's names—conclusively proved the defendants' involvement. Knight had no eyewitnesses to the murders; his evidence was circumstantial, but he told the court in his opening statement, "What matters is that [the accused] did intentionally suffocate and drown these two innocent children, causing their deaths in circumstances which amount to murder. And this we will prove beyond all reasonable doubt."

Tan, with Lim's and the police's permission, used $10,000 of the $159,340 (US$4,730 of US$75,370) seized from the trio's flat to engage J. B. Jeyaretnam for her defence. Hoe had to accept the court's offer of counsel, receiving Nathan Isaac as her defender. Since his arrest, Lim had refused legal representation. He defended himself at the Subordinate Court hearings, but could not continue to do so when the case was moved to the High Court; Singapore law requires that for capital crimes the accused must be defended by a legal professional. Thus Howard Cashin was appointed as Lim's lawyer, although his job was complicated by his client's refusal to cooperate. The three lawyers decided not to dispute that their clients had killed the children. Acting on a defence of diminished responsibility, they attempted to show that their clients were not sound of mind and could not be held responsible for the killings. If this defence had been successful, the defendants would have escaped the death penalty to face either life imprisonment, or up to 10 years in jail.

Lim

No comment.

Justice Sinnathuray

No, no, no, Adrian Lim, you can't keep saying that to me. (To Cashin) He is your witness.

Cashin

You can see now, my Lord, how difficult it is with this witness.

Court transcript illustrating the court's frustration with Lim's behaviour

Proceedings

After Knight had presented the prosecution evidence the court heard testimonies on the personalities and character flaws of the accused, from their relatives and acquaintances. Details of their lives were revealed by one of Lim's "holy wives". Private medical practitioners Dr. Yeo Peng Ngee and Dr. Ang Yiau Hua admitted that they were Lim's sources for drugs, and had provided the trio sleeping pills and sedatives without question on each consultation. The police and forensics teams gave their accounts of their investigations; Inspector Suppiah, the investigating officer-in-charge, read out the statements the defendants had made during their remand. In these statements Lim stated that he had killed for revenge, and that he had sodomised Ng. The accused had also confirmed in their statements that each was an active participant in the murders. There were many contradictions among these statements and the confessions made in court by the accused, but Judge Sinnathuray declared that despite the conflicting evidence, "the essential facts of this case are not in dispute". Lim's involvement in the crimes was further evidenced by a witness who vouched that just after midnight on 7 February 1981, at the ground floor of Block 12, he saw Lim and a woman walk past him carrying a dark-skinned boy.

On 13 April Lim took the stand. He maintained that he was the sole perpetrator of the crimes. He denied that he raped Lucy Lau or Ng, claiming that he made the earlier statements only to satisfy his interrogators. Lim was selective in answering the questions the court threw at him; he verbosely answered those that agreed with his stance, and refused to comment on the others. When challenged on the veracity of his latest confession, he claimed that he was bound by religious and moral duty to tell the truth. Knight, however, countered that Lim was inherently a dishonest man who had no respect for oaths. Lim had lied to his wife, his clients, the police, and psychiatrists. Knight claimed Lim's stance in court was an open admission that he willingly lied in his earlier statements. Tan and Hoe were more cooperative, answering the questions posed by the court. They denied Lim's story, and vouched for the veracity of the statements they had given to the police. They told how they had lived in constant fear and awe of Lim; believing he had supernatural powers, they followed his every order and had no free will of their own. Under Knight's questioning, however, Tan admitted that Lim had been defrauding his customers, and that she had knowingly helped him to do so. Knight then got Hoe to agree that she was conscious of her actions at the time of the murders.

Battle of the psychiatrists

No one doubted that Lim, Tan, and Hoe had killed the children. Their defence was based on convincing the judges that medically, the accused were not in total control of themselves during the crimes. The bulk of the trial was therefore a battle between expert witnesses called by both sides. Dr Wong Yip Chong, a senior psychiatrist in private practice, believed that Lim was mentally ill at the time of the crimes. Claiming to be "judging by the big picture, and not fussing over contradictions", he said that Lim's voracious sexual appetite and deluded belief in Kali were characteristics of a mild manic depression. The doctor also said that only an unsound mind would dump the bodies close to his home when his plan was to distract the police. In rebuttal, the prosecution's expert witness, Dr Chee Kuan Tsee, a psychiatrist at Woodbridge Hospital, said that Lim was "purposeful in his pursuits, patient in his planning and persuasive in his performance for personal power and pleasure". In Dr Chee's opinion, Lim had indulged in sex because through his role as a medium he obtained a supply of women who were willing to go to bed with him. Furthermore, his belief in Kali was religious in nature, not delusional. Lim's use of religion for personal benefit indicated full self-control. Lastly, Lim had consulted doctors and freely taken sedatives to alleviate his insomnia, a condition which, according to Dr Chee, sufferers from manic depression fail to recognise.

Dr R. Nagulendran, a consultant psychiatrist, testified that Tan was mentally impaired by reactive psychotic depression. According to him she was depressed before she met Lim, due to her family background. Physical abuse and threats from Lim deepened her depression; drug abuse led her to hallucinate and believe the medium's lies. Dr Chee disagreed; he said that Tan had admitted to being quite happy with the material lifestyle Lim gave to her, enjoying fine clothes and beauty salon treatments. A sufferer from reactive psychotic depression would not have paid such attention to her appearance. Also, Tan had earlier confessed to knowing Lim was a fraud, but changed her stance in court to claim she was acting completely under his influence. Although Dr Chee had neglected Lim's physical abuse of Tan in his judgment, he was firm in his opinion that Tan was mentally sound during the crimes. Both Dr Nagulendran and Dr Chee agreed that Hoe suffered from schizophrenia long before she met Lim, and that her stay in Woodbridge Hospital had helped her recovery. However, while Dr Nagulendran was convinced that Hoe suffered a relapse during the time of the child killings, Dr Chee pointed out that none of the Woodbridge doctors saw any signs of relapse during the six months of her follow-up checks (16 July 1980 – 31 January 1981). If Hoe had been as severely impaired by her condition as Dr Nagulendran described, she would have become an invalid. Instead, she methodically abducted and helped kill a child on two occasions. Ending his testimony, Dr Chee stated that it was incredible that three people with different mental illnesses should share a common delusion of receiving a request to kill from a god.

Closing statements

In their closing speeches, the defence tried to reinforce the portrayal of their clients as mentally disturbed individuals. Cashin said that Lim was a normal man until his initiation into the occult, and that he was clearly divorced from reality when he entered the "unreasonable world of atrociousness", acting on his delusions to kill children in Kali's name. Jeyaretnam said that due to her depression and Lim's abuse, Tan was just "a robot", carrying out orders without thought. Isaac simply concluded, "[Hoe's] schizophrenic mind accepted that if the children were killed, they would go to heaven and not grow up evil like her mother and others." The defence criticised Dr Chee for failing to recognise their clients' symptoms.

The prosecution started its closing speech by drawing attention to the "cool and calculating" manner in which the children were killed. Knight also argued that the accused could not have shared the same delusion, and only brought it up during the trial. The "cunning and deliberation" displayed in the acts could not have been done by a deluded person. Tan helped Lim because "she loved [him]", and Hoe was simply misled into helping the crimes. Urging the judges to consider the ramifications of their verdict, Knight said: "My Lords, to say that Lim was less than a coward who preyed on little children because they could not fight back; killed them in the hope that he would gain power or wealth and therefore did not commit murder, is to make no sense of the law of murder. It would lend credence to the shroud of mystery and magic he has conjured up his practices and by which he managed to frighten, intimidate and persuade the superstitious, the weak and the gullible into participating in the most lewd and obscene acts."

Judgment

On 25 May 1983, crowds massed outside the building, waiting for the outcome of the trial. Due to limited seating, only a few were allowed inside to hear Justice Sinnathuray's delivery of the verdict, which took 15 minutes. The two judges were not convinced that the accused were mentally unsound during the crimes. They found Lim to be "abominable and depraved" in carrying out his schemes. Viewing her interviews with the expert witnesses as admissions of guilt, Sinnathuray and Chua found Tan to be an "artful and wicked person", and a "willing [party] to [Lim's] loathsome and nefarious acts". The judges found Hoe to be "simple" and "easily influenced". Although she suffered from schizophrenia, they noted that she was in a state of remission during the murders; hence she should bear full responsibility for her actions. All three defendants were found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hanged. The two women did not react to their sentences. On the other hand, Lim beamed and cried, "Thank you, my Lords!", as he was led out.

Lim accepted his fate; the women did not, and appealed against their sentences. Tan hired Francis Seow to appeal for her, and the court again assigned Isaac to Hoe. The lawyers asked the appeal court to reconsider the mental states of their clients during the murders, charging that the trial judges in their deliberations had failed to consider this point. The Court of Criminal Appeal reached their decision in August 1986. The appeal judges reaffirmed the decision of their trial counterparts, noting that as finders of facts, judges have the right to discount medical evidence in the light of evidence from other sources. Tan and Hoe's further appeals to London's Privy Council and Singapore President Wee Kim Wee met with similar failures.

Having exhausted all their avenues for pardon, Tan and Hoe calmly faced their fates. While waiting on death row the trio were counselled by Catholic priests and nuns. In spite of the reputation that surrounded Lim, Father Brian Doro recalled the murderer as a "rather friendly person". When the day of execution loomed, Lim asked Father Doro for absolution and Holy Communion. Likewise, Tan and Hoe had Sister Gerard Fernandez as their spiritual counsellor. The nun converted the two female convicts to Catholicism, and they received forgiveness and Holy Communion during their final days. On 25 November 1988 the trio were given their last meal and led to the hangman's noose. Lim smiled throughout his last walk. After the sentences were carried out, the three murderers were given a short Catholic funeral mass by Father Doro, and cremated on the same day.

Singaporeans crowded the grounds of the Subordinate Court (pictured) and other courts to catch a glimpse of the killers.

Legacy

The trial on the Toa Payoh ritual murders was closely followed by the populace of Singapore. Throngs of people constantly packed the grounds of the courts, hoping to catch a glimpse of Adrian Lim and to hear the revelations first-hand. Reported by regional newspapers in detail, the gory and sexually explicit recounting of Lim's acts offended the sensibilities of some; Canon Frank Lomax, Vicar of St. Andrew's Anglican Church, complained to The Straits Timesthat the reports could have a corrupting effect on the young. His words received support from a few readers. Others, however, welcomed the open reporting, considering it helpful in raising public awareness of the need for vigilance even in a city with low crime rates. Books, which covered the murders and the trial, were quickly bought by the public on their release.

The revelations from the trial cast Lim as evil incarnate in the minds of Singaporeans. Some citizens could not believe that anyone would willingly defend such a man. They called Cashin to voice their anger; a few even issued death threats against him. On the other hand, Knight's name spread among Singaporeans as the man who brought Adrian Lim to justice, boosting his career. He handled more high-profile cases, and became the director of the Commercial Affairs Department in 1984. He would maintain his good reputation until his conviction for corruption seven years later.

Even in prison, Lim was hated; his fellow prisoners abused and treated him as an outcast. In the years that followed the crime, memories remained fresh among those who followed the case. Journalists deemed it the most sensational trial of the 80s, being "the talk of a horrified city as gruesome accounts of sexual perversion, the drinking of human blood, spirit possession, exorcism and indiscriminate cruelty unfolded during the 41-day hearing". Fifteen years from the trial's conclusion, a poll conducted by The New Paper reported that 30 per cent of its respondents had picked the Toa Payoh ritual murders as the most horrible crime, despite the paper's request to vote only for crimes committed in 1998. Lim had become a benchmark for local criminals; in 2002 Subhas Anandan described his client, wife-killer Anthony Ler, as a "cooler, more handsome version of [the] notorious Toa Payoh medium-murderer".

During the 1990s, the local film industry made two movies based on the murder case, the first of which was Medium Rare. The 1991 production had substantial foreign involvement; most of the cast and crew were American or British. The script was locally written and intended to explore the "psyche of the three main characters". The director, however, focused on sex and violence, and the resulting film was jeered by the audience at its midnight screening. Its 16-day run brought in $130,000 (US$75,145), and a reporter called it "more bizarre than the tales of unnatural sex and occult practices associated with the Adrian Lim story". The second film, 1997's God or Dog, also had a dismal box-office performance despite a more positive critical reception. Both shows had difficulty in finding local actors for the lead role; Zhu Houren declined on the basis that Adrian Lim was too unique a personality for an actor to portray accurately, and Xie Shaoguang rejected the role for the lack of "redeeming factors" in the murderer. On the television, the murder case would have been the opening episode for True Files, a crime awareness programme in 2002. The public, however, complained that the trailers were too gruesome with the re-enactments of the rituals and murders, forcing the media company MediaCorp to reshuffle the schedule. The Toa Payoh ritual murders episode was replaced by a less sensational episode as the opener and pushed back into a later timeslot for more mature viewers, marking the horrific nature of the crimes committed by Lim, Tan, and Hoe.

OTHER LINKS:

http://www.executedtoday.com/2011/11/25/1988-adrian-lim-toa-payoh-murders-singapore/

http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_71_2005-02-02.html

GERMAN NAZI SS OFFICER: HANS MOSER (APRIL 7, 1906 TO NOVEMBER 26, 1948)

November 25, 2013, 2:04 pm

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            On this date, November 26, 1948, a Nazi SS officer, Hans Möser, was executed by hanging in Landsberg Prison. I will post the information about the sadistic officer from Wikipedia.

Hans Möser in US custody, 1947

Born	April 7, 1906 Darmstadt, Germany
Died	November 26, 1948 (aged 42) Landsberg am Lech, Germany
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Schutzstaffel
Rank	Obersturmführer
Unit	SS-Totenkopfverbänd

Hans Karl Möser, or Hans Moeser, (April 7, 1906 – † November 26, 1948) was a German Nazi SS officer at the Neuengamme, Auschwitz and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps during World War II. Rising to the rank of SS-Obersturmführer, he was captured at the end of the war and tried by the United States Military Government Court for war crimes. The only one among 19 defendants at the Dora Trial sentenced to death, Möser was executed at Landsberg Prisonin 1948 (death by hanging).

Life

Möser was born in Darmstadt, Germany. A merchant by trade, he joined the Nazi Party in October 1929 (Member No. 155301) and the SS in July 1931 (Member No. 9555). On July 1940 Möser joined the staff at the newly opened SS-Hinzert concentration camp, infamous for its brutality, and later he transferred to Neuengamme. From May 1943 until October 1943 he was posted to the Auschwitz III Monowitz concentration camp as Kompanieführer of the Wachbatallion (Guard Battalion) in IG Farben's "Buna" plant. By the end of April 1944 he was also Kompanieführer of the Men on Watch at the Auschwitz I main camp (German: Stammlager).

He transferred to the Dora central camp on May 1, 1944, initially serving as Deputy Protective Custody Camp Leader (German: Schutzhafthaftlagerführer) and then in July promoted to First Protective Custody Camp Leader. Here he was to commit the atrocities that would lead to his later trial and execution. During hangings of prisoners, for instance, he sometimes saw to it that the ropes were cut while the victims were still alive, in order to prolong their agony. In February, 1945, as the Red Army overran German positions on the Eastern Front, the SS headquarters personnel at Auschwitz evacuated to Mittelbau-Dora. Auschwitz commander Richard Baer and his staff took over the Dora complex and Möser was again made Deputy Leader, this time under Franz Hößler.

On April 5, 1945, as American 3rd Armored Division closed in on Mittelbau-Dora, Möser led a forced evacuation of over 3000 prisoners to the railhead for transfer to Neuengamme. Due to the wartime situation the train was diverted to Ravensbrück concentration camp instead. The prisoners were then led on a death march for the last stage of their journey.

Sixteen of the nineteen defendants on trial for war crimes committed during the war at Dora-Mittelbau. Locale: Dachau, [Bavaria] Germany The Dora defendants, Hans Möser 3rd from the right

Trial and Execution

Möser was arrested at the end of the war. Following the June 1945 Fedden Mission investigation of the Dora conditions, Möser was among 19 defendants tried by the American General Military Government Court in the Dora Trial (The United States of America versus Arthur Kurt Andrae et al., Case Number 000-50-37), part of the Dachau Trials. Proceedings began on July 7, 1947 and lasted until December 30. Möser was found to have been present at hangings and personally shooting prisoners execution-style during escape attempts. The responsibility for the death marches during the final evacuation of Dora were also attributed to Möser. In his trial statement he said: “The same way, with the same pleasure, as you shoot deer, I shot a human being. When I came to the SS and had to shoot the first three persons, my food didn’t taste good for three days, but today it is a pleasure. It is a joy for me.” Found guilty, he was the only defendant in the Dora Trial sentenced to death. Following appeals, Möser was executed by hanging at Landsberg Prison on November 26, 1948.

MEET THE CHIEF JUSTICE OF JAPAN, APPOINTED ON NOVEMBER 21, 2008 [PRO DEATH PENALTY QUOTES OF THE WEEK ~ SUNDAY NOVEMBER 24, 2013 TO SATURDAY NOVEMBER 30, 2013]

November 26, 2013, 1:24 pm

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Hironobu Takesaki 竹崎博允

Hironobu Takesaki 竹崎博允

QUOTE 1:“As a judge of the court of last resort. I will strive to make a rational judgment while hearing opinions of the parties from a neutral and fair perspective and taking into consideration the course of history.”

QUOTE 2: “The law has its logical and scientific side, but we [judges] also face the problem of understanding human beings, which is why history interests me. Trying to understand any crime or incident without knowing the background is inconceivable to me. Every social phenomenon has to be seen in its historical context. History is fundamental.”

AUTHOR:Hironobu Takesaki (竹崎博允Takesaki Hironobuborn July 8, 1944) is a Japanese lawyer and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Japan. He is a graduate of the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law and of Columbia Law School. At age 64, Takesaki replaced Niro Shimada as the Chief Justice when November 21, 2008, the date of Shimada's mandatory retirement, came.

Takesaki is now at the apex of a judicial career that began in 1969. The western Japan native divides his time between his official residence in Tokyo and the city’s suburbs, where he spends every weekend with his wife and daughter. Despite a demanding schedule, he still makes time to cultivate English roses in his garden on weekends and, above all, to read. Takesaki counts works in the natural sciences, and especially history, among his favorites, and values them as much for the pleasure he gets from the subject matter as for the depth they give him as a jurist.

APPLICATION: Although these two quotes are not referring to the death penalty, I chose them because it is another example of safeguards in capital cases. The Chief Justice of Japan himself, wants to learn from history to research more, in order to understand the cases in deeper prospective.

ISRAEL NEEDS THE DEATH PENALTY FOR TERRORISTS [ARTICLE ON THE DEATH PENALTY OF THE WEEK ~ SUNDAY NOVEMBER 24, 2013 TO SATURDAY NOVEMBER 30, 2013]

November 27, 2013, 1:08 pm

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NOTICE: The following article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.

PAGE TITLE:http://www.cbsnews.com/

ARTICLE TITLE:How Bibi blew it with Hamas

DATE: Friday October 28, 2011

AUTHOR: Deroy Murdock

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Deroy Murdock is an American libertarian syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service and a contributing editor with National Review Online.

