China arrested more than 800,000 people last year for endangering state security or for being involved in activities regarded as separatist, terrorist or extremist, a top official.

US Catholic bishops launched a campaign against the death penalty and presented new data suggesting support for capital punishment among American Catholics had fallen sharply in recent years to below 50 percent. Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick told a news conference the campaign would bring renewed urgency and energy to efforts to end capital punishment.

the number of people sentenced to death last year in the United States fell to the lowest level since the US Supreme Court reinstated the penalty in 1976.

the Bush administration decided to pull out of an international agreement that opponents of the death penalty have used to fight the sentences of foreigners on death row in the United States, officials said.

the White House has ordered state courts to consider the complaints of 51 Mexican foreign nationals on death row in the United States, International Herald Tribune reported.

the US Supreme Court ruled the US Constitution generally forbids the use of shackles for a defendant at a sentencing hearing to determine whether the death penalty will be imposed.

a legislative committee rejected a bill on April 12 aimed at reinstating the state's death penalty, which a court had suspended last year.

preliminary data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report for 2004 found that murders in the U. S. dropped last year by 3.6%. The number of executions also declined in 2004.

the NACDL's Spring Meeting will be held in New York from April 14 to April 17, 2005. An important occasion to be involved in the ever-expanding International Criminal Law arena.

American researchers have called for a halt to lethal injection, the most common method of execution in the United States, because it is not always a humane and painless way to die.

the US Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by Jose Medellin, a Mexican man facing execution in Texas, in a closely watched test-case on whether World Court rulings on capital cases apply to US courts.