Brian Dorsey, convicted of murdering his cousin and her husband, put to death amid efforts by many to have his sentence commuted

Brian Dorsey, who was convicted of murdering his cousin and her husband in 2006, was executed in Missouri’s Bonne Terre state prison Tuesday despite an extraordinary effort by corrections officials and his appeals judge to have his capital sentence commuted.

Prison officials confirmed that Dorsey had been put to death by lethal injection. They said he had been pronounced dead at 6.11pm.

Prison guards, judges, jurors and prison workers have beseeched Mike Parson to commute capital punishment to life without parole

With less than a week until Brian Dorsey is scheduled to be executed at Potosi correctional center in Missouri for the 2006 killings of his cousin and her husband, an extraordinary effort is underway to have the 52-year-old death row inmate’s capital sentence commuted to life without parole.

More than 150 people have called on the Missouri governor Mike Parson to commute Dorsey’s punishment – including more than 70 current and former prison workers, many of whom got to know Doresy behind bars, Republican state representatives, jurors and even the appeals judge who upheld Dorsey’s conviction and death sentence in 2009.

Afghan regime’s return to public stoning and flogging is because there is ‘no one to hold them accountable’ for abuses, say activists

The Taliban’s announcement that it is resuming publicly stoning women to death has been enabled by the international community’s silence, human rights groups have said.

Safia Arefi, a lawyer and head of the Afghan human rights organisation Women’s Window of Hope, said the announcement had condemned Afghan women to return to the darkest days of Taliban rule in the 1990s.

Move follows Alabama’s recent killing of death row inmate Kenneth Smith using previously untested method

Three of the largest manufacturers of medical-grade nitrogen gas in the US have barred their products from being used in executions, following Alabama’s recent killing of the death row inmate Kenneth Smith using a previously untested method known as nitrogen hypoxia.

The three companies have confirmed to the Guardian that they have put in place mechanisms that will prevent their nitrogen cylinders falling into the hands of departments of correction in death penalty states. The move by the trio marks the first signs of corporate action to stop medical nitrogen, which is designed to preserve life, being used for the exact opposite – killing people.

This week Ivan Cantu faces execution in Texas for murder. I’ve known him for 20 years and felt the trauma when prisoners die

I’ve known Ivan Cantu for 20 years. I also know the day he is due to die. Cantu, 50, has been on death row since 2001. I first met him a few years later when I moved to Texas from England. In the two decades I’ve covered the death penalty in the US, Cantu has helped me understand what inmates go through in one of the America’s most notorious prisons, and his own story of how he got there – a story that, if his execution goes ahead , will end on Wednesday at 6pm.

That story is complicated. Cantu was convicted of killing his cousin and his cousin’s fiancée in November 2000 as a result of a drug dispute. But he’s always denied it. There was no physical evidence proving he was at the crime scene – no fingerprints, shoe prints, DNA. And he was hundreds of miles away at his fiancée’s parents’ house in Arkansas when the bodies of James Mosqueda, 27, and Amy Kitchen, 22, were discovered in their Dallas home, riddled with bullets. Yet Cantu’s jeans and socks, which police found in his rubbish bin, had the victims’ blood on them, and Cantu’s fiancée, Amy Boettcher, told police he had shown her the bodies.