URL:http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-bibi-blew-it-with-hamas/

Terrorist Cadet School (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.tonyinman.net/hot-off-the-press/what-will-your-legacy-be/attachment/afghanistan-suicide-bombers-cartoon)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, previously counted among the toughest leaders in the civilized world, has become softer than the secretary general of the United Nations. Netanyahu recently ransomed a kidnapped Israeli soldier whom Hamas had held hostage since 2006. The price for Sgt. Gilad Shalit's freedom? Israel will free 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Many are hardened terrorists with Israeli and even American blood on their hands. This colossal breach of justice for these victims injects this toxic population back into society. Some of them almost certainly will express their gratitude with machine guns and dynamite.

The first waveof 477 prisoners swapped for Shalit includes at least three terrorists who have slaughtered Americans.

• Ahlam Tamimi conspired to attack a Sbarro restaurant on Aug. 9, 2001. This Jerusalem suicide bombing killed 15 -- including Passaic, N.J.'s Shoshana Greenbaum, 31 -- and wounded 130 more.

Now carefree in Jordan, despite 16 life sentences, Tamimi has no regrets.

"It was a calculated act, performed with conviction and faith in Allah," she told a Hamas website. "Jihad warriors are always ready to die as martyrs, to be arrested -- or to succeed. I managed to overcome the barrier of prison and was released. Why should I repent?"

• Abd al-Hadi Rafa Ghanim of Islamic Jihad grabbed the wheel of a Jerusalem-bound bus and steered into a ravine in 1989, killing eleven (including Philadelphia's Rita Susan Levin, 39) and injuring 27. Ghanim was serving 16 life sentences.
• Ibrahim Muhammad Yunus Dar Musa received 17 years for, among other things, helping to murder Detroit native Dr. David Applebaum, 51, and his daughter, Nava, 20, on her wedding eve. Five others were killed and at least 50 wounded in a Sept. 9, 2003, suicide bombing at Jerusalem's Café Hillel.
• Abd al-Aziz Yussuf Mustafa Salehi famously waved his bloody hands from the window of a Ramallah police station, in which he and other members of a mob fatally flogged and killed Israeli reservists Vadim Norzhich and Yosef Avrahami. These October 2000 murders earned Salehi a life sentence.
• Maedh Waal Taleb Abu Sharakh, Majdi Muhammad Ahmed Amr, and Fadi Muhammad Ibrahim al-Jaaba of Hamas planned a March 5, 2003, suicide bombing of Haifa's bus 37, killing 17 and wounding 53. These murderers received 19, 19, and 18 life sentences respectively.
• Nasir Sami Abd al-Razzaq Ali al Nasser-Yataima planned a Passover 2002 suicide bombing that killed 30 and wounded 140 at Netanya's Park Hotel, earning him 29 life terms, plus 20 years.

In addition to the 469 other prisoners released on October 18, Israel soon will free another 550 dangerous characters -- all to rescue oneIsraeli soldier.

With all due respect and sympathy for Sergeant Shalit, this was a stupid, disproportionate, and likely deadly decision.

As Nadav Shragai wrotein Jerusalem Viewpoints, an estimated 50 percent of terrorists in previous Israeli prisoner swaps and "goodwill gestures" subsequently executed, plotted, or supported terror assaults. In fact, Israel had previously freed participants in the aforementioned Passover massacre and Café Hillel bombing. Israeli officials had twice discharged Ramez Sali Abu Salmim. He eventually blew himself up in Café Hillel.

Israel, Palestinians swap prisoners

Israel: Politics behind the prisoner swap

In October 2010, the U.S.-Israeli Almagor Terror Victims Association counted at least 30 attacks involving Islamic extremists liberated by Israel's government. Almagor reports that 177 people have been murdered, and many others injured, in attacks that Israel could have prevented simply by keeping these savages caged.

While Israel now has complicated its own anti-terrorist vigilance, America cannot rest either. Some of these freed killers will remain in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, from which they can attack Israelis. That would be bad enough.

Some of the more adventurous terrorists, however, might use their new and undeserved freedom to target Americans. Why not teach Israel's chief benefactor and staunchest ally a lesson by, say, blasting a U.S. bank branch elsewhere in the Middle East -- or beyond? No American embassy, hotel, military base, or bar full of laughing, singing U.S. tourists is any safer for Netanyahu's folly -- from London to Lima.

And why not bomb Americans in Long Island or Los Angeles? A quick flight from, say, Cairo through Frankfurt to Mexico City, and then over the well-trampled route across America's wide-open southern frontier (or via the even more vulnerable northern border), and jihad in America can become a reality for any of these hundreds of dedicated terrorists that Israel has escorted right onto the street.

Also, Netanyahu idiotically has fixed the terrorist-soldier exchange rate at approximately 1,000 to one. With 3,997 Palestinians still in custody as of August 31, not counting the 1,027 swap beneficiaries, Hamas needs to kidnap just four Israeli soldiers in order to demand freedom for all of its detainedcomrades. My friend Jacob Laksin reports in FrontPageMag.com that Palestinians in Gaza already have begun to chant: "The people want a new Gilad!"

Ironically, President Obama, who is sometimes considered soft on terrorism, has deployed drones and Navy SEALS overseas to blow major terrorists into splinters, due process be damned. (Hooray for that!) In contrast, Netanyahu -- approximately the Ronald Reagan of Israel -- liberates thousands of Islamic-extremist killers, like a one-man Israeli ACLU.

Netanyahu totally ignores these wise words:

"Do not release jailed terrorists. . . . Prisoner releases only embolden terrorists by giving them the feeling that even if they are caught, their punishment will be brief. Worse, by leading terrorists to think such [prisoner-exchange] demands are likely to be met, they encourage precisely the kind of terrorist blackmail they are supposed to defuse."

This sound advice was offered by none other than . . . Benjamin Netanyahu on page 144 of his 1995 book Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism. 

Israel urgently needs something far closer to the Obama model. Rather than "punish" terrorist killers with meaningless multiple life sentences, Israel should give them the death penalty -- good and hard. Terrorists can be neither demanded, nor exchanged, nor killed again, while dead. Israel should execute this filth, cremate them, and then dump their ashes into the Mediterranean. They will no longer bother anyone, save for a few unfortunate fish that will deserve apologies for having to swim amid such filth.

Bio: Deroy Murdock is a fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Counterterrorism researchers Mitchell Baxter and Laurence Herman supplied information for this article. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

A GREAT SHOCK TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH: LEONARD KEITH LAWSON (1927 TO 29 NOVEMBER 2003)

November 28, 2013, 1:05 pm

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            Ten years ago on this date, 29 November 2003, a convicted rapist and murderer, Leonard Keith Lawson died in his cell at the Grafton Correctional Centre in New South Wales, Australia. I will post information about him from Wikipedia and Murderpedia and some quotes from Paul B. Kidd’s book, before giving my comments and thoughts. His case was very similar to Barry Gordon Hadlow.

Convicted murderer Leonard Lawson arrested and arraigned, Central Police Court, Sydney (Photo by Jack Mulligan) (PHOTO SOURCE: http://murderpedia.org/male.L/l/lawson-leonard-keith.htm)

INTERNET SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_Lawson

Leonard Keith Lawson (1927 - 29 November 2003), better known as Len Lawsonor Lennie Lawson, was a bestselling Australian comic book creator, successful commercial artist and photographer, and a convicted rapist and murderer.

Lawson first came to prominence as the creator of The Lone Avenger, an Australian comic book hero, whose first appearance was in the second issue of Action Comics in 1946, running for thirteen years, eventually taking over the entire comic and selling up to 70,000 copies. Lawson also created another masked Western vigilante hero The Hooded Rider, as well as Diana, Queen of the Apes and Peter Fury.

In 1954, however, Lawson kidnapped, assaulted and raped five models. He was sentenced to death but had his sentence commuted to 14 years in prison. After his release in 1961, he raped and killed another model on 7 November 1962 and on the next day, took several hostages at the Sydney Church of England Girls' Grammar School, killing a 15-year old girl in the ensuing siege. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Lawson died in prison in November 2003.

INTERNET SOURCE: http://murderpedia.org/male.L/l/lawson-leonard-keith.htm

Classification: Murderer

Characteristics: Convicted rapist - Siege at a private girls’ school

Number of victims: 2

Date of murders: November 7-8, 1961

Date of arrest: November 8, 1961

Date of birth: August 16, 1927

Victims profile: Jane Bower, 16 / Wendy Sue Luscombe, 15

Method of murder: Stabbing with knife / Shooting

Location: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Status: Sentenced to death on 25 June 1954. Commuted to 14 years imprisonment. Paroled in May 1961. Sentenced to life in prison, 1962. Died in prison on November 29, 2003

An artist, Lawson was convicted of the rape of two teenage girls in 1952. Originally sentenced to death it was later commuted to life imprisonment.

He was released on parole in 1961, whereupon he stabbed a 16 year-old girl and the next day strangled a 15 year-old girl in Sydney.

Again sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders, he is now eligible to apply to the Supreme Court for a fixed sentence. While in prison he tried to kill another female in 1972.

Leonard Keith Lawson

Leonard Keith Lawson, a convicted rapist and murderer, died on Nov. 29, 2003, in his cell at the Grafton Correctional Centre in New South Wales. Authorities say he probably suffered a heart attack. He was 76.

Lawson worked as a successful commercial artist and photographer before he became a violent criminal. In 1954, he kidnapped five models, took them into the Terrey Hills bush in north Sydney and raped two of them at gunpoint; he also sexually assaulted the others. Originally sentenced to be executed, Lawson received a 14-year prison sentence after the death penalty was commuted. When he was released, Lawson used his artistic background to lure new victims.

On Nov. 7, 1961, while painting a portrait of 16-year-old Jane Bower, Lawson tied her up, sexually assaulted her then stabbed her to death. The next day, he carried a gun into the Sydney Church of England Girls' Grammar School and took several students hostage. Fifteen-year-old Wendy Sue Luscombe, who was sitting in the chapel pews, was shot and killed during the siege. This time, Lawson received a life sentence.

Imprisonment didn't curb Lawson's violent tendencies. Ten years into his second incarceration, a group of dancers gave a concert for the inmates at his prison. At the end of the performance, Lawson jumped on stage and threatened to kill one of the dancers, Sharon Hamilton, with a knife. Although Hamilton was released unharmed, she committed suicide six years after the attack.

One of the oldest prisoners in Australia, Lawson spent 48 years in prison, and has been behind bars continuously since 1962. Several of his paintings currently hang at the prison where he died.

Leonard Keith Lawson (b. 16 August 1927), creator of The Lone Avengerand The Hooded Rider comic books, drove five female models on a photo shoot to bushland in the Terrey Hills area on 7 May 1954. After binding and gagging them at gunpoint, he raped three of them, and indecently assaulted the other two women.

He was apprehended by police and was initially sentenced to death on 25 June 1954, but this was later commuted to 14 years imprisonment. A model prisoner, Lawson was paroled in May 1961 after just serving seven years.

On 6 November 1961, he raped and murdered a teenage girl, Jane Bower, and was apprehended by police the following day during a siege at a private girls’ school where, while struggling with a teacher, Lawson’s gun went off, killing a student, Wendy Luscombe. Lawson was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1962 and died at the Grafton Correctional Centre on 29 November 2003.

Killer Lawson dies after 50 years in jail

By Candace Sutton - The Sun-Herald

November 30, 2003

One of NSW's most notorious criminals, Leonard Keith Lawson, 76, died in Grafton jail yesterday after being imprisoned for the better part of 50 years.

Lennie Lawson, as he was known, became a successful commercial artist and photographer before committing multiple rape and murder.

In his teens, he created a highly popular comic book character, The Lone Avenger, a masked lawman who saved women from kidnappers and brought murderers to task.

In 1954, at the age of 26, he took five June Dally-Watkins photographic models into the Terrey Hills bush in north Sydney and, at gunpoint, raped two and sexually assaulted the others.

He was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to 14 years' jail and he was released after serving only half the term.

On November 7, 1962, while painting a portrait of 16-year-old Manly girl, Jane Bower, in his flat at Collaroy, Lawson bound her arms, sexually assaulted her and stabbed her to death. The next day, he burst into the chapel of the Sydney Church of England Girls' Grammar School at Moss Vale, taking schoolgirls hostage.

(A few weeks earlier he had dined with the SCEGGS pupils and staff as an honoured "author", after convincing the headmistress he was researching a novel set in a girls' school.)

In the siege, a struggle ensued and his gun discharged, killing 15-year-old Wendy Sue Luscombe, who was sitting in the pews.

Lawson was sentenced to life imprisonment.

On December 15, 1972, a group of dancers arrived at Parramatta jail to give a concert for the inmates.

Lawson, on privileges, was in the audience. At the end of the performance, he whipped out a knife and jumped to the stage, holding the blade to the throat of dancer Sharon Hamilton in what prison warders believe was an escape attempt.

Hamilton later sought extensive psychiatric treatment and became a patient at the now notorious Chelmsford Hospital. Six years after the attack, Hamilton committed suicide.

Residing in Grafton jail, Lawson applied for day leave and, in 1994, for a determinant sentence.

He told a reporter that he believed he deserved some freedom and he wasn't a threat, although "the rhythms of the city and its women" got to him.

His application was rejected.

Lawson continued his painting throughout his life in jail, producing many canvases which hang in Grafton.

COMMENTS:

            In Paul B. Kidd’s book, ‘Never to be released’, Lenny Keith Lawson won his parole for the two rapes he committed not only because of just escaping the death sentence, but also because he was a model prisoner, good artist and a devout Roman Catholic. Just like Barry Hadlow, Lenny played Christian to get out of prison.

           

            Lenny’s case is a great embarrassment to Sister Helen Prejean who always insists that murderers should be allowed to keep their lives. I suggest anybody showing to her and see how she will freak out for sure! Three innocent lives were lost and Sister Helen Prejean will keep silent for sure!

            Since Lenny died in prison already, Thank God that no one can free him or write any letters to him. I encourage people to destroy his artworks, such a disgrace to buy artwork from a rapist murderer. This is a perfect example of how flawed restorative Justice is.

---

THE KALLANG BODY PARTS MURDERER: LEONG SIEW CHOR (EXECUTED BY HANGING IN SINGAPORE ON 30 NOVEMBER 2007)

November 29, 2013, 2:04 pm

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           On this date, 30 November 2007, Leong Siew Chor was executed by hanging in Singapore. He was convicted of the 15 June 2005 murder of Chinese National, Liu Hong Mei where her body was cut into seven pieces and thrown into two rivers in Singapore.  
 

INTERNET SOURCE:http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_1793_2011-03-17.html

The Kallang Body Parts Murder is one of Singapore’s more prominent criminal cases. The crime took place in June 2005 and involved the murder of Liu Hong Mei, a Chinese national who had been working in Singapore. She was killed by her supervisor and lover, Leong Siew Chor, and subsequently chopped up into seven parts. Her body parts and belongings were then dumped at the Kallang River, Singapore River, rubbish bins along Ubi Road and outside Ang Mo Kio MRT Station. The crime came to light when parts of her body surfaced at Kallang River, giving the crime its name.

Background
Liu was a 22 year-old Chinese national who had come to Singapore to work. Leong was 50 years old and married with three children. Both Liu and Leong worked at Agere Systems Singapore in Serangoon North Avenue 5, where Liu was a production operator and Leong was her supervisor. In mid-2004, the two began to have an affair.

On 13 June, the two checked into a hotel room at Hotel81 in Geylang. While Liu was occupied, Leong stole her bank card. Over the next two days, he withdrew over $2,000 from her savings account. Leong knew her personal identification number, and withdrew the money from ATM machines in Tanjong Katong, Joo Chiat and Haig Road.  Liu later discovered that her card was missing and notified the police. She was advised that she could view the surveillance photos of the offender to see if she could identify the person. Not knowing that Leong was the culprit, she confided in him about the theft of her bank card.

The murder

The murder is believed to have taken place some time between the mornings of 15 and 16 June at Leong’s home at 114 Lorong 3 Geylang. Leong strangled Liu, and then proceeded to chop her body into seven parts: feet, legs above the knee, lower torso, upper torso and head. He used a chopper and a rubber mallet to cut through her bones. He placed the body parts into green plastic bags and cardboard boxes.

Leong then made several trips on various modes of transportation to dump the parts of Liu’s dismembered body at different sites. He cycled to Ubi Road and dumped her clothes, shoes and feet in separate rubbish bins. He took taxis to the Singapore River and the Kallang River, where he dumped her lower legs and head, and lower and upper torso respectively. He then dumped her handbag and its contents at the rubbish bin outside Ang Mo Kio MRT on his way to work. He then reported for work as usual and denied knowledge of Liu’s whereabouts when other colleagues became worried that she was late and did not show up. Her colleagues eventually filed a missing persons report with the police.

On 17 June, the body parts that Leong had dumped into the Kallang River surfaced and drifted to the bank, where they were discovered by a cleaner. The lower and upper torso were the first parts to be discovered. The cleaner first came upon the lower torso, while the police found the upper torso further down on the river bank. The police subsequently managed to find her head and legs in bags from the Singapore River destined for the Tuas incineration plant. However, despite the best efforts of the police, her feet, clothes and belongings were never recovered.

Investigative process

Leong was arrested on 17 June and charged with murder the following day. He was remanded in Changi and Queenstown Prisons while police investigations and a psychiatric evaluation were conducted. During this period, he was also not allowed to meet with either his family or his lawyer, the well-known criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan.

Liu’s funeral was delayed as the police carried out forensic investigations. The process was complicated due to the decomposed nature of the victim's body parts. Her wake was finally held on 12 July 2005, and was attended by more than 100 sympathisers who went to pay their respects.

Legal proceedings

Leong’s trial started in May 2006. As the trial progressed, there was controversy over statements he had given to the police. Leong had initially confessed to killing Liu and had cited a failed suicide pact as the motivation. Based on Leong's statement, his defence lawyer argued that he had made a suicide pact with Liu and that she had therefore consented to her death.

However, Leong later changed his statement in June 2005, stating that he had killed her because he had feared being found out for stealing over $2,000 from her using her bank card. Anandan tried to get the judge to dismiss the changed statement as Leong claimed that it was the police that had convinced him to change it in order to get a lighter sentence. Justice Tay Yong Kwang accepted the changed statement, refusing the defence’s arguments that police procedures and actions had been misleading and inappropriate. Tay argued that suicide was not consistent with Liu’s situation as she was still young and stable in her job.

Leong was found guilty and sentenced to death on 19 May 2006. He appealed, but the appeals court ruled against him in September 2006. A second attempt to have his appeal re-heard was also unsuccessful. He then appealed to President S. R. Nathan for clemency in November 2007 but this was also rejected. Leong was hanged on 30 November 2007.

