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Capital Punishment In Virginia
Capital punishment was abolished in Virginia on March 24, 2021, when Governor Ralph Northam signed a bill into law. The law took effect on July 1, 2021. Virginia is the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty, and the first southern state in United States history to do so. The first execution in what would become the United States was carried out in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1608, when Captain George Kendall was executed in Jamestown for spying. Since then, Virginia has executed more than 1,300 people, the most of any other state. In the modern, post-''Gregg'' era, Virginia conducted 113 executions, the third most in the country, behind only Texas and Oklahoma. The last execution in the state was on July 6, 2017, when William Morva was executed via lethal injection for murder. Early history The first recorded execution in the United States took place in 1608 at the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. Captain George Kendall was executed for treason. Hanging was the predominan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Capital Punishment
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that the person is responsible for violating norms that warrant said punishment. The sentence ordering that an offender is to be punished in such a manner is known as a death sentence, and the act of carrying out the sentence is known as an execution. A prisoner who has been sentenced to death and awaits execution is ''condemned'' and is commonly referred to as being "on death row". Crimes that are punishable by death are known as ''capital crimes'', ''capital offences'', or ''capital felonies'', and vary depending on the jurisdiction, but commonly include serious crimes against the person, such as murder, mass murder, aggravated cases of rape (often including child sexual abuse), terrorism, aircraft hijacking, war crimes, crimes against ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust Limited, Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of ''The Guardian'' in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of ''The Guardian'' free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for ''The Guardian'' the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supreme Court Of The United States
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. Federal tribunals in the United States, federal court cases, and over State court (United States), state court cases that involve a point of Law of the United States, federal law. It also has Original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States, original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party." The court holds the power of Judicial review in the United States, judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution of the United States, Constitution. It is also able to strike down presidential directives for violating either the Constitution or statutory law. However, it may act only within the context of a case in an area of law ove ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Allen Muhammad
John Allen Muhammad (born Williams; December 31, 1960 – November 10, 2009) was an American convicted murderer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He, along with his partner and accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo (aged 17), a native of Kingston, Jamaica, carried out the D.C. sniper attacks of October 2002, killing 10 people. Muhammad and Malvo were arrested in connection with the attacks on October 24, 2002, following tips from alert citizens. Although the actions of the two individuals were classified by the media as psychopathy attributable to serial killer characteristics, whether or not their psychopathy meets this classification or as a spree killer is debated by researchers. Born as John Allen Williams, Muhammad joined the Nation of Islam in 1987 and later changed his surname to Muhammad. At Muhammad's trial, the prosecutor claimed that the attacks were part of a plot to kill his ex-wife and regain custody of his children, but the judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teresa Lewis
Teresa Wilson Bean Lewis (April 26, 1969 – September 23, 2010) was an American murderer who was the only woman on death row in Virginia prior to her execution. She was sentenced to death by lethal injection for the murders of her husband and stepson in October 2002. Lewis sought to profit from a $250,000 life insurance policy her stepson had taken out as a U.S. Army reservist in anticipation of his deployment to Iraq. In September 2010, Lewis became the first female inmate to die by lethal injection in the state of Virginia. The state had last executed a woman in 1912. The case led to debate over capital punishment owing to Lewis's sex, as well as to questions regarding her mental capacity. Capital punishment was abolished in Virginia on March 24, 2021, officially making Lewis the last woman to be executed in Virginia. Background Teresa Wilson grew up in poverty in Danville, Virginia, where her parents both worked in a textile mill. Teresa sang in a church during her youth. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virginia Christian
