Nigerian court sentences 54 soldiers to death

Court sentences 54 soldiers to death

ABUJA, Nigeria

Nigeria on Wednesday sentenced 54 soldiers to death for mutiny, assault, cowardice and refusing to fight Islamic extremists.

The court-martial charges all were connected to the soldiers’ refusal to deploy to recapture three towns seized by Nigeria’s home-grown Boko Haram in August, according to the charge sheet.

The lawyer for the condemned men, Femi Falana, said the 54 soldiers were convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad. He said five soldiers were acquitted.

Leader: Siege may have been preventable

SYDNEY

Australia’s prime minister said today that a deadly siege in a Sydney cafe may have been preventable, as the chorus of critics demanding to know why the gunman was out on bail despite facing a string of violent charges grew louder.

Man Haron Monis, a 50-year-old Iranian-born, self-styled cleric with a lengthy criminal history, burst into a downtown Sydney cafe on Monday wielding a shotgun, taking 17 people inside hostage. The siege ended 16 hours later when police stormed into the cafe to free the captives, two of whom were killed in a barrage of gunfire, along with Monis.

“This has been a horrific wake-up call,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Macquarie Radio. “This was an atrocity — it may well have been a preventable atrocity, and that’s why this swift and thorough review is so important.”

Abbott has ordered a sweeping government review of the siege and the events leading up to it, including why Monis was out on bail and how he obtained a shotgun despite the country’s tough gun laws.

Judge: Boy shouldn’t have been executed

COLUMBIA, S.C.

More than 70 years after South Carolina sent a 14-year-old black boy to the electric chair in the killings of two white girls in a segregated mill town, a judge threw out the conviction, saying the state committed a great injustice.

George Stinney was arrested, convicted of murder in a one-day trial and executed in 1944 — all in the span of about three months and without an appeal. The speed in which the state meted out justice against the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century was shocking and extremely unfair, Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen wrote in her ruling Wednesday.

The girls, ages 7 and 11, were beaten badly in the head with an iron railroad spike in the town of Alcolu in Clarendon County, about 45 miles southeast of Columbia, authorities said. A search by dozens of people found their bodies several hours later.

Executions, new death sentences fall

WASHINGTON

Executions and new death sentences dropped to their lowest numbers in decades in 2014, an anti-death penalty group said in a new report.

The Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that opposes executions and tracks the issue, said 35 inmates were executed this year and 71 have so far been given death sentences.

The last time fewer inmates were put to death was in 1994, when there were 31 executions nationwide. The number of new sentences is the lowest in the 40 years that the center calls the modern death-penalty era.

Since executions resumed in 1977 following a halt imposed by the Supreme Court, the number of executions peaked at 98 in 1999. That same year, 277 inmates were sentenced to death.

Associated Press