Death Penalty News

A death row inmate spent Monday in court so a lawyer could fight his death sentence, despite his own desire to die. In 2016, Scotty Ray Gardner was arrested for the murder of Susan Stubbs. His attorney says his desire to be executed was made clear during the months leading up to his conviction and sentencing. Public and private statements since Gardner's trial reaffirm his desire to be executed. Gardner has just finished his eighth year on death row. Meanwhile, his case is undergoing