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The end of the death penalty under common law?

Amanda Clift-Matthews Barrister and former in-house counsel at The Death Penalty Project

Time to read

In the 2020 UK Supreme Court case of  El Gizouli v Secretary of State, [1]  Lord Kerr commented that it is “ surely now beyond controversy that the death penalty is regarded by English common law to constitute cruel and unusual punishment ” (para 141).

Such a statement is truly remarkable when one recalls that the common law once mandated that any person who stole anything worth over a shilling should be hanged. It would mean that, today, the common law shuns capital punishment for even the most heinous of crimes, such as those allegedly committed by El Shafee El Sheikh and Alexanda Kotey – the two members of the ‘Beatles’ ISIS cell accused of beheading hostages in Iraq and Syria at the centre of the El Gizouli challenge. For English common law to now regard as inhuman the once accepted penalty for all felonies would be a striking testament to the common law’s ability to absorb external juridical developments and adapt to contemporary societal values.  

Hence, if the remaining judges of the Supreme Court agreed with Lord Kerr that the common law has now come to regard the death penalty as a cruel and unusual punishment, then this is a milestone deserving of some recognition.

The entrance to the UK Supreme Court, London

Photo credit: Yogendra Joshi via Flickr  (Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0)

Maha El Gizouli, El Sheikh’s mother, brought judicial review proceedings against the Home Secretary because of his decision to supply information gathered by UK investigating authorities to prosecutors in the US where El Sheikh and Kotey were to stand trial. Although it was the UK’s long-standing practice to seek assurances that the death penalty would not be imposed in the event of a conviction for a death eligible offence, legal assistance was provided to the US in El Sheikh’s and Kotey’s cases without any such assurances .

Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that the Home Secretary’s decision was unlawful because insufficient attention had been paid to the requirements of the Data Protection Act 2018. But El Gizouli had also argued that the common law prohibited the government from providing legal assistance if it meant the UK would be facilitating the infliction of a cruel and unusual punishment on an individual by another state power. 

The ‘non-facilitation’ argument was rejected by the majority of the Supreme Court. However, a necessary step in that argument was that the common law had now come to regard the death penalty as a cruel and unusual punishment. The fundamental premiss is our English Bill of Rights 1688, which governs development of the common law and declares that “ excessive Baile ought not to be required nor excessive Fines imposed nor cruel and unusual Punishments inflicted. ” As Lord Kerr observed, what is conceived to be cruel and unusual punishment “adjusts, like so many other societal perceptions, to changes in the standards and values of society which develop over time with the growth of knowledge and the evolution of attitudinal changes ” (para 102). How that preliminary argument was regarded by the majority of the Supreme Court is less clear.

The decision of the lower court

The Divisional Court outright rejected the argument that the common law had now come to a position where the death penalty was prohibited. It found that development of the common law with regard to capital punishment had been abruptly truncated with the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act 1965, so that “ there was no room for the common law to develop domestically to achieve a similar end ” (paras 93-95). As far as it was concerned, what constituted ‘cruel and unusual’ could only be determined by reference to the European Convention on Human Rights via the Human Rights Act 1998. 

Yet, while no one would dispute that the common law is trumped when an issue has been comprehensively dealt with by statute, that does not mean the common law cannot develop harmoniously alongside legislation – as the Supreme Court would later confirm. Lord Bingham once observed that the common law and the European Convention “walk side by side” when protecting rights. [2]  Furthermore, Lord Toulson previously reminded us “ the development of the common law did not come to an end on the passing of the Human Rights Act 1998. ” [3] In fact, not only does the Human Rights Act itself expressly preserve the existence and development of common law rights, but many European Convention rights are fulfilled only by a concurrent development of the common law. This relationship is something that Lord Reed, one of the Supreme Court judges in this case, had previously recognised. [4]

In any event, the 1965 abolition Act did not put an end to the death penalty as the Divisional Court claimed. It only abolished capital punishment for murder. The Act said nothing about treason, for which the common law punishment had always been death. While no execution has been carried out in this country since 1964, capital punishment was not comprehensively abolished by statute until 1998.

The Divisional Court also claimed that the common law had failed to define what constitutes ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. But, of course, what amounts to cruel and unusual punishment has no singular definition. It is not trapped in 1965 and is ever evolving. What today constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under our Bill of Rights falls to be decided against the background of domestic and international developments, such as:

• In 1999, the UK cemented its abolition of the death penalty when it ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The ICCPR, as interpreted by the Humans Right Committee, has come to regard the death penalty as cruel and inhuman punishment and, while granting time to retentionist member states to effect abolition, it prohibits any reintroduction of the death penalty in an abolitionist member state such as the UK. [5]
• In 2004, the UK became a signatory to the Thirteenth Protocol to the European Convention, under which abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances is “ essential for the protection of this right [to life] and for the full recognition of the inherent dignity of all human beings. ” One may even argue that, since 41 out of 44 countries territorially in Europe have ratified the Thirteenth Protocol and only one country actively executes (Belarus), there is a customary regional norm in Europe that the death penalty is inhuman or degrading treatment. (A norm that may protect us in the UK from the re-introduction of the death penalty should the UK’s membership of the Council of Europe and its long-standing opposition to the death penalty ever come under threat.)

These international obligations have a profound influence on our common law. As Lord Mance has previously stated, the rights under the European Convention “ may be expected, at least generally even if not always, to reflect and to find their homologue in the common or domestic statute law. ” [6] Even if there isn’t always complete equivalence between English common law and the rights accorded to us under the various human rights treaties, it has been repeatedly recognised that there is a presumption in favour of interpreting the common law in a way which does not place the UK in breach of its international obligations. Sometimes that necessarily accelerates the common law’s development.

The Supreme Court’s decision

Whilst accepting the ability of the common law to develop in tandem with European Convention and Human Rights Act, the majority of the Supreme Court did not expressly contradict the Divisional Court in its analysis as to whether the death penalty was a cruel and unusual punishment under English common law. The majority of the Supreme Court saw the issue before it in terms of the government’s duty to protect life under public law, rather than its obligation not to inflict cruel and unusual punishment under common law. In that sense, a finding was not necessary. Yet, it seems to me, it must have implicitly accepted that the death penalty is now regarded as cruel and unusual under common law, even if that development has been propelled by legislation, international obligations, policy or otherwise.

Lord Carnwath, who delivered the majority judgment, found that “ [t]he recent statements in this court support the development of the common law in line with the European Convention but not beyond ”. The common law, he said, “ had had nothing to do with the death penalty ” for some time and was unlikely to have reached ‘Soering principle’ [7] “ unaided by Strasbourg ” (para 197-18). The Soering principle prevents extradition of an individual outside of Council of Europe states to face an inhuman or degrading punishment. The principle, as developed by subsequent jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), regards the death penalty as one such inhuman and degrading punishment. But Lord Carnwath’s statement, of course, implicitly accepts that the principle has become part of our common law, even if there is controversy over the absolute nature of the principle as he went on to highlight.

The significance of the common law position

So, why does it matter whether the death penalty is cruel and unusual under English common law, when we are so amply protected elsewhere? Aside from illustrating the dynamism of the common law, one reason is the potential effect on other jurisdictions with common legal heritage, most notably those in the Caribbean and Africa, where there remains considerable reliance on English judgments. Naturally, these jurisdictions develop their own common law, which is interpreted in the context of their domestic constitutions and legislation, but English common law (especially from the Privy Council) is woven throughout their jurisprudence and its influence is ever pervasive. 

Another reason is that in these unpredictable times, one cannot be too complacent. After all, it was formerly unthinkable that the government would turn its back on its long-standing policy of seeking assurances that the death penalty will not be imposed before providing legal assistance to a foreign state.

In addition, in December 2020, the government announced that the Human Rights Act is under review . Whilst the government has said that the review does not encompass the scope of the substantive rights contained in the European Convention, what is under consideration is the potential for the government to ignore implementing those rights when articulated by the judgments of the ECtHR. In those circumstances, the growth of domestic rights is only to be encouraged.

Therefore, if the common law has at last come to regard the death penalty – which was imposed in this country from at least the twelfth century – as a cruel and unusual punishment, it is cause for celebration. For with the rise of anti-European sentiment and political disagreement over the ECtHR’s decisions, it is not in our interests to archive our common law protections just yet.

Amanda Clift-Matthews is a barrister and former in-house counsel at The Death Penalty Project.

[1] [2020] UKSC 10.

