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Arkansas Supreme Court Decision Allows New DNA Testing in Case of the ​“West Memphis Three,” Convicted of Killing Three Children in 1993

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On April 18, 2024, the Arkansas Supreme Court decided 4-3 to reverse a 2022 lower court decision and allow genetic testing of crime scene evidence from the 1993 killing of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis. The three men convicted in 1994 for the killings were released in 2011 after taking an Alford plea, in which they maintained their innocence but plead guilty to the crime, in exchange for 18 years’ time served and 10 years of a suspended sentence. 

Prosecutors Seek Death Penalty for Kansas Anti-Semitic Gunman

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Former KKK leader Frazier Glenn Cross facing hate crimes charges; if found guilty could face death penalty.

Prosecutors filed a death penalty murder charge Tuesday against a white supremacist accused of fatally shooting 3 people at Jewish sites over the weekend, judicial sources said.

Frazier Glenn Cross, 73, was charged with 1 count of capital murder for the deaths of a 69-year-old physician and his teenage grandson outside the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City.

He also faces 1 count of 1st-degree murder for the death of a 53-year-old woman at the nearby Village Shalom retirement community where she was paying a weekly visit to her mother.

Cross was scheduled to appear in court Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., a spokeswoman for Johnson County District Attorney Stephen Howe told AFP by telephone.

Sunday's bloodshed - on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Pesach (Passover) - occurred in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park. All 3 victims were Christian.

Local police, FBI agents and federal prosecutors said Monday they intended to pursue Cross for hate crimes, which under federal law calls for tougher sentencing.

Cross shouted "Heil Hitler" from the back of a police car when he was taken into custody Sunday.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League described Cross as a North Carolina native and former US army Green Beret commando who, in the 1980s, founded and led the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party.

The center, which monitors hate groups, said Cross, a Vietnam war veteran, is well-known for espousing anti-Semitic and white supremacist views.

He spent 3 years in federal prison after being indicted on weapons charges and for plotting robberies and the murder of the law center's co-founder Morris Dees.

More recently, resettling in rural Aurora, Missouri, Cross helped launch a short-lived newspaper called The Aryan Alternative and "actively promoted his racist and anti-Semitic views online," the Anti-Defamation League said.

"I'm a patriotic white man... The only thing I ain't figured out is whether to hate all you (expletive) Jews or just the Zionists," Cross candidly told Kansas City television station KMBC in a 2006 interview.

Source: Israel National News, April 16, 2014
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