Paragould News

An officer in Sacramento spots a vehicle possibly connected to an armed robbery; Seattle deputies use a Taser on a known offender; Cleveland police chase a fleeing suspect who hides his crack.

While the City of Rector currently has in excess of $268,000 in unpaid fines for various violations, a discussion in Monday night's city council meeting indicated the city already is going about collecting these funds in the most effective way.

By Ethan C. Nobles Arkansas Realtors Association Ethan@ArkansasRealtors.com According to Hanley Wood , the U.S. remodeling industry pulls in $306 billion a year.

TRUMANN/PARAGOULD, AR - A Region 8 News investigation has revealed disturbing details involving teenagers and young adults.

The Piggott Community Center took on the sights and sounds of Christmas Tuesday, Oct.

There are approximately 2,200 registered sex offenders in Region 8, according to Missouri and Arkansas sex offender registries.

A Paragould man died in a single car accident just north of Newark early Tuesday morning.

Two people were killed in Greene County Thursday night after a car lost on control on the wet road.

Good morning, folks. I can't report on Rector's weather this morning as I am currently in Rison, AR visiting with Carol and Jim Stone.

Parents and school officials across the Region 8 viewing area are reacting to recent child abduction reports throughout the country.

Fifteen organizations from throughout the state have been presented Arkansas Governor's Quality Awards during the 15th Annual Awards Celebration for the Governor's Quality Award Program.

Robert Roy Britt editorial Director space.com Tue Oct 20, 12:30 pm ET The Orionid meteor shower is expected to put on a good show tonight into the predawn hours Wednesday, weather permitting.

With the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery in it's third week and gathering steam. Many church aligned private colleges are having to deal with the issue of their students playing the lottery.

Volunteers passionate about Greene Countya s history have turned a downtown building once used for data processing into one for historic preservation.

George Ray's Wildcat Dragstrip in Paragould will celebrate 50 years next year and Jimmy Flanigan of Manila has been there from the start.

October's Teacher of the Month teaches at Crowley's Ridge Academy in Paragould. For the past three years this woman of faith has been battling cancer and taking the life lessons she has learned and sharing them with her students.

The Web's most remarkable stories, determined by people like you. Stories are ranked based on your votes, comments, emails, and searches.

Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother's fiance by his side to vouch for him.

As the international community prepares to mark the World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October, Amnesty International has highlighted two cases of people facing execution - one in the USA, one in Iran.

A Texas man who faces execution after jurors at his trial consulted the Bible when deliberating his fate should have his death sentence commuted, Amnesty International said on Friday.

Khristian Oliver, 32, is set to be killed on 5 November after jurors used Biblical passages supporting the death penalty to help them decide whether he should live or die.

Amnesty International is calling on the Texas authorities to commute Khristian Oliver's death sentence. The organization considers that the jurors' use of the Bible during their sentencing deliberations raises serious questions about their impartiality.

Khristian Oliver was sentenced to death in 1999 for a murder committed during a burglary. According to accomplice testimony at the trial, 20-year-old Oliver shot the victim before striking him on the head with a rifle butt.

After the trial, evidence emerged that jurors had consulted the Bible during their sentencing deliberations. At a hearing in June 1999, four of the jurors recalled that several Bibles had been present and highlighted passages had been passed around.

One juror had read aloud from the Bible to a group of fellow jurors, including the passage, "And 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".

The judge ruled that the jury had not acted improperly and this was upheld by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

In 2002, a Danish journalist interviewed a fifth juror. The latter said that "about 80 percent" of the jurors had "brought scripture into the deliberation", and that the jurors had consulted the Bible "long before we ever reached a verdict".

He told the journalist he believed "the Bible is truth from page 1 to the last page", and that if civil law and biblical law were in conflict, the latter should prevail. He said that if he had been told he could not consult the Bible, "I would have left the courtroom". He described himself as a death penalty supporter, saying life imprisonment was a "burden" on the taxpayer.

As part of a global campaign to end the death penalty, ambassadors of the nations of the European Union (EU) gathered at the Swedish Embassy today to call on all nations to abolish the death penalty. The event was held to mark the World Day Against the Death Penalty, observed on Saturday, October 10.

The American Civil Liberties Union urges the Obama administration and all 35 U.S. death penalty states to heed the call of the EU and put a halt to the death penalty in the U.S. criminal justice system. Earlier this month, the ACLU delivered a statement on the flaws of the capital punishment system in the U.S. at the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation of Europe (OSCE) in Warsaw, Poland. Since 1977, over 1,125 people in the U.S. have been executed. 52 people have been executed since October of 2008. As of January 2009, the number of people awaiting execution across the country was approximately 3,300.

The following can be attributed to Jamil Dakwar, Director of the ACLU Human Rights Program:

"The European Union today has thrown down the gauntlet to all nations to end capital punishment once and for all. The U.S. should heed domestic and international calls to bring an end to the death penalty. It is time to admit that the use of the death penalty in the U.S. has been a failed experiment with a very high cost in human suffering and inestimable damage to the country's standing and image in the world as a beacon for human rights and democratic values."

The following can be attributed to John Holdridge, Director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project:

"The need to end this barbaric practice is underscored by the fact that five men were released from death row in 2009 and that new evidence has come forward that a man executed in Texas in 2004 could not have set the lethal fire for which he was condemned to die, meaning that an innocent man almost certainly has been put to death at the hands of the state. There are too many incurable problems with the death penalty. It remains arbitrary. There is racial and geographic bias in the decisions to try cases. It continues to be the penalty of the poor. The only way for the U.S. to prevent executing other innocent people is to end the practice of capital punishment."