Timeline
Mid-2004: Affair between Leong and Liu begins.
13 June 2005:Leong steals Liu’s bank card.
14 June 2005:Leong withdraws over $2,000 from Liu’s bank account at several ATM machines.
15-16 June 2005: Leong strangles Liu, chops her body into seven parts and dumps them in the Singapore River and Kallang River.
16 June 2005: Liu’s lower torso is discovered at the Kallang River.
17 June 2005: Leong is arrested.
May 2006: Murder trial begins in High Court.
19 May 2006: Leong is sentenced to death.
September 2006: Leong’s appeal is rejected.
January 2007:A clemency plea sent to President S. R. Nathan.
November 2007: President rejects Leong’s plea.
30 November 2007: Leong is hanged.

 

OTHER LINKS:

http://www.singaporelaw.sg/sglaw/laws-of-singapore/case-law/free-law/high-court-judgments/12904-public-prosecutor-v-leong-siew-chor-2006-3-slr-290-2006-sghc-81

SUPERIOR ORDERS

November 30, 2013, 2:31 pm

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            On this date, December 1, 1945, a German General, Anton Dostler was executed by firing squad in Aversa, Italy. The trial found General Dostler guilty of war crimes, rejecting the defense of Superior Orders. I will post about Superior Orders from Wikipedia, in accordance to the same date of his execution.

Superior orders, often known as the Nuremberg defense, lawful orders or by the German phrase "Befehl ist Befehl" ("Orders are Orders"), is a plea in a court of law that a soldier not be held guilty for actions which were ordered by a superior officer. The superior orders plea is similar to the doctrine of respondeat superior in tort law where a superior is held liable for the actions of a subordinate. Some legal scholars and war crimes tribunals will correlate the plea to the doctrine of respondeat superior; whereas others will distinguish the two concepts.

The superior orders plea is often regarded as the complement to command responsibility.

One of the most noted uses of this plea, or "defense," was by the accused in the 1945–46 Nuremberg Trials, such that it is also called the "Nuremberg defense". The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the main victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany. It was during these trials, under the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal which set them up, that the defense of superior orders was no longer considered enough to escape punishment; but merely enough to lessen punishment.

Historically, the plea of superior orders has been used both before and after the Nuremberg Trials, with a notable lack of consistency in various rulings.

Apart from the specific plea of Superior Orders, discussions about how the general concept of superior orders ought to be used, or ought not to be used, have taken place in various arguments, rulings and Statutes that have not necessarily been part of “after the fact” war crimes trials, strictly speaking. Nevertheless these discussions and related events help us understand the evolution of the specific plea of superior orders and the history of its usage.

Hagenbach on trial, from Berner Chronik des Diebold Schilling dem Älteren

1 History before 1900

1.1  The trial of Peter von Hagenbach

In 1474, in the trial of Peter von Hagenbach by an ad hoc tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire, occurred the first known “international” recognition of commanders’ obligations to act lawfully. Hagenbach offered the defense that he was just following orders, but this defense was rejected and he was convicted of war crimes and beheaded.

Specifically, Hagenbach was put on trial for atrocities committed under his command but not by him directly, during the occupation of Breisach. This was the earliest modern European example of the doctrine of command responsibility.Since he was convicted for crimes "he as a knight was deemed to have a duty to prevent," Hagenbach defended himself by arguing that he was only following orders from the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, to whom the Holy Roman Empire had given Breisach. This defense was rejected.

2 History from 1900 to 2000

2.1German military trials after World War I

On June 4, 1921, the legal doctrine of superior orders was used during the German Military Trials that took place after World War I: One of the most famous of these trials was the matter of Lieutenant Karl Neumann, who was a U-Boat Captain responsible for the sinking of the hospital ship the Dover Castle. Even though he frankly admitted to having sunk the ship, he stated that he had done so on the basis of orders supplied to him by the German Admiralty; and that being so, he could not be held liable for his actions. The Leipzig Supreme Court (then Germany's supreme court) acquitted him, accepting the defense of superior orders as a grounds to escape criminal liability. Further, that very court had this to say in the matter of superior orders:

“… that all civilized nations recognize the principle that a subordinate is covered by the orders of his superiors."

Many accused of war crimes were acquitted on a similar defense, creating immense dissatisfaction amongst the Allies. This has been thought to be one of the main causes for the specific removal of this defense in the August 8, 1945 London Charter of the International Military Tribunal. This removal has been attributed to the actions of Robert H. Jackson, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who was appointed Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.

2.2The Dostler case

On October 8, 1945, Anton Dostler was the first German general to be tried for war crimes by a U.S. military tribunal at the Royal Palace of Caserta in Caserta. He was accused of ordering the execution of 15 captured U.S. soldiers of Operation Ginny II in Italy in March 1944. He admitted into ordering the execution but said that he could not be held responsible because he was just following orders from his superiors. The execution of 15 U.S. prisoners of war in Italy ordered by Dostler was an implementation of Hitler's Commando Order of 1942 which required the immediate execution of all Allied commandos, whether in proper uniforms or not, without trial if apprehended by German forces. The tribunal rejected the defense of Superior Orders and found Dostler guilty of war crimes. He was sentenced to death and executed by a firing squad on December 1, 1945, in Aversa.

The Dostler case became a precedent for the principle, used in the Nuremberg Trials of German generals, officials, and Nazi leaders beginning in November 1945, that using Superior orders as a defense does not relieve officers from responsibility of carrying out illegal orders and their liability to be punished in court. This principle was codified in Principle IV of the Nuremberg Principles, and similar principles were found in sections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

2.3Nuremberg Trials after World War II

See also: Nuremberg Trials

In 1945 and 1946, during the Nuremberg Trials the issue of superior orders again arose. Before the end of World War II, the Allies suspected such a defense might be employed, and issued the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which specifically stated that following an unlawful order is not a valid defense against charges of war crimes.

Thus, under Nuremberg Principle IV, "defense of superior orders" is not a defense for war crimes, although it might influence a sentencing authority to lessen the penalty. Nuremberg Principle IV states:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

During the Nuremberg Trials, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodland other defendants unsuccessfully used the defense.

(Before the trials, there was little consensus amongst the Allies as to what was to be done with the Nazi war prisoners. Winston Churchill was inclined to have the leaders 'executed as outlaws'. The Soviets desired trials, but wished there to be a presumption of guilt, as opposed to the procedural presumption of innocence that accompanies most western criminal trials.

2.3.1The "Nuremberg Defense"

These trials gained so much attention that the "superior orders defense" has subsequently become interchangeable with the label, "Nuremberg defense". This is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was "only following orders" ("Befehl ist Befehl", literally "an order is an order") and is therefore not responsible for his or her crimes.

However, U.S. General Telford Taylor, who had served as Chief Counsel for the United States during the Nuremberg trials, employed the term "Nuremberg defense" in a different sense. He applied it not to the defense offered by the Nuremberg defendants, but to a justification put forward by those who refused to take part in military action (specifically America's involvement in the Vietnam War) that they believed to be criminal. Used in this way, "Nuremberg defense" refers not to the position that "an order is an order", but rather to the opposing (and rebutting) view that only lawfulorders are binding. (This latter use of the term has apparently fallen into disuse, perhaps in part as a result of the United States' subsequent abolition of the draft.)

2.4History from 1947 to 2000

The defense of superior orders again arose in the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel, as well as the trial of Alfredo Astiz of Argentina, the latter responsible for a large number of disappearances and kidnappings that took place during that country's Dirty War.

2.4.1Israeli law since 1956

In 1957, the Israeli legal system established the concept of a 'blatantly illegal order' to explain when a military order (or in general, a security-related order) should be followed, and when an order must not be followed. The concept is explained in 1957 by the infamous Kafr Qasim massacre ruling.

The Kafr Qasim trial considered for the first time the issue of when Israeli security personnel are required to disobey illegal orders. The judges decided that soldiers do not have the obligation to examine each and every order in detail as to its legality, nor were they entitled to disobey orders merely on a subjective feeling that they might be illegal. On the other hand, some orders were manifestly illegal, and these must be disobeyed. Judge Benjamin Halevy's words, still much-quoted today, were that "The distinguishing mark of a manifestly illegal order is that above such an order should fly, like a black flag, a warning saying: 'Prohibited!'." (Lippman, Bilsky).

The notion of 'blatantly illegal orders' is taught as part of mandatory studies in the Israeli high-school system, as well as in basic training in the mandatory Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) service.

2.4.21968 My Lai Massacre

Following the My Lai Massacre in 1968, the defense was employed during the court martial of William Calley. Some have argued that the outcome of the My Lai Massacre courts martial was a reversal of the laws of war that were set forth in the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals. Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway was quoted in the New York Times as stating that Calley's sentence was reduced because Calley believed that what he did was a part of his orders.

In United States v. Keenan, the accused was found guilty of murder after he obeyed an order to shoot and kill an elderly Vietnamese citizen. The Court of Military Appeals held that "the justification for acts done pursuant to orders does not exist if the order was of such a nature that a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know it to be illegal." The soldier who gave the order, Corporal Luczko, was acquitted by reason of insanity.

2.4.31996, Erich Priebke

In 1996, the superior orders defense was successfully used by Erich Priebke, although the verdict was appealed and he was later convicted. It was used with varying degrees of success by those involved in the Hostages Trial.

2.4.4The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court

It could be argued that a version of the superior orders defense can be found as a defense to international crimes in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. (The Rome Statute was agreed upon in 1998 as the foundational document of the International Criminal Court, established to try those individuals accused of serious international crimes.) Article 33, titled "Superior orders and prescription of law," states:

1. The fact that a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court has been committed by a person pursuant to an order of a Government or of a superior, whether military or civilian, shall not relieve that person of criminal responsibility unless:

(a) The person was under a legal obligation to obey orders of the Government or the superior in question;

(b) The person did not know that the order was unlawful; and

(c) The order was not manifestly unlawful.

2. For the purposes of this article, orders to commit genocide or crimes against humanity are manifestly unlawful.

There are two interpretations of this Article:

·         This formulation, especially (1)(a), whilst effectively prohibiting the use of the Nuremberg defense in relation to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, does however, appear to allow the Nuremberg defense to be used as a protection against charges of war crimes, provided the relevant criteria are met.

·         Nevertheless, this interpretation of ICC Article 33 is open to debate: For example Article 33 (1)(c) protects the defendant only if "the order was not manifestly unlawful." The "order" could be considered "unlawful" if we consider Nuremberg Principle IV to be the applicable "law" in this case. If so, then the defendant is not protected. Discussion as to whether or not Nuremberg Prinicple IV is the applicable law in this case is found in a discussion of the Nuremberg Principles' power or lack of power.

See also: States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court

3History 2000 to present

3.1Legal proceedings of Jeremy Hinzman in Canada

See also: Jeremy Hinzman, Anne L. Mactavish, and Canada and Iraq War resisters

Nuremberg Principle IV, and its reference to an individual’s responsibility, was at issue in Canada in the case of Hinzman v. Canada.Jeremy Hinzman was a U.S. Army deserter who claimed refugee status in Canada as a conscientious objector, one of many Iraq War resisters. Hinzman's lawyer, (at that time Jeffry House), had previously raised the issue of the legality of the Iraq War as having a bearing on their case. The Federal Court ruling was released on March 31, 2006, and denied the refugee status claim. In the decision, Justice Anne L. Mactavish addressed the issue of personal responsibility:

“An individual must be involved at the policy-making level to be culpable for a crime against peace ... the ordinary foot soldier is not expected to make his or her own personal assessment as to the legality of a conflict. Similarly, such an individual cannot be held criminally responsible for fighting in support of an illegal war, assuming that his or her personal war-time conduct is otherwise proper.”

On Nov 15, 2007, a quorum of the Supreme Court of Canada made of Justices Michel Bastarache, Rosalie Abella, and Louise Charron refused an application to have the Court hear the case on appeal, without giving reasons.

“... in written arguments to the Supreme Court of Canada, Mr. House pointed out that although our courts have so far refused to grant refugee status to American soldiers who are deserting military duty out of moral objection to the war in Iraq, in 1995 the Federal Court of Appeal granted refugee status to a deserter from Saddam Hussein's armed incursion into Kuwait, on the basis that he should not be compelled to take part in an illegal war.

"The courts are taking one stance for Saddam Hussein's soldiers and another one entirely for American soldiers," Mr. House said.

3.2Legal proceedings of Ehren Watada in the United States

In June 2006, during the Iraq War, Ehren Watada refused to go to Iraq on account of his belief that the Iraq war was a crime against peace (waging a war of aggression for territorial aggrandizement), which he believed could make him liable for prosecution under the command responsibility doctrine. In this case, the judge ruled that soldiers, in general, are not responsible for determining whether the order to go to war itself is a lawful order - but are only responsible for those orders resulting in a specific application of military force, such as an order to shoot civilians, or to treat POWs inconsistently with the Geneva Conventions. This is consistent with the Nuremberg Defense, as only the civilian and military principals of the Axis were charged with crimes against peace, while subordinate military officials were not so charged. It is often the case in modern warfare that while subordinate military officials are not held liable for their actions, neither are their superiors, as was the case with Calley's immediate superior Captain Ernest Medina.

Based on this principle international law developed the concept of individual criminal liability for war crimes which resulted in the current doctrine of command responsibility.

4Arguments for and against

4.1Historical overview summary table

(For overview purposes, the below table attempts to capsulize much of the history in the above article. It is based on references above. To navigate to those supporting references and further information for each case, click on "see details" for each case.)

Date	Preceding context	Jurisdiction / decisionmaker	Defendant(s) or case(s)	[found] "responsible" despite superior orders	[found] "not responsible" because of superior orders
1474	the occupation of Breisach	ad hoc tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire	Peter von Hagenbach	yes (see details)
1921	World War I	Germany's Supreme Court (trials after World War I)	Lieutenant Karl Neumann and others		yes (see details)
1945	World War II	Nuremberg trials after World War II	all defendants	yes (see details)
1998	preparation for future cases	Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court	future cases under Article 33 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court	in cases of genocide and possibly other cases (see details)	possibly in cases other than genocide(see details)
2006	Iraq War	Justice Anne L. Mactavish - Federal Court (Canada)	Jeremy Hinzman (refugee applicant)		equivalent to yes (see details)

Note: Yellow rows indicate the use of the precise plea of Superior Orders in a war crimes trial - as opposed to events regarding the general concept of Superior Orders.

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

4.2Arguments

See also: international legal theory, sources of international law, laws of war, and Rule of Law in Armed Conflicts Project

The superior orders defense is still used with the following rationale in the following scenario: An "order" may come from one's superior at the level of national law. But according to Nuremberg Principle IV, such an order is sometimes "unlawful" according to international law. Such an "unlawful order" presents a legal dilemma from which there is no legal escape: On one hand, a person who refuses such an unlawful order faces the possibility of legal punishment at the national levelfor refusing orders. On the other hand, a person who accepts such an unlawful order faces the possibility of legal punishment at the international level (e.g. Nuremberg Trials) for committing unlawful acts.

Nuremberg Principle II responds to that dilemma by stating: "The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law."

The above scenario might present a legal dilemma, but Nuremberg Principle IV speaks of "a moral choice" as being just as important as "legal" decisions: It states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".

In "moral choices" or ethical dilemmas an ethical decision is often made by appealing to a "higher ethic" such as ethics in religion or secular ethics. One such "higher ethic," which is found in many religions and also in secular ethics, is the "ethic of reciprocity," or the Golden Rule. It states that one has a right to just treatment, and therefore has a reciprocal responsibility to ensure justice for others. "Higher ethics," such as those, could be used by an individual to solve the legal dilemma presented by the superior orders defense.

Another argument against the use of the superior orders defense is that it does not follow the traditional legal definitions and categories established under criminal law. Under criminal law, a principal is any actor who is primarily responsible for a criminal offense. Such an actor is distinguished from others who may also be subject to criminal liability as accomplices, accessories or conspirators. (See also the various degrees of liability: absolute liability, strict liability, and mens rea.)

Nuremberg Principle IV, the international law which counters the superior orders defense, is legally supported by the jurisprudence found in certain articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which deal indirectly with conscientious objection. It is also supported by the principles found in paragraph 171 of the Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status which was issued by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Those principles deal with the conditions under which conscientious objectors can apply for refugee status in another country if they face persecution in their own country for refusing to participate in an illegal war.

PLEASE WATCH THESE TWO VIDEOS TO SEE THE TRIAL & EXECUTION OF ANTON DOSTLER:

Trial and Execution of General Anton Dostler w/Musical Score (REAL)

VIDEO SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMQCpUlqCiE

Military History - Execution of German General Anton Dostler

VIDEO SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKuyMgX5zi0

WRONGFULLY CONVICTED MAN DIED IN PRISON: IN LOVING MEMORY OF TIMOTHY BRIAN COLE (JULY 1, 1960 TO DECEMBER 2, 1999)

December 1, 2013, 8:14 am

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On this date, December 2, 1999, an African American man by the name of Timothy Brian Cole, died in prison due to an asthma attack. He was actually wrongfully convicted of raping a fellow student in 1985. Sadly, a wrongfully convicted person had died in prison. I feel sincerely sorry for Cole and his family, I wished that he could have live and be released from prison. I will post about him from Wikipedia, before giving my thoughts. Keep in mind, as much as I have empathy and sympathy for murdered victims and their families, I feel for innocent people who have died in prison too. Please go to this blog post to learn more.

Historical marker at Cole's grave

VAN TUONG NGUYEN (17 AUGUST 1980 TO 2 DECEMBER 2005)

December 1, 2013, 8:14 am

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           On this date, 2 December 2005, a Vietnamese Australian convicted Drug Trafficker, Van Tuong Nguyen was executed by hanging at Changi Prison in Singapore. He was arrested at Changi Airport on 12 December 2002 when he was caught with 396.2g of heroine strapped to his body. I will post information about him from Wikipedia before giving my comments.

Mugshot taken of Van Tuong Nguyen, taken following his arrest.

Born	17 August 1980 Songkhla, Thailand
Died	2 December 2005 (aged 25) Changi Prison, Singapore
Criminal charge	Drug trafficking
Criminal penalty	Death penalty

Van Tuong Nguyen(Vietnamese: Nguyễn Tường Vân, 17 August 1980 – 2 December 2005) baptised Caleb, was an Australian from Melbourne, Victoria convicted of drug trafficking in Singapore. A Vietnamese Australian, he was also addressed as Nguyen Tuong Van in the Singaporean media, his name in Vietnamese custom.

Drug trafficking carries a mandatory death sentence under Singapore's Misuse of Drugs Act, and despite pleas for clemency from the Australian government, Amnesty International, the Holy See, as well as other individuals and groups, he was executed by hanging at 6:07 am SST on 2 December 2005 at Changi Prison (22:07 UTC, 1 December).

Biography

Van Tuong Nguyen and his twin brother, Dang Khoa Nguyen, were born in a refugee camp at Songkhla in Thailand to Vietnamese parents. He did not know his father until 2001 when he travelled from the United States to Australia. His mother, Kim, is Vietnamese and migrated to Australia shortly after the boys' birth. She married a Vietnamese Australian in 1987, who beat them often, according to Nguyen. His education was at St Ignatious School Richmond, St Joseph's Primary School in Springvale and Mount Waverley Secondary College.

