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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. 

Warren, Biden Reject Trump Plan to Speed Executions for Slayings

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Leading Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden rejected the idea of speeding up executions for mass slayings, a measure the Trump administration plans to pursue.

The White House will back legislation drafted by the Justice Department to expedite the death penalty for people convicted of mass murder, Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence told reporters traveling with Pence between Poland and Ireland on Monday.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren rolled her eyes at the idea when asked at an event in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.

“I don’t support the death penalty,” she said during a gaggle with reporters.

She said she’d support a government buyback of weapons.


“We need to treat this as the public health emergency that it is,” Warren said. “And it’s going to take a lot of pieces and a lot of changes that we need to do to bring down deaths from gun violence.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the leading Democratic candidate to contest Trump’s re-election, said Monday that he didn’t believe the death penalty proposal advocated by Pence would have stopped mass shooters like the one responsible for the El Paso attack.

Pence’s proposal was “what you do when you can’t get something done that’s rational -- you increase the penalty for the irrational,” Biden said during a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

In July, Biden released a criminal justice plan that called for abolishing the death penalty.

Source: Bloomberg, Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou  and Tyler Pager, August 3, 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: Washington, DC, USA
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