the states of Florida and Mississippi both executed convicted murderers by lethal injection.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said he hoped legal proceedings against former president Saddam Hussein would be short and that he would be found guilty and sentenced to death soon.

a federal judge has ruled for the second time that Missouri's death penalty procedures were unconstitutional. The ruling issued October 16 by US District Judge Fernando Gaitan Jr. confirmed a ruling he made in September that the death penalty protocol, which uses a three-drug lethal injection, could subject Missouri inmates to an unreasonable risk of cruel and unusual punishment.

the Federal Court in Putrajaya, Malaysia, dismissed Mohd Azhar Saad’s appeal against his death sentence for trafficking in almost 1kg of cannabis.

Iraq's Central Criminal Court has sentenced an al-Qaida member to death and convicted 64 others on charges of belonging to armed groups and other crimes, the US military command said.

India’s Supreme Court clipped the president’s power to pardon convicts on death row.

as many as 41,500 healthy people who practice Falun Gong became involuntary victims of organ transplants and murdered between 2002 and 2005, according to a report that was presented before the U.S. Congress.

islamic radicals carried out their second public execution in less than a month amid fears of increasing extremist violence in Somalia.

Rwanda's ruling party will push for a law abolishing the death penalty in the east African state, a senior party official said. Outlawing capital punishment would clear the way for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and western countries to extradite genocide suspects to Rwanda.

the judiciary has suspended the hanging of Kobra Rahmanpour "while it waits for the husband's family to pardon her," said in an interview her attorney, Abdolsamad Khorramshahi.

a woman sentenced to death in Vietnam for smuggling heroin and detained in isolation became pregnant and would thus have her sentence commuted to life imprisonment, her lawyer said.

a prominent UAE human rights activist has called for the abolition of the death penalty in the UAE, on the fourth annual World Day Against the Death Penalty.