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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. 

Sotomayor Blasts Secrecy Around Execution Drugs

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Justice Sotomayor
(CN) – Echoing concerns she has raised in other capital cases, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday slammed her colleagues’ decision not to hear the appeal of a Tennessee inmate set to be executed next year.  

Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman was convicted in 1987 of first-degree murder for stabbing a drug dealer to death in Nashville.  

After losing appeals based on claims of ineffective counsel and prosecutorial misconduct, Abdur’Rahman alleged cumulative error affecting his sentencing and improper jury instructions about accomplice testimony.

The Sixth Circuit rejected his appeal in 2015. His execution is scheduled for April 9, 2020.   

Last October, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Tennessee to execute double murderer Edmund Zagorski by electric chair because he argued the state’s lethal injection protocol constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Justice Sotomayor dissented in that case, saying she takes issue with the “perverse requirement that inmates offer alternative methods for their own executions.”

Tennessee is one of many states that has struggled in recent years to find alternative drugs for its execution protocol in the wake of pharmaceutical shortages driven by protests against the death penalty.

The barbiturate pentobarbital is widely regarded as a humane method of execution for its ability to render the subject fully insensate, but Sotomayor noted that Tennessee “was noncommittal about pentobarbital’s availability” after scheduling Zagorski’s execution last year.

The Supreme Court similarly declined Monday to take up Abdur’Rahman’s case, drawing a single-page dissent from Sotomayor.

“Today, the court again ignores the further injustice of state secrecy laws denying death-row prisoners access to potentially crucial information for meeting [the alternative-method] require­ment,” she wrote. “Because I continue to believe that the alternative-method requirement is fundamentally wrong—and particularly so when compounded by secrecy laws like Tennessee’s—I dissent.”

Source: Court News, Kevin Lessmiller, May 13, 2019


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Location: Tennessee, USA
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