Pussy Riot bandmember Maria Alyokhina, who was freed from prison Monday under a Kremlin-backed amnesty, slammed the measure as a mere publicity stunt and said that she would have preferred to remain in prison.
A Moscow court on Thursday convicted Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky of tax evasion, provoking fresh outrage more than three years after his prison death.
The US state of Texas on Wednesday executed its 500th convict since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, a record in a country where capital punishment is in decline elsewhere.
A German fantasist who impersonated a member of the Rockefeller family, an English aristocrat and a Hollywood film producer, was convicted Wednesday of murdering his California landlord in 1985.
The man behind the anti-Islam video blamed for sparking deadly protests in the Muslim world was jailed in the US for a year Wednesday for breaching the terms of his probation for a previous offense.
The US state of Oklahoma on Tuesday executed a convicted murderer who made a reference to the "very close race" for the White House won by President Barack Obama in his final words.
The leader of a breakaway Amish group and 15 followers were convicted of hate crimes in the US state of Ohio Thursday for a series of beard-cutting attacks against rivals in the community.
An obese death row inmate in the US state of Ohio has asked a court for a stay of execution, saying lethal injection would be "torturous and lingering" due to his weight.