2 Okla. prisoners pick firing squad as way to delay lethal injections
OKLAHOMA CITY — Two men on Oklahoma’s death row — at the prodding of a federal judge — agreed to choose execution by firing squad as a way to delay their upcoming lethal injections, one of their attorneys told the judge.
The two inmates — Donald Grant and Gilbert Postelle — want U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot to grant them a temporary injunction that would halt their upcoming executions until a trial can be held over whether Oklahoma’s threedrug lethal injection method is constitutional.
A trial on the issue is set to begin before Friot on Feb. 28, but the judge has said in order to be added as plaintiffs, inmates must select an alternative method of execution.
Grant, who is scheduled to die Jan. 27, and Postelle, who has a Feb. 17 execution date, hadn’t previously selected an alternative method.
“While it may be gruesome to look at, we all agree it will be quicker,” attorney Jim Stronski told Friot.
More than two dozen death row inmates who are plaintiffs in the challenge agreed previously to provide the court with an alternative method of execution, including the use of different drug combinations or firing squad, which is one of several execution methods authorized under Oklahoma law.
Friot did not issue a decision Monday on the inmates’ motion but said he hoped to release an order by the end of the week.
Troops in Kazakhstan: The president of Kazakhstan announced Tuesday that a Russia-led security alliance will start pulling out its troops from the Central
Asian nation in two days after completing its mission.
The mostly Russian troops were deployed to Kazakhstan last week by the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance of six former Soviet states, at the president’s request amid the worst public unrest the former Soviet nation has faced since gaining independence 30 years ago.
Protests over soaring fuel prices erupted in the oil and gas-rich Central Asian nation of 19 million on Jan. 2 and quickly spread across the country, with political slogans reflecting wider discontent over the country’s authoritarian government.
Over the next few days, the demonstrations turned violent, with dozens of civilians and law enforcement officers killed.
In Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital and largest city, protesters set government buildings on fire and briefly seized the airport. The unrest was largely quelled by the weekend.
South African fire: A homeless man accused of setting a fire that destroyed part of South Africa’s historic Parliament complex was charged with terrorism Tuesday and sent to a psychiatric hospital for a month of assessment.
Zandile Mafe, 49, appeared in a courtroom in Cape Town for a bail hearing, when the terrorism charge was added to his indictment. Mafe was already charged with housebreaking with intent to steal, theft, two counts of arson and possession of an explosive device when he appeared in court for the first time last week.
Prosecutors now contend that Mafe had intended to “deliver, place, discharge or detonate” the explosive device at the Parliament complex.
The Parliament precinct in Cape Town was ravaged by a major blaze, which Mafe is accused of starting early Jan. 2. It took firefighters four days to completely extinguish the fire.
Ghislaine Maxwell case: The U.S. government will agree to drop pending perjury charges against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell if her sex trafficking case goes to sentencing later this year, prosecutors said.
The offer was made in a letter to a judge filed jointly late Monday by the prosecutors and Maxwell’s attorneys in federal court in Manhattan. The defense countered by asking that questions about the perjury charges be put off until the judge rules on its request for a new trial.
Maxwell, 60, was convicted last month of recruiting teenage girls between 1994 and 2004 for financier Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse. Two perjury counts that were separated from the main case accuse Maxwell of lying in a 2016 civil deposition.
At a trial ending with her conviction last month, Maxwell vehemently denied any wrongdoing. Her lawyers argued that she was made a scapegoat for the sex crimes of Epstein, her onetime boyfriend and employer.
Islamic State regret: The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal of a woman who left home in Alabama to join the Islamic State terror group, but then decided she wanted to return to the United States.
The justices declined without comment on Monday to consider the appeal of Hoda Muthana, who was born in New Jersey in October 1994 to a diplomat from Yemen and grew up in Alabama near Birmingham.
Muthana left the U.S. to join the Islamic State in 2014, apparently after becoming radicalized online.
While she was overseas, the government determined she was not a U.S. citizen and revoked her passport, citing her father’s status as a diplomat at the time of her birth. Her family sued to enable her return to the United States.
A federal judge ruled in 2019 that the U.S. government correctly determined Muthana wasn’t a U.S. citizen despite her birth in the country. Children of diplomats aren’t entitled to birthright citizenship. The family’s lawyers appealed, arguing that her father’s status as a diplomat assigned to the U.N. had ended before her birth, making her automatically a citizen.
Muthana surrendered to U.s.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces as Islamic State fighters were losing the last of their self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria and going to refugee camps.
Muthana said she regretted her decision to join the group and wanted to return to the U.S. with her toddler child, the son of a man she met while living with the group. The man later died.
Her current whereabouts aren’t clear.
Betty White’s death: Actress Betty White died from a stroke she had six days before her Dec. 31 death at age 99, according to her death certificate.
The “Golden Girls” and “Mary Tyler Moore Show” actor died at her home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles as the result of a Dec. 25 cerebrovascular accident, the medical term for a stroke, according to the LA County death certificate obtained Monday by The Associated Press.
The cause was provided by White’s doctor, as is typical in such cases.
She was cremated and her remains were given Friday to Glenn Kaplan, the man in charge of White’s advanced health care directive.