Death Penalty News

Brian Dorsey is a “rare case where those of us who sit in judgment of a man convicted of capital murder got it wrong,” according to a former judge who upheld his death sentence. Brian Dorsey's appointed trial lawyers were paid a flat fee of $12,000 to represent him. Against the advice of another lawyer, they advised Dorsey to plead guilty without a deal from prosecutors to take the death penalty off the table. 

Across the country, few people have been on death row longer than Karu Gene White. White was 20 years old when he was convicted of taking part in the brutal murders of three elderly Breathitt County shopkeepers in February 1979. The following year, he was sentenced to death by execution. Today, nearly 44 years later, White is still languishing on death row at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Lyon County — awaiting an execution that may never come. And he’s not the only one.

Some death penalty lawyers get paid the same no matter how long they work on a case. Critics say it’s a perverse incentive when a life is at stake. Brian Dorsey’s argument for why he should not be executed by the state of Missouri requires the kind of math familiar to any gig worker.

The American Bar Association filed an amicus brief today with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the court for the 2nd time to take up a Texas death penalty case in which defendant Areli Escobar was convicted on DNA evidence and testimony from a police laboratory that was later deemed unreliable by the state.

Sixty correctional officers and prison staff say a Missouri man who faces execution in April should be granted clemency.  Brian Dorsey is scheduled to die by lethal injection on April 9. The 51 year old was convicted in the 2006 killing of his cousin Sarah Bonnie and her husband Ben Bonnie in New Bloomfield, in central Missouri. He has served most of his sentence at Potosi Correctional Center, about 70 miles south of St. Louis.

Retired Judge James Brogan began his legal career in 1967 as an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney in Montgomery County. He was elected in 1980 and served five terms on the Ohio Second District Court of Appeals before retiring in 2011. My involvement with the death penalty runs deep. I dealt with capital punishment cases as a prosecutor and judge in Montgomery County. In 2011, I was appointed by the then-chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court to serve as chairman of the Joint Task Force on the Administration of Ohio’s Death Penalty. I do not oppose the death penalty in concept, but because it fails as an effective public policy, I support current legislation to repeal Ohio’s capital punishment statute. When Ohio reinstituted the death penalty in the late 1990s, both the electric chair - 'Old Sparky" - and a bed for lethal injection were available in the death chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility outside of Lucasville. Now both methods have been ruled out, leaving st...

On October 30, 2023, the United States Supreme Court denied Texas death-sentenced prisoner Brent Brewer’s petition for certiorari and clearing the way for his scheduled execution on November 9th. Mr. Brewer’s attorneys argue that unreliable “future dangerousness” junk science testimony from a psychiatrist who never even met Mr. Brewer resulted in his death sentence. At trial, the prosecution called Dr. Richard Coons as an expert witness to opine about Mr. Brewer’s future behavior. Despite never meeting with Mr. Brewer, Dr. Coons testified that he would “probably” join a prison gang while incarcerated, depicting him “as a terminally dangerous menace to society.” After hearing Dr. Coons’ testimony, the jury sentenced Mr. Brewer to death.

Will junk science prevail? By April 1990, 19-year-old Brent Brewer was in the midst of a full-blown crisis.  A few weeks earlier, he’d been released from a hospital in Texas, where he’d been involuntarily committed for several months after his grandmother, with whom he was living, found a suicide note he’d written. In the midst of a relapse and with no place to stay, Brent and his girlfriend, whom he’d met at the hospital, asked a flooring store owner named Robert Doyle Laminack for a ride to an Amarillo-area Salvation Army. In the car, Brent and his girlfriend tried to rob Laminack at knifepoint. In the ensuing struggle, Brewer stabbed Laminack in the neck, killing him.

Scott Panetti was deemed incompetent for execution. What does this mean for other prisoners? A federal judge has declared that Scott Panetti, a longtime resident of Texas’ death row, is incompetent for execution due to the severity of his mental illness. The decision comes more than 15 years after the U.S. Supreme Court determined—also in Panetti’s case—that the Eighth Amendment bars the state from executing someone who doesn’t understand the reason for their execution. 

It took a jury about 40 minutes to decide that Louis Gaskin should die. Dubbed by the media the Ninja Killer because of the dark outfit he wore during his crimes, Gaskin had been found guilty of shooting Robert and Georgette Sturmfels as he burglarized their Flagler County home. His defense attorney offered little to weigh against capital punishment. From what Thomas Stuckey remembers more than three decades after he served on the 12-person jury, they didn’t have much to discuss. “There was no debate whatsoever,” Stuckey said. “It was cut and dried.” Court records, though, reflect a vote of 8-4. That means four people voted for life in prison. But the other eight were all that were needed to send Gaskin to death row.