After leaving school at 18, he intended to study at Deakin University, but financial difficulties led him to work as a store clerk, door-to-door salesman, computer salesman and research marketer. He started his own computer sales business in 1999. After his brother Khoa got into legal trouble, Van wound up the business. He then found a sales, research and marketing job and earned between A$1500 to A$2500 a month (depending on how much commission he received). He subsequently took long leave between June and December 2002. In his confession, he stated he was on "medication for acne that required 4 months leave".

Drug trafficking

Throughout his trial, Van claimed that he was carrying the drugs in a bid to pay off debts amounting to approximately A$20,000 to A$25,000 that he owed and to repay legal fees his twin brother Khoa (a former heroin addict) had incurred in defending drug-trafficking and other criminal charges including an attack on a Pacific Islander youth with a samurai sword. In addition to his own financial troubles, Nguyen said he tried to help pay his twin brother's debt of A$12,000. His twin brother's loan had to be repaid by the end of the 2002. Nguyen could afford to repay only A$4000, the interest on the loan.

By October 2002, Van had been out of a job for four months and sustaining expenses which included interest on the loan and personal living costs, all totaling A$580 a month. In November 2002, Nguyen contacted a Chinese man named "Tan", who told him to travel to Sydney to meet a Vietnamese man named "Sun". Sun proposed that he would repay Nguyen's loans if Nguyen transported packages from Cambodia back to Melbourne and possibly Sydney, via Singapore. The man said the packages contained "white", which Nguyen understood to be heroin.

It was Nguyen's first trip overseas from Australia since his immigration. He reached Phnom Penh at midday on 3 December 2002 after leaving Sydney in the evening of the previous day. He met with a Cambodian man at the Lucky Burger restaurant on 4 December and was taken by car to a garage where he was told to smoke some heroin. The following day, Nguyen met his associates at the Lucky Burger and was again taken to the garage. Nguyen was instructed to stay in Phnom Penh until 10 December, at which point he was to meet at the Lucky Burger.

On 8 December, he decided to fly to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, missed the scheduled meeting on 10 December after arriving back late from Ho Chi Minh City. On 11 December he was taken to the garage, where he was then instructed on how to crush heroin bricks and to strap the powdered drug packages to his body. The rest of the day was spent crushing and packaging the drugs in his hotel room. He checked out of the hotel the next day and went to the airport.

Arrest and conviction

On boarding his flight to Melbourne after a four hour stopover at Singapore Changi Airport, he triggered a metal detector. A package of heroin from Cambodia was found strapped to his body. After the first package was discovered, Nguyen informed the airport official about a second package in his luggage.

Nguyen confessed to have in his possession 396.2 g of heroin, more than 26 times the amount of heroin that mandates a death sentence under the Misuse of Drugs Act (Illegal traffic, import or export of Heroin of more than 15 grams). The Singaporean High Court sentenced Nguyen to death for this crime on 20 March 2004. After he was convicted, Nguyen was held on death row in Changi Prison.

An appeal to the Court of Appeal was rejected on 20 October 2004. Nguyen's family received a registered letter from the Singapore Prisons Department, notifying of his scheduled hanging on 2 December 2005. On the same day at the APEC Summit in South Korea, Australian Prime Minister John Howard made a last appeal on Nguyen's behalf to the Singaporean Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong. However, the letter of notice by that time had already been delivered to Nguyen's mother.

Howard later said he was "very disappointed" that Lee did not inform him of Nguyen's execution date during their meeting that morning. Singapore Foreign Affairs Minister George Yeo also conveyed his apologies to his counterpart Alexander Downer. Nguyen's lawyers arrived in Singapore on 18 November 2005 to inform their client of his impending execution date.

On 2 December 2005 Nguyen was executed at 6:07 am SGT and was officially reported as dead at 7:17 am SGT by the Ministry of Home Affairs. In a short statement, the Ministry said, "The sentence was carried out this morning at Changi Prison."

http://www.singaporelaw.sg/sglaw/laws-of-singapore/case-law/cases-in-articles/singapore-and-international-law/1637-nguyen-tuong-van-v-public-prosecutor-2005-1-slr-103-2004-sgca-47

Pleas for clemency

A plea for clemency by the Australian Government was rejected in October 2005. Members of the federal and state parliaments appealed for the decision to be reconsidered and clemency to be granted. His hanging was the first execution of an Australian in Southeast Asia since 1993, when Michael McAuliffe was hanged in Malaysia for drug trafficking.

On 21 November 2005, the Australian Government was considering a request made by Nguyen Tuong Van's lawyers to apply for a hearing at the International Court of Justice which required the Singaporean government's agreement to its jurisdiction. However, Foreign Minister Downer considered it unlikely that the Singaporean government would agree. On 24 November 2005, Victorian Attorney General Rob Hulls met with Singapore's Senior Minister of State for Law and Home Affairs Ho Peng Kee to press the case for clemency but was unsuccessful. On 28 November 2005 Australia's Human Rights Commissioner, Sev Ozdowski, said Australia must keep pressuring Singapore to abandon the death penalty, even if it proves too late for Nguyen.

After his sentencing in March 2004, anti-death-penalty campaigners were reported to be inundated with emails from Australians offering support for Van Tuong Nguyen. Politicians and religious figures made pleas for clemency, but these were rejected by the Singaporean government.

One day before Nguyen was hanged, a lawyer launched a last-ditch legal tactic, charging Nguyen with drug related offences in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court, which he hoped would allow the Australian Federal Government to extradite Nguyen. However, Justice Minister Chris Ellison ruled out extradition, saying that the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions would not have attempted to prosecute Nguyen in Australia.

Criticism

The Australian Government was criticised by the media, human rights lawyers and human rights activists for doing too little, too late and for not taking a stronger stance against the death penalty. Amnesty International was criticized by Howard Glenn and Greg Barns for refusing to work with other human rights groups with various campaigns to save Nguyen, but rather asking the public to donate money to Amnesty International.

Media coverage and public opinion

ABC broadcast a documentary: Just Punishment on 7 December 2006. This documentary was filmed over a period of two years, following Nguyen's mother (Kim), his brother and his two close friends, through the appeals, and campaigns held (in Australia) before the execution day. It was rebroadcast on the night of 8 December 2008, also on the ABC.

An opinion poll conducted by Roy Morgan Research two days after Nguyen's execution showed 52% of Australians approved of it, compared with 44% against.

In 2013, SBS TV produced a television drama series about the events surrounding Nguyen's arrest, trial, unsuccessful plea for clemency, and execution. Better Man starred David Wenham, Claudia Karvan, Bryan Brown and Remy Hii; and directed by Khoa Do.

Singaporean response

As a transportation hub, Singapore has always been a potential transit point for Golden Triangle heroin. In a letter to David Hawker, the Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives, Abdullah Tarmugi, the Speaker of the Parliament of Singapore, wrote: "He was caught in possession of almost 400 grams of pure heroin, enough for more than 26,000 doses of heroin for drug addicts.... He knew what he was doing and the consequences of his actions. As representatives of the people, we have an obligation to protect the lives of those who could be ruined by the drugs he was carrying."

"We cannot allow Singapore to be used as a transit for illicit drugs in the region,"Tarmugi wrote to Australian MPs. "We know this is a painful and difficult decision for Mr Nguyen's family to accept, but we hope you and your colleagues will understand our position."

In an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Singapore's High Commissioner in Australia, Joseph Koh, argued that "Singapore cannot afford to pull back from its tough drug trafficking position".

Vigils

A group of human rights activists held a vigil for Nguyen in Singapore on 7 November 2005. Among those present was opposition politician Chee Soon Juan, leader of the Singapore Democratic Party, who is an opponent of the mandatory death penalty.

A request was made by Liberal MP Bruce Baird for an official minute's silence to honour Nguyen. Representatives of the Returned and Services League objected, stating such tributes should be reserved for fallen soldiers or victims of natural disasters; other groups felt it was inappropriate to "honour" a convicted trafficker of drugs which killed hundreds each year. A motion to hold a minute's silence passed in the Legislative Assembly of Queensland 49-18 after an hour's debate. MPs who voted against the move walked out before the observance.

A group of people protesting outside Singapore's High Commission in Canberra today. Photo: Reuters (2 December 2005) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/pm-attacks-clinical-singapore/2005/12/02/1133422084249.html]

Execution and funeral

A minor controversy occurred when Singapore's contract hangman, Darshan Singh, gave an interview to an Australian newspaper prior to the execution in which he said he hoped to be called on to perform the execution and that his experience would ensure Nguyen would be hanged "efficiently". The result was disapprobation in both Australia and Singapore. Nguyen was hanged by another executioner.

After the execution, Nguyen's body was released to his family and it left Changi Prison about four hours after he was hanged. Nguyen's body was taken to the Marymount Chapel of the Good Shepherd's Convent in Singapore for a private memorial service at 1 pm. The family requested for the media to stay away from the chapel. His family returned to Melbourne with his body on 4 December 2005. A requiem mass was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral on 7 December 2005. Victorian MPs Geoff Hilton, Bruce Mildenhall, Sang Minh Nguyen and Richard Wynne attended the service and were criticised by the Crime Victims Support Association, who said it appeared to give support to a convicted drug trafficker.

Political consequences

John Howard's warning against illicit drugs

Australian Prime Minister John Howard used the execution of Nguyen as a warning to young people to stay away from drugs. He told Melbourne radio station 3AW:

I don't believe in capital punishment, he was a convicted drug trafficker and that is to be wholly condemned ... don't have anything to do with drugs. Don't use them, don't touch them, don't carry them, don't traffic in them and don't imagine for a moment—for a moment—that you can risk carrying drugs anywhere in Asia without suffering the most severe consequences.

Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott also said that the Singapore government's decision to go ahead with the execution was wrong and that the punishment "certainly did not fit the crime.... But people do need to understand that drug trafficking is a very serious offence and it has heavy penalties in Australia and it has even more drastic penalties overseas as we have been reminded today."

Australia–Singapore relations

While it was reported that some minor ties have been broken (including airport workers refusing to process Singapore Airlines luggage), John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, said that the country would not be taking any punitive action against Singapore.

On 23 February 2006, the Australian government rejected a bid by Singapore Airlines for permission to fly a permanent route between Sydney and the United States. This drew strong criticism from the government of Singapore. Peter Costello, the Australian treasurer, denied that the refusal was linked to Nguyen's hanging.

MY THOUGHTS:

            As mention earlier, I do not give a 100% support in executing drug traffickers. I am more in favour of executing the Drug Lords than the drug mules. For Nguyen’s case, I am actually split on the issue of whether he deserve to die or not. I do feel sorry for Nguyen and his family members, I am satisfied that he owned up to his mistakes.

            I personally disagree with the abolitionists in Australia, who protested his execution and fight so hard to safe him. If they claim to be against the death penalty under any circumstances, why did they not stand outside the Indonesian Embassy and protest the Bali Bombers’ execution on 9 November 2008?

BOBBY WAYNE WOODS (EXECUTED IN TEXAS ON DECEMBER 3, 2009)

December 2, 2013, 5:18 pm

≫ Next: NAZI WAR CRIMINAL OF THE DACHAU TRIAL: RICHARD DRAUZ (EXECUTED BY HANGING ON DECEMBER 4, 1946)

≪ Previous: VAN TUONG NGUYEN (17 AUGUST 1980 TO 2 DECEMBER 2005)

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            On this date, December 3, 2009, Bobby Wayne Woods was executed by lethal injection in Texas. He was convicted of the April 30, 1997 rape, kidnapping and murder of 11-year-old Sarah Patterson. I will post information about him from Wikipedia and other links. Please go to the Unit 1012 Blog to hear from the victim’s families.

Bobby Wayne Woods

 

Born	October 11, 1965 Livingston, Texas, US
Died	December 3, 2009 (aged 44) Huntsville, Texas, US
Cause of death	execution
Criminal penalty	death penalty
Conviction(s)	murder, kidnapping, and rape (1998)

Bobby Wayne Woods (October 11, 1965 – December 3, 2009) was a convicted American murderer, kidnapper and rapist executed by the state of Texas for the murder and rape of 11-year old Sarah Patterson in 1997. Woods also received a 40-year sentence for the abduction of Patterson's younger brother, whom he beat unconscious and left for dead but who survived. On May 28, 1998, Woods was sentenced to death for Patterson's murder and was executed on December 3, 2009 after a failed appeal based on Woods's low IQ.

Sarah Patterson

Biography

A seventh-grade dropout, Woods was so illiterate that he had to refer to a spelling list just to write simple notes to his family. He had IQ scores of 80 and 78 during elementary school. His IQ score right before his murder trial was 70, and another in 2002 returned 68. Woods also worked as a short-order cook and roofer.

On April 30, 1997, Woods entered the home of his ex-girlfriend Schwana Patterson through the open window of her children's bedroom; Patterson had expelled Woods two months earlier. Woods then kidnapped Patterson's two children, 11-year-old Sarah Patterson and 9-year-old Cody Patterson, and raped Sarah. After driving to a cemetery, Woods beat and stomped Cody's head, strangled Cody, and abandoned the boy at the cemetery. Cody notified police, and Woods told police that Sarah was dead and led the police to her body.

Trial

Because the Woods case was heavily reported in Dallas-area media, Woods's trial was held in Llano, Texas. During his trial Woods admitted to kidnapping Patterson's children and beating Cody Patterson unconscious. A psychologist representing the defense but who did not evaluate Woods testified that Woods was mentally retarded and no longer a threat to society. In response, a psychiatrist representing prosecution testified that Woods was not mentally retarded and could commit future violent crimes. Woods, a resident of Granbury, Texas, was sentenced to death on May 28, 1998.

Patterson was also tried on charges of child neglect and was found guilty on October 14, 1998. She was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Execution

Woods was scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. on October 23, 2008. However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals delayed the execution after lawyers raised issue that Woods's IQ would make him ineligible for the death penalty due to the United States Supreme Court case Atkins v. Virginia. That court ruled 8-1 on October 7, 2009 that there was insufficient evidence that Woods was retarded. The Supreme Court of the United States denied Woods's appeal hours before Woods's final execution day.

Woods was executed at 6:48 p.m. local time on December 3, 2009 in the Huntsville Unit state prison. He was the 50th murderer executed in the U.S. in 2009 and 1,186th since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled capital punishment constitutional in the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia. In Texas, Woods was the 24th murderer executed in 2009 and 447th executed since 1976.

OTHER LINKS:

http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/woods1186.htm

NAZI WAR CRIMINAL OF THE DACHAU TRIAL: RICHARD DRAUZ (EXECUTED BY HANGING ON DECEMBER 4, 1946)

December 3, 2013, 5:15 pm

≫ Next: THE HAMBURG RAVENSBRUCK TRIALS (5 DECEMBER 1946 TO 21 JULY 1948)

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            On this date, December 4, 1946, Richard Drauz was executed by hanging in Landsberg Prison for war crimes. I will post the information about him from Wikipedia.

Richard Drauz (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.stadtgeschichte-heilbronn.de/index.php?id=richard_drauz)

Richard Drauz (help·info) (April 2, 1894 – December 4, 1946) was a Nazi German politician and Kreisleiter of Heilbronn, Germany. He was also Member of the Reichstag from 1933 until the collapse of the Third Reich after World War II. One of the most fanatical and violent NSDAP leaders in the last days of the war, Drauz was put on trial and executed by American occupation forces for war crimes in 1946.

Richard Drauz

Feb 1945 Masthead of Richard Drauz's propaganda mouthpiece, the Heilbronner Tagblatt. The box on the right reads "Whoever Hopes, Wins!"

Early life

Drauz was born in Heilbronn in Württemberg, the son of postal official Christian Heinrich Drauz (1865–1937) and Friederike Johanna née Dederer (1866–1938). His parents were both from old Heilbronner vintner's families. After attending middle and high school in Heilbronn, he became a mechanic's apprentice. He enlisted in the German Army at the start of World War I and advanced to the rank of Feldwebel (Sergeant) by 1918. After the war he studied at the Hochschule Esslingen in Esslingen am Neckar and from 1921 to 1928 worked at the Maschinenfabrik Esslingen as a refrigeration engineer. There he met Wilhelm Murr, a Nazi agitator who later became Gauleiter and then Reichsstatthalter of the German State of Württemberg. On 1 April 1928, Drauz joined the Nazi Party as Member No. 80730 and shortly afterwards he and his family moved to Dortmund. His employment there is unclear.

 

Aerial view of bomb-damaged Heilbronn city center, March, 1945

Rise to Power

In 1932 Wilhelm Murr, the new Party Gauleiter of Württemberg, called upon Drauz to be NSDAP District Leader in Heilbronn, a city with a loyal SPD/DDP social-democratic electorate and therefore a problem for the Party. Drauz returned to his home city to impose "National Socialist virtue", by force if necessary. He was made Director of the Nazi daily party newspaper, the Heilbronner Tagblatt, a key position he would use to spread propaganda, harass enemies and make calls to action. After the Nazi Seizure of Power on 30 January 1933, Drauz pushed all other Heilbronner newspapers out of business through raids, property seizures and advertiser intimidation. In July 1933, a large group of Sturmabteilung (SA) storm troopers attacked the former Lord Mayor Emil Beutinger, who had been critical of the Nazis. Beutinger's home was damaged but he was able to escape unharmed. Police proceedings against 40 suspects were suppressed by Drauz.

He was rewarded for such brutal actions, first appointed Political Commissar for the greater Heilbronn Landkreis and then made an honorary Sturmbannführer in the SA. From August 1933 he also gained membership on the Heilbronn City Council, and as such, also appointed deputy to Oberbürgermeister (Lord Mayor) Heinrich Gültig on October 12. This was merely a formality as Drauz already had authority over Gültig in the party hierarchy. In the national elections of November 1933, Drauz also won a seat in the Reichstag for Württemberg District 18, although by this time the Reichstag was neither democratically elected nor politically influential.

By 1938 Drauz had gained significant positions on the Boards of many companies, associations and unions in Heilbronn, such as: Heilbronn Maschinenbau-Gesellschaft, Glashütte Heilbronn AG, the Portland Cement Plant in Lauffen am Neckar and even the VfR Heilbronn football club. He answered the rejection of his request for a supervisory board position at the food manufacturer Knorr (brand) with hate mail and abusive articles in the Tagblatt. As the result of district reforms on October 1, 1938, Heilbronn became seat of the newly created Heilbronn County and the previously independent towns of Böckingen, Sontheim and Neckargartach were annexed. Heilbronn was now the second largest city in Württemberg, after Stuttgart, and Drauz its political master.

However, Drauz was unpopular with many people, even in the Nazi's own ranks. There were several proceedings against him before the Party's Internal District Court. Two complainants accused him in 1934 of "purely arbitrary policies of violence" and that he was leading "an immoral lifestyle that defies description and will harm the overall movement". They pointed at notorious street drinking sessions and numerous adulterous love affairs. All proceedings ended with acquittal, probably due to the patronage of Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr. Drauz responded by insulting his internal party opponents, initiating smear campaigns and dismissing them from any party functions he could. If his reputation was tarnished, his career remained unharmed: In 1943 he was appointed NSDAP Oberbereichsleiter and he acquired additional district management roles in Vaihingen an der Enz and Ludwigsburg.