Virginia Christian (August 15, 1895 – August 16, 1912) was the first female criminal executed in the 20th century in the state of Virginia, and a juvenile offender executed in the United States. She was also the only female juvenile executed by electric chair and, to date, the last female criminal executed in the electric chair by the Commonwealth of Virginia. She was the last female criminal executed by the Commonwealth until September 23, 2010, when Teresa Lewis became the first female criminal in nearly a century to be executed in the US state of Virginia. Christian, a black maid, was convicted of the murder of her employer Ida Belote, a 72-year-old white woman, in her home at Hampton on March 18, 1912. Shortly after she was arrested, it is said she confessed that she hit Belote, but that she had never intended to kill her. Incident Belote is alleged to have mistreated and abused Christian, and in mid- March 1912, an argument ensued between the two in which Belote accused C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without their consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or against a person who is incapable of giving valid consent, such as one who is unconscious, incapacitated, has an intellectual disability, or is below the legal age of consent. The term ''rape'' is sometimes used interchangeably with the term ''sexual assault.'' The rate of reporting, prosecuting and convicting for rape varies between jurisdictions. Internationally, the incidence of rapes recorded by the police during 2008 ranged, per 100,000 people, from 0.2 in Azerbaijan to 92.9 in Botswana with 6.3 in Lithuania as the median. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Race And Capital Punishment In The United States
The relationship between race and capital punishment in the United States has been studied extensively. As of 2014, 42 percent of those on death row in the United States were Black. As of October 2002, there were 12 executions of White defendants where the murder victim was Black, however, there were 178 executed defendants who were Black with a White murder victim. Since then, the number of white defendants executed where the murder victim was black has increased to just 21 (less than 1.36 percent of all executions), whereas the number of Black defendants executed where the murder victim was White has increased to 299 (nearly 19.4 percent of all executions). 54 percent of people wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in the United States are black. Executions by race and race of victim Since 1991, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has produced quarterly reports containing statistics related to capital punishment in the United States. The reports include a breakd ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martinsville Seven
The Martinsville Seven were a group of seven African-American men from Martinsville, Virginia, who were all executed in 1951 by the United States government after being accused of raping a white woman. At the time of their arrest, all but one were between the ages of 18 and 23. They were quickly tried in six separate trials (two agreed to be tried together), and each was convicted and sentenced to death. It was the largest mass execution for rape that had been reported in the United States. On August 31, 2021, the Governor of Virginia pardoned the convictions of all seven men, 70 years after their deaths. The Civil Rights Congress defended the men originally, and later conducted two marches and other attempts to raise awareness and conduct a public campaign on behalf of their agenda. This was objected to by the NAACP, who feared further backlash because of the CRC's Communist affiliations. Martin A. Martin and other NAACP attorneys defended the men on appeals, attempting to ensure f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of enslaved Africans who are from the United States. While some Black immigrants or their children may also come to identify as African-American, the majority of first generation immigrants do not, preferring to identify with their nation of origin. African Americans constitute the second largest racial group in the U.S. after White Americans, as well as the third largest ethnic group after Hispanic and Latino Americans. Most African Americans are descendants of enslaved people within the boundaries of the present United States. On average, African Americans are of West/ Central African with some European descent; some also have Native American and other ancestry. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, African immigrants generally do not s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electric Chair
An electric chair is a device used to execute an individual by electrocution. When used, the condemned person is strapped to a specially built wooden chair and electrocuted through electrodes fastened on the head and leg. This execution method, conceived in 1881 by a Buffalo, New York dentist named Alfred P. Southwick, was developed throughout the 1880s as a supposed humane alternative to hanging, and first used in 1890. The electric chair has been used in the United States and, for several decades, in the Philippines. While death was originally theorized to result from damage to the brain, it was shown in 1899 that it primarily results from ventricular fibrillation and eventual cardiac arrest. Although the electric chair has long been a symbol of the death penalty in the United States, its use is in decline due to the rise of lethal injection, which is widely believed to be a more humane method of execution. While some states still maintain electrocution as a legal method of e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gibbet
A gibbet is any instrument of public execution (including guillotine, executioner's block, impalement stake, hanging gallows, or related scaffold). Gibbeting is the use of a gallows-type structure from which the dead or dying bodies of criminals were hanged on public display to deter other existing or potential criminals. Occasionally, the gibbet was also used as a method of execution, with the criminal being left to die of exposure, thirst and/or starvation. The practice of placing a criminal on display within a gibbet is also called "hanging in chains". Display Gibbeting was a common law punishment, which a judge could impose in addition to execution. This practice was regularized in England by the Murder Act 1751, which empowered judges to impose this for murder. It was most often used for traitors, murderers, highwaymen, pirates, and sheep stealers and was intended to discourage others from committing similar offenses. The structures were therefore often placed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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