Gunmen have killed a British-Swedish journalist with a single bullet in an unusual execution-style attack on a civilian in Kabul's heavily policed diplomatic district.
These haphazard approaches, along with a number of cruel and unusual executions, have thrust the constitutionality of lethal injection practices back into the spotlight.
An article on Monday about the unusual public execution of two men in a Tehran park who had been convicted of stabbing a man and stealing the equivalent of $20 contained a number of errors in some editions.
The unusual mode of execution was, apparently, decreed by Henry, after some thought.
That he would be called upon to take a chance deep was not itself so unusual, but the execution of the play was a sign of what was to come.
Death sentences have been falling steadily, down from a peak of 326 in 1995 to an estimated 110 last year.Announcing the Supreme Court's judgment, John Roberts, the chief justice, said that to constitute a cruel and unusual punishment, the execution method had to present a "substantial" or "objectively intolerable" risk of serious harm; avoidance of all pain was not required.
Mr. Penry's lawyers did not bring back to the Supreme Court this time the broader question of whether the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment bars execution of the retarded, and it is not until the fall that the justices will take that up in the North Carolina case they accepted on Monday.
A flood of lawsuits challenging lethal injection as cruel and unusual has stalled executions in some states and may prompt others to abandon them.
The British Library team, by contrast, wants to digitize everything possible, giving priority to items rare in age, exceptional in execution and unusual in content, whatever that may be.
Mr. Davis's lawyers had asked the court to determine whether the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment bars the execution of the innocent.
In any penal system, he pointed out, but especially in our own — which can be brutal, overcrowded, rife with rape and other forms of violence — a lifelong prison sentence can prove more cruel and unusual than a speedy execution.