Street fighting in destroyed Heilbronn in April 1945: US soldiers of the 100th Infantry (“Century”) Division, 399th Infantry Regiment, 1st Battalion

World War II

After news of the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, Drauz was continuously active in delivering propaganda at the behest of the Party. He delivered speeches nearly every day in front of local Nazi rallies in the City and County of Heilbronn. His speeches typically conjured up old memories of the First World War to emphasize how much victory depended on their attitude and loyalty.

On 16 January 1944 Drauz attended an NSDAP meeting which adopted "Struggle, Work, Faith" as slogan of the year, and on January 30 in Heilbronn's Marktplatz he announced a policy of "Endsieg". In August 1944, he ordered the managers of Heilbronn-based companies to an information session, during which he demanded full mobilization of all available resources for "Total War". One result was the discontinuation of the Metropolitan Orchestra and Municipal Theater. Any remaining cultural life in the city was finally broken after the first heavy bombing raids on September 10, 1944, to be replaced only by Drautz's "Rallying Calls".

Despite his arbitrary leadership, behind the scenes Drauz became more serious about evacuation plans for the city, although far too late. Initial air raids had killed about 300 people, and Drauz carefully argued a case to his boss, Gauleiter and now Military Defense Commissar Wilhelm Murr, that any large-scale attack on the densely populated city center would result in heavy loss of life because of its confined position on the Neckar. Murr refused to permit any evacuation, not only because it would be "defeatist" but, more practically, any evacuees would by now have no place to go. Drauz's prediction became a tragic reality on 4 December 1944. That night a major raid completely destroyed the city center and over 6500 people were killed, including 1000 children, the majority incinerated in a fire storm. It became the worst bombing experience of any city in Württemberg.

In the final months of the war, Drauz became increasingly desperate and violent in trying to follow Hitler's most absurd commands. As a result of the Nero Decree in March 1945, Drauz sought to turn what remained of the ruined city into scorched earth, for example giving orders to blow up the Neckarsulm Vehicle Factory. His goal was largely resisted by the population because defeat was obvious, however it partly succeeded through his orders to withdraw any remaining fire brigades. He also ordered every district village be turned into a bastion and fight to the last on penalty of death. On 3 April 1945, as Allied ground forces approached, Drauz had 57-year old Ortsgruppenleiter Karl Taubenberger shot because he failed to prevent residents from removing a tank barricade. He left Taubenberger's corpse on display 24 hours a day on the main road. A sign with the inscription "I am a national traitor" was hung around his neck.

The final Battle of Heilbronn began on April 4, 1945. By April 6, recognizing the city center could not be held but refusing to accept defeat, Drauz disbanded his District Office, burned records and the Party Flag, then fled in two cars with a large escort. On reaching Schweinsbergstraße, the entourage saw white flags flying from five or six homes, including that of City Council member Karl Kübler. The inhabitants had been advised to raise the flags by retreating Wehrmacht troops, who had described the superior strength of approaching American forces. Drauz stopped the car and ordered "get out, shoot, shoot everything!" Three companions indiscriminately shot at anyone who showed up at a window or opened a door. Kübler's wife Anna, standing protectively in front of her husband, was murdered as well as Kübler himself, the 72-year old pastor Gustav Beyer and 46-year old Elsa Drebinger. Heilbronn Dairy director Karl Weber, who barely escaped the hail of bullets, later reported that Kübler had been given authority by mayor Heinrich Gültig to surrender the city without a fight, but Drauz "was too powerful and would not allow surrender."

Drauz's actions directly left a total of 14 civilians dead, and his orders to fanatical paramilitary units to fight to the end culminated in another week of bitter hand to hand fighting, needlessly costing hundreds more lives and further destroying what was left of the city. Unlike Stuttgart, whose mayor Karl Strölin had quietly negotiated his city's surrender, Heilbronn was not spared this final agony because of Drauz.

Arrest and Execution

At war's end in May 1945, Drauz was already being sought by the US Army because of his involvement in the summary execution of an American POW that previous March. Now a fugitive, he fled initially to Tübingen with his family. The couple then left their children behind with a tutor and escaped under false papers into the Rhineland, where they took shelter at Dernbach Monastery in Montabaur. In July 1945, when his wife learned their children had been abandoned by the tutor, she went back across American lines and brought them to her hometown of Talheim. There the US Counter Intelligence Corps was waiting for her. After a long interrogation, the CIC learned her husband's location and his false name of "Richard Binder". CIC agent Al Sandwina and investigator Helmut F.W. Frey then drove by jeep to the monastery, where with guns drawn they found a man in a small garden house answering to the name "Binder". The agents, of course, already knew this name in the false passport. When confronted, Drauz fell apart and was arrested without further incident.

He was tried by the American General Military Government Court (US vs. Richard Drauz, Case Number 12-1182-1) in the Dachau Trials. The court determined that on March 24, 1945 he shot and killed a downed American Airman who had surrendered in the village of Dürrenzimmern, in the Heilbronn district of Brackenheim, a war crime under the Third Geneva Convention. In his defense he stated that the American pilot represented "Anglo-American air gangsters" who had indiscriminately murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in Dresden, Hamburg, and other cities. Drauz was found guilty and sentenced to death on December 11, 1945. Transferred to Landsberg Prison, he was executed by hanging on December 4, 1946.

In the aftermath, Heilbronn's new newspaper, the Heilbronner Stimme (Voice of Heilbronn), remarked that "he was a particularly nasty specimen of the Nazi movement." For his brutality, indiscriminate murder, and responsibility in the final agony of their city, Drauz remains a figure of contempt in Heilbronn to this day

THE HAMBURG RAVENSBRUCK TRIALS (5 DECEMBER 1946 TO 21 JULY 1948)

December 4, 2013, 8:45 pm

≫ Next: VICE ADMIRAL TADASHIGE DAIGO (15 OCTOBER 1891 TO 6 DECEMBER 1947)

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            On this date, 5 December 1948, The Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials began against the camp officials from the Hamburg Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. I will post the information from Wikipedia.

The Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials were a series of seven trials for war crimes against camp officials from the Ravensbrück concentration camp that the British authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Hamburg after the end of World War II. These trials were heard before a military tribunal; the three to five judges at these trials were British officers, assisted by a lawyer. The defendants included concentration camp personnel of all levels: SS officers, camp doctors, male guards, female guards (Aufseherinnen), and a few former prisoner-functionaries who had tortured or mistreated other inmates. In total, 38 defendants were tried in these seven trials. 21 of the defendants were women. Executions relating to these trials were carried out at Hameln Prison by British hangman Albert Pierrepoint.

Female prisoners at Ravensbruckin 1939

The trials

First Ravensbrück Trial

The first Ravensbrück trial was held from December 5, 1946 until February 3, 1947.

Defendant	Function	Sentence
Johann Schwarzhuber	Deputy camp leader	Death
Gustav Binder	Warden	Death
Heinrich Peters	Warden	15 years imprisonment; released May 18, 1955
Ludwig Ramdohr	Gestapo inspector	Death
Martin Hellinger	Medical doctor	15 years imprisonment; released May 14, 1955
Rolf Rosenthal	Medical doctor	Death
Gerhard Schiedlausky	Medical doctor	Death
Percy Treite	Medical doctor	Death; committed suicide on April 8, 1947 before the sentence could be carried out
Adolf Winkelmann	Medical doctor	Died during the trial on February 1, 1947
Dorothea Binz	Assistant Chief warden (Oberaufseherin)	Death; executed May 2, 1947
Greta Bösel	Labor Department Head (Aufseherin)	Death; executed May 3, 1947
Margarete Mewes	Jail Warden	10 years imprisonment; released February 26, 1952
Elisabeth Marschall	Nurse	Death; executed May 3, 1947
Carmen Mory	Inmate; Kapo	Death; committed suicide on April 9, 1947 before the sentence could be carried out
Vera Salvequart	Inmate; Kapo	Death; executed on June 2, 1947
Eugenia von Skene	Inmate; Kapo	10 years imprisonment, released December 21, 1951

The death sentences (except for Salvequart) were carried out on May 2—3, 1947, in Hameln.

Two more defendants, camp leader Fritz Suhren and "work leader" Hans Pflaum, escaped from prison prior to the trial. They were apprehended under assumed names in 1949 and handed over to French authorities, who were conducting another Ravensbrück trial in Rastatt at the time; both men were sentenced to death in that trial and shot dead by a firing squad on June 12, 1950.

Female prisoners gathered when the Red Cross arrive to Ravensbrück in April 1945. The white paint marks shows they are prisoners.

Photo of Dorothea Binz, left, and three other defendants at the Ravensbrück trial, Hamburg, 1947, (l, to r,) Dorothea Binz, Margarete Mewes, Greta Bösel, and Eugenia von Skene.  Courtesy of Dokumentationsarchiv des Öesterreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna, Austria.. (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.chgs.umn.edu/museum/exhibitions/ravensbruck/justice.html)

PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/nazigirls.html

Second Ravensbrück Trial

In the second Ravensbrück trial, which lasted from November 5 to 27, 1947, the only defendant was Friedrich Opitz, a factory leader in the concentration camp. Opitz had escaped from prison along with Fritz Suhren and Hans Pflaum before the first trial began. He received a death sentence, which was carried out on February 26, 1948.

Third Ravensbrück Trial

In the third Ravensbrück trial, the so-called "Uckermark trial" that took place from April 14 to 26, 1948, five female camp officials of the Uckermarkextermination camp, were indicted on four charges:

1. Mistreatment of Allied women in Uckermark
2. Participation in the selection of Allied women for the gas chamber in Uckermark
3. Mistreatment of Allied women in the Ravensbrück concentration camp
4. Selection of Allied women for the gas chamber in the Ravensbrück concentration camp

Uckermark was about one mile from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. It had been opened in May 1942 as a prison or concentration camp for girls aged 16 to 21 who were considered criminal or just difficult. Girls who reached the upper age limit were transferred to the Ravensbrück women's camp. Camp administration was provided by the Ravensbrück camp. In January 1945, the juveniles camp was closed and the infrastructure was subsequently used as an extermination camp for "sick, no longer efficient, and over 52 years old women".

Defendant	Function	Sentence
Johanna Braach	Criminal inspector; warden in the juvenile's camp	Acquitted
Lotte Toberentz	Camp leader of the juvenile's camp	Acquitted
Elfriede Mohneke	Assistant Chief warden of the extermination camp	10 years of imprisonment; released June 14, 1952
Margarete Rabe	Warden of the extermination camp	Lifetime imprisonment; reduced in 1950 to 21 years; released June 16, 1959
Ruth Neudeck	Chief warden of the extermination camp	Death; executed on July 29, 1948

Braach and Toberentz were acquitted because they had worked at Uckermark only while it was still a juveniles camp, and there were no Allied women there at that time; the camp was exclusively for German girls, whose fate or treatment was of no interest to the tribunal.

Fourth Ravensbrück Trial

The fourth trial was held from May to June 8, 1948. The accused were all members of the medical staff of the camp at Ravensbrück, including one inmate who had worked as a nurse. The charges again centered on mistreatment, torture, and sending to gas chambers of women of Allied nationality.

Defendant	Function	Sentence
Benno Orendi	Medical doctor	Death; executed September 17, 1948
Walter Sonntag	Medical doctor	Death; executed September 17, 1948
Martha Haake	Nurse	10 years imprisonment; released on January 1, 1951 due to medical reasons
Liesbeth Krzok	Nurse	4 years imprisonment; released February 3, 1951
Gerda Ganzer	Inmate; Nurse	Death

Ganzer had already stood trial for her activities in Ravensbrück in 1946 before a Russian military tribunal and had been acquitted. In Hamburg, she was found guilty, but her death sentence was commuted into lifetime imprisonment on July 3, 1948, which in turn was reduced to 21 years imprisonment in 1950 and then to 12 years in 1954. She was finally released on June 6, 1961.

Fifth Ravensbrück Trial

In the fifth trial, three SSmembers were accused of having killed Allied inmates. The trial lasted from June 16 to 29, 1948. The judgments were handed down on July 15, 1948.

Defendant	Function	Sentence
Arthur Conrad	SS warden	Death; executed September 17, 1948
Heinrich Schäfer	SS warden	2 years imprisonment; released October 28, 1949
Walter Schenk	SS warden	20 years imprisonment; released August 3, 1954

Sixth Ravensbrück Trial

This trial lasted from July 1 to 26, 1948. Both defendants were accused of having mistreated Allied inmates.

Defendant	Function	Sentence
Kurt Lauer	SS warden	15 years imprisonment; released May 7, 1955
Kurt Rauxloh	SS warden	10 years imprisonment; released September 26, 1954 due to medical reasons

Seventh Ravensbrück Trial

Finally, six Aufseherinnen(female camp wardens) were tried from July 2 to 21, 1948. The charges were mistreatment of inmates of Allied nationality and participation in the selection of inmates for the gas chamber.

Defendant	Function	Sentence
Luise Brunner	Chief warden (Oberaufseherin)	3 years imprisonment
Anna Friederike Mathilde Klein	Chief warden	Acquitted due to lack of evidence
Emma Zimmer	Assistant chief warden	Death; executed September 20, 1948
Christine Holthöwer	Chief Warden of Siemens	Acquitted due to lack of evidence
Ida Schreiter	Labor Department Warden	Death; executed September 20, 1948
Ilse Vettermann	Warden	12 years imprisonment

PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/nazigirls.html

Thus all 11 were publicly hanged before a large crowd, estimated at several thousand, at 5.00 p.m. on July 4th, 1946 at Biskupia Gorka hill near Danzig. A row of simple gallows had been set up in a large open area, four double ones with a triple gallows in the middle. A fleet of open trucks brought the prisoners to the execution ground, their hands and legs tied with cords. The trucks were backed under the gallows and the condemned made to stand on the tailboards or on the chairs on which they had sat. A simple cord noose was put round their necks and when the preparations were complete, each truck was driven forward leaving them suspended. They were not hooded and given only a short drop, and as can be seen from the photos, some of them struggled for some time after suspension. It is alleged that one man and two women (un-named) struggled and fought with their guards prior to being hanged, although the others seemed to accept their fate calmly. The whole event was recorded by official press photographers, hence the clarity of the pictures. (PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/nazigirls.html)

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VICE ADMIRAL TADASHIGE DAIGO (15 OCTOBER 1891 TO 6 DECEMBER 1947)

December 5, 2013, 8:30 am

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            On this date, 6 December 1947, Vice Admiral Tadashige Daigo was executed for war crimes during World War II. I will post the information about him from Wikipedia.

Vice admiral Tadashige Daigo

Born	October 15, 1891 Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan
Died	December 6, 1947 (aged 56) Pontianak, Borneo, Dutch East Indies
Allegiance	Empire of Japan
Service/branch	Imperial Japanese Navy
Years of service	1912-1947
Rank	Vice admiral
Commands held	SS-27, SS-57, Ro-64, Yubari, Naka, Kuma, Iwate, Tokiwa, Yakumo, Ashigara Submarine Squadron 5, Eastern Attack Group, Naval Submarine School, IJN 6th Fleet
Battles/wars	World War II Invasion of Sarawak Battle of Midway

MarquisTadashige Daigo (醍醐忠重Daigo Tadashige, 15 October 1891 – 6 December 1947) was a vice admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II.

Biography

Born in Chiyoda, Tokyo into a kuge family of court nobility related to the Fujiwara aristocracy, Daigo was a graduate of the Gakushuin Peers' school. He went on to graduate from the 40th class of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in 1912. His rank on entering was only 126th out of 150 cadets, but he improved his scores, so that he graduated at 17th out of 144.

Daigo served as a midshipman on the cruiser Azuma and battleship Shikishima. As an ensign, he was assigned to the cruiser Tokiwa.

After his promotion to sub-lieutenant in 1913, he took time out to attend a session of the House of Peers as was obligatory for members of his social class. He then returned to active service on the battleship Kongō and destroyer Urakaze.

Daigo was promoted to lieutenant in 1918, and after taking courses in torpedo warfare, was assigned to submarines, serving on SS-26, and then becoming captain of SS-27, followed by SS-57. He also served on the cruiser Aso in 1924. After promotion to lieutenant commander in 1924, he was captain of Ro-64 in 1926, and chief torpedo officer on the battleship Yamashiro later the same year.

In the 1930s, Daigo was captain of a large number of cruisers in rapid succession: Yubari, Naka, Kuma, Iwate, Tokiwa, Yakumoand Ashigara. He was promoted to rear admiral on 15 November 1940.

Daigo commanded Submarine Squadron 5 (Subron 5), with hisa flag on the light cruiser Yuraat the start of the Pacific War. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Subron 5 was covering the first wave of the Malaya Invasion Force south of the Cape of Camau, French Indochina.

On 9 December 1941, Subron 5 was ordered to pursue and sink the Royal Navy Force Z (battleship HMS Prince of Wales, battlecruiser Repulse and supporting destroyers). Although Yura received word from I-65that the British ships were spotted, due to poor wireless reception, the signal was unclear and the British vessels were overwhelmed by torpedo bombers of the 22nd Air Flotilla from bases in Indochina before Yura and her submarines could take action.

Subron 5 was then assigned to the invasion of Sarawak from 13–26 December, covering landings in Brunei, Miri, Seria, and Kuching. The 2,500 men of the "Kawaguchi Detachment" and the No. 2 Yokosuka Special Naval Landing Force (SNLF) quickly captured Miri's airfield and oil fields. The operation was completed, and Yura returned to its base at Camranh Bay, Indochina by the end of the year.

Subron 5 was also part of the advance screening force for the Battle of Midway.

Daigo became vice admiral on 1 November 1943. He was assigned command of the Eastern Attack Group which carried out midget submarine and merchant shipping attacks on the east coast of Australia.

Daigo was Commandant of the Naval Submarine School from 23 August 1944 and final Commander in Chief of the IJN 6th Fleet from 1 May 1945. During these assignments, he was involved in the kaiten human-torpedo program.

After the end of the war, Daigo was arrested by SCAP authorities at the request of the Netherlands government, and was extradited to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, where he was charged with war crimes in connection with the kidnapping, torture and massacre of 21,000 people (including women and children) by Japanese troops in Pontianak. After being held for several months under severe conditions, he was found guilty in a closed military tribunal at Pontianak after only three hours of testimony, during which time he was not allowed to speak in his own defense, and was executed with a rifle shot to the stomach on 6 December 1947. As Daigo was commander of submarine forces, (although from 8 November 1943 the 22nd Special Guard Division based at Balikpapan, Borneo fell nominally under his command), his connection (if any) with the events in Pontianak from 23 April 1943–28 June 1944 remain very unclear. Whereas other "Class B" war criminals found guilty of professional negligence for atrocities committed by junior staff under their nominal command were sentenced to several years in prison, the speed and secrecy surrounding his trial, and the severity and brutality of his punishment, have created questions which remain unanswered.

