death sentences
Judicial killing orders
Death sentences are judicial punishments condemning a person to execution for a crime.
The term extends to anything perceived as ensuring destruction or doom: The diagnosis felt like a death sentence.
A judge hands down or passes a death sentence; courts impose them; governors may commute them to life imprisonment.
- executionsLegally sanctioned killings
- penaltiesPunishments for infractions
- capital punishmentExecution by legal authority
- condemned prisonerPerson sentenced to die
- hangingsSuspended wall coverings
cruel and unusual · gas chambers · lethal injection · firing squad · condemnations · electric chair · abolition movements · guillotines · wrongful conviction · innocent man · capital crimes · appeals process · retribution · morality · justice · commutation · final appeal · last meal
- Soviet RepressionStalin, NKVD, gulag, gulags, Great Purge
- war crimescrimes against humanity, Nuremberg, war crimes tribunals, prisoner abuse, war criminals
- criminal trialstrials, accused, verdicts, convictions, charges
death sentencespardons
Official forgiveness of crimes
clemency · acquittals · reprieves · amnesty · exoneration
death sentenceslife sentences
Punishment lasting until death
reprieves · clemency · pardons · second chances · new leases on life
death sentencesacquittals
Verdicts freeing defendants
exonerations · dismissals · charges dropped · pardons · vindication
death, sentence, deaths, sentences, deadly, deaden, deadened, deathly, deathlike