[2] R (Amin) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2003] UKHL 5, para 30.

[3] R (Guardian News and Media Ltd) v City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court [2012] EWCA Civ 420, para 88.

[4] Osborn v Parole Board [2013] UKSC 61, para 57.

[5] Ng v Canada (1994) Communication No. 469/1991, UN Doc CCPR/C/49/D/469/1991, para 16.2; Judge v Canada (2003) Communication No. 829/1998, UN Doc CCPR/C/78/D/829/1998, para 10.4 and Appendix 2, Opinion A.

[6] Kennedy v The Charity Commission (Secretary of State for Justice intervening) [2014] UKSC 20, para 46.

[7] Soering v United Kingdom App no 14038/88 (ECtHR, 7 July 1989).

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50 years since the last execution can the UK help end the death penalty worldwide?

On 13 August 50 years ago, Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were hanged for the murder of John West. Nobody knew it at the time, but they were to be the last people executed in Great Britain. The anniversary is not just a time for looking back on this historic event, though. It is also a time for looking forward to the day that executions worldwide come to an end, and it is a time for appreciating the leading role that Britain now plays in ending the death penalty in other parts of the world.

When looking back on an execution-free half century, we should not forget those men and women whose deaths it took to spur us towards abolition. Timothy Evans was hanged in 1950 for the murder of his baby daughter, only for the real killer to confess three years later – the same year in which Derek Bentley was hanged despite doubts about his role in the murder of a policeman (his conviction was posthumously quashed in 1998). And in 1955, there was public outrage when Ruth Ellis was executed, not least because she had suffered incredible physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the man she killed. These manifestly unfair hangings galvanised the anti-death penalty movement and spurred parliament to suspend the death penalty in 1965.

Despite our horrific experiences with capital punishment, there are still calls to reinstate the death penalty today. It’s worth bearing in mind that if we had capital punishment, the likes of Angela Cannings and Sally Clark might have shared the same fate as Evans, Bentley and Ellis. Like Evans, they were convicted of murdering their babies, and, like Ellis, such murders flew in the face of society’s expectations of women. Cannings and Clark, though, were both released from prison when it became clear they did not commit the crimes they were convicted of. If we had the death penalty, the blood of Cannings and Clark would be on our hands.

Of course, there are those horrific murders where the guilt of the person is not in doubt and the urge to execute is strong, and in any debate about capital punishment we should not forget the victims of the likes of Harold Shipman and Fred and Rosemary West. But it is precisely at these moments that a society needs to stand strong and not reduce itself to the level of taking lives. So we should be glad that the UK ratified the 13th Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights in 2003 and abolished the death penalty in all circumstances.

We could have stopped there, but we have long recognised that we cannot stand back and let other states commit human rights violations. The UK has therefore taken a leading role in encouraging states to end capital punishment. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has a detailed strategy for promoting the abolition of the death penalty, and British-based charities such as Reprieve and Amicus have provided invaluable legal assistance to Britons who are facing the death penalty abroad and have played a vital role in ensuring that we are not inadvertently complicit in executions elsewhere.

But for all the admirable work of the UK government in this field, we still have a long way to go. Britons still face the death penalty in other countries, such as Lindsay Sandiford in Indonesia and Andargachew Tsege in Ethiopia. Investigations have also revealed that the government provides financial and technical aid to countries like Iran and Pakistan to help with their anti-drug trafficking efforts – aid that ultimately assists these states with the execution of drug traffickers. And despite our efforts to promote abolition worldwide, 100 countries still have capital punishment on the books.

The end of the global death penalty might be a long way off, but the centuries-old roots of capital punishment are slowly withering away. Executions in the US are dwindling as states struggle to actually carry out executions, and more and more countries are turning their backs on capital punishment as revelations of innocent people being killed by the state come to the surface, and as more and more people express their disgust with this barbaric, violent and ineffective way of dealing with crime. Only 16 states had abolished the death penalty for all crimes in 1977, but this figure now stands at 98. On the 50th anniversary of the last executions on these shores, we must press on with our goal of promoting abolition and saving the lives of those condemned to die.

Dr Bharat Malkani, Lecturer and Pro Bono Coordinator, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham. This article was first published by The Conversation .

Famous British miscarriages of justice

• British Crime

The notion of ‘the punishment fitting the crime’ has always caused fierce debate in the UK. To this day, public anger over ‘soft sentences’ is an ongoing conversation whenever a high-profile criminal case goes through sentencing. While we argue over whether a given number of years imprisonment is fitting for any given crime, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the fact that Britain has been the scene of many v alongside a long and gruesome history of capital punishment.

British Injustice with Raphael Rowe

These state-sanctioned killings only ended in 1964 with the executions of Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans - and the death sentence itself was still in place for acts of treason as recently as 1998.

Alongside the ethical debate on the brutality of capital punishment, another major contributor to the demise of capital punishment in the UK were several high-profile miscarriages of justice that saw innocents accused and sentenced for crimes they didn’t commit. These events crystallized the arguments of those who wanted an end to the death sentence and have gone down in history as a stain on the history of the British justice system.

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Timothy evans.

Timothy Evans was sentenced to death by hanging on 9th March 1950. Despite his death occurring over 70 years ago, Evans’ name lingers in the collective memory because he was attached to the case of infamous serial killer John Christie , who murdered at least eight women. The murders took place at his home in Notting Hill, 8 Rillington Place - an address that has achieved notoriety, not least because a film was made of that name detailing Christie’s wicked crimes. As Christie’s unfortunate neighbour, Evans found himself caught up in the grisly events.

Would Ruth Ellis be convicted of murder today?

Evans was tried and convicted for the murder of his wife and daughter, Beryl and Geraldine and had accused Christie of the murders, but to little avail. The case against Evans was largely based on Christie’s evidence which ultimately saw his demise. After a public inquiry, Evans was pardoned in 1966 based on the findings of that investigation.

Derek Bentley

Possibly even more controversial than Evans’ death at the hands of the authorities was the case of Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old man who was executed for the shooting of Police Constable Sidney Miles in 1953. In the midst of a burglary, Bentley - who had learning difficulties and a mental age of 11 - was stopped with his accomplice, 16-year-old Christopher Craig.

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Craig was too young to be sentenced to death, so the hanging of Bentley hinged around the fact the burglary and subsequent shooting was a ‘joint enterprise’ between the two.

The entire case against Bentley pivoted on the phrase, ‘Let him have it, Chris’ which Bentley is said to have uttered moments before the shooting. The ambiguity of those words - which could have meant either ‘give him the gun’ or ‘shoot him’ - led to the jury deciding it was a call to murder, sealing Bentley’s fate. He was eventually pardoned posthumously in 1998.

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Edith thompson.

Another presumed ‘murder by incitement’, the case against Edith Thomspon is largely considered to have been weak, even before the trial began. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to shipping clerk Percy Thompson, Edith embarked on a love affair with a younger man, Freddy Bywaters. After a period of courtship, it was Bywaters who fatally stabbed Percy Thompson as he walked home from a theatre one night in October 1922, accompanied by his wife.

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The prosecution of Edith was based on extracts from her letters to Bywaters, who was 18 years of age to her 27. The age gap was considered outrageous at the time and was used to point to her guilt alongside mention in her letters that she had tried to ‘poison’ her husband, which was likely a flight of fancy.

There was also a segment in which she opined over a woman who had lost three husbands where she ‘can’t even lose one’. These details were used to point out her lack of moral standing. When Bywaters ultimately leapt from a bush and murdered Percy Thomson, Edith is said to have begged him not to. This detail had little effect on the jury, who found her guilty and subsequently saw her sentenced to death in January 1923.

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Stefan kiszko.

The case of Stefan Kiszko was historically too recent to result in the death sentence, but his experience serves as a powerful reminder of how miscarriages of justice can be just as devastating even if wrongful execution is not the outcome. Stefan Kiszko was tried for the sexual assault and stabbing of Lesley Molseed in 1976.

The Stockwell 6: How police corruption led to a terrible miscarriage of justice

With a mental age of 12, Kiszco fitted the profile of a killer according to the police, who based this contention mainly on an accusation against him of indecent assault made to police three days before the murder by a group of girls. Having been told he could ‘go home’ if he confessed to the murder, instead Kiszco was sent to prison for 16 years where he was routinely bullied, as is liable to happen to jailed sex offenders.

