Reena Virk was a 14-year-old Canadian girl who was beaten and killed by a group of teenagers in Saanich, British Columbia, Canada. Her status as a victim of bullying prior to her murder attracted substantial media scrutiny in Canada. Six teenagers were tried and convicted for their participation in her death. The Globe and Mail commented at the time that her case was "elevated into a national tragedy". A pair of Canadian sociologists have described the case as a watershed moment for a "moral panic" over girl violence by the Canadian public in the late 1990s.
William Edgar Rayner Goddard, Baron Goddard, was Lord Chief Justice of England from 1946 to 1958, known for his strict sentencing and mostly conservative views despite being the first Lord Chief Justice to be appointed by a Labour government, as well as the first to possess a law degree. Goddard's no-nonsense reputation was reflected in a number of nicknames that he acquired, which included: 'The Tiger', 'Justice-in-a-jiffy', and—from Winston Churchill—'Lord God-damn'. He is considered one of the last hanging judges.
Gregg v. Georgia, Proffitt v. Florida, Jurek v. Texas, Woodson v. North Carolina, and Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. It reaffirmed the Court's acceptance of the use of the death penalty in the United States, upholding, in particular, the death sentence imposed on Troy Leon Gregg. The set of cases is referred to by a leading scholar as the July 2 Cases, and elsewhere referred to by the lead case Gregg. The court set forth the two main features that capital sentencing procedures must employ in order to comply with the Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual punishments". The decision essentially ended the de facto moratorium on the death penalty imposed by the Court in its 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia (1972). Justice Brennan's dissent famously argued that "The calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person's humanity ... An executed person has indeed 'lost the right to have rights.'"
Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground is a book by Michael J. Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind. It is an account of the early Norwegian black metal scene, with a focus on the string of church burnings and murders that occurred in the country around 1993. A film adaptation of the book was directed by Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund in 2018. The book has been the subject of controversy over the alleged political leanings of author Michael Moynihan, though he denies these allegations.
Scott Thomas Erskine was an American serial killer on California's death row, convicted in 2003 for the 1993 murder of two California boys. He was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison.
Channon Gail Christian, aged 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom Jr., aged 23, were from Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. They were kidnapped on the evening of January 6, 2007, when Christian's vehicle was carjacked. The couple were taken to a rental house. Both of them were raped, tortured, and murdered. Four males and one female were arrested, charged, and convicted in the case. In 2007, a grand jury indicted Letalvis Darnell Cobbins, Lemaricus Devall Davidson, George Geovonni Thomas, and Vanessa Lynn Coleman on counts of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder. Also in 2007, Eric DeWayne Boyd was indicted by a federal grand jury of being an accessory to a carjacking, resulting in serious bodily injury to another person and misprision of a felony. In 2018, Boyd was indicted on state-level charges of kidnapping, robbery, rape, and murder.
The Deltona massacre was a residential murder which occurred on August 6, 2004, in a home on Telford Lane in Deltona, Florida, United States. Four men broke into the home and bludgeoned six victims to death. The four attackers, apparently inspired by the film Wonderland, tortured and killed four men, two women, and a dog inside the home, making it the deadliest mass murder in Volusia County history. Their primary motive for the murders was revenge on Erin Belanger, who had evicted a squatter, Troy Victorino, from her grandmother's then-vacant house, with the secondary motive of recovering an Xbox game console and some clothing that Victorino had left behind. Victorino was able to further motivate his accomplices by pointing out that the attack would likely allow them to kill another person they were mad at, but that person happened not to be at the house that night.
John Eldon Smith was convicted of the murders of Ronald and Juanita Akins. He was executed by the state of Georgia via electric chair at the age of 53. He became the first person to be executed in Georgia since 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated.
Tiffany Ann Cole is an American convicted murderer who was found guilty of the kidnapping and first-degree murder of a Duval County, Florida husband and wife and sentenced to death. Also found guilty in the case were three men: Alan Wade; Bruce Nixon; and Cole's boyfriend, Michael Jackson. Prosecutors said Cole and the three men developed a plan to kidnap and kill the couple to steal their money, and dug a grave for them in Charlton County, Georgia, two days before knocking on their door and asking to use the phone. As of February 2015, Cole was the third youngest woman on death row in the United States; she was 26 at the time of her conviction.
William Henry Hance was an American serial killer and soldier who is believed to have murdered four women and molested three in and around military bases before his arrest in 1978. He was convicted of murdering three of them, and not brought to trial on the fourth. He was executed by the state of Georgia in the electric chair.
The Murder of Terry King occurred on November 26, 2001. Terry Lee King, a resident of Cantonment, Florida, U.S., was bludgeoned to death by his two children, 13-year old Derek and 12-year old Alex King.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Florida.
In February 2009, Heather Strong was kidnapped and murdered in Marion County, Florida. Emilia Lily Carr, a rival for the affections of a man Strong had dated, came under suspicion. Carr denied any guilt and alleged her statements were coerced. Carr was nevertheless found guilty in December 2010 and sentenced to death by lethal injection in February 2011. Carr was one of five women on death row in the state of Florida. On May 19, 2017, Emilia Carr was re-sentenced to life without parole. Joshua Fulgham was similarly convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping in the death. At a separate trial, where he pled guilty, Joshua Fulgham received two consecutive sentences of life in prison for his involvement in Strong's murder.
Wainwright vs. Witt, 469 U.S. 412 (1985), was a U.S. Supreme Court case concerning a criminal defendant, Johnny Paul Witt, who argued that his Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated when he was sentenced to death for first degree murder by the state of Florida. He argued that the trial court had unconstitutionally hand-picked a jury during the voir dire process. This was because certain people were excused from the jury because they admitted pre-trial, that their decision of guilty or not guilty toward capital punishment would be swayed due to personal or religious beliefs.
Ahmed Salim Faraj Abu Khattala is an incarcerated Libyan, who commanded a small militia during the 2011 uprising against Qaddafi. He participated in the 2012 Benghazi attack on the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, in which Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
Travis Victor Alexander was an American salesman who was murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Ann Arias, in his house in Mesa, Arizona while in the shower. Arias was convicted of first-degree murder on May 8, 2013, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on April 13, 2015.
Dylann Storm Roof is an American white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and mass murderer who perpetrated the Charleston church shooting. During a Bible study on June 17, 2015, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Roof killed nine people, all African Americans, including senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, and injured a tenth person. After several people identified Roof as the main suspect, he became the center of a manhunt that ended the morning after the shooting with his arrest in Shelby, North Carolina. He later confessed that he committed the shooting in hopes of igniting a race war. Roof's actions in Charleston have been widely described as domestic terrorism.
Hurst v. Florida, 577 U.S. 92 (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court, in an 8–1 ruling, applied the rule of Ring v. Arizona to the Florida capital sentencing scheme, holding that the Sixth Amendment requires a jury to find the aggravating factors necessary for imposing the death penalty. In Florida, under a 2013 statute, the jury made recommendations but the judge decided the facts.
The Tommy Zeigler case refers to the murders of four people in Winter Garden, Florida, United States on December 24, 1975. Thirty-year-old Tommy Zeigler was charged for the quadruple murder of his wife, her parents, and another man at his family-owned furniture store. He was tried and convicted on July 2, 1976. Zeigler was sentenced to death on July 16, 1976, for two of the murders, in addition to life imprisonment.
On February 18, 1994, a brother-sister pair were attacked by two men at a camping site in Ocala National Forest, Florida, United States. The 21-year-old sister was raped twice by the attackers, but the 18-year-old brother, John Timothy Edwards, was murdered by the same two perpetrators of the attack. During the same month, the two killers, William Christopher Paul and Loran Kenstley Cole, were arrested and charged with kidnapping, robbery, rape and murder.
