1-year-old Jaidyn Leskie’s body was found in a dam near Moe in Australia on 1 January 1998, after he disappeared in mysterious circumstances. His mother’s former boyfriend, Greg Domaszewicz, who was babysitting Jaidyn when he disappeard, was charged with the murder, but was acquittted by a Supreme Court jury in December 1998. The deputy state coroner closed the case in 2001, after holding a closed-door inquiry and producing a two-page report outlining the previously known facts about the death. Nonetheless, police detectives attached to his office continued to investigate the circumstances of the toddler’s death, taking new statements from witnesses involved, as well as new DNA and other forensic tests. In 2006 State Coroner Graeme Johnstone found Mr Domaszewicz had a role disposing of 13-month-old Jaidyn’s body but stopped short of naming him as the child’s killer. The murder of the toddler is still unsolved.

Measure that would end death penalty in California qualifies for ballot -

If the November measure passes, the sentences of more than 700 people on death row would be commuted to life in prison without possibility of parole. California is set for a major debate on the death penalty following qualification Monday of a November ballot measure that would replace capital punishment with a life term without possibility of parole. If passed, the measure would make California the 18th state in the nation without a death penalty. During the last five years, four states have replaced the death penalty and Connecticut is soon to follow. Growing numbers of conservatives in California have joined the effort to repeal the state’s capital punishment law, expressing frustration with its price tag and the rarity of executions. California has executed 13 inmates in 23 years, and prisoners are far more likely to die of old age on death row than by the executioner’s needle. November’s ballot measure would commute the sentences of more than 700 people on death row to life without possibility of parole, a term that would then become the state’s most severe form of criminal punishment. Most death row inmates would be returned to the general prison population and be expected to work. Their earnings would go to crime victims.

Backing the new measure are Ron Briggs, who ran the 1978 campaign for a successful ballot initiative that expanded the reach of California’s death penalty; Donald J. Heller, an ex-prosecutor who wrote the 1978 initiative; Jeanne Woodford, a former warden of San Quentin State Prison who oversaw four executions; and former L.A. County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who said his experience as D.A. helped change his mind about the fairness of the system. Although their views on the proposition are unknown, former California Chef Justice Ronald M. George and current Chief Tani Cantil-Sakauye, both Republican former prosecutors, have stated publicly that the death penalty system is not working. The chorus of criticism has death penalty advocates worried, even though California voters have historically favored capital punishment, passing several measures over the last few decades to toughen criminal penalties and expand the number of crimes punishable by death. “The people of California have regularly voted for the death penalty by wide margins, but of course it has to be a matter of concern,” said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which advocates for tough criminal penalties. He said fundraising to defeat the November measure would be difficult. Scheidegger’s group filed a lawsuit last week seeking a court order to force the state to establish a single-drug lethal injection procedure that his group says should end litigation that has blocked executions for six years.

Fourteen inmates on death row have exhausted their appeals and could be executed if courts permitted the state to go forward, he said. A federal judge who suspended executions cited the possibility that inmates might suffer extreme pain with the three-drug procedure. A three-year study by a judge and a law professor concluded last year that the death penalty in California costs $183 million more to administer than life without possibility of parole, and that California’s 13 executions cost taxpayers $4 billion. The additional expense includes legal costs for expanded trials and appeals and for housing inmates in single cells. Scheidegger contended the costs are inflated and cited a 10-year-old report by the state of Indiana that found capital cases there cost 21% more than non-capital murder cases. Garcetti said he learned as a district attorney that the location where a person was tried significantly affected whether that person would be condemned because of varying attitudes in different jury pools. He called the cost “obscene” and noted that death row inmates in other states have been exonerated. Given the huge size of California’s death row, “I just feel there is at least one factually innocent person” there, he said.

This is the X-ray of a young woman who was murdered by her husband of a few years, they both worked on the same golfing range. The husband murdered her due to her sexual relationships with other women, he then began postmortum mutilation.  He stabbed golf tees into her face and stabbed her under her chin with a pen. He then shoved a kitchen knife inside her genitalia and pushed a golf ball inside her. X-rays show the knife and golf ball inside her genitalia.

On August 18th, 1979, Albert Fentress, thirty-nine, a history teacher at Poughkeepsie Middle School in New York, wrote two scripts concerning murder and sexual mutilation. Two days later he invited Paul Masters, eighteen, into his house for a drink. Fentress then assaulted, mutilated, and shot the boy. Afterwards, he cut the body into pieces and cooked and ate them. Fentress, who had no previous record, was committed to a mental institution indefinitely.