Forensic evidence ultimately freed Kiszco, whose mother had campaigned for a retrial throughout his incarceration. His release was based on the fact he was infertile whilst semen found at the scene was found to contain sperm - proving that he could not have been the murderer. On top of this, the three girls who made the indecent assault accusation admitted that they had lied.

Kiszco was released in February 1992 and eventually, the real murderer - Ronald Castree - was found, tried and imprisoned for the crime. If the sequence of events weren’t tragic enough, Kiszco only tasted freedom for a matter of months. Mentally broken, in 1993 he suffered a massive heart attack and died after only a year of liberty with his mother passing away just a few short months later.

While Kiszco’s case is unquestionably tragic, at least he lived to see his redemption in the eyes of the public and the law - even if for a miserably short amount of time. For those executed before the truth came out, the same unfortunately can’t be said.

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UK Supreme Court finds evidence sharing in death penalty case unlawful

by Daniel Cullen | Apr 17, 2020

About Daniel Cullen

Daniel Cullen,”UK Supreme Court finds evidence sharing in death penalty case unlawful”(OxHRH Blog, April 2020), <https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/uk-supreme-court-finds-evidence-sharing-in-death-penalty-case-unlawful/> [date of access]

On 25 March 2020, the UK Supreme Court handed down its judgment in the case of Elgizouli v SSHD [2020] UKSC 10 . At issue was the legality of a UK Government decision to provide mutual legal assistance (MLA) to US authorities in circumstances where the information shared may be used in a prosecution for offences carrying the death penalty. On the facts of the case, the panel of seven Justices determined that the decision had been unlawful under data protection legislation, although not at common law.

The case centred on the prosecution in the US of two individuals who were alleged to have committed extremely serious crimes as members of an ISIS cell operating in Syria. In June 2018, then Home Secretary Sajid Javid wrote to then US Attorney General Jeff Sessions to confirm that the UK would comply with an MLA request to provide information to assist this prosecution, and – contrary to long-standing policy – would not seek assurances against the imposition or carrying out of the death penalty. Following this, witness statements and evidence gathered in UK investigations were shared with US authorities.

A judicial review of the Home Secretary’s decision was brought by the mother of one of the two individuals. Following a February 2019 High Court ruling that the decision had been lawful, the case reached the Supreme Court as an expedited appeal. Before the Supreme Court, two main questions were addressed. Firstly, was it unlawful at common law to facilitate the imposition of the death penalty against an individual in a foreign state through the provision of information? Secondly, had the decision to provide information been lawful under the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018)?

The first question was examined at length in the judgment of Lord Kerr. He found that the common law had evolved to recognise a principle whereby “it is unlawful to facilitate by provision of material to be used in the trial of a person in a foreign country where there is a risk that, as a result of those proceedings, that person would be at risk of execution.” [160] In reaching this conclusion, he cited a range of factors and influences, including the Bill of Rights 1688, British contemporary values, European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) jurisprudence, European Union jurisprudence and the jurisprudence of the Joint Committee of the Privy Council and other Commonwealth countries.

The majority of the Justices, however, were unable to agree, dismissing this ground of the appeal. Lord Carnwath noted that the key legal developments in relation to the death penalty had been delivered by Parliament and by the ECtHR, rather than the domestic courts. Furthermore, Parliament had recently legislated in this area by passing the Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Act 2019. [194]-[195] Lord Reed meanwhile considered the recognition of the proposed principle not to constitute an incremental step in the development of the common law. [171]

At issue in the second question was whether the decision had complied with the provisions of the DPA 2018. Sections 73-76 of the Act set out the conditions for the transfer of personal data to third countries. These conditions specify that transfers must be necessary for law enforcement purposes and must be based on either an adequacy decision, the presence of appropriate safeguards or special circumstances. It was accepted that the Home Secretary had not addressed his mind to this framework while reaching his decision. As such, the conditions had not been satisfied, and on this basis, the Justices unanimously agreed that the decision was unlawful.

The ruling is one of significance both for future cooperation over this prosecution and for other cases involving death penalty assurances. Beyond the outcome, the Elgizouli judgment merits a full reading. From a legal perspective, the comments of Lord Carnwath on the Soering principle [197]-[198] and Lord Kerr’s discussion of the existence of a customary international law norm that the death penalty is per se a violation of the prohibition on torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment [148]-[151] are both of note. From a diplomatic perspective, the details indicate serious pressure from the current US administration over the UK’s assurances policy – described by one senior US official as ‘an irritant’.

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Death Penalty Research Unit

Esrc research project on drug offences in southeast asia.

In 2022, the Death Penalty Research Unit began a new three-year project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), ' Mapping the Political Economy of Drugs and the Death Penalty in Southeast Asia '. Conducted in collaboration with the Death Penalty Project, this project will test the veracity of assumptions about who is convicted of drug offences in the region and investigate the deterrent effect of the death penalty.

The Death Penalty Research Unit (DPRU) is housed within the Oxford Centre for Criminology and is led by Professor Carolyn Hoyle . 

Contact us:

Email: [email protected]

Twitter/X: @DPRUOxford

The Death Penalty Research Unit has three main aims:

(a) to develop empirical, theoretical and policy-relevant research on the death penalty worldwide; (b) to encourage death penalty scholarship including at graduate level, through education, events, research dissemination and an active blog; and (c) to engage in knowledge production, exchange and dissemination in cooperation with civil society, charities, legal practitioners, policy-makers and local academics in those countries where research is ongoing.

Part of the Oxford Centre’s Global Criminal Justice Hub , the DPRU focuses on the retention, administration and politics of the death penalty worldwide. We aim to understand the rationales for the death penalty, how it is used in practice, and its diverse application and impact on communities.

We are committed to working with our partners in various regions on collaborative production and dissemination of empirical and theoretical knowledge. This work is not only aimed at elucidating the law and practice of capital punishment worldwide, but at challenging it, with the explicit aim of abolition or, failing that, progressive restriction.

The DPRU is led by  Professor Carolyn Hoyle . It builds on the strong foundations laid by the late  Professor Roger Hood , Director of the Centre for Criminology from 1973 to 2003. Much of our work is done in partnership with  The Death Penalty Project , a London-based legal action charity with many years of experience of litigation, capacity building and research.

The DPRU also collaborates with partner organisations and academics in the countries we work in; building on their research aspirations, training ‘local’ researchers in a range of research methodologies, and sharing in the production and dissemination of outputs. In so doing, we seek to ensure that our research has an impact on governments, civil society, legal practitioners and those who are subject to criminal justice systems, while also assisting in the development of scholarship in these regions.

The DPRU honours Robert Badinter (1928-2024)

Dpru research students selected as john robert lewis fellows, dpru research associate professor jon yorke’s legal advocacy against scheduled nitrogen gas execution in alabama, related blogs, abolition, retention and capital punishment in twentieth-century india, witness: an insider's narrative of the carceral state, treason and the death penalty in sub-saharan africa, dpru q&as: chris kerkering, katiba institute, kenya, dpru q&as: fulgence massawe, legal and human rights centre (lhrc) tanzania, related content.

Sentenced to death, but innocent: These are stories of justice gone wrong.

Since 1973, more than 8,700 people in the U.S. have been sent to death row. At least 182 weren’t guilty—their lives upended by a system that nearly killed them.

A version of this story appears in the March 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.

A 63-year-old man named Kwame Ajamu lives walking distance from my house in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Ajamu was sentenced to death in 1975 for the murder of Harold Franks, a money order salesman on Cleveland’s east side. Ajamu was 17 when he was convicted.

Ajamu, then named Ronnie Bridgeman, was found guilty primarily because of the testimony of a 13-year-old boy, who said he saw Bridgeman and another young male violently attack the salesman on a city street corner. Not a shred of evidence, forensic or physical, connected Bridgeman to the slaying. He had no prior criminal record. Another witness testified that Bridgeman was not on the street corner when Franks was killed. Yet mere months after his arrest, the high school junior was condemned to die.

It would be publicly revealed 39 years later that the boy who testified against him had immediately tried to recant his statement. But Cleveland homicide detectives told the boy they would arrest and charge his parents with perjury if he changed his story, according to his later court testimony. Ajamu was released on parole in 2003 after 27 years in prison, but the state of Ohio would not declare him innocent of the murder for nearly another 12 years, when the boy’s false statement and police misconduct were revealed in a related court hearing.

I interviewed Ajamu and others who represent vastly different backgrounds but share a similar, soul-crushing burden: They were sentenced to death after being convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.

(*Figures in all captions are rounded to the nearest year and don’t include time in jail pre-sentencing.)  

