Death Penalty News

The first-ever use of nitrogen gas by Alabama to kill Kenneth Smith shows why the U.S. must end these futile, costly, deeply flawed government killings, says Sister Helen Prejean. A few nights ago convicted murderer Kenneth Smith was suffocated to death by the state of Alabama. His killing with nitrogen gas was a first. And it was fully approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, which allows death penalty states to experiment at will with different methods of execution. This is a court that steadfastly refuses to recognize that the long, dragged-out confinement and killing of conscious human beings counts as “cruel punishment.”

Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed CS/HB 1297 into law, which made sexual assault and battery on children 12 or younger a capital offense, taking effect in October. Florida's Fifth Judicial Circuit could see the first application of the new law in a case now. Florida's Fifth Judicial Circuit, which covers Lake, Hernando, Sumter, Citrus, and Marion Counties is seeking the death penalty for Joseph A. Giampa, who reportedly captured video of himself abusing a minor.

The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution protects us from “cruel and unusual punishment” by the government. This seemingly simple language raises a host of complicated questions. “Cruel” by what standard? “Unusual” in what sense? Does this provision have a fixed meaning? Or does its meaning change over time? History offers a few clues. In 1689, England adopted a Declaration of Rights that prohibited “cruel and unusual punishments.” Some of the Founders argued that we needed a similar provision in our own Bill of Rights.

Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion ensures that innocent people will spend years behind bars. The Supreme Court just ruled that at least some federal prisoners who are completely innocent must serve out their entire sentence, with no meaningful way to challenge their unlawful conviction. One of the most fundamental principles of criminal law is that no one may be convicted of a crime unless the legislature previously passed a law making their actions illegal. If there is no law on the books that, say, marijuana possession is unlawful, then a judge cannot toss someone in jail because they were found with a joint.

Outrage around the school shooter’s sentence reveals tensions between what some victims’ families want and the justice system’s limits. After a Florida jury voted to sentence Nikolas Cruz to life in prison earlier this month for the murders of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,  news coverage  focused on the disappointment and rage of his victims’ families. Many of them wanted the death penalty, and some will speak in court at his sentencing on Nov. 1. Cruz’s trial featured days of defense testimony about his adversities, including his mother’s drug and alcohol use while he was developing in utero. That was his right — the Supreme Court  long ago said , when the death penalty is on the table, juries must consider the whole person, not just the single crime — but it left the impression that Cruz had won a sympathy contest. “This jury failed our families today,” Fred Guttenberg, the father of Jaime Guttenberg,  told reporters . Soon after, Florida Gov. ...

Alabama offered death-row inmates an untested method of execution — and then went back to the even worse option The state of Alabama wants to kill Alan Miller. But it is having a hard time getting its act together to do so. On Sept. 12, Alabama made headlines when it announced that it would use nitrogen hypoxia to put Miller to death. It had added this method to its execution arsenal in 2018, making Alabama one of just three states (along with Mississippi and Oklahoma) to authorize it. But none of them has yet to use it in an execution. Nitrogen hypoxia is a new and so far hypothetical method of administering capital punishment in which the air someone breathes is replaced with 100 percent nitrogen. As a CBC report explains, this will "deprive the person of the oxygen needed to maintain bodily functions," presumably leading to a rapid and painless death. Three days after that announcement, Alabama abruptly reversed course and said it would use lethal injection to execute Mill...

ONE WEEK BEFORE he was killed in the death chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, Donald Grant asked a woman named Sue Hosch a question about his coming execution. “He asked me, did I think it was going to be botched?” Hosch recalled. “And I said, ‘I don’t know.’” As an activist who corresponded with men on death row, Hosch hoped that Grant would die peacefully — “you know, go to sleep.” But he told her that he was scared. Grant had good reason to be afraid. In his years on death row, he had seen neighbors taken to die whose executions had gone horribly wrong. Since 2014, Oklahoma’s 3-drug lethal injection formula had relied upon midazolam, a sedative that experts warned was inadequate to provide anesthesia. In a lawsuit, attorneys for people on Oklahoma’s death row argued that using midazolam put their clients at risk of “severe pain, needless suffering, and a lingering death.” After a series of disastrous executions made national news, officials announced that they would revise ...

”The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.” A hard lesson that law students learn in criminal procedure classes is the difference between factual guilt and legal guilt . Factual guilt refers to what someone actually did. Legal guilt refers to what the prosecution can prove in accordance with law’s distinctive presumptions and burdens of proof. Being factually innocent is no guarantee of what juries and judges will decide as they apply those presumptions and burdens. Convicting the innocent is always tragic, but never more so than in death penalty cases. We know that 187 people have been wrongly convicted in capital cases and ultimately exonerated since 1973. And there is little doubt that innocent people have been executed in this country. On Monday, May 23, in Shinn v. Ramirez , the Supreme Court increased the chances that still more innocent people will be executed. In that case, the now-dominant six-Justice conservative majo...