Vice Admiral Tadashige Daigo, seated in uniform, with members of his staff and kaiten pilots (with bandanas) of I-36

Notable Positions Held

• Crewmember, BB Kongo - 1 December 1916-1 April 1917
• Chief Equipping Officer, SS RO-64 - 15 January 1925-30 April 1925
• Commanding Officer, SS RO-64 - 30 April 1925-1 December 1925
• Staff Officer, Yokosuka Naval District - 1 December 1925-1 March 1926
• ComSubDiv 9–1 December 1932-15 November 1933
• ComSubDiv 19–15 November 1933-15 November 1934
• Commanding Officer, CL Yubari - 15 November 1934-25 May 1935
• Commanding Officer, CL Naka - 25 May 1935-15 November 1935
• Commanding Officer, CL Kuma - 15 November 1935-1 December 1936
• Commanding Officer, CA Takao - 1 December 1936-3 June 1938
• Commanding Officer, CA Ashigara - 3 June 1938-1 December 1938
• ComSubRon 5–20 October 1941-10 July 1942
• Acting Commanding Officer, Kure SubRon - 31 August 1942-1 April 1943
• ComSubRon 11–1 April 1943-20 October 1943
• Commander-in-Chief, 6th Fleet - 1 May 1945-15 September 1945

Dates of Promotion

• Midshipman - 17 July 1912
• Ensign - 1 December 1913
• Sublieutenant - 13 December 1915
• Lieutenant - 1 December 1918
• Lieutenant Commander - 1 December 1924
• Commander - 30 November 1929
• Captain - 15 November 1934
• Rear Admiral - 15 November 1940
• Vice Admiral - 1 November 194

OTHER LINKS:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&p=1352494

http://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=506

CICERO ON PUNISHMENT [PRO DEATH PENALTY QUOTE OF THE WEEK ~ SUNDAY DECEMBER 1, 2013 TO SATURDAY DECEMBER 14, 2013]

December 6, 2013, 6:21 pm

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PHOTO SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/219232

QUOTE:Let the punishment match the offense.(De Legibus)

AUTHOR:Cicero A.K.A Marcus Tullius Cicero (3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC; sometimes anglicized as Tully) was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.

His influence on the Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of prose in not only Latin but European languages up to the 19th century was said to be either a reaction against or a return to his style. According to Michael Grant, "the influence of Cicero upon the history of European literature and ideas greatly exceeds that of any other prose writer in any language". Cicero introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary (with neologisms such as humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia) distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher.

Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance in public affairs, humanism, and classical Roman culture. According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński, "Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity." The peak of Cicero's authority and prestige came during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and his impact on leading Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu was substantial. His works rank among the most influential in European culture, and today still constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for the writing and revision of Roman history, especially the last days of the Roman Republic.

Though he was an accomplished orator and successful lawyer, Cicero believed his political career was his most important achievement. It was during his consulship that the Second Catilinarian Conspiracy attempted the government overthrow through an attack on the city from outside forces, and Cicero suppressed the revolt by executing five conspirators without due process. During the chaotic latter half of the 1st century BC marked by civil wars and the dictatorship of Gaius Julius Caesar, Cicero championed a return to the traditional republican government. Following Julius Caesar's death Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony in the ensuing power struggle, attacking him in a series of speeches. He was proscribed as an enemy of the state by the Second Triumvirate and subsequently murdered in 43 BC.

THE NEEDLE A.K.A THE LETHAL INJECTION [WEAPON OF THE FORTNIGHT ~ SUNDAY 1 DECEMBER 2013 TO SATURDAY 14 DECEMBER 2013]

December 6, 2013, 8:37 pm

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            31 years ago on this day (7 December 1982), Charles Brooks, Jr., (September 1, 1942 – December 7, 1982) was a convicted murderer who was the first person in the United States to be executed using lethal injection. He was the first prisoner executed in Texas since 1964.

            I will post the information on Letha injection from Wikipedia. 

 

The "death chamber" at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, Texas. (AFP Photo/Paul Buck) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://news.yahoo.com/texas-rejects-death-penalty-appeal-argued-racial-bias-221343316.html]

Lethal injectionis the practice of injecting a person with a fatal dose of drugs (typically a barbiturate, paralytic, and potassium solution) for the express purpose of causing immediate death. The main application for this procedure is capital punishment, but the term may also be applied in a broad sense to euthanasia and suicide. It kills the person by first putting the person to sleep, and then stopping the breathing and heart, in that order.

1 History

Lethal injection gained popularity in the late twentieth century as a form of execution intended to supplant other methods, notably electrocution, hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, and beheading, that were considered to be more painful. It is now the most common form of execution in the United States of America.

Lethal Injection, known as putting someone to death, was first proposed on January 17, 1888, by Julius Mount Bleyer, a New York doctor who praised it as being cheaper than hanging. Bleyer's idea, however, was never used. The British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949–53) also considered lethal injection, but eventually ruled it out after pressure from the British Medical Association (BMA). Half a century later, Nazi Germany developed the Action T4 euthanasia programme as one of its methods of disposing Lebensunwertes Leben("life unworthy of life").

On May 11, 1977, Oklahoma's state medical examiner, Jay Chapman, proposed a new, less painful method of execution, known as Chapman's Protocol: "An intravenous saline drip shall be started in the prisoner's arm, into which shall be introduced a lethal injection consisting of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic." After the procedure was approved by anesthesiologist Stanley Deutsch, formerly Head of the Department of Anaesthesiology of the Oklahoma University Medical School, the Reverend Bill Wiseman introduced the method into the Oklahoma legislature, where it passed and was quickly adopted (Title 22, Section 1014(A)). Since then, until 2004, thirty-seven of the thirty-eight states using capital punishment introduced lethal injection statutes. On August 29, 1977, Texas adopted the new method of execution, switching to lethal injection from electrocution. On December 7, 1982, Texas became the first state to use lethal injection to carry out capital punishment, for the execution of Charles Brooks, Jr.

The People's Republic of China began using this method in 1997, Guatemala in 1998, the Philippines in 1999, Thailand in 2003, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) in 2005. Vietnam reportedly now uses this method. The Philippines has since abolished the death penalty.

Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program used lethal injection as one of several methods to destroy what the Nazi government dubbed "life unworthy of life".

The export of drugs to be used for lethal injection was banned by the European Union (EU) in 2011, together with other items under the EU Torture Regulation.

2 Procedure

2.1 Procedure in China executions

Further information: Execution van

The People's Republic of China used to execute prisoners exclusively by means of shooting, but has been changing over to lethal injection in recent years. The specific lethal injection procedures, including the drug or drugs used, are a state secret and not widely known. In at least some cases, prisoners facing death by lethal injection have been sedated at a prison, then placed inside an execution van that is disguised to look like a regular police van.

2.2 Procedure in U.S. executions

The condemned person is strapped onto a gurney; two intravenouscannulae ("IVs") are inserted, one in each arm. Only one is necessary to carry out the execution; the other is reserved as a backup in the event the primary line fails. A line leading from the IV linein an adjacent room is attached to the prisoner's IV, and secured so the line does not snap during the injections.

The arm of the condemned person is swabbed with alcohol before the cannula is inserted. The needles and equipment used are sterilized. There have been questions about why these precautions against infection are performed despite the purpose of the injection being death. There are several explanations: cannulae are sterilized during manufacture, so using sterile ones is routine medical procedure. Secondly, there is a chance that the prisoner could receive a stay of execution after the cannulae have been inserted, as happened in the case of James Autry in October 1983 (he was eventually executed on March 14, 1984). Finally, it would be a hazard to prison personnel to use unsterilized equipment.

Following connection of the lines, saline drips are started in both arms. This, too, is standard medical procedure: it must be ascertained that the IV lines are not blocked, ensuring the chemicals have not precipitated in the IV lines and blocked the needle, preventing the drugs from reaching the subject. A heart monitor is attached so prison officials can determine when death has occurred.

In most states, the intravenous injection is a series of drugs given in a set sequence, designed to first induce unconsciousnessfollowed by death through paralysis of respiratory muscles and/or by cardiac arrest through depolarization of cardiac muscle cells. The execution of the condemned in most states involves three separate injections (in sequential order):

1.    Sodium thiopental or pentobarbital: ultra-short action barbiturate, an anesthetic agent used at a high dose that renders the prisoner unconscious in less than 30 seconds. Depression of respiratory activity is one of the characteristic actions of this drug. Consequently, the lethal-injection doses, as described in the Sodium Thiopental section below, will — even in the absence of the following two drugs — cause death due to lack of breathing, as happens with overdoses of opioids.

2.    Pancuronium bromide: non-depolarizing muscle relaxant, causes complete, fast and sustained paralysis of the skeletal striated muscles, including the diaphragmand the rest of the respiratory muscles; this would eventually cause death by asphyxiation.

3.    Potassium chloride: stops the heart, and thus causes death by cardiac arrest.

The drugs are not mixed externally as that can cause them to precipitate. Also, a sequential injection is key to achieve the desired effects in the appropriate order: administration of the pentobarbital essentially renders the inmate unconscious; the infusion of the pancuronium bromide induces complete paralysis, including that of the lungs and diaphragm rendering the inmate unable to breathe. If the condemned were not already completely unconscious, the injection of a highly concentrated solution of potassium chloride could cause severe pain at the site of the IV line as well as along the punctured vein, but it interrupts the electrical activity of the heart muscle and causes it to stop beating, bringing about the death of the inmate.

The intravenous tubing leads to a room next to the execution chamber, usually separated from the offender by a curtain or wall. Typically a prison employee trained in venipuncture inserts the needle, while a second prison employee orders, prepares and loads the drugs into the lethal injection syringes. Two other staff members take each of the three syringes and secure them into the IVs. After the curtain is opened to allow the witnesses to see inside the chamber, the condemned offender is then permitted to make a final statement. Following this, the warden will signal that the execution may commence, and the executioner(s) (either prison staff or private citizens depending on the jurisdiction) will then manually inject the three drugs in sequence. During the execution, the condemned's cardiac rhythm is monitored. Death is pronounced after cardiac activity stops. Death usually occurs within seven minutes, although the whole procedure can take up to two hours, as was the case with the execution of Christopher Newton on May 24, 2007. According to state law, if a physician's participation in the execution is prohibited for reasons of medical ethics, then the death ruling can be made by the state Medical Examiner's Office. After confirmation that death has occurred, a coroner signs the condemned’s death certificate.

In two states (Delaware and Missouri) there is a lethal injection machine designed by Massachusetts-based Fred A. Leuchter that comprises two components: the delivery module and the control module. Two staff members each have a station in which they key the machine on and depress two stations buttons to be ready in case of mechanical failure. Each person presses one station button on the console which travels to a computer which starts all three injections electronically. The computer then deletes who actually started the syringes so that participants are not aware if their syringe contained saline or one of the drugs necessary for execution (to assuage guilt in a manner similar to the blank cartridge in execution by firing squad). The delivery module has eight syringes. The end syringes containing saline, syringes 2, 4, 6 containing the lethal drugs for the main line and syringes 1, 3, 5 containing the injections for the back-up line. The system was used in New Jersey before the abolition of the death penalty in 2007. Illinois previously used the computer, and Missouri and Delaware use the manual injection switch on the delivery panel.

Eleven states have switched, or have stated their intention to switch, to a one-drug lethal injection protocol. A one-drug method is using the single drug sodium thiopental to execute someone. The first state to switch to this method was Ohio, in December 8, 2009. In 2011, after pressure by activist organizations, the manufacturers of sodium thiopental and pentobarbital halted supply of the drugs to U.S. prisons performing lethal injections and required all resellers to do the same.

Execution room in the San Quentin State Prison in California

3 Drugs

3.1 Conventional lethal injection protocol

Typically, three drugs are used in lethal injection. Sodium thiopental is used to induce unconsciousness, pancuronium bromide(Pavulon) to cause muscle paralysis and respiratory arrest, and potassium chlorideto stop the heart.

3.1.1 Sodium thiopental

Main article: Sodium thiopental

• Lethal injection dosage: 2–5 grams

Sodium thiopental (US trade name: Sodium Pentothal) is an ultra-short acting barbiturate, often used for anesthesia induction and for medically induced coma. The typical anesthesia induction dose is 0.35 grams. Loss of consciousness is induced within 30–45 seconds at the typical dose, while a 5 gram dose (14 times the normal dose) is likely to induce unconsciousness in 10 seconds.

A full medical dose of Thiopental reaches the brain in about 30 seconds. This induces an unconscious state. Five to twenty minutes after injection, approximately 15% of the drug is in the brain, with the rest in other parts of the body.

The half-lifeof this drug is about 11.5 hours, and the concentration in the brain remains at around 5–10% of the total dose during that time. When a 'mega-dose' is administered, as in state-sanctioned lethal injection, the concentration in the brain during the tail phase of the distribution remains higher than the peak concentration found in the induction dose for anesthesia, because repeated doses — or a single very high dose as in lethal injection — accumulate in high concentrations in body fat, from which the thiopental is gradually released. This is the reason why an ultra-short acting barbiturate, such as thiopental, can be used for long-term induction of medical coma. Historically, thiopental has been one of the most commonly used and studied drugs for the induction of coma. Protocols vary for how it is given, but the typical doses are anywhere from 500 mg up to 1.5 grams. It is likely that this data was used to develop the initial protocols for state-sanctioned lethal injection, according to which one gram of thiopental was used to induce the coma. Now, most states use 5 grams to be absolutely certain the dosage is effective.

Barbiturates are the same class of drug used in medically assisted suicide. In euthanasia protocols, the typical dose of thiopental is 1.5 grams; the Dutch Euthanasia protocol indicates 1-1.5 grams or 2 grams in case of high barbiturate tolerance. The dose used for capital punishment is therefore about 3 times more than the dose used in euthanasia.

3.1.2 Pancuronium bromide (Pavulon)

Main article: Pancuronium

Lethal injection dosage: 100 milligrams

Pancuronium bromide (Trade name: Pavulon): The related drug curare, like pancuronium, is a non-depolarizing muscle relaxant (a paralytic agent) that blocks the action of acetylcholine at the motor end-plate of the neuromuscular junction. Binding of acetylcholine to receptors on the end-plate causes depolarization and contraction of the muscle fiber; non-depolarizing neuromuscular blocking agents like pancuronium stop this binding from taking place.

The typical dose for pancuronium bromide in capital punishment by lethal injection is 0.2 mg/kg and the duration of paralysis is around 4 to 8 hours. Paralysis of respiratory muscles will lead to death in a considerably shorter time.

Other drugs in use are tubocurarine chloride and succinylcholine chloride.

Pancuronium bromide is a derivative of the alkaloidmalouetinefrom the plant Malouetia bequaertiana

3.1.3 Potassium chloride

Main article: Potassium chloride

Lethal injection dosage: 100 mEq (milliequivalents)

Potassium is an electrolyte, 98% of which is intracellular. The 2% remaining outside the cell has great implications for cells that generate action potentials. Doctors prescribe potassium for patients when there is insufficient potassium, called hypokalemia, in the blood. The potassium can be given orally, which is the safest route; or it can be given intravenously, in which case there are strict rules and hospital protocols on the rate at which it is given.

The usual intravenous dose is 10–20 mEq per hour and it is given slowly since it takes time for the electrolyte to equilibrate into the cells. When used in state-sanctioned lethal injection, bolus potassium injection affects the electrical conduction of heart muscle. Elevated potassium, or hyperkalemia, causes the resting electrical potential of the heart muscle cells to be lower than normal (less negative). Without this negative resting potential, cardiac cells cannot repolarize (prepare for their next contraction).

Depolarizing the muscle cell inhibits its ability to fire by reducing the available number of sodium channels (they are placed in an inactivated state). ECG changes include faster repolarization (peaked T-waves), PR interval prolongation, widening of the QRS, and eventual sine-wave formation and asystole. Cases of patients dying from hyperkalemia (usually secondary to renal failure) are well known in the medical community, where patients have been known to die very rapidly, having previously seemed to be normal.

3.2 New lethal injection protocols

The Ohio protocol, developed after the incomplete execution of Romell Broom, ensures the rapid and painless onset of anesthesia by only using sodium thiopental and eliminating the use of Pavulon and potassium as the second and third drugs, respectively. It also provides for a secondary fail-safe measure using intramuscular injection of midazolam and hydromorphone in the event intravenous administration of the sodium thiopental proves problematic. The first state to switch to use Midazolam as the first drug in a new three-drug protocol protocol was Florida on October 15, 2013. Then on November 14, 2013, Ohio made the same move.

·         Primary: Sodium thiopental, 5 grams, intravenous

·         Secondary: Midazolam, 10 mg, intramuscular, and hydromorphone, 40 mg, intramuscular

In the brief for the U.S. courts written by accessories, the State of Ohio implies that they were unable to find any physicians willing to participate in development of protocols for executions by lethal injection, as this would be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath, and such physicians would be thrown out of the medical community and shunned for engaging in such deeds, even if they could not lawfully be stripped of their license.

On December 8, 2009, Kenneth Biros became the first person executed using Ohio's new single-drug execution protocol. He was pronounced dead at 11:47 a.m. EST, 10 minutes after receiving the injection. On September 10, 2010, Washingtonbecame the second state to use the single-drug Ohio protocol with the execution of Cal Coburn Brown. Currently, seven states (Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Ohio, South Dakota, Texasand Washington) have used the single-drug execution protocol. Four additional states (Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Missouri) have announced that they are switching to a single-drug protocol but, as of May 2013, have not executed anyone since switching protocols.

After sodium thiopental began being used in executions, Hospira, the only American company that made the drug, stopped manufacturing it due to its use in executions. The subsequent nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental led states to seek for other drugs. Pentobarbital, a drug often used for animal euthanasia, was used as part of a three drug cocktail for the first time on December 16, 2010, when John David Dutywas executed in Oklahoma. It was then used as the drug in a single drug execution for the first time on March 10, 2011, when Johnnie Baston was executed in Ohio.

4 Euthanasia protocol

Lethal injection has also been used in cases of euthanasia to facilitate voluntary death in patients with terminal or chronically painful conditions. Euthanasia can be accomplished either through oral, intravenous, or intramuscular administration of drugs. In individuals who are incapable of swallowing lethal doses of medication, an intravenous route is preferred. The following is a Dutch protocol for parenteral (intravenous) administration to obtain euthanasia, with the old protocol listed first and the new protocol listed second:

First a coma is induced by intravenous administration of 1 g thiopental sodium (Nesdonal), if necessary, 1.5-2 g of the product in case of strong tolerance to barbiturates. Then 45 mg alcuronium chloride (Alloferin) or 18 mg pancuronium bromide (Pavulon) is injected. In order to ensure optimal availability, these agents are preferably given intravenously. However, there are substantial indications that they can also be injected intramuscularly. In severe hepatitis or cirrhosis of the liver, alcuronium is the agent of first choice.

Intravenous administration is the most reliable and rapid way to accomplish euthanasia and therefore can be safely recommended. A coma is first induced by intravenous administration of 20 mg/kg thiopental sodium in a small volume (10 ml physiological saline). Then a triple intravenous dose of a non-depolarizing neuromuscular muscle relaxant is given, such as 20 mg pancuronium bromide or 20 mg vecuronium bromide (Norcuron). The muscle relaxant should preferably be given intravenously, in order to ensure optimal availability. Only for pancuronium dibromide are there substantial indications that the agent may also be given intramuscularly in a dosage of 40 mg.

A euthanasia machinemay allow an individual to perform the process alone.