The daily paths they travel as former death-row inmates are every bit as daunting, terrifying, and confusing as the burden of innocence that once taunted them. The post-traumatic stress faced by a wrongly convicted person who has awaited execution by the government doesn’t dissipate simply because the state frees the inmate, apologizes, or even provides financial compensation—which often is not the case.

For Hungry Minds

The lesson is as charged as superbolt lightning: An innocent man or woman sentenced to die is the perfect witness against what many see as the inherent immorality and barbarity of continuing capital punishment.

It’s a particularly poignant lesson in a nation that executes people at a rate outpaced by few others—and where factors such as a defendant’s or victim’s race, low income, or inability to counter overly zealous police and prosecutors can put the accused at increased risk of a wrongful conviction that could lead to execution. Race is a particularly strong determinant: As of April 2020, Black people made up more than 41 percent of those on death row but only 13.4 percent of the U.S. population.

During the past three decades, groups such as the Innocence Project have shed light on how dangerously fallible the U.S. justice system can be, particularly in capital cases. DNA testing and scrutiny of actions by police, prosecutors, and public defenders have helped exonerate 182 people from death row since 1972, and as of December 2020 had led to more than 2,700 exonerations overall since 1989.

Each of the former death-row inmates I interviewed belongs to an organization called Witness to Innocence . Based in Philadelphia since 2005, WTI is a nonprofit led by exonerated death-row inmates. Its primary goal is to see the death penalty abolished in the U.S. by shifting public opinion on the morality of capital punishment.

During the past 15 years, WTI’s outreach targeting the U.S. Congress, state legislatures, policy advisers, and academics has been credited with helping to abolish the death penalty in several states, though it remains legal in 28 states, the federal government, and the U.S. military. In 2020, 17 people were executed in the U.S., 10 by the federal government. It was the first time more prisoners were executed by the federal government than by all of the states combined.

“I was abducted by the state of Ohio when I was 17 years old,” Ajamu began our conversation when we met on my backyard patio.

“I was a child when I was sent to prison to be killed,” Ajamu, now chairman of WTI’s board, told me. “I did not understand what was happening to me or how it could happen. At first I begged God for mercy, but soon it dawned on me that there would be no mercy coming.”

The day Ajamu arrived at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in rural Ohio, he was escorted to a cellblock filled with condemned men. At the end of death row was a room that held Ohio’s electric chair. Before the guards put him in his cell, they made a point of walking him past that room.

“One of the guards really wanted me to see that chair,” Ajamu recalled. “I’ll never forget his words: ‘That’s gonna be your hot date.’ ”

From the time Ajamu was sentenced to die until 2005—when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing juveniles violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment—the nation executed 22 people who were convicted of a crime committed when they were under age 18, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) .

The high court’s ruling countered a history of executing juveniles that began long before the United States was conceived. The first known case of a juvenile executed in the British colonies was in 1642 in the Plymouth Colony, where Thomas Granger, 17, was hanged. His alleged offense was sodomy with livestock.

In the earliest days of the nation, even younger children were subject to the harshest of all judicial penalties. Hannah Ocuish, 12, a Native American girl, was hanged in New London, Connecticut, in 1786 for murder. Two enslaved boys—a 12-year-old convicted of murder and a 13-year-old convicted of arson—were hanged in Virginia in 1787 and 1796, respectively.

For most of the next 200 years, age was ignored as a factor in sentencing. Juveniles and adults alike were tried, convicted, and executed based on their crimes, not their maturity. Available criminal records don’t cite the age of the executed regularly until around 1900. By 1987, when the U.S. Supreme Court first agreed to consider the constitutionality of the death penalty for minors, some 287 juvenile executions had been documented. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that Ohio’s death penalty law violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the 14th Amendment’s requirement of equal protection under the law, Ajamu’s death sentence was reduced to life in prison. Still, he lingered behind bars for another quarter of a century, when he was released on parole. He wouldn’t be exonerated until 2014, after a crusading reporter for a Cleveland magazine and the Ohio Innocence Project helped unravel the lie that had sent Ajamu to death row.

“There is a wide array of blunders that can cause erroneous convictions in capital cases,” said Michael Radelet, a death penalty scholar and sociologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Police officers might secure a coerced or otherwise false confession. Prosecutors occasionally suppress exculpatory evidence. Sometimes there is a well-intentioned but mistaken eyewitness identification. Most common is perjury by prosecution witnesses.”

Few opponents of capital punishment summarize the case against state-sponsored executions more bluntly than Sister Helen Prejean, co-founder of WTI and author of Dead Man Walking, the best-selling book that inspired the 1995 film of the same title, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

The plainspoken nun described how her animus toward the death penalty became personal by recalling her fear of a fairly routine dental experience she underwent years ago.

“I had to have a root canal on a Monday morning,” she told me. “The whole week before that root canal, I dreamt about it. As the appointment got closer, the more nervous I became.”

She continued, “Now imagine anticipating your scheduled appointment to be put to death. The six people that I’ve accompanied onto death row all had the same nightmare. The guards were dragging them from their cells. They cry for help and struggle. Then they wake up and realize that they are still in their cells. They realize it’s just a dream. But they know that one day the guards are really going to come for them, and it won’t be a dream. That’s the torture. It’s a torture that as of yet our Supreme Court refuses to recognize as a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.”

More than 70 percent of the world’s nations have rejected the death penalty in either law or practice , according to the DPIC. Of the places where Amnesty International has recorded recent executions, the U.S.—which has the highest incarceration rates in the world—was one of just 13 countries that held executions every one of the past five years. Americans’ support for capital punishment has dropped significantly since 1996, when 78 percent supported the death penalty for people convicted of murder. By 2018, support had fallen to 54 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

“If I were to be murdered,” wrote Prejean, “I would not want my murderer executed. I would not want my death avenged— especially by government —which can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.”

Before Ray Krone was sentenced to die, his life bore no resemblance to Ajamu’s. From tiny Dover, Pennsylvania, Krone was the eldest of three children and a typical small-town American boy. Raised a Lutheran, he sang in a church choir, joined the Boy Scouts, and as a teenager was known as a fairly smart kid, a bit of a prankster. He pre-enlisted in the Air Force during high school; after graduating, he served for six years.

Having received an honorable discharge, he stayed in Arizona and went to work for the U.S. Postal Service, a job he planned to keep until retirement.

That career dream—and his life—were abruptly shattered in December 1991, when Kim Ancona, a 36-year-old bar manager, was found stabbed to death in the men’s bathroom of a Phoenix lounge that Krone frequented.

Police immediately zeroed in on Krone as a suspect after learning that he’d given Ancona, whom he knew casually, a ride to a Christmas party a few days earlier. The day after her body was discovered, Krone was ordered to provide blood, saliva, and hair samples. A dental cast of his teeth also was created. The next day he was arrested and charged with aggravated murder.

Investigators said the distinctive misalignment of Krone’s teeth matched bite marks on the victim’s body. Media reports would soon derisively refer to Krone as the “snaggletooth” killer. As was the case with Ajamu, there was no forensic evidence linking Krone to the crime. DNA was a fairly new science, and none of the saliva or blood collected at the crime scene was tested for DNA. Simpler blood, saliva, and hair tests were inconclusive. Exculpatory evidence was available but ignored, such as shoe prints found around the victim’s body that didn’t match the size of Krone’s feet or any shoes he owned.

Based on little more than the testimony of a dental analyst who said the bite marks on the victim’s body matched Krone’s misaligned front teeth, a jury found Krone guilty. He was sentenced to death.

“It’s a devastating feeling when you recognize that everything you’ve ever believed in and stood for has been taken away from you, and without just cause,” Krone told me. “I was so naive. I didn’t believe this could actually happen to me. I had served my country in uniform. I worked for the post office. I wasn’t perfect, but I had never been in trouble. I’d never even gotten a parking ticket, but here I was on death row. That’s when I realized that if it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.”

The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office spent upwards of $50,000 on the prosecution, centered on its bite-mark theory, while the consulting dental expert for Krone’s publicly funded defense was paid $1,500. This discrepancy in resources available to prosecutors and defendants in capital cases has long been replicated across the nation, leading to predictable outcomes for defendants staked to under-resourced and often ineffective legal counsel.

Krone got a new trial in 1995, when an appeals court ruled that prosecutors had wrongly withheld a videotape of the bite evidence until the day before the trial. Again, he was found guilty. Prosecutors relied on the same dental analysts who’d helped convict Krone the first time. But this time the sentencing judge ruled that a life sentence was appropriate, not death.

