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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. 

South Dakota: Charles Rhines execution scheduled for Monday

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Charles Russell Rhines
Charles Russell Rhines is scheduled to be executed the Department of Corrections  Monday, the Department of Corrections announced.

Rhines, 63, was sentenced to death in 1993 for the 1992 murder of 22-year-old Donnivan Schaeffer inside a Rapid City doughnut shop.

RELATED | South Dakota: Gay Man on Death Row Mounts Last-Ditch Effort

The execution will be at 1:30 p.m. at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls by lethal injection. 

Rhines will be the 20th person executed in South Dakota since 1877.

Rhines' execution comes after a lengthy list of appeals from the circuit courts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Most recently, Rhines protested the state's decision to use pentobarbital as the lethal barbiturate drug in his execution. 

Rhines had requested the state execute him with an ultra-short-acting barbiturate and a chemical paralytic, something the state did when he was sentenced in 1993. 

Current law allows inmates sentenced before a 2007 execution statute change to choose the manner of their execution by current law or at the time of their sentencing. 

A circuit court judge denied Rhines' request for a preliminary injunction and stay of execution, a decision Rhines appealed to the South Dakota Supreme Court. 

The South Dakota Supreme Court has not issued a ruling.

Rhines also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and stay his execution. There has not been a ruling. 

The last person to be executed in South Dakota was Rodney Berget, who was executed on Oct. 29, 2018, for the 2011 killing of correctional officer R.J. Johnson. 

Source: argusleader.com, Danielle Ferguson, November 1, 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: Sioux Falls, SD, USA
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