5 Constitutionality in the United States

In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in Hill v. McDonough that death-row inmates in the United States could challenge the constitutionality of states' lethal injection procedures through a federal civil rights lawsuit. Since then, numerous death-row inmates have brought such challenges in the lower courts, claiming that lethal injection as currently practiced violates the ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" found in the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Lower courts evaluating these challenges have reached opposing conclusions. For example, courts have found that lethal injection as practiced in California, Florida, and Tennessee is unconstitutional. On the other hand, courts have found that lethal injection as practiced in Missouri, Arizona, and Oklahoma is constitutionally acceptable.

Though the practice of lethal injection has been ruled unconstitutional in California in 2006, the state has continued to execute prisoners on death row. As of 2011, California has nearly 700 prisoners condemned to death with the use of lethal injection despite a five-year moratorium. They have opened a facility costing over $800,000 used for performing the executions.

On September 25, 2007, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a lethal injection challenge arising from Kentucky, Baze v. Rees. In Baze, the Supreme Court addressed whether Kentucky's particular lethal injection procedure comports with the Eighth Amendment and will determine the proper legal standard by which lethal injection challenges in general should be judged, all in an effort to bring some uniformity to how these claims are handled by the lower courts. Although uncertainty over whether executions in the United States would be put on hold during the period in which the United States Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of lethal injection initially arose after the court agreed to hear Baze, no executions took place during the period between when the court agreed to hear the case and when its ruling was announced, with the exception of one lethal injection in Texas hours after the court made its announcement.

On April 16, 2008, the Supreme Court rejected Baze v. Rees thereby upholding Kentucky's method of lethal injection in a majority 7–2 decision. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented. Several states immediately indicated plans to proceed with executions.

6 Ethics of lethal injection

Main article: Participation of medical professionals in American executions

The American Medical Association believes that a physician's opinion on capital punishment is a personal decision. Since the AMA is founded on preserving life, they argue that a doctor "should not be a participant" in executions in any professional capacity with the exception of "certifying death, provided that the condemned has been declared dead by another person" and "relieving the acute suffering of a condemned person while awaiting execution". Amnesty International argues that the AMA's position effectively "prohibits doctors from participating in executions." The AMA, however, does not have the authority to prohibit doctors from participation in lethal injection, nor does it have the authority to revoke medical licenses, since this is the responsibility of the individual states.

Typically, most states do not require that physicians administer the drugs for lethal injection, but many states do require that physicians be present to pronounce or certify death.

Some states specifically detail that participation in a lethal injection is not to be considered practicing medicine. For example, Delaware law reads "the administration of the required lethal substance or substances required by this section shall not be construed to be the practice of medicine and any pharmacist or pharmaceutical supplier is authorized to dispense drugs to the Commissioner or the Commissioner's designee, without prescription, for carrying out the provisions of this section, notwithstanding any other provision of law" (excerpt from Title 11, Chapter 42, § 4209). State law allows for the dispense of the drugs/chemicals for lethal injection to the state's Department of Corrections (DOC) without a prescription.

7 Controversy

7.1 Opposition

7.1.1 Awareness

Opponents of lethal injection believe that it is not actually painless as practiced in the United States. Opponents argue that the thiopental is an ultra-short acting barbiturate that may wear off (anesthesia awareness) and lead to consciousness and an uncomfortable death wherein the inmate is unable to express their discomfort because they have been rendered paralyzed by the paralytic agent.

Opponents point to the fact that sodium thiopental is typically used as an induction agent and not used in the maintenance phase of surgery because of its short acting nature. Following the administration of thiopental, pancuronium bromide is given. Opponents argue that pancuronium bromide not only dilutes the thiopental, but (since the inmate is paralyzed) also prevents the inmate from expressing pain. Additional concerns have been raised over whether inmates are administered an appropriate level of thiopental owing to the rapid redistribution of the drug out of the brain to other parts of the body.

Additionally, opponents argue that the method of administration is also flawed. They state that since the personnel administering the lethal injection lack expertise in anesthesia, the risk of failing to induce unconsciousness is greatly increased. In reference to this problem, Jay Chapman, the creator of lethal injection, said, "It never occurred to me when we set this up that we’d have complete idiots administering the drugs." Also, they argue that the dose of sodium thiopental must be customized to each individual patient, not restricted to a set protocol. Finally, the remote administration results in an increased risk that insufficient amounts of the lethal injection drugs enter the bloodstream.

In total, opponents argue that the effect of dilution or improper administration of thiopental is that the inmate dies an agonizing death through suffocation due to the paralytic effects of pancuronium bromide and the intense burning sensation caused by potassium chloride.

Opponents of lethal injection, as currently practiced, argue that the procedure employed is designed to create the appearance of serenity and a painless death, rather than actually providing it. More specifically, opponents object to the use of Pancuronium bromide, arguing that its use in lethal injection serves no useful purpose since the inmate is physically restrained. Therefore the default function of pancuronium bromide would be to suppress the autonomic nervous system, specifically to stop breathing.

7.1.2 Research

In 2005, University of Miami researchers, in cooperation with an attorney representing death row inmates, published a research letter in the medical journal The Lancet. The article presented protocol information from Texas and Virginia which showed that executioners had no anesthesia training, drugs were administered remotely with no monitoring for anesthesia, data were not recorded and no peer-review was done. Their analysis of toxicology reports from Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina showed that post-mortem concentrations of thiopental in the blood were lower than that required for surgery in 43 of 49 executed inmates (88%); 21 (43%) inmates had concentrations consistent with awareness. This led the authors to conclude that there was a substantial probability that some of the inmates were aware and suffered extreme pain and distress during execution. The authors attributed the risk of consciousness among inmates to the lack of training and monitoring in the process, but carefully make no recommendations on how to alter the protocol or how to improve the process. Indeed, the authors conclude, "because participation of doctors in protocol design or execution is ethically prohibited, adequate anesthesia cannot be certain. Therefore, to prevent unnecessary cruelty and suffering, cessation and public review of lethal injections is warranted."

Paid expert consultants on both sides of the lethal injection debate have found opportunity to criticize the 2005 Lancet article. Subsequent to the initial publication in the Lancet, three letters to the editor and a response from the authors extended the analysis. The issue of contention is whether Thiopental, like many lipid-soluble drugs, may be redistributed from blood into tissues after death, effectively lowering thiopental concentrations over time, or whether thiopental may distribute from tissues into the blood, effectively increasing post-mortem blood concentrations over time. Given the near-absence of scientific, peer-reviewed data on the topic of thiopental post-mortem pharmacokinetics, the controversy continues in the lethal injection community and in consequence, many legal challenges to lethal injection have not used the Lancet article.

In 2007, the same group that authored The Lancet study extended its study of the lethal injection process through a critical examination of the pharmacology of the barbiturate thiopental. This study – published in the online journal PloS Medicine – confirmed and extended the conclusions made in The Lancet article and go further to disprove the assertion that the lethal injection process is painless.

To date these two studies by the University of Miami team serve as the only critical peer-reviewed examination of the pharmacology of the lethal injection process. These findings also appear true to be further supported by increased reporting of problematic lethal injections in the United States.

7.1.3 Single drug

According to the New Lethal Injection Protocols section above, single-drug lethal injection is already in use, or intended, in eleven states.

The execution can be painlessly accomplished, without risk of consciousness, by the injection of a single large dose of a barbiturate. By this logic, the use of any other chemicals is entirely superfluous and only serves to unnecessarily increase the risk of pain during the execution. Another possibility would be the infusion of a powerful and fast-acting narcotic, such as fentanyl, which would ensure comfort while suppressing the victim's respiratory drive.

When sodium pentobarbital, a barbiturate used in animal euthanasia, is administered in an overdose, it causes rapid unconsciousness. Respiratory arrest follows next, through paralysis of the diaphragmand collapse of the lungs. The drug would then suppress cardiac activity, thus causing death.

7.1.4 Cruel and unusual

On occasion, there have also been difficulties inserting the intravenous needles, sometimes taking over half an hour to find a suitable vein. Typically, the difficulty is found in convicts with a history of intravenous drug use. Opponents argue that the insertion of intravenous lines that take excessive amounts of time are tantamount to being cruel and unusual punishment. In addition, opponents point to instances where the intravenous line has failed, or where there have been adverse reactions to drugs, or unnecessary delays during the process of execution.

On December 13, 2006, Angel Nieves Diazwas not executed successfully in Florida using a standard lethal injection dose. Diaz was 55 years old, and had been sentenced to death for murder. Diaz did not succumb to the lethal dose even after 35 minutes, necessitating a second dose of drugs to complete the execution. At first, a prison spokesman denied Diaz had suffered pain, and claimed the second dose was needed because Diaz had some sort of liver disease. After performing an autopsy, the Medical Examiner, Dr. William Hamilton, stated that Diaz’s liver appeared normal, but that the needle had been pierced through Diaz’s vein into his flesh. The deadly chemicals had subsequently been injected into soft tissue, rather than into the vein. Two days after the execution, then-Governor Jeb Bush suspended all executions in the state and appointed a commission “to consider the humanity and constitutionality of lethal injections.” The ban was lifted by Governor Charlie Crist when he signed the death warrant for Mark Dean Schwab on July 18, 2007. On November 1, 2007, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously upheld the state's lethal injection procedures.

A study published in 2007 in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS Medicinesuggested that "the conventional view of lethal injection leading to an invariably peaceful and painless death is questionable".

The execution of Romell Broom was abandoned in Ohio on September 15, 2009, after prison officials failed to find a vein after 2 hours of trying on his arms, legs, hands and ankle. This has stirred up intense debate in the United States about lethal injection.

7.1.5 European Union export ban

Due to its use for executions in the US, the UK introduced a ban on the export of sodium thiopental in December 2010, after it was established that no European supplies to the US were being used for any other purpose. The restrictions were based on "the European Union Torture Regulation (including licensing of drugs used in execution by lethal injection)". From 21 December 2011 the European Union extended trade restrictions to prevent the export of certain medicinal products for capital punishment, stating that "The Union disapproves of capital punishment in all circumstances and works towards its universal abolition".

7.2 Support

7.2.1 Commonality

The combination of a barbiturate induction agent and a nondepolarizing paralytic agent is used in thousands of anesthetics every day. Supporters of the death penalty argue that unless anesthesiologists have been wrong for the last 40 years, the use of pentothal and pancuronium is safe and effective. In fact, potassium is given in heart bypass surgery to induce cardioplegia. Therefore, the combination of these three drugs is still in use today. Supporters of the death penalty speculate that the designers of the lethal injection protocols intentionally used the same drugs as used in every day surgery to avoid controversy. The only modification is that a massive coma-inducing dose of barbiturates is given. In addition, similar protocols have been used in countries that support euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide.

7.2.2 Anesthesia awareness

Thiopental is a rapid and effective drug for inducing unconsciousness, since it causes loss of consciousness upon one circulation through the brain due to its high lipophilicity. Only a few other drugs, such as methohexital, etomidate, or propofolhave the capability to induce anesthesia so rapidly. (Narcotics such as Fentanyl are inadequate as induction agents for anesthesia.) Supporters argue that since the thiopental is given at a much higher dose than for medically induced coma protocols, it is effectively impossible for the condemned to wake up.

Anesthesia awareness occurs when general anesthesia is inadequately maintained, for a number of reasons. Typically, anesthesia is induced with an intravenous drug, but maintained with an inhaled anesthetic given by the anesthesiologist (note that there are several other methods of safely and effectively maintaining anesthesia). Barbiturates are used only for induction of anesthesia and these drugs rapidly and reliably induce anesthesia, but wear off quickly. A neuromuscular blocking drug may then be given to cause paralysis which facilitates intubation, although this is not always required. The anesthesiologist has the responsibility to ensure that the maintenance technique (typically inhalational) is started soon after induction to prevent the patient from waking up.

General anesthesia is not maintained with barbiturate drugs. An induction dose of thiopental wears off after a few minutes because the thiopental redistributesfrom the brain to the rest of the body very quickly. However, it has a long half-life, which means that it takes a long time for the drug to be eliminated from the body. If a very large initial dose is given, little or no redistribution takes place (since the body is saturated with the drug), which means that recovery of consciousness requires the drug to be eliminated from the body, which is not only slow (taking many hours or days), but unpredictable in duration, making barbiturates very unsatisfactory for maintenance of anesthesia.

Thiopental has a half-life of approximately 11.5 hours (however, the action of a single dose is terminated within a few minutes by redistribution of the drug from the brain to peripheral tissues) and the long acting barbiturate phenobarbital has a half-life of approximately 4–5 days. It contrasts towards the inhaled anesthetics have extremely short half-lives and allow the patient to wake up rapidly and predictably after surgery.

The average time to death once a lethal injection protocol has been started is about 7 – 11 minutes. Since it only takes about 30 seconds for the thiopental to induce anesthesia, 30–45 seconds for the pancuronium to cause paralysis, and about 30 seconds for the potassium to stop the heart, death can theoretically be attained in as little as 90 seconds. Given that it takes time to administer the drug, time for the line to flush itself, time for the change of the drug being administered, and time to ensure that death has occurred, the whole procedure takes about 7–11 minutes. Procedural aspects in pronouncing death also contribute to delay and, therefore, the condemned is usually pronounced dead within 10 – 20 minutes of starting the drugs. Supporters of the death penalty say that a huge dose of thiopental, which is between 14 – 20 times the anesthetic induction dose and which has the potential to induce a medical coma lasting 60 hours, could never wear off in only 10 to 20 minutes.

7.2.3 Dilution effect

Death penalty supporters state that the claim that pancuronium dilutes the sodium thiopental dose is erroneous. Supporters argue that pancuronium and thiopental are commonly used together in surgery every day and if there were a dilution effect, it would be a known drug interaction.

Drug interactions are a complex topic. Some drug interactions can be simplistically classified as either synergistic or inhibitory interactions. In addition, drug interactions can occur directly at the site of action, through common pathways or indirectly through metabolism of the drug in the liver or through elimination in the kidney. Pancuronium and thiopental have different sites of action, one in the brain and one at the neuromuscular junction. Since the half-life of thiopental is 11.5 hours, the metabolism of the drugs is not an issue when dealing with the short time frame in lethal injections. The only other plausible interpretation would be a direct one, or one in which the two compounds interact with each other. Supporters of the death penalty argue that this theory does not hold true. They state that even if the 100 mg of pancuronium directly prevented 500 mg of thiopental from working, there would be sufficient thiopental to induce coma for 50 hours. In addition, if this interaction did occur, then the pancuronium would be incapable of causing paralysis.

Supporters of the death penalty state that the claim that the pancuronium prevents the thiopental from working, yet is still capable of causing paralysis, is not based on any scientific evidence and is a drug interaction that has never before been documented for any other drugs. Supporters of the death penalty question if this is an invented false claim.

7.3 Single drug

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Death Penalty Information Center, Reprieve, and other anti-death penalty groups have not proposed a lethal injection protocol which they believe is less painful. Supporters of the death penalty argue that the lack of an alternative proposed protocol is testament to the fact that the painfulness of the lethal injection protocol is not the issue. Instead supporters argue that the issue is the continued existence of the death penalty, since if the only issue was the painfulness of the procedure, then Amnesty International, HRW, or the DPIC should have already proposed a less painful method.

Regardless of an alternative protocol, some death penalty opponents have claimed that execution can be less painful by the administration of a single lethal dose of barbiturate. Supporters of the death penalty, however, state that the single drug theory is a flawed concept. Terminally ill patients in Oregon who have requested physician-assisted suicide have received lethal doses of barbiturates. The protocol has been highly effective in producing a painless death, but the time to cause death can be prolonged. Some patients have taken days to die, and a few patients have actually survived the process and have regained consciousness up to three days after taking the lethal dose. In a Californian legal proceeding addressing the issue of the lethal injection cocktail being "cruel and unusual," state authorities said that the time to death following a single injection of a barbiturate could be as much as 45 minutes.

Scientifically, this is readily explained. Barbiturate overdoses typically cause death by depression of the respiratory center, but the effect is variable. Some patients may have complete cessation of respiratory drive, whereas others may only have depression of respiratory function. In addition, cardiac activity can last for a long time after cessation of respiration. Since death is pronounced after asystole and given that the expectation is for a rapid death in lethal injection, multiple drugs are required; specifically potassium chloride to stop the heart. In fact, in the case of Clarence Ray Allen a second dose of potassium chloride was required to attain asystole. The position of most death penalty supporters is that death should be attained in a reasonable amount of time.

Supporters of the death penalty agree that the use of pancuronium bromide is not absolutely necessary in the lethal injection protocol. Some supporters believe that the drug may decrease muscular fasciculations when the potassium is given, but this has yet to be proven.

8 Use of Lethal Injection in the Middle East

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where a death sentence results in beheading in a public square, and sometimes shootings as an alternative. There have been calls in the Kingdom for replacing beheadings with lethal injection because of the beliefs that they should be more humane when it comes to executions, but nothing has been changed to this day.

PLEASE WATCH THIS VIDEO TO SEE A SCENE FROM THE 1995 MOVIE, ‘DEAD MAN WALKING’:

VIDEO SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDFDpzWJj2s

 

THE YAMASHITA STANDARD: COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY [ARTICLE ON THE DEATH PENALTY OF THE WEEK ~ SUNDAY DECEMBER 1, 2013 TO SATURDAY DECEMBER 7, 2013]

December 6, 2013, 9:04 pm

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            On this date, December 7, 1945, the military commission found General Yamashita guilty as charged, and sentenced him to death. General Tomoyuki Yamashita was charged with "unlawfully disregarding and failing to discharge his duty as a commander to control the acts of members of his command by permitting them to commit war crimes."

            I will post the article on Command Responsibility from Wikipedia. I chose this as the death penalty article of the week to remember the Pearl Harbor Attack on December 7, 1941 and also the sentencing of General Yamashita, coincidentally on December 7, 1945, four years after the attack. 

PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.rarenewspapers.com/view/584964

Command responsibility, sometimes referred to as the Yamashita standardor the Medina standard, and also known as superior responsibility, is the doctrine of hierarchical accountability in cases of war crimes.

The term may also be used more broadly to refer to the duty to supervise subordinates, and liability for the failure to do so, both in government, military law and with regard to corporations and trusts.

The doctrine of "command responsibility" was established by the Hague Conventions (IV) and (X) of 1907 and was applied for the first time by the German Supreme Court at the Leipzig War Crimes Trials after World War I, in the 1921 trial of Emil Müller.

The "Yamashita standard" is based upon the precedent set by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita. He was prosecuted in 1945, in a still controversial trial, for atrocities committed by troops under his command in the Philippines during World War II. Yamashita was charged with "unlawfully disregarding and failing to discharge his duty as a commander to control the acts of members of his command by permitting them to commit war crimes."

The "Medina standard" is based upon the 1971 prosecution of U.S. Army Captain Ernest Medina in connection with the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. It holds that a commanding officer, being aware of a human rights violation or a war crime, will be held criminally liable when he does not take action. However, Medina was acquitted of all charges.