Krone’s mother and stepfather refused to give up on their belief in their son’s innocence. They mortgaged their house, and the family hired their own lawyer to look into the physical evidence collected during the original investigation. Over objections by the prosecution, a judge granted a request by the family’s lawyer to have an independent lab examine DNA samples, including saliva and blood from the crime scene.

In April 2002 the DNA test results showed that Krone was innocent. A man named Kenneth Phillips, who lived less than a mile from the bar where Ancona was killed, had left his DNA on clothes Ancona had been wearing. Phillips was easy to find: He already was in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a seven-year-old girl.

When Krone was released from prison four days after the DNA test results were announced, he became known as the hundredth man in the United States since 1973 who’d been sentenced to death but later proved innocent and freed.

Gary Drinkard was no choirboy. He’d had prior brushes with the law when Dalton Pace, a junk dealer, was robbed and killed in Decatur, Alabama, in August 1993.

Police arrested Drinkard, then 37, two weeks later when Beverly Robinson, Drinkard’s half sister, and Rex Segars, her partner, struck a deal with police that implicated Drinkard in the slaying. Facing unrelated robbery charges that also potentially implicated Drinkard, the couple agreed, in exchange for the charges being dropped against them, to cooperate with police and testify that Drinkard told them he’d killed Pace.

When I spoke with Drinkard, he reminded me of a weather-beaten man straight out of a Merle Haggard song. He wore coveralls and chain-smoked Newports. He spoke slowly and guardedly in a deep southern drawl. He grew exasperated only when I asked him to describe his time on death row.

“I thought they were going to kill me,” Drinkard said. That certainly seemed to be the plan. Using testimony from their star witnesses (the half sister and her partner), prosecutors hammered home the alleged confession while improperly influencing the jury with references to Drinkard’s alleged involvement in those earlier thefts. Drinkard’s public defenders, who had no experience in capital cases and very little in criminal law, mostly stood mute. They made no real attempt to introduce evidence that could have proved their client’s innocence. Drinkard was found guilty in 1995 and sentenced to death. He would spend close to six years on death row.

In 2000 the Supreme Court of Alabama ordered a new trial because of the prosecution’s introduction of Drinkard’s criminal history.

“Evidence of a defendant’s prior bad acts … is generally inadmissible. Such evidence is presumptively prejudicial because it could cause the jury to infer that, because the defendant has committed crimes in the past, it is more likely that he committed the particular crime with which he is charged,” the court wrote in granting a new trial.

Drinkard’s case had drawn the attention of the Southern Center for Human Rights, an organization that fights capital punishment. It provided him with legal counsel. At Drinkard’s 2001 retrial, his lawyers introduced evidence that indicated Drinkard was suffering from a debilitating back injury and was heavily medicated at the time of the slaying. Drinkard’s lawyers argued that he had been at home and on workers’ compensation when Pace was killed, so he couldn’t have committed the crime. A county jury found Drinkard not guilty within one hour, and he was released.

“I was not opposed to capital punishment until the state tried to kill me,” Drinkard said.

There have been more than 2,700 exonerations overall in the U.S. since 1989, the first year that DNA became a factor, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

In 1993 Kirk Bloodsworth was the first person in the nation to be exonerated from death row based on DNA evidence. Bloodsworth was arrested in 1984 and charged with raping and murdering Dawn Hamilton, a nine-year-old girl, near Baltimore, Maryland. Police were alerted to Bloodsworth, who had just moved to the area, when an anonymous tipster reported him after seeing a televised police sketch of the suspect.

Bloodsworth bore little resemblance to the suspect in the police sketch. No physical evidence linked him to the crime. He had no prior criminal record. Yet Bloodsworth was convicted and sentenced to death based primarily on the testimony of five witnesses, including an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old, who said they could place him near the murder scene. Witness misidentification is a factor in many wrongful convictions, according to the DPIC.

“Give him the gas and kill his ass,” Bloodsworth recalled people in the courtroom chanting after he was sentenced. All the while, he wondered how he could be sentenced to die for a ghastly crime he hadn’t committed.

He was granted a second trial nearly two years later, after it was shown on appeal that prosecutors had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from his defense, namely that police had identified another suspect but failed to pursue that lead. Again, Bloodsworth was found guilty. A different sentencing judge handed Bloodsworth two life sentences, rather than death.

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“I had days when I was giving up hope. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison. And then I saw a copy of Joseph Wambaugh’s book,” Bloodsworth said.

That 1989 book, The Blooding, describes the then emerging science of DNA testing and how law enforcement had first used it to both clear suspects and solve a rape and murder case.

Bloodsworth wondered whether that science could somehow clear his name.

When he asked whether DNA evidence could be tested to prove that he was not at the crime scene, he was told the evidence had been destroyed inadvertently. That wasn’t true. The evidence, including the girl’s underwear, later was found in the courthouse. Prosecutors, sure of their case, agreed to release the items.

Once the items were tested, usable DNA was detected—none of it Bloodsworth’s. He was freed, and six months later, in December 1993, Maryland’s governor granted him a full pardon. It would be almost another decade before the actual killer was charged. The DNA belonged to a man named Kimberly Shay Ruffner, who had been released from jail two weeks before the girl’s murder. For a time Ruffner, who was given a 45-year sentence for an attempted rape and attempted murder soon after Bloodsworth’s arrest, and Bloodsworth were housed in the same prison. Ruffner pleaded guilty to Hamilton’s murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

Today Bloodsworth is the executive director of WTI and a tireless campaigner against capital punishment. The Innocence Protection Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004, established the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Grant Program to help defray the cost of DNA testing after conviction.

“I was poor and had only been in the Baltimore area for 30 days when I was arrested,” said Bloodsworth, now 60. “When I tell people my story and how easy it is to be convicted of something of which you’re innocent, it often causes them to rethink the way the criminal justice system works. It doesn’t require much of a stretch to believe that innocent people have been executed.”

Sabrina Butler discovered that Walter, her nine-month-old son, had stopped breathing shortly before midnight on April 11, 1989. An 18-year-old single mother, Butler responded with urgent CPR. When the child could not be revived after several minutes, she raced him to a hospital in Columbus, Mississippi, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Less than 24 hours later she was charged with murder.

Walter had serious internal injuries when he died. Butler told police investigators she believed that the injuries were caused by her efforts to revive him. Police doubted her story, and after several hours of interrogation, without a lawyer present, she signed a statement that said she’d struck her baby in the stomach after he wouldn’t stop crying. Eleven months later Butler was convicted of murder and sentenced to die.

Butler’s defense team called no witnesses. A medical expert might have testified that Walter’s injuries were consistent with the clumsy CPR of a desperate mother. A neighbor—who was called as a witness during a subsequent trial—could have provided helpful testimony of Butler’s attempts to save her son’s life. Instead Butler’s court-appointed lawyers, including one who specialized in divorce law, neither called witnesses nor put Butler on the witness stand to support her case.

“Here I was, this young Black child in a room full of white adults,” Butler, now Sabrina Smith, recalled. “I did not understand the proceedings. All that I had been told by my attorneys was to sit quietly and look at the jury. When I realized my defense wasn’t going to call any witnesses to help prove my innocence, I knew my life was over.”

Butler’s conviction and sentence were set aside in August 1992, after Mississippi’s supreme court ruled that the prosecutor had improperly commented on her failure to testify at trial. A new trial was ordered.

The second trial, with better lawyers, working pro bono, resulted in exoneration. A neighbor testified about Butler’s frantic attempts to revive her child. A medical expert testified that the child’s injuries could have resulted from the CPR efforts. Evidence also was introduced indicating that Walter had a preexisting kidney condition that likely contributed to his sudden death. Butler was released after spending five years in prison, the first half of that on death row.

Less than two years after her exoneration, Butler, the first of just two American women ever to be exonerated from death row, received a summons for jury duty.

“I was so appalled,” she told me. “I went downtown and spoke to the court administrator. I explained to him that the state of Mississippi had tried to kill me. I told him I was quite certain that I would not make a good juror.” She was dismissed.

A question that frequently confounds exonerees and the general public alike is whether a consistent formula exists for compensating the falsely convicted, especially those sentenced to die. The short answer is no. A small number of exonerees have been compensated for millions of dollars depending on the laws of the state that convicted them, but many receive little or nothing.

