Death Penalty News

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she found it “distasteful” to affirm the death sentence of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev based on her personal opposition to capital punishment. “I found the vote distasteful to cast, and I wish our system worked differently,” Barrett writes in a passage of her new memoir, according to an excerpt published by the Free Press. “Yet I had no doubt that voting to affirm the sentence was the right thing for me to do.” Barrett’s memoir, “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution,” is scheduled to be published Sept. 9. The Trump appointee will mark her fifth anniversary as a justice this fall.

A fractured Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a new trial for Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip, whose appeal drew national attention and support from the state’s conservative attorney general, in light of allegations that the state withheld evidence related to its main witness. The ruling is a major win for Glossip, whose 1998 conviction for arranging the murder of Barry Van Treese a year earlier has been called into question by him and, critically, the state attorney general after new evidence emerged in recent years.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday that a federal court can’t order a state to transport a death row inmate to a medical facility for testing without a showing that the information sought would be useful in the prisoner’s habeas case. At issue was a federal court order requiring Ohio to transport death row inmate Raymond Twyford for a neurological examination. Twyford claimed that his trial lawyer had been ineffective for failing to investigate his head injury after he shot himself at age 13. Twyford was convicted for killing a man who allegedly raped his girlfriend’s daughter. At trial, Twyford’s lawyer had pursued another theory: that Twyford committed the murder to save the rape victim from the type of abuse that Twyford had suffered as a child. A federal court had used the All Writs Act to order Twyford’s transportation to the hospital for tests. The law authorizes federal courts to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeab...

The Supreme Court has reinstated the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In a 6-3 ruling on Friday, the court found that a federal appeals court was wrong to vacate the death sentence based on issues of jury selection and evidence. The vote was divided along lines of ideology, with outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Elena Kagan, and, in part, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting with the ruling. Three people were killed and 260 were injured, many seriously, in the 2013 bombing. Seventeen of those who were injured lost limbs. A police officer was killed during the ensuing manhunt. “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one,” conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. The court was looking at a ruling by a panel of three judges in the US Court of Appeals for the first Circuit. The panel agreed with Tsarnaev’s attorneys back in July that p...

An Alabama inmate who sought execution by nitrogen hypoxia was put to death by lethal injection Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the execution to proceed. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was among 4 justices who would have kept an injunction in place that prevented execution of the inmate, 43-year-old Matthew Reeves . She did not join the dissent, however, by Justice Elena Kagan that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen G. Breyer. Reeves’ lawyers had contended that he failed to choose execution by nitrogen hypoxia because he didn’t understand the form presenting the choices. Reeves read at a grade-school level because of cognitive deficiencies, according to the evidence. Reeves claimed that the Americans with Disabilities Act required prison officials to explain the form to him. A federal judge and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Atlanta had prevented Reeves’ execution. The appeals court had reasoned that Reeves would still be executed by hydrogen hypoxia...

Hamm v. Reeves , a death penalty order that the Supreme Court handed down Thursday night, is an epilogue to a longstanding tension between drug companies that do not wish their products to be used to kill people, and states that are willing to use unreliable drugs to conduct executions if effective sedatives are not available. It’s also unsettlingly cruel. The upshot of the Court’s 5-4 decision in Hamm is that a man was executed using a method that may have caused him excruciating pain, most likely because that man’s disability prevented him from understanding how to opt in to a less painful method of execution. There is significant evidence that Matthew Reeves, a man convicted of murder that the state of Alabama executed after the Supreme Court permitted it to do so on Thursday, had an intellectual disability. Among other things, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in a 2021 dissenting opinion, an expert employed by the state gave Reeves an IQ test and determined that “Reeves’ IQ was wel...

Man executed for 1996 killing after Supreme Court clears way Alabama executed an inmate by lethal injection for a 1996 murder on Thursday after a divided U.S. Supreme Court sided with the state and rejected defense claims the man had an intellectual disability that cost him a chance to choose a less “torturous,” yet untried, execution method. Matthew Reeves, 43, was put to death at Holman Prison after the court lifted a lower court order that had prevented corrections workers from executing the prisoner. He was pronounced dead at 9:24 p.m. CST, state Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement. Reeves was convicted of killing a driver who gave him a ride in 1996. Evidence showed Reeves went to a party afterward and celebrated the killing. He had no last words. After craning his neck to look around a few times, Reeves grimaced and looked toward his left arm toward an intravenous line. With his eyes closed and mouth slightly agape, Reeves' abdomen moved repeatedly before he g...

The United States Supreme Court heard argument November 9, 2021 to review Texas death-row prisoner John Henry Ramirez’s claim that the state’s refusal to allow his pastor to “lay hands” on him or pray audibly during his execution violates the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) and his First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. The Court appeared troubled by Ramirez’s religious freedom claims, but some conservative justices openly worried that ruling for Ramirez would open a floodgate of last-minute execution-related litigation at the Supreme Court. The Court had stayed Ramirez’s execution on September 8, 2021, in an order issued three hours after he had been scheduled to be put to death. Ramirez had asked that Texas permit his pastor to accompany him to the execution chamber, pray audibly, and “lay lands” on him to administer religious rites, as the state had permitted prison chaplains to do in the past. Texas — which had amended its exe...