Elijah and Ahab in Naboth’s vineyard. (PHOTO SOURCE: http://eteacherbiblical.com/articles/have-you-killed-and-also-taken-possessions)

Origin

Developing accountability

In The Art of War, written during the 6th century BC, Sun Tzu argued that it was a commander's duty to ensure that his subordinates conducted themselves in a civilised manner during an armed conflict. Similarly, in the Bible (Kings 1: Chapter 21), within the story of Ahab and the killing of Naboth, King Ahab was blamed for the killing of Naboth on orders from Queen Jezebel, because Ahab (as king) is responsible for everyone in his kingdom.

The trial of Peter von Hagenbachby an ad hoc tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire in 1474, was the first "international" recognition of commanders' obligations to act lawfully. Hagenbach was put on trial for atrocities committed during the occupation of Breisach, found guilty of war crimes and beheaded. Since he was convicted for crimes "he as a knight was deemed to have a duty to prevent" Hagenbach defended himself by arguing that he was only following orders from the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, to whom the Holy Roman Empire had given Breisach. Despite the fact there was no explicit use of a doctrine of "command responsibility" it is seen as the first trial based on this principle.

During the American Civil War, the concept developed further, as is seen in the "Lieber Code". This regulated accountability by imposing criminal responsibility on commanders for ordering or encouraging soldiers to wound or kill already disabled enemies. Article 71 of the Lieber Code provided that:

Whoever intentionally inflicts additional wounds on an enemy already wholly disabled, or kills such an enemy, or who orders or encourages soldiers to do so, shall suffer death, if duly convicted, whether he belongs to the Army of the United States, or is an enemy captured after having committed his misdeed.

The Hague Convention of 1907 was the first attempt at codifying the principle of command responsibility on a multinational level, specifically within "Laws and Customs of War on Land" (Hague IV); October 18, 1907: "Section I on Belligerents: Chapter I The Qualifications of Belligerents", "Section III Military Authority over the territory of the hostile State", and "Adaptation to Maritime War of the Principles of the Geneva Convention" (Hague X); October 18, 1907. Article 1 of Section I of the 1907 Hague IV states that:

The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:

• To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
• To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
• To carry arms openly; and
• To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Another example of command responsibility is shown in Article 43 of Section III of the same convention which stipulates that:

The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.

In "Adaptation to Maritime War of the Principles of the Geneva Convention" (Hague X), Article 19 states that:

The commanders-in-chief of the belligerent fleets must see that the above articles are properly carried out; they will have also to see to cases not covered thereby, in accordance with the instructions of their respective Governments and in conformity with the general principles of the present Convention.

While the Hague Convention of 1907 does not explicitly create a doctrine of command responsibility, it does uphold a notion that a superior must account for their actions of his subordinates. It also suggests that military superiors have a duty to ensure that their troops act in accordance with international law and if they fail to command them lawfully, their respective states may be held criminally liable. In turn, those states may choose to punish their commanders. At such, this convention has been viewed as a foundational root of modern doctrine of command responsibility. After World War I, the Allied Powers'Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on the Enforcement of Penalties recommended the establishment of an international tribunal, which would try individuals for "order[ing], or, with knowledge thereof and with power to intervene, abstain[ing] from preventing or taking measures to prevent, putting an end to or repressing, violations of the laws or customs of war."

Hagenbach on trial, from Berner Chronik des Diebold Schilling dem Älteren

Introducing responsibility for an omission

Command responsibility is an omission mode of individual criminal liability: the superior is responsible for crimes committed by his subordinates and for failing to prevent or punish (as opposed to crimes he ordered). In re Yamashita before a United States Military Commission in 1945, General Yamashita became the first to be charged solely on the basis of responsibility for an omission. He was commanding the 14th Area Army of Japan in the Philippines during World War II when some of the Japanese troops engaged in atrocities against thousands of civilians. As commanding officer, he was charged with "unlawfully disregarding and failing to discharge his duty as a commander to control the acts of members of his command by permitting them to commit war crimes."

By finding Yamashita guilty, the Commission adopted a new standard, stating that where "vengeful actions are widespread offences and there is no effective attempt by a commander to discover and control the criminal acts, such a commander may be held responsible, even criminally liable." However, the ambiguous wording resulted in a long-standing debate about the amount of knowledge required to establish command responsibility. The matter was appealed, and was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in 1946. After sentencing, Yamashita was executed.

Following In re Yamashita, courts clearly accepted that a commander's actual knowledge of unlawful actions is sufficient to impose individual criminal responsibility.

In the High Command Case (1947–8), the U.S. Military Tribunal argued that in order for a commander to be criminally liable for the actions of his subordinates "there must be a personal dereliction" which "can only occur where the act is directly traceable to him or where his failure to properly supervise his subordinates constitutes criminal negligence on his part" based upon "a wanton, immoral disregard of the action of his subordinates amounting to acquiescence".

In the Hostage Case (1947–8), the U.S. Military Tribunal seemed to limit the situations where a commander has a duty to know to instances where he has already had some information regarding subordinates' unlawful actions.

After World War II, the parameters of command responsibility were thus increased, imposing liability on commanders for their failure to prevent the commission of crimes by their subordinates. These cases – the latter two part of the Nürnberg tribunals – discussed explicitly the requisite standard of mens rea, and were unanimous in finding that a lesser level of knowledge than actual knowledge may be sufficient.

Codification

The first international treaty to comprehensively codify the doctrine of command responsibility was the Additional Protocol I("AP I") of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Article 86(2) states that:

the fact that a breach of the Conventions or of this Protocol was committed by a subordinate does not absolve his superiors from ... responsibility ... if they knew, or had information which should have enabled them to conclude in the circumstances at the time, that he was committing or about to commit such a breach and if they did not take all feasible measures within their power to prevent or repress the breach.

Article 87 obliges a commander to "prevent and, where necessary, to suppress and report to competent authorities" any violation of the Conventions and of AP I.

In Article 86(2) for the first time a provision would "explicitly address the knowledge factor of command responsibility".

 

Photo of Yamashita Tomoyuki, Lieutenant-General, Commander of the Japanese 25th Army

Definitions

In the discussion regarding "command responsibility" the term "command" can be defined as
A.De jure (legal) command, which can be both military and civilian. The determining factor here is not rank but subordination. Four structures are identified:

1. Policy command:heads of state, high-ranking government officials, monarchs
2. Strategic command:War Cabinet, Joint Chiefs of Staff
3. Operational command: military leadership. In Yamashita it was established that operational command responsibility cannot be ceded for the purpose of the doctrine of command responsibility; operational commanders must exercise the full potential of their authority to prevent war crimes – failure to supervise subordinates or non-assertive orders does not exonerate the commander.
4. Tactical command: direct command over troops on the ground

International case lawhas developed two special types of "de jure commanders."

1. Prisoners-of-war (POW) camp commanders: the ICTY established in Aleksovski that POW camp commanders are entrusted with the welfare of all prisoners, and subordination in this case is irrelevant.
2. Executive commanders: supreme governing authority in the occupied territory. Subordination is again irrelevant – their responsibility is the welfare of the population in the territory under their control, as established in the High Command and Hostages cases after World War II.

B.De facto (factual) command, which specifies effective control, as opposed to formal rank. This needs a superior-subordinate relationship. Indicia are:

1. Capacity to issue orders.
2. Power of influence: influence is recognized as a source of authority in the Ministries case before the US military Tribunal after World War II.
3. Evidence stemming from distribution of tasks: the ICTY has established the Nikolic test– superior status is deduced from analyzing distribution of tasks within the unit, and the test applies both to operational and POW camp commanders.

Additional Protocol I and the Statutes of the ICTY, the ICTR, and the ICC makes prevention or prosecution of crimes mandatory.

Application of command responsibility

Nuremberg Tribunal

Main articles: Nuremberg Trials, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, and Nuremberg Defense

Following World War II, communis opinio was that the atrocities committed by the Nazis were so severe a special tribunal had to be held. However, contemporary jurists such as Harlan Fiske Stonecriticized the Nuremberg Trialsas victor's justice. The Nuremberg Charterdetermined the basis to prosecute people for:

Crime	Description
Crimes against peace	the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.
War crimes	violations of the laws and customs of war. A list follows with, inter alia, murder, ill-treatment or deportation into slave labour or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, the killing of hostages, the plunder of public or private property, the wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
Crimes against humanity	murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhuman acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The jurisdiction ratione personae is considered to apply to "leaders, organisers, instigators and accomplices" involved in planning and committing those crimes.

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

Main article: International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

The ICTY statute article 7 (3) establishes that the fact that crimes "were committed by a subordinate does not relieve his superior of criminal responsibility if he knew or had reason to know that the subordinate was about to commit such acts or had done so and the superior failed to take the necessary and reasonable measures to prevent such acts or to punish the perpetrators."

In The Prosecutor v. Delalić et al. ("the Čelebići case") first considered the scope of command responsibility by concluding that "had reason to know" (article 7(3)) means that a commander must have "had in his possession information of a nature, which at the least, would put him on notice of the risk of ... offences by indicating the need for additional investigation in order to ascertain whether ... crimes were committed or were about to be committed by his subordinates."

In The Prosecutor v. Blaškić ("the Blaškić case") this view was corroborated. However, it differed regarding mens rea required by AP I. The Blaškić Trial Chamber concluded that "had reason to know", as defined by the ICTY Statute, also imposes a stricter "should have known" standard of mens rea.

The conflicting views of both cases were addressed by the Appeals Chambers in Čelebići and in a separate decision in Blaškić. Both rulings hold that some information of unlawfal acts by subordinates must be available to the commander following which he did not, or inadequately, discipline the perpetrator.

The concept of command responsibility has developed significantly in the jurisprudence of the ICTY. One of the most recent judgements that extensively deals with the subject is the Halilović judgement of 16 November 2005 (para. 22-100).

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Main article: International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 955 (1994) set up an international criminal tribunal to judge people responsible for the Rwandan Genocide and other serious violations of international law in Rwanda, or by Rwandan citizens in nearby states, between 1 January and 31 December 1994; additional later resolutions expanded the scope and timeline of the tribunal. The tribunal has jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

The judgement against Jean-Paul Akayesu established rape as a war crime. Rape was placed in line with "other acts of serious bodily and mental harm" rather than the historical view of rape as "a trophy of war." Akayesu was held responsible for his actions and non-actions as mayor and police commander of a commune in which many Tutsis were killed, raped, tortured, and otherwise persecuted.

Another case prosecuted persons in charge of a radio station and a newspaper that incited and then encouraged the Rwandan genocide. The defendants were charged with genocide, incitement to genocide, and crimes against humanity for their positions of control and command in the "hate media," although they physically had not committed the acts.

International Criminal Court

Main article: International Criminal Court

Following several ad hoc tribunals, the international community decided on a comprehensive court of justice for future crimes against humanity. This resulted in the International Criminal Court, which identified four categories

.

1.    Genocide

2.    Crimes against humanity

3.    War crimes

4.    Crimes of aggression

Article 28 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court codified the doctrine of command responsibility. With Article 28(a) military commanders are imposed with individual responsibility for crimes committed by forces under their effective command and control if they:

either knew or, owing to the circumstances at the time, should have known that the forces were committing or about to commit such crimes.

It uses the stricter "should have known" standard of mens rea, instead of "had reason to know," as defined by the ICTY Statute.

The Bush administration has adopted the American Servicemembers' Protection Act and entered in Article 98 agreements in an attempt to protect any US citizen from appearing before this court. As such it interferes with implementing the command responsibility principle when applicable to US citizens.

War on terror

Further information: War on terror

A number of commentators have advanced the argument that the principle of "command responsibility" could make high-ranking officials within the Bush administration guilty of war crimes committed either with their knowledge or by persons under their control.

As a reaction to the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. government adopted several controversial measures (e.g., invading Iraq, asserting "unlawful combatant" status, and "enhanced interrogation methods").

Alberto Gonzales and others argued that detainees should be considered "unlawful combatants" and as such not be protected by the Geneva Conventions in multiple memoranda regarding these perceived legal gray areas.

Gonzales' statement that denying coverage under the Geneva Conventions "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act" suggests, at the least, an awareness by those involved in crafting policies in this area that US officials are involved in acts that could be seen to be war crimes. The U.S. Supreme Court overruled the premise on which this argument is based in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which it ruled that Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions applies to detainees in Guantanamo Bay, and that the Guantanamo military commission used to try these suspects were in violation of US and international law because it was not created by Congress.

On April 14, 2006, Human Rights Watch said that Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be criminally liable for his alleged involvement in the abuse of Mohammad al-Qahtani. Dave Lindorff contends that by ignoring the Geneva Conventions the US administration, including President Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, is culpable for war crimes. In addition, former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials Benjamin Ferencz has called the invasion of Iraq a "clear breach of law", and as such it constitutes a crime against peace. On November 14, 2006, invoking universal jurisdiction, legal proceedings were started in Germany - for their alleged involvement of prisoner abuse - against Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, George Tenet and others. This allegedly prompted recently retired Donald Rumsfeld to cancel a planned visit to Germany.

Former Army Lt. Ehren Watada refused to be deployed to Iraq based on his claims of command responsibility. Although his own deployment was not ordered until after Security Council Resolution 1511 authorized a multinational force in Iraq, Watada argued that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, and as such he claimed he was bound by command responsibility to refuse to take part in an illegal war. He was discharged from the Army in 2009.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is seen as an amnesty law for crimes committed in the War on Terror by retroactively rewriting the War Crimes Act and by abolishing habeas corpus, effectively making it impossible for detainees to challenge crimes committed against them.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo told The Sunday Telegraph that he is willing to start an inquiry by the International Criminal Court (ICC), and possibly a trial, for war crimes committed in Iraq involving British Prime Minister Tony Blair and American President George W. Bush, even though under the Rome Statute the ICC has no jurisdiction over Bush, since the United States is not a State Party to the relevant treaty—unless Bush were accused of crimes inside a State Party, or the UN Security Council (where the United States has a veto) requested an investigation. However, Blair does fall under ICC jurisdiction as Britain is a State Party.

Nat Hentoff wrote on August 28, 2007, that a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the July 2007 report by Human Rights First and Physicians for Social Responsibility, titled Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, might be used as evidence of American war crimes if there was a Nuremberg-like trial regarding the War on Terror.

Shortly before the end of President Bush's second term, newsmedia in other countries started opining that under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the United States is obligated to hold those responsible for prisoner abuse to account under criminal law. One proponent of this view was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Professor Manfred Nowak) who, on January 20, 2009, remarked on German television that former president George W. Bush had lost his head of state immunity and under international law the United States would now be mandated to start criminal proceedings against all those involved in these violations of the UN Convention Against Torture. Law professor Dietmar Herz explained Nowak's comments by saying that under U.S. and international law former President Bush is criminally responsible for adopting torture as interrogation tool.

War in Darfur

Further information: Darfur conflict, International response to the Darfur conflict, War in Darfur, Timeline of the War in Darfur, and Janjaweed

Human Rights Watch commented on this conflict by stating that:

... individual commanders and civilian officials could be liable for failing to take any action to end abuses by their troops or staff ... The principle of command responsibility is applicable in internal armed conflicts as well as international armed conflicts.

The Sunday Times in March 2006, and the Sudan Tribune in March 2008, reported that the UN Panel of Experts determined that Salah Gosh and Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein

had "command responsibility" for the atrocities committed by the multiple Sudanese security services.

Following an inquiry by the United Nations, regarding allegations of involvement of the Government in genocide, the dossier was referred to the International Criminal Court. On May 2, 2007, the ICC issued arrest warrants for militia leader Ali Muhammad al-Abd al-Rahman, of the Janjaweed, a.k.a. Ali Kushayb, and Ahmad Muhammad Haroun for crimes against humanity and war crimes. To this day Sudan has refused to comply with the arrest warrants and has not turned them over to the ICC.

The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, announced on July 14, 2008, ten criminal charges against President Omar al-Bashir, accusing him of sponsoring war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The ICC's prosecutors have charged al-Bashir with genocidebecause he "masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part" three tribal groups in Darfur because of their ethnicity. The ICC's prosecutor for Darfur, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is expected within months to ask a panel of ICC judges to issue an arrest warrant for Bashir.

Zimbabwe

Further information: Human rights in Zimbabwe, Joshua Nkomo, Zimbabwean Fifth Brigade, and Zimbabwean presidential election, 2008

For his conduct as President of Zimbabwe, including allegations of torture and murder of political opponents, it is suggested Robert Mugabe may be prosecuted using this doctrine. Because Zimbabwe has not subscribed to the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction it may be authorised by the United Nations Security Council. The precedent for this was set by its referral to bring indictments relating to the crimes committed in Darfur. Otherwise, a Zimbabwean regime following Mugabe's would have jurisdiction over his alleged crimes (in the absence of any amnesty law) as would the numerous countries with universal jurisdiction over torture, including the UK.

KENNETH BIROS THE BODY PARTS MURDERER OF OHIO (EXECUTED IN OHIO ON DECEMBER 8, 2009)

December 7, 2013, 2:53 pm

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            On this date, December 8, 2009, Kenneth Biros A.K.A the Body Parts murderer of Ohio, was executed in that state by lethal injection. He was convicted of murdering Tami Engstrom on February 8, 1991. Please go to Unit 1012 Blog to hear from the victim’s families.

   

Born	June 24, 1958
Died	December 8, 2009 (aged 51) Lucasville, Ohio
Criminal penalty	Death sentence
Criminal status	Executed by lethal injection
Conviction(s)	Aggravated murder Attempted rape Aggravated robbery Felonious sexual penetration

Kenneth Biros(June 24, 1958 – December 8, 2009) was an American convicted murderer who was sentenced to death and executed for the aggravated murder, attempted rape, aggravated robbery and felonious sexual penetration of a young woman. Biros was the first condemned person to be executed by lethal injection in the United States with the use of a single drug.

Tami Engstrom, with son Casey, was 22 on Feb. 7, 1991, when she was  murdered and beheaded by Kenneth Biros.

Murder

Biros admitted to killing 22 year old Tami Engstrom during February 1991 in a fit of rage. Biros then cut up the body and spread various parts over a wide territory encompassing portions of northeast Ohio and northwest Pennsylvania.

onviction

Biros was convicted of aggravated murder, attempted rape, aggravated robbery and felonious sexual penetration and sentenced to death. He was originally sentenced to die by means of lethal injection at 10:00 A.M. on March 20, 2007. This would have been the first execution during Governor Ted Strickland's administration. Governor Strickland denied Biros clemency on March 16, 2007. However, on that day the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the ruling of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Biros' execution should be stayed to allow him to continue to argue his case that Ohio's lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. He was then transferred from Ohio's death row to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio. On April 24, 2009, Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins requested the Ohio Supreme Court to set an execution date after a federal judge decided on Tuesday, April 21, 2009, that Ohio's execution method was flawed, but not unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of Ohio later set a new execution date for Dec. 8, 2009.

Execution

Biros was executed by lethal injection on December 8, 2009 at 11:00 AM at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio. His execution was originally scheduled for 10:00 AM, but was later delayed until 11:00 AM. He was pronounced dead at 11:47 AM. Biros was the first condemned person to be executed with a lethal single-drug dose of an anesthetic, sodium thiopental, in the United States.

OTHER LINKS:

http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/biros1187.htm

http://www.murderpedia.org/male.B/b1/biros-kenneth-photos.htm