The body of murder victim Nicole Brown Simpson being removed from the crime scene in Los Angeles, California, with police and forensic personnel observing matters closely.

Miguel Rivera randomly attacked young boys in tenement buildings in East Harlem and on the Upper West Side of New York between March 1972 and August 1973. His first victim, an eight-year-old boy, was stabbed thirty-eight times and sodomized, and an attempt was made to cut off his penis. Three others were found in hallways, in basements, and on the rooftops of various tenements, stabbed to death and their genitals cut off. Local children dubbed the serial killer “Charlie Chop-Off.” Witness testimony produced a description of a Puerto Rican suspect who was attempting to persuade young boys to run errants for him. Following a failed attempt to kidnap a nine-year-old boy in May 1974, Miguel Rivera, who exhibited severe signs of mental illness, was arrested. Rivera claimed that God had told him to transform little boys into girls.

This photograph shows the heads of the Pollet Brothers, Abel and Auguste, after their guillotining at Bethune Prison on January 11, 1909. Their heads have been washed of blood and placed on a table. Auguste is on the right. In the background attendants wash the head of one of their gang, Canut Vrohant; a box for the brothers’ heads is at their right. The Pollet brothers gang had nine other members, including two women. Starting in 1898, the gang terrorized northern France, from Calais to Belgium. Abel, the chief of the band, was first arrested in 1901 for moving contraband over the Belgium border into France. He was imprisoned in Loos where he was educated in criminal techniques. In 1905 and 1906 the gang committed a series of horrific crimes, terrorizing northern France villages: on July 14, 1905, they killed 77-year-old M. Deron in Calonne-sur-la-Lys; on August 16, 1905, they brutally and violently killed 79-year-old Mme. Lenglemetz in Lacon near Bethune; on January 2, 1906, they killed a couple, ages 73 and 72, in Crombeke in Belgium, crossing the border on January 20, 1906, in Violaines near Pas-de-Calais, they killed the Lecocq family: 81 and 79-years-old parents and their 51-year-old daughter; on April 8 in Bailleul they attacked a 69-year-old man, robbing and seriously wounding him. The Brigade Mobile de Lille, a special unit outfitted with cars - rare for police at the time - finally captured the famous”Terror Thugs of the North.”They were tried, convicted and sentenced to the guillotine.

Man in the electric chair at Ohio State Penitentiary, 1901 - Ohio, the second state to adopt electrocution, was proud of its humane choice of execution and issued souvenir cards of the procedure. In this image, a condemned man is strapped into the chair with the executioner standing at the switches, ready to pull the levers. With the passage of time and some mishaps, each execution technique was advanced, as minor flaws were corrected. Some very early executions had the hands of the condemned in a bucket of water. In its final form, the person is usually shaved and strapped to the chair with belts across his chest, groin, legs, head, and arms (some prisons place a strap over the mouth and nose and use a blindfold); a metal skullcap-shaped electrode is attached to the scalp and forehead over a sponge moistened with saline; and an additional electrode is moistened with conductive jelly and attached to a portion of the prisoner’s leg that has been shaved to reduce resistance to electricity. This creates a closed circuit. After the condemned is prepared, the warden may again read the death sentence, then he signals the executioner to pull a lever, sending a 15 to 30 second jolt between 1,000 and 2,000 volts into the condemned. The current surges and is then turned off, at which time the body relaxes and the doctors check to see if the inmate’s heart is still beating; intermittent jolts of electricity are given until the heart stops. The problem most viewers have found with electrocution isthe tremendous effect visual on the body: the prisoner is often fried in the process. At the end of the procedure, the body temperature can reach over 140 degrees. The audience reacts poorly to blistering skin and bursting, boiling blood vessels. United States Supreme Court Justice William Brennan offered the following description of an execution by the electric chair:

“… the prisoner’s eyeballs sometimes pop out and rest on [his] cheeks. The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool. The body turns bright red as its temperature rises, and the prisoner’s flesh swells and his skin stretches to the point of breaking. Sometimes the prisoner catches fire… Witnesses hear a loud and sustained sound like bacon frying, and the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh permeates the chamber.”

In 1979, the only anonymous photograph to win a Pulitzer Prize was taken.  It captured nine Kurdish rebels and two of the Shah’s policemen being executed by firing squad in revolutionary Iran.  In 2006, the photographer’s identity was revealed to be Jahangir Razmi.