Few death-row exonerees more closely follow the issue of compensation than Ron Keine, who lives in southeastern Michigan. Keine has made it part of his life’s mission to improve the plight of the wrongly convicted, who often reenter society with meager survival skills. He wasn’t always so benevolent.

Growing up in Detroit, Keine ran with a rough crowd. He’d been shot and stabbed before he turned 16. At age 21, he and his closest friend, who both belonged to a notorious motorcycle club, decided to drive a van across the U.S.

The extended open-road party was going as planned until he and four others were arrested in 1974 in Oklahoma and extradited to New Mexico, where they were charged with the murder and mutilation of a 26-year-old college student in Albuquerque. A motel housekeeper reported that the group raped her and that she then saw the group kill the student at the same motel.

The problem with the story should have been readily apparent. The bikers weren’t in Albuquerque when William Velten, Jr., the student, was killed. They were partying in Los Angeles and had a dated traffic citation to prove it. The housekeeper later recanted her story.

In September 1975 a drifter, Kerry Rodney Lee, confessed to killing Velten, possibly because he felt guilty knowing that four men were on death row for his crime. The gun used in Velten’s slaying matched a gun stolen from the father of Lee’s girlfriend. Based on this evidence, Keine and his biker friends were granted new trials and the prosecutor decided not to indict them. Lee was convicted in May 1978 of murdering Velten.

“When I was on death row, I knew I was innocent, but I still came within nine days of my first scheduled execution date,” said Keine, now 73. “I didn’t have a voice. So when I got out, I decided I was going to spend my life being a thorn” in the side of the criminal justice system. “I decided that I was going to go from dead man walking to dead man talking.”

Keine, who founded several successful small businesses after his exoneration, has testified before state legislators seeking to overturn capital punishment laws. Having received only a $2,200 settlement from the county that put him on death row, he has been vocal in calling for a system of compensation for others wrongly sentenced to death.

“When people get off death row, they feel like a piece of shit,” he said. “They don’t have any self-worth—no self-esteem, and they usually don’t have two nickels in their pocket. We try to build them up. We try and help them find the resources they need to survive.”

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MS Coast jury convicts stepfather of capital murder in deadly child abuse of toddler

A Harrison County jury took 45 minutes Thursday to convict Joseph David Heard of capital murder in the beating and suffocation death of his 2-year-old stepson.

Afterward, Judge Larry Bourgeois polled the jury to confirm the verdict.

The jury will return Friday to determine whether to sentence Heard, 41, to life in prison without parole or death for the Dec 27, 2021, killing of 2-year-old Hayden Lee Bataille.

Heard’s wife, Hailey Lynn Bataille Heard, 24, is already serving a life sentence in her son’s murder.

The morning of the toddler’s death, Joseph David Heard repeatedly punched the toddler in the gut and the head, and when the toddler cried out in pain, his mother said, the beating only escalated.

Joseph David Heard was already angry that morning, two days after Christmas 2021, because the toddler with curly blond hair had soiled his diapers overnight.

The torture began when Heard felt like the child took too long to get a juice box out of the refrigerator after his bath.

Hayden’s cries ended only after his mother said she later walked into the living room of their one-bedroom apartment, where the boy’s stepfather was still beating the child. She testified that she put her hand over her child’s mouth and nose, hoping he would stop crying and the beating would end.

Hayden turned blue and slipped from consciousness. He died of suffocation.

Denials and banana peels for bruising

Earlier Thursday, Heard testified in his defense and repeatedly denied abusing the child. Instead, he said he walked into the living room, saw the little boy wasn’t breathing and started performing CPR on him to save him.

Heard denied any culpability in the crime or any of the abuse, even testifying that he never saw the first bruise on Hayden’s body the day of the toddler’s death.

But in body camera footage from Biloxi police at the couple’s home, Heard acknowledges the bruising and talks about how Hayden likes to play rough.

Heard said he had seen bruising on the child in the past, but his wife told him the toddler had fallen off a bed or a couch.

As Heard kept up his denials, prosecutors pointed out how a forensic review of his phone showed how he had searched online for ways to make bruises go away. When Heard thought he had found a remedy, he texted his wife to tell her they could use banana peels to make them go away faster.

Attorney claims mom killed child

An autopsy showed the toddler had bruises — both old and new — all over his face, his head, his abdomen, his back, and his legs, plus old and new broken bones and more.

Joseph David Heard’s attorney, Donald Rafferty, maintains that Hailey Heard caused the toddler’s death when she put her hand over his mouth, suffocating him.

Assistant District Attorneys George Huffman and Mara Joffe are prosecuting the death penalty case this week before Judge Larry Bourgeois.

In opening arguments, Joffe told the jury that Hailey Heard had been the victim of repeated domestic violence by Heard and how her son’s torture and abuse at the hands of his stepfather was a repeat occurrence during the couple’s one-year relationship.

“This is a case about control,” Joffe said. “It’s about this defendant, Joseph David Heard, controlling his wife Hailey Heard and his 2-year-old stepson Hayden through violence, through abuse, and through torture.”

The torture and abuse that Hailey Heard and her son suffered, Joffe said, “was not isolated but was prolonged.”

“They had to do things his way or face punishment,” she said.

A 911 call, child abuse and toddler covered in bruises

When a 911 call came in that morning about an unresponsive child, authorities said the cause was first reported as a possible drowning.

But when Biloxi police, firefighters, and paramedics with American Medical Response responded to the call on St. Mary Boulevard, they found the child fully clothed and lying on the living floor. The child was not wet, Biloxi police said.

When AMR paramedic Mark Dillard arrived, he said Hayden wasn’t moving, then gasped for air twice and stopped breathing.

Dillard said that he noticed extensive bruising on the toddler but kept doing what he could to revive the child.

A firefighter carried Hayden to the waiting ambulance, and AMR rushed the child down the street to Merit Health hospital in Biloxi.

‘Most horrific scene’

The emergency room physician, Dr. Leanne Lee, said she attempted additional life-saving measures on Hayden before pronouncing him dead around 7 a.m. on Dec. 27, 2021.

“It was one of the most horrific scenes I’ve witnessed as an ER doctor,” Lee said. “I had never seen a kid that had sustained so much trauma.”

Lee described the extensive bruising on Hayden’s body, along with broken bones in different stages of healing, a burn mark and more.

The state medical examiner, Dr. Staci Turner, said an autopsy showed the child died due to suffocation but had also sustained other significant injuries, including swelling in his head.

At the trial, Biloxi police read aloud pages of text messages between Heard and his wife. In them, he often sounded off about how Hayden had done something wrong and how he planned to exact his punishment on the child.

On some occasions, Hailey Heard said, Joseph David Heard punished the child by making him stand up and move his arms up and down repeatedly for hours at a time.

At other times, she said, Joseph David Heard made Hayden sit on his potty chair for hours because the child had soiled his diaper.

When Hayden got in trouble at other times, Joseph David Heard told his wife he was going to hit her son’s hand, which had a second-degree burn, with a rubber spatula.

The exchanges included repeated threats from Joseph David Heard to divorce his wife. She begged him to stay, although she was the one who worked and paid the bills.

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Infected blood inquiry: study that said risk was seen as ‘tolerable’ omitted patient death

Exclusive: 2003 study was cited as evidence that risks of hepatitis C could not have been foreseen at the time

A study cited at the infected blood inquiry, as evidence that the devastating consequences of blood products contaminated with hepatitis could not have been foreseen, misrepresented the results of a trial in making its case, the Guardian can reveal.

Up to 6,520 people are believed to have been infected with hepatitis C through imported factor VIII blood products in the 1970s and 80s, while a further 26,800 are estimated to have been infected with the virus though blood transfusions. About 2,000 people are estimated to have died as a result.

The inquiry, which publishes its final report on 20 May , heard that the medical profession considered non-A and non-B hepatitis (later known as hepatitis C) as “relatively benign” at the time, with Pier Mannuccio Mannucci’s 2003 paper, Aids, hepatitis and haemophilia in the 1980s: memoirs from an insider , quoted in support of this proposition.

Mannucci’s 2003 paper argued that the view held by “the great majority of haemophilia treaters was that the problem of hepatitis was a tolerable one, because the benefits of concentrates seemed to outweigh risks”.

In making his argument, Mannucci cited his own work, writing: “A prospective biopsy study was undertaken by me … in 10 haemophiliacs with non-A, non-B chronic hepatitis followed up for more than six years. The study, published in 1982, demonstrated no case of progression towards cirrhosis or haepatocellular carcinoma.”

