Death Penalty News

Reverend Jeff Hood, 40, wants to help condemned inmates 'feel human again' and vows to continue his efforts to befriend murderers in spite of death threats against his family A reverend who has made it his mission to comfort death row inmates in their final days has revealed the '"moral torture" his endeavor entails. Reverend Dr. Jeff Hood, 40, lives with his wife and five children in Little Rock, Arkansas. But away from his normal home life, he can suddenly find himself holding the shoulder of a murderer inside an execution chamber, moments away from the end of their life. 

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has approved legislation allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions, a change the Republican-controlled Statehouse championed amid concerns that the U.S. Supreme Court has banned capital punishment in such cases. Lee, a Republican, quietly signed off on the legislation in May without issuing a statement.

DENVER (AP) — Anderson Lee Aldrich, who killed five people and injured 19 others at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, is prepared to plead guilty to federal hate crime charges as well as gun charges Tuesday following new evidence of anti-gay slurs and weapons purchases before the mass shooting.

MONROE TOWNSHIP, Ohio — One year ago, three young brothers were shot and killed outside their home in New Richmond, Ohio.  Their father has been charged in their deaths. Chad Doerman was arrested last June after investigators said he shot and killed his three sons, 3-year-old Chase, 4-year-old Hunter and 7-year-old Clayton.

Professor Jimmy Gurulé, founder and director of the Notre Dame Exoneration Justice Clinic, recently attended the world premiere of “Rebel Nun,” a documentary of the life of Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., and her decades-long struggle against the death penalty.  The world premiere was held in New York City as part of the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival. The documentary was produced by Universal Pictures.

David Hosier, who was executed on June 11 for a crime he insisted he didn't commit, described the harrowing conditions of Missouri's death row, where he spent the last 11 years of his life During the last four months of his life, David Hosier spent almost all of his time in a 7-foot-wide by 15-foot-long cell, completely isolated from everyone, only allowed to leave if he was shackled head-to-toe, had a full security escort and a legitimate reason to venture out into the rest of the prison.

The 1200 building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where Nikolas Cruz killed 14 students and three adults in a Valentine’s Day shooting, is being torn down, much to the relief of Hunter Pollack, whose sister was one of the slain students.  Pollack believes that the building is a constant reminder of the horrific tragedy and should be demolished to help the community heal. The building has stood as a painful reminder of the tragic day for years, and the tearing down of the building is seen as an opportunity for closure for the community, which has been traumatized by the events that took place there.

"When they mapped my veins a couple nights before and seen exactly where my veins were at – I watched them map it – I thought, 'man I'm gone,'" Creech told KTVB. BOISE, Idaho — Three and a half months ago, Thomas Eugene Creech narrowly escaped death inside the execution chamber at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The man who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder will face death for killing his roommate’s 25-year-old girlfriend and putting her body in a plastic storage bin in 2019. A judge sentenced Markas Fishburne to death for the murder of Aisha Levy Thursday after a jury voted 10-to-2 in February.

BEIJING: Wang Haowen, who is serving a 15-year prison term for trafficking three children, has been punished again for the same crime. The penalty this time is death, thepaper.cn reported on Thursday (June 13). According to the Chinese media outlet, the 66-year-old man was recently sentenced to death by the Nanchong Intermediate People's Court in Sichuan province after being convicted of trafficking additional 11 children.

STOCKHOLM, June 13 (Reuters) - Sweden said on Thursday it had called in Iraq's charge d'affaires in Stockholm to protest against a death sentence handed down to a Swedish citizen in Iraq. The foreign ministry said Iraqi authorities had confirmed that one Swedish citizen had been sentenced to death and that it had also received information that one or two other Swedish citizens had been handed the same sentence.

Rev. Jeff Hood served as the spiritual adviser for David Hosier, who was executed by the state of Missouri on June 11, 2024. Shortly before 5:45 p.m. Tuesday, the Rev. Jeff Hood was escorted through a maze of halls and security checks at the prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri, leading him into the state’s execution chamber. “Big door after big door closes,” he said. “Every time one of the doors closes, you can ... feel it in your soul.” He was taken into the chamber where he sat down and put his right hand on David Hosier’s shoulder.