The number of botched executions in the United States reached a record high in 2022, according to a report released by a non-profit capital punishment research group on Friday, even as the overall number of inmates put to death remained near a 5-decade low. 7 of the 20 executions attempted this year were "visibly problematic," including 1 attempt at lethal injection that led to an unprecedented 3-hour struggle to insert an intravenous (IV) line into an Alabama man, the Death Penalty Information Center said in its annual report. 2 of the 20 executions attempts this year - both lethal injections in Alabama - were called off midway after officials tried and failed to establish IV lines, prompting the state's Republican governor to call for a "top-to-bottom" review of the execution process. Other scheduled executions were called off in Tennessee, Idaho and South Carolina when state officials discovered lapses in execution preparation or protocol, the report said. Th...

After Charles Rhines, a gay man, was convicted of murder, jurors weighing a death sentence argued that sending him to prison for life would have been “sending him where he wants to go” because of all the men there. Advocates around the country are fighting jury discrimination after one man’s sexuality was a contributing factor in his 2019 execution. Charles Rhines confessed to murdering 22-year-old Donnivan Schaefer during a 1992 burglary in South Dakota. The defendant went to a Rapid City doughnut shop — from which he’d been fired weeks earlier — forced Schaefer into a storeroom, tied him up and stabbed him repeatedly in the stomach, according to CBS News. RELATED |  South Dakota executes Charles Rhines The controversy in Rhines’ case came during the sentencing phase of his 1993 murder trial, when jurors were left to decide between a sentence of life in prison or death by execution.  He received the death penalty — in part because the men and women tasked with deciding his fa...

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...

Clark County ranks fifth in the nation for counties with the highest number of new death sentences in the last five years (2017-2021). The death penalty is being aggressively pursued while at the same time, nationally, new executions, new death sentences, and public opinions of the practice are at record lows and the practice itself continues to erode. Virginia has executed more people than any other state in the nation — and is the most recent to abolish the death penalty. Most U.S. states have either abolished the death penalty (23) or have an official moratorium (10), while another 10, including Nevada, have not had an execution in at least 10 years. Eleven people were executed in the United States in 2021 – the fewest of any year since 1988. We are told that the death penalty is necessary for “the worst of the worst,” yet the data demonstrate these individuals were among the most vulnerable or impaired. According to the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center, 10 out of the 11 ...

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...

The United States Supreme Court recently decided to consider in a consolidated case next fall, two separate cases involving Arizona death row inmates who are seeking relief from their death sentences because the attorneys who represented them decades ago failed to present evidence that could have mitigated their sentences or cast doubt upon their guilt. Cases like this are always difficult. The crimes involved are heinous and justice for the victims and their families is always a concern. The death penalty is an issue on which many Americans have differing views. While the American Bar Association does not specifically oppose the death penalty, we do insist it is applied and used fairly. And that is what is at issue here. Important evidence was never presented Nothing has a greater impact on fairness in capital cases than the effectiveness of legal representation. Courts have long recognized a fundamental constitutional right to effective counsel at trial. Unfortunately, the representa...

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released its annual report, The State of Criminal Justice 2021 , examining major issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. The annual bar publication includes a chapter devoted to significant developments in capital punishment, authored by Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice and a longtime member of the Steering Committee of the ABA’s Death Penalty Representation Project­. Tabak’s analysis highlights the effects of the Trump administration’s unprecedented federal execution spree, the historic repeal of capital punishment in Virginia, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the continuing long-term downward trend in death sentences and executions across the U.S., and the decrease in public support for capital punishment. “After 17 years in which the federal government did not execute anyone, it executed 13 people between...

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium on federal executions and a new study of death penalty procedures last week. The move is a small step that fails to make good on President Joe Biden’s campaign promises to end capital punishment. Following on the heels of the Justice Department‘s effort to restore Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence, Garland’s announcement sends a muddled message about what the administration wants to do about capital punishment. Together, these two actions suggest that there is not much courage behind the administration’s rhetorical anti–death penalty commitments. Opponents of the death penalty should expect and demand more while the current Democratic administration is in office. Recent history cautions that announcing a moratorium is often a substitute for rather than a step toward ending capital punishment. It saves lives for the time it is in place, but a moratorium is easily reversed if and when a pro–death penalty admi...