{"id":2979,"date":"2009-10-16T14:37:21","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T22:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2979"},"modified":"2009-10-17T11:30:59","modified_gmt":"2009-10-17T19:30:59","slug":"sharia-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/sharia-watch\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Sharia’ Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m almost always opposed to the death penalty (mainly because I tend to be skeptical of government’s ability to do anything <\/em>right), so I’m probably biased, but, if this report <\/a>from the London Times<\/em> is accurate, it is, to say the least, dismaying:<\/p>\n

A Texas man is due to be executed next month despite admissions by jurors that they consulted biblical passages advocating death as a punishment to help to decide his fate. <\/p>\n

Before sending Khristian Oliver to his death after he was convicted of murdering his victim \u2014 who was bludgeoned with a gun barrel \u2014 jurors read passages of the Old Testament, including one that states that a killer who uses an iron object to kill \u201cshall surely be put to death\u201d. Oliver, 32, is due to be executed on November 5. He was convicted in 1999 of the murder of Joe Collins, 64, during a 1998 break-in at the victim\u2019s rural East Texas home. <\/p>\n

During the trial, the jurors were instructed by the judge not to refer to anything that was not presented as evidence in the courtroom.<\/p>\n

Amnesty International called on the Texas authorities to commute Oliver\u2019s death sentence because since his trial, jurors had admitted that they read the Bible while they decided whether he should live or die. In particular, they said that Bibles were passed around with specific passages highlighted, and that one juror read aloud to his fellow jurors the passage, from Numbers XXXV, 16: \u201cAnd if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m almost always opposed to the death penalty (mainly because I tend to be skeptical of government’s ability to do anything right), so I’m probably biased, but, if this report from the London Times is accurate, it is, to say … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[363],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2979"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2979"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2989,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2979\/revisions\/2989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}