An Alabama jury on Wednesday recommended the death penalty for a man they convicted of capital murder in the 2019 slaying of a pregnant woman in a Conecuh County grocery store. The Conecuh County jury voted 10-2 in recommending death for Michael Collin Mitchell, 43, of Evergreen in the fatal shooting of Lavon McCreary and her unborn child, court records showed.

BUFFALO — Lawyers for the shooter who killed 10 people at a Tops grocery store in 2022 have asked for a federal court order exempting him from the death penalty because he was 18 years old at the time of the racist mass shooting. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juvenile offenders was unconstitutional. Since that ruling carved out an exemption for people under 18, the science of late-adolescent brain development has advanced markedly, according to the public defense lawyers for Payton Gendron.

A court on the Indonesian tourist island of Bali has began the trial of an Australian man who faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted of possessing methamphetamine under the country’s tough drug laws DENPASAR, Indonesia -- A court on the Indonesian tourist island of Bali on Thursday began the trial of an Australian man who faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted of possessing methamphetamine under the country's tough drug laws.

PARKLAND, Fla. (AP) — The three-story building where 17 people died in the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School looms over campus behind a screened fence, a horrific and constant reminder to students, teachers, the victims’ families and passersby.

Marcellus Williams has been sentenced to death, despite prosecutors saying he is innocent A man who has been sentenced to death in Missouri is not guilty of the crimes he is being sentenced for, prosecutors have said. Marcellus Williams has now had his execution date set, despite the people who are prosecuting him insisting that he is innocent.

Alabama is seeking to carry out another nitrogen gas execution, months after the state became the first to put a person to death with the previously untested method. The attorney general’s office on Monday asked the Alabama Supreme Court to authorize an execution date for Carey Dale Grayson, who was convicted in the 1994 killing of Vickie Deblieux in Jefferson County.

David Hosier, who maintained innocence in 2009 murders of Angela and Rodney Gilpin, pronounced dead at 6.11pm Missouri executed a man on death row on Tuesday night, the state’s second lethal injection carried out this year.

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); June 10, 2024: Iran Human Rights has recorded at least 64 executions in May and 237 executions in the first five months of 2024. According to data collected by Iran Human Rights, at least 64 people were executed in 18 different Iranian prisons and at least 237 were executed in the first five months of 2024.

Taberon Dave Honie is set to be executed using a new drug in a lethal injection cocktail, which will now feature ketamine alongside the usual fentanyl and potassium chloride A murderer has had his execution date set despite growing concerns over the lethal injection drug combination to be used.

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Missouri Gov. Mike Parson on Monday turned down a clemency request for condemned inmate David Hosier, a move that likely clears the way for his execution. Hosier, 69, faces lethal injection Tuesday for the 2009 deaths of a Jefferson City couple, Angela and Rodney Gilpin. 

Iran's judiciary has commuted the death sentence of a Sunni cleric to a life imprisonment sentence. Iran's judiciary media outlet, Mizan News Agency, reported that Mohammad Khezrnejad's execution sentence was reduced after he "expressed remorse and commitment to good behavior" and requested an amnesty.

The Lahore police have arrested Jamila Jacob, a Christian woman, on charges of committing blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad. The arrest followed an FIR filed at the North Cantonment police station, Lahore by Asif Ali, a local shopkeeper.

Thomas Creech, 73, was sentenced to death for fatally beating prisoner David Jensen back in 1981, but when he was wheeled into the execution chamber at Idaho Maximum Security prison in February, things didn't go to plan A death row inmate who was part of a botched execution has opened up on the harrowing ordeal.

The day after Alabama carried out the first-known US execution using nitrogen gas, its attorney general sent a clear message to death penalty states that might want to follow suit: “Alabama has done it, and now so can you.” Indeed, in the weeks immediately following the January execution of Kenneth Smith, it appeared a handful of states were listening, introducing bills that would adopt the method known as nitrogen hypoxia or a similar one. Officials behind each framed the legislation as an alternative method that could help resume executions where they had long been stalled.

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); June 5, 2024: Mohammad Saeed Zohrabi, Hassan Nematollahi and Mahmoud Ghaedi were executed for drug and murder charges in Shiraz Central Prison. Three other men’s executions were postponed.

