As 20 and 30 prisoners at a time were executed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, warders trailed through cities like Baghdad, "selling" exemption from execution to shocked families, according to people in Iraq who said they had spoken to relatives of those involved.
"Everybody who spent a few years doing PR opened up their own mom-and-pop shops, selling media execution.
Its Department of Criminal Justice is scheduled to put convicted murder Ramiro Hernandez Llanas to death on April 9, using the same pentobarbital-based method as in the Sells execution.
The most effective barbiturates, including sodium thiopental, can no longer be obtained by prison authorities because anti-death-penalty advocates lobbied the drug's Danish manufacturer to stop selling it for executions, Alito said.
In 1945, for example, a Dutchman named Han van Meegeren faced execution for selling a national art treasure, in the form of a painting by Vermeer, to Hermann Göring, Hitler's deputy.
He has had solo shows in the United States and Europe, as well as in Asia and, in 2007, set a record for Chinese contemporary art when his painting "Execution" sold for about $5.3 million at Sotheby's in London, a record that has since been broken.
The Island order book, available for free at Island.com, allows traders to peer into the entire set of buys and sells open for execution on the Island ECN.
An autobiographical "Narrative", thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe, was sold at his execution, quickly followed by popular plays.
The powerful scene in which the betrayed Smith yells at Capote, "What's the name of your book?" is based on a letter the real Perry Smith wrote to Capote on 12 April 1964: "I've been told that the book is to be coming off the press and to be sold after our executions.