However, the original 1982 report says that there were actually 11 – not 10 – people included in the study and “one patient with active cirrhosis died of liver failure during the follow-up period”.

Who knew what about the risks and when is a key plank of the inquiry.

Jason Evans, who was four years old when his father died after receiving blood contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C and who founded the Factor 8 campaign , said: “It’s a calculated cover-up, removing the inconvenient truths about the lethal risks of hepatitis to justify the decision to give patients dangerous factor VIII blood products. We’re beginning to see the specifics of how the infected blood scandal cover-up happened, and the scale of it is genuinely incredible.

“This evidence exposes a dangerous precedent in medical research, where data was so easily manipulated to fit a narrative of defending past decisions.

“The audacity to omit a patient’s death to skew the results of a study is a direct assault on the scientific method and an abuse of the trust placed in researchers by the public. What happened here was not a mere oversight or a bad judgment call; it was clearly a deliberate act to deceive.

“The victims of this scandal deserve justice, and the medical community and the state must take the inquiry’s findings seriously to understand how it failed so many so profoundly.”

Mannucci’s 2003 study, which was published in the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, stated: “The view and arguments presented here are certainly not exciting for the media, which prefer stories about preventable disasters with their related blame on the medical community.”

Giving evidence at the infected blood inquiry in October 2020, Prof Christine Lee, who worked at the haemophilia centre for the Royal Free hospital in north London during the 1980s and 90s, quoted from the report, saying that “it was only in the mid-80s that it [hepatitis] was shown to be progressive and severe in one-sixth of patients”.

Lee told the inquiry that she did not like the idea of compensation for victims of the contaminated blood scandal because “it suggests liability” and people at the time “were doing what they thought was the best”.

Evans said that, given the 2003 study had misrepresented the data, it was “an abomination to the victims of the infected blood scandal” that Lee cited it.

Asked by the Guardian whether there was a cover-up, Mannucci, an emeritus professor of internal medicine at the University of Milan, said: “What happened with the 11th patient that developed severe liver disease and died with decompensated liver disease, frankly, I don’t remember. The majority of patients did not have liver disease, at least at biopsy, and these results were also confirmed by a much larger study done in the United States.

“Hepatitis C was not yet known. Only when hepatitis C was discovered much later, it became apparent that it could evolve to chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.”

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Follow our news, recent searches, strong, growing support for death penalty reflected in surveys of singapore, neighbouring countries: shanmugam, advertisement.

Polls show that in Singapore, backing for the death penalty as appropriate punishment for drug trafficking has risen; while the majority of residents in the region see it as an effective deterrent.

Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam delivering a ministerial statement in Parliament on May 8, 2024.

This audio is AI-generated.

Natasha Ganesan

Ang Hwee Min

SINGAPORE: Singapore's Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam on Wednesday (May 8) cited local and regional surveys as proof of strong and growing support for using the death penalty on drug traffickers.

He was delivering a ministerial statement in parliament on Singapore’s approach to drug control . 

“There is broad support from our population because we have been upfront and open about the rationale, circumstances and safeguards on the use of the death penalty,” said Mr Shanmugam.

Preliminary findings from a Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) survey conducted in 2023 showed that about 69 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the mandatory death penalty was an appropriate punishment for trafficking a significant amount of drugs.

This was up from 66 per cent recorded in 2021, Mr Shanmugam noted, adding that MHA will publish a full report of the most recent survey later this year.

Nearly 77 per cent of survey respondents agreed that the death penalty should be used for the most serious crimes – up from almost 74 per cent two years back.

He also pointed to a National Council Against Drug Abuse survey last year, where almost 91 per cent of respondents expressed support for the country’s drug-free approach.

Eighty-seven per cent agreed that Singapore’s drug laws are effective in keeping the country relatively free of drugs.

Beyond Singapore, Mr Shanmugam highlighted a 2021 study conducted in parts of the region where most of the country's arrested drug traffickers have come from in recent years.

It showed that 87 per cent of respondents believed that the death penalty deters people from trafficking substantial amounts of drugs into Singapore.

A similar proportion - 86 per cent - believed that the death penalty makes people not want to commit serious crimes in Singapore.

Of the respondents, 83 per cent also believed the death penalty is more effective than life imprisonment, in discouraging people from bringing drugs in.

"So those who suggest that the death penalty can be replaced by life imprisonment, should look at these figures. The deterrent effects of the two penalties are very different," said Mr Shanmugam.

"It is not easy for us ... to decide to have capital punishment as part of the penalties in law. But the evidence shows that it is necessary to protect our people, prevent the destruction of thousands of families, and prevent the loss of thousands of lives."

Mr Shanmugam said the high levels of support were due to Singaporeans' trust in the government to do the right thing, and do right by Singapore.

“So when Mr Richard Branson comes in to argue, he doesn’t realise that we take our duty seriously, we are accountable to Singaporeans, we speak with thousands of them and we know what Singaporeans support,” said Mr Shanmugam.

The British billionaire has been vocal in his views against Singapore's death penalty. In 2022, he made false assertions on alleged racial bias and the treatment of defence lawyers in the case of convicted drug trafficker Nagaenthran Dharmalingam .

In response, MHA invited Branson to Singapore for a live televised debate with Mr Shanmugam on the topic, but he turned it down .

“The vast majority of Singaporeans know and understand the facts and reality, and why the government says the death penalty is necessary," said Mr Shanmugam.

'Every region is affected': Shanmugam lays out 'worrying' global drugs situation

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Challenging the courts.

In his speech, Mr Shanmugam described anti-death penalty activists as making “baseless allegations, one-sided claims and half-truths”.

In May last year, Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) directions were issued against 10 social media posts and two online articles for containing false statements about the death sentence meted out to convicted drug trafficker Tangaraju Suppiah .

Five parties – The Transformative Justice Collective, The Online Citizen Asia, Andrew Loh, Kirsten Han, M Ravi – had continued to falsely allege that Tangaraju was denied an interpreter during the recording of his statement, said Mr Shanmugam.

"This, despite the Courts’ clear statement to the contrary. A blatant, false attack on the criminal justice system," he said.

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Some of the activists have also helped to file "unmeritorious" legal applications on behalf of convicted drug traffickers, often at the last minute, said Mr Shanmugam.

In one case, there were seven post-appeal applications, which were all dismissed by the courts for being without merit, he said.

The last application had a correspondence email address belonging to an anti-death penalty activist, shared Mr Shanmugam.

The Court dismissed that application as a "blatant and ill-disguised application to disrupt the carrying out of the sentence", he said.

In November 2022, parliament passed the Post-Appeal Applications in Capital Cases (PACC) Bill to provide a clear process for such applications.

Mr Shanmugam expects the PACC Act to be brought into force soon. It will seek to safeguard the administration of justice and the rule of law, introducing new requirements to reduce potential delays to proceedings, he said.

"We are now considering what else needs to be done to make sure this new legislation can be properly supported. We will come back to the House if necessary," he added.

"I wish to make it clear to members and Singaporeans, be assured we will take all necessary steps to ensure that this sort of abuse of process is dealt with."

"MULTIFACETED ASSAULT"

During the debate on Wednesday, MP Murali Pillai (PAP-Bukit Batok) asked how Singapore will entrench its anti-drugs policy in younger generations of Singaporeans - particularly what's known as Gen Z and Alpha - who are exposed to positive perceptions of “soft drugs” on social media.

Mr Pillai added that Singapore seems to be “set aside” at international conferences for its anti-drug stance, recalling how he was referred to as having “outlier arguments” during a symposium.

In response, Mr Shanmugam said that there are listed companies around the world that finance non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and publicity that sell the idea that soft drugs are good and harmless.

“If you look at these international conferences, the NGOs which are taking a tough line on drugs are usually poorly financed. Their material is not so attractive whereas on the other side, there are all these glitzy arguments as to why soft drugs (like) cannabis causes you no harm, (that) it’s just something for you to try at school,” he said.

Mr Shanmugam said this “cool factor” is pushed at the young from various avenues such as media, online and friends. “Wherever you turn, it is there and it’s glamorised today … You can’t get away from it.”

He added: “It’s very difficult to stand against this multifaceted assault but I think we’ve done a reasonably good job.”

The minister also agreed with Mr Pillai’s point about Singapore being an “outlier” at international conferences. The country is either met with silence when presenting statistics or told that Singapore’s success cannot be replicated elsewhere, he added.