Media reported that the Idaho Department of Corrections had purchased three doses of pentobarbital, the drug used in lethal injections, for $100,000 On June 1, 2024, an Idaho jury sentenced Chad Daybell to death for the 2019 murders of his first wife and his second wife’s two youngest children. Mr. Daybell pleaded not guilty to multiple first-degree murder, fraud, and conspiracy charges, but after being found guilty, he chose to waive his right to present mitigating evidence during his sentencing hearing. 

On August 9, 2018, Steven Hale stood outside a Tennessee prison as a convicted murderer inside awaited a lethal dose of a three-drug cocktail. It was the first execution of a death row inmate in the state in nearly a decade. Hale was one of seven reporters selected by a grim lottery to witness Billy Ray Irick’s execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He’d written stories about Irick’s horrific rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl more than three decades earlier.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana judges could order surgical castration for people convicted of sex crimes against young children under legislation approved Monday, and if Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signs it into law, the state apparently would be the first with such a punishment. The GOP-controlled Legislature passed the bill giving judges the option to sentence someone to surgical castration after the person has been convicted of certain aggravated sex crimes — including rape, incest and molestation — against a child under 13.

Three inmates convicted of drug offenses were executed in Adelabad Prison, Shiraz, on June 1, according to the Iran Human Rights Organization. The executed inmates have been identified as Mohammad-Saeed Zohrabi, Hassan Nematollahi, and 30-year-old Mahmoud Ghaedi.

In a landmark ruling, District Judge and Additional Sessions Judge S R Padwal has issued a triple death penalty in the harrowing case of the rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl reported in Linga village of Kalmeshwar tehsil in 2019.  Sanjay Devpuri Puri (32), the convict, faced full force of the law as Judge Padwal found him guilty under multiple sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. 

Nazir Masih was under treatment in CMH Hospital for nine days and underwent two head surgeries SARGODHA: A Christian man who became a target of an angry mob in Punjab's Sargodha district over alleged blasphemy succumbed to his injuries on Monday morning, police officials said. 

Fukuoka, June 5 (Jiji Press)--A Japanese court Wednesday turned down a request for a retrial for the 1992 murder of two girls in the southwestern prefecture of Fukuoka, for which a death row convict had been executed. Fukuoka District Court thus denied the second retrial request over the so-called Iizuka incident, in which two primary school first graders in the Fukuoka city of Iizuka were killed. 

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — A man who was sentenced to death for killing a 15-year-old girl died by suicide inside a Nevada state prison, according to the Clark County Coroner’s office. Staff at Ely State Prison found Norman Belcher, 49, unresponsive last Thursday, the 8 News Now Investigators have learned.  The cause of death was hanging, according to the Coroner’s office.

By a vote of 6-3 along ideological lines, the justices ruled that a federal appeals court was wrong when it ordered post-conviction relief for Danny Lee Jones, who contended that his Sixth Amendment right to have adequate representation by his lawyer was violated during the sentencing phase of his trial. Jones was convicted and sentenced to die in 1993 for the brutal murders of three people: Robert Weaver, Weaver’s seven-year-old daughter Tisha, and Katherine Gumina, Weaver’s grandmother. Jones beat each of his victims with a baseball bat.

The United States ranks among the top countries using capital punishment, contributing to a worldwide surge in executions last year. That’s according to data released last week by Amnesty International, which opposes capital punishment in all cases. The London-based rights group’s annual report on the global use of the death penalty documents more than 1,100 executions in 2023.

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A jury in Idaho unanimously agreed Saturday that convicted killer Chad Daybell deserves the death penalty for the gruesome murders of his wife and his girlfriend’s two youngest children, ending a grim case that began in 2019 with a search for two missing children. The prosecutors claim the case was fueled by power, sex, money and apocalyptic spiritual beliefs.

MANILA – The Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) assured two overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) on death row in Brunei of the government’s continuing support. DMW Secretary Hans Leo Cacdac visited OFWs Edgar Puzon and Cyrile Tagapan at the Maraburong Prison Facility 1 in Keriam, Tutong District, Brunei Darussalam last Wednesday.