Execution by firing squad, in the past sometimes called fusillading, is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in the military and in times of war. Some reasons for its use are that firearms are usually readily available and a gunshot to a vital organ, such as the brain or heart, most often will kill relatively quickly.
The D.C. sniper attacks were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred during three weeks in October 2002 throughout the Washington metropolitan area, consisting of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, and preliminary shootings, that consisted of murders and robberies in several states, and lasted for six months starting in February 2002. Seven people were killed, and seven others were injured in the preliminary shootings, and ten people were killed and three others were critically wounded in the October shootings. In total, the snipers killed 17 people and wounded 10 others in a 10-month span.
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda was a Soviet secret police official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised arrests, show trials, and executions of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, climactic events of the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using penal labor from the gulag system, during which 12,000–25,000 laborers died.
Joseph Paul Franklin was an American serial killer, white supremacist, and domestic terrorist who engaged in a murder spree spanning the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Herman Friedrich Graebe or Gräbe was a German manager and engineer in charge of a German building firm in Ukraine, who witnessed mass executions of the Jews of Dubno on 5 October 1942 by Nazis and in the ghetto of Rovno on 13 July 1942. Following the war he wrote a famous and horrifying testimony.
Otto Bradfisch was an economist, a jurist, an SS-Obersturmbannführer, leader of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B of the Security Police and the SD, and Commander of the Security Police in Litzmannstadt (Łódź) and Potsdam.
The executions during the Irish Civil War took place during the guerrilla phase of the Irish Civil War. This phase of the war was bitter, and both sides, the government forces of the Irish Free State and the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) insurgents, used executions and terror in what developed into a cycle of atrocities. From November 1922, the Free State government embarked on a policy of executing Republican prisoners in order to bring the war to an end. Many of those killed had previously been allies, and in some cases close friends, of those who ordered their deaths in the civil war. In addition, government troops summarily executed prisoners in the field on several occasions. The executions of prisoners left a lasting legacy of bitterness in Irish politics.
The Kragujevac massacre was the mass murder of between 2,778 and 2,794 mostly Serb men and boys in Kragujevac by German soldiers on 21 October 1941. It occurred in the German-occupied territory of Serbia during World War II, and came as a reprisal for insurgent attacks in the Gornji Milanovac district that resulted in the deaths of ten German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others. The number of hostages to be shot was calculated as a ratio of 100 hostages executed for every German soldier killed and 50 hostages executed for every German soldier wounded, a formula devised by Adolf Hitler with the intent of suppressing anti-Nazi resistance in Eastern Europe.
The Crveni Krst concentration camp, also known as the Niš concentration camp, located in Crveni Krst, Niš, was operated by the German Gestapo and used to hold captured Serbs, Jews and Romanis during the Second World War. Established in mid-1941, it was used to detain as many as 35,000 people during the war and was liberated by the Yugoslav Partisans in 1944. More than 10,000 people are thought to have been killed at the camp. After the war, a memorial to the victims of the camp was erected on Mount Bubanj, where many inmates were shot. A memorial museum was opened on the former campgrounds in 1967 and in 1979 the campgrounds were declared a Cultural Monument of Exceptional Importance and came under the protection of the Socialist Republic of Serbia.
The Wichita Massacre, also known as the Wichita Horror, was a week-long violent crime spree perpetrated by brothers Reginald and Jonathan Carr in the city of Wichita, Kansas, between December 8 and 15, 2000. Five people were killed, and two people, a man and a woman, were severely wounded. The brothers were arrested and convicted of multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, robbery, and rape. They were both sentenced to death in October 2002. Their vicious crimes created panic in the Wichita area resulting in an increase in the sales of guns, locks, and home security systems.
Curtis Osborne was an American convicted murderer on death row in Georgia from Spalding County. He murdered Arthur Lee Jones and Linda Lisa Seaborne in 1990 to avoid paying a $400 debt. Johnny Mostiler, his court-appointed attorney, allegedly neglected to inform Osborne that the prosecutor had offered him a life sentence in exchange for a plea bargain, declaring "That little nigger deserves the death penalty." Osborne's case for clemency was championed by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former Deputy U.S. Attorney General Larry Thompson, who wrote letters to the clemency board pleading for mercy. Former U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell also spoke on his behalf. His execution was carried out despite these appeals.
John Kewish Jr. was the last person executed in the Isle of Man. He was convicted and executed for the crime of patricide.
The Kravica massacre was one of the mass executions of Bosniaks by the Army of Republika Srpska during the Srebrenica massacre. It was committed on 14 July, 1995. It is estimated that between 1,000 and 1,500 men were killed.
Samuel A. Bierfield is believed to be the first Jew lynched in the United States. Bierfield and his African-American clerk, Lawrence Bowman, were confronted in Bierfield's store in Franklin, Tennessee, and fatally shot on August 15, 1868, by a group of masked men. The killers were believed to belong to a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which had emerged as an insurgent force in the state in 1866. The murder of Bierfield and Bowman was reported by both The New York Times and the Nashville Union and Dispatch.
The Snagovo massacre refers to the mass killing of 36 Bosnian Muslim civilians by Serbs on 29 April 1992 in the village Snagovo, located in the municipality of Zvornik, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The massacre occurred at the start of the Bosnian War.
Baker Phillips was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy during the War of the Austrian Succession. During the conflict, he served as second lieutenant abroad HMS Anglesea. In 1745, an unprepared Anglesea was attacked and captured by a French warship. Phillips was court-martialed and executed for surrendering his ship while in command, his superiors having fallen to French fire. His court-martial was widely criticised and led to an amendment of the British Articles of War.
In the early morning hours of March 26, 2017, a shootout occurred at the Cameo nightclub in southeastern Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. One person was killed and 16 others were injured. Two suspects were arrested on March 30, though police continued to search for more people involved. One of the suspects, who was among those injured, later died of his injuries on April 4.
A mercy dog was a dog that served in a paramedical role in the military, most notably during World War I. They were often sent out after large battles, where they would seek out wounded soldiers, and they were well-suited to the conditions of trench warfare. They carried first-aid supplies that could then be used by wounded soldiers, and comforted dying soldiers who were mortally wounded. They were also trained to guide combat medics to soldiers who required extensive care. Many mercy dogs were trained by national Red Cross societies to serve the country in which the specific society operated. The German army called such dogs medical dogs. As many as 20,000 dogs are estimated to have served as mercy dogs in World War I and World War II, and they have been credited with saving thousands of lives. Such dogs were also used by the United States in the Korean War.
Girvies L. Davis and Richard "Ricky" Holman were American serial killers who killed at least four people during robberies in Illinois between 1978 and 1979. Davis, the older of the two, told an investigator that shooting witnesses was "easier" than wearing a mask. The two were nicknamed "The .22 Caliber Killers". Davis was executed in 1995, while Holman, too young to be executed, is serving a life sentence.
The Normandy massacres were a series of killings in-which approximately 156 Canadian and two British prisoners of war (POWs) were murdered by soldiers of the 12th SS Panzer Division during the Battle of Normandy in World War II. The majority of the murders occurred within the first ten days of the Allied invasion of France. The killings ranged in scale from spontaneous murders of individual POWs, to premeditated mass executions involving dozens of victims. Colonel Kurt Meyer, a commander in the 12th SS Panzer Division, was the only perpetrator charged for his role in the atrocities.
