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Communist Vietnam's secret death penalty conveyor belt: How country trails only China and Iran for 'astonishing' number of executions

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Prisoners are dragged from their cells at 4am without warning to be given a lethal injection Vietnam's use of the death penalty has been thrust into the spotlight after a real estate tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to be executed in one of the biggest corruption cases in the country's history. Truong My Lan, a businesswoman who chaired a sprawling company that developed luxury apartments, hotels, offices and shopping malls, was arrested in 2022.

Colorado cinema shooting: Judge allows fingerprint evidence

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James Holmes and lawyer
A judge presiding over the murder case of Colorado cinema shooting suspect James Holmes will let fingerprint evidence linking him to the mass shooting be used at trial, a ruling made public on Monday showed.

Arapahoe County District Court Judge Carlos Samour denied a motion by lawyers defending the former neuroscience graduate student that sought to exclude the evidence, arguing that fingerprint comparison is a subjective, inexact science.

Public defenders also had made a similar argument challenging the reliability of firearms analysis, which Samour also rejected earlier this month.

Holmes, 26, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to opening fire inside a suburban Denver movie theater during a midnight screening of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises." 12 moviegoers were killed and 70 were wounded in the July 2012 rampage.

Prosecutors have charged Holmes with multiple counts of 1st-degree murder and attempted murder, and have said they will seek the death penalty for the California native if he is convicted.

The defense challenged the reliability of fingerprint analysis testimony, citing the 2004 train bombing in Madrid that killed 191 people. An FBI investigation initially said fingerprints found at the Madrid scene matched those of an American lawyer, who was arrested but later released after the error was discovered.

But Samour said in his ruling that despite occasional mistakes, fingerprint evidence has been deemed reliable in U.S. courts for more than a century.

"The fact that fingerprint examiners make false positive identifications is more directly related to the competency of the practitioners, not to the reliability of fingerprint comparison as a methodology," he said.

Prosecutors plan to call a police analyst and an FBI agent who matched Holmes' fingerprints to prints lifted from the theater's emergency exit door, firearms, and other items recovered from his apartment, which was rigged with explosives.

The trial is set to begin with jury selection in December.

Source: Toronto Sun, Sept. 16, 2014
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