“I think it can be, but it is not for me to fight the fight in the rest of the world,” Mr Shanmugam said.

“But as long as others don’t tell us what to do and leave us alone to protect our population, then I think that is the best that we can hope for.”

STRUGGLES OF A FORMER DRUG ADDICT

Speaking to CNA at a reception at parliament hosted in conjunction with Mr Shanmugam’s ministerial statement, Minister of State for Home Affairs Faishal Ibrahim noted that those who attended the session said Singapore is heading in the right direction. 

“Because they recognise the harmful effects of drugs and they want to continue to protect our people. However, to do this, we must be united. We must be on board the journey, all hands on deck, regardless of who you are.” 

If Singapore lets go of all its efforts, drug traffickers will take advantage of it and reap the benefits, he added. “And they will not bother about how we lose out, how it affects our abusers, their family members and their loved ones.”

Also at the event was 39-year-old Hannah Chun, who struggled with drug addiction for 10 years.

For Ms Chun, seeing her oldest son “acting up” in school was the turning point. 

In some instances, her son used a pencil to poke his friends' hands, injuring them. Her son also seemed scared and insecure. 

“Because of the addiction, I would go in and out of the toilet, he would also mimic that … This was also how he coped with fear. Whenever he felt fearful, he would hide in the toilet.” 

Ms Chun knew that her son was behaving this way because of her. Her health was also suffering because of her addiction and she was “in a lot of pain”. 

“I could feel that if I don’t seek help, I’ll either die as a drug addict or be caught again,” she shared. 

Coming from a broken family, she started taking drugs at 13 because she wanted to rebel, which was “a cover-up” for abandonment, rejection and hurt that she could not express, she said. 

She was imprisoned for one-and-a-half years when she was 17 for possessing and consuming drugs. After she was released, she quickly fell back into her addiction and was incarcerated again at 18. 

“I would make light of the situation, and I would deceive myself into believing that it’s ok, everyone makes mistakes … I would just bluff myself, and of course I never thought much about other consequences.” 

She was pregnant during her second sentence and gave birth to her oldest son, now 21, during her prison sentence. But this did not stop her. 

“I had no knowledge that addiction is a lifetime battle. And it’s not like being in prison for a few years could stop that addiction. I wasn’t in control.” 

Her family took care of her son while she was serving her sentence, and Ms Chun said her sister supported her throughout. 

“Coming out (of prison) as a single parent, there were more responsibilities. There were more things to be fearful about,” she said. This prompted her to return to work at nightclubs, which built up to her next relapse, she shared. 

“I would always find friends who used to party and take drugs with me. And I always thought that by just joining them and not touching any drugs, I would be fine. But that was just wrong,” she continued. 

Fourteen years ago, she met her current husband, with whom she had three more children aged 12, nine and five. Her husband was very helpful in her recovery, said Ms Chun, adding that she’s relieved that she met “the right person”. 

“When you think back on the years that you’ve lost, the amount of bad decisions, consequences, burdens and responsibilities that happened because of your bad choices, you think ‘you’re such a loser’,” she said. 

At her lowest points, she often felt like there was no way out. 

“But to have someone who’ll constantly remind you to take one step at a time … I think that really helped. Someone positive in the family.” 

She also speaks to all her children openly about her addiction, in the hope that it will help them understand what she went through.

“They know everything, (I told them about it) to make sure that they are not ashamed, that they don’t think that they are lesser,” said Ms Chun, who now works at a shelter for women with addiction.  

“I think that’s what I want to bring them up with - confidence and with a lot of compassion towards people with addiction.” 

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Louisiana lawmakers reject adding exceptions of rape and incest to abortion ban

FILE - Abortion-rights supporters protest on the steps of the John Minor Wisdom United States of Appeals Fifth Circuit Building after the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, in New Orleans, Friday, June 24, 2022. Democratic lawmakers in Louisiana are pushing bills to add exceptions, including in cases of rape and incest, to the state’s near-total abortion ban. A GOP-dominated House committee began its review of those measures Tuesday, April 30, 2024, but similar proposals for loosening one of the country’s strictest abortion laws effectively died there last year. (Sophia Germer/The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate via AP, File)

FILE - Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry addresses members of the House and Senate on opening day of a legislative special session focusing on crime, Feb. 19, 2024, in the House Chamber at the State Capitol in Baton Rouge, La. Democratic lawmakers in Louisiana are pushing bills to add exceptions to abortion bans, including in cases of rape and incest, to the state’s near-total abortion ban. A GOP-dominated House committee began its review of those measures Tuesday, April 30, 2024, but similar proposals for loosening one of the country’s strictest abortion laws effectively died there last year. (Hilary Scheinuk/The Advocate via AP, File)

Louisiana Democratic state Rep. Delisha Boyd works at her desk at her office May 3, 2024, in New Orleans. As Boyd faces an uphill battle in Louisiana, as she attempts to advance a bill that would add cases of rape and incest as exceptions to Louisiana’s near total abortion ban, the Democrat opens opening up about her mother’s harrowing story and how it effected them. (AP Photo/Stephen Smith)

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Despite pleas from Democrats and gut-wrenching testimony from doctors and rape survivors, a GOP-controlled legislative committee rejected a bill Tuesday that would have added cases of rape and incest as exceptions to Louisiana’s abortion ban.

In the reliably red state, which is firmly ensconced in the Bible Belt and where even some Democrats oppose abortions, adding exceptions to Louisiana’s strict law has been an ongoing battle for advocates — with a similar measure failing last year. Currently, of the 14 states with abortion bans at all stages of pregnancy, six have exceptions in cases of rape and five have exceptions for incest.

“I will beg (committee) members to come to common sense,” Democratic state Rep. Alonzo Knox said to fellow lawmakers ahead of the vote, urging them to give approval to the exceptions. “I’m begging now.”

Lawmakers voted against the bill along party lines, with the measure failing 4-7.

A nearly identical bill met the same fate last year, effectively dying in the same committee. In the hopes of advancing the legislation out of committee and to the House floor for full debate, bill sponsor Democratic state Rep. Delisha Boyd added an amendment to the measure so that the exceptions would only apply to those who are younger than 17. However, the change was still not enough to sway opponents.

“We have cases here in Louisiana with children being raped and then subjected to carrying a child to term,” Boyd, a Democrat who has told her own mother’s story in an effort to fight for passage of the bil l. “I hope we take a look at the fact that this is to protect the most vulnerable, our children.”

Boyd said she will continue to try to get the bill onto the floor, possibly asking the House chamber to vote to bypass the committee. However, the technique is rarely successful for Democrats in the Legislature where Republicans hold a supermajority.

While most of those who voted against the bill did not give a reason for their vote, GOP state Rep. Dodie Horton offered her thoughts, saying that while she believes convicted rapists should receive the maximum penalty possible, she can’t in good conscience allow for abortions. She described the fetuses as “innocent children.”

“I think we should punish the perpetrator to the nth degree, I’d love to hang them from the high street if it was in my power to do so. But I cannot condone killing the innocent,” Horton said.

As in multiple other Republican states, Louisiana’s abortion law went into effect in 2022 following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a half-century of the nationwide right to abortion. The only exceptions to the ban are if there is substantial risk of death or impairment to the mother if she continues the pregnancy or in the case of “medically futile” pregnancies — when the fetus has a fatal abnormality.

Democrats have repeatedly fought — and failed — to loosen the law by clarifying vague language, abolishing jail time for doctors who perform illegal abortions and adding exceptions.

“It’s disgusting to me that we have a society where we can’t make exceptions in a situation where a young girl’s innocence has been taken away in the most vile way... and now she’s impregnated and somebody, somewhere, wants to force a nine, 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old child to have a baby for the monster that took away her innocence?” Knox said.

The bill attracted dozens of people to testify, including rape survivors who shared their own stories and doctors who argued that their hands are tied by the current law.

OB-GYN Dr. Neelima Sukhavasi told lawmakers that since the abortion ban has gone into effect, she and other colleagues have delivered babies who are birthed by teenagers who have been raped.

“One of these teenagers delivered a baby while clutching a Teddy Bear — and that’s an image that once you see that, you can’t unsee it,” Sukhavasi said.

In 2021, there were 7,444 reported abortions in Louisiana, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those, 27 were obtained by people younger than 15. Nationwide, 1,338 pregnant patients under 15 received abortions, according to the CDC.

A study released by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that between July 2022 and January 2024, there were more than 64,000 pregnancies resulting from rape in states where abortion has been banned in all or most cases.