Death Penalty | featured news

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction, the US Department of Justice says. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was charged in hospital, could face the death penalty. A White House spokesman has said Mr Tsarnaev will not be treated as an "enemy combatant", as suggested by some Republican members of Congress.

A self-styled street preacher was sentenced to death Thursday in the killings of three down-and-out men lured by bogus job offers posted on Craigslist. The jury that convicted Richard Beasley of murder recommended that he face execution. The judge had the option of reducing the sentence to life in prison.

Colorado prosecutors have reached the decision that James Holmes deserves to die for killing 12 people in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater last July. Their decision comes after Holmes’ offer to plead guilty to the shooting in exchange for receiving life in prison was rejected by prosecutors.

Lawyers for Colorado theater shooting suspect James Holmes have offered to have him plead guilty and serve the rest of his life in prison to avoid the death penalty. Lawyers made the offer in a motion filed Wednesday but said prosecutors haven't accepted the offer because they may want to pursue the death penalty. Prosecutors are set to announce Monday whether they'll seek capital punishment. Prosecutors declined comment. They would likely consult with victims and their families before deciding whether to accept the offer.

Begging to have jurors spare her son's life, the mother of a triple killer who lured his victims with Craigslist job offers testified Wednesday that he had a troubled childhood and suffered physical and sexual abuse. "I love Richard with all my heart," a teary-eyed Carol Beasley testified during the sentencing phase of the trial of her son, 53-year-old Richard Beasley. He was convicted last week of killing three men and wounding a fourth, all lured with offers of farmhand jobs in southeast Ohio in 2011.

Nearly half of registered voters still back capital punishment, but the margin has shrunk to 3 percentage points. Voters also favor easing the three-strikes law.

A 23-year-old man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to killing six people and wounding 13 others, including then-U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, in an Arizona shooting rampage last year and will be spared the death penalty in exchange.

A Texas man convicted of killing a police informant was executed Tuesday evening after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected arguments that he was too mentally impaired to qualify for the death penalty.

More than one-third of Americans now oppose the death penalty.

Troy Davis is executed in Georgia for the shooting of a policeman in 1989, after his final appeal was rejected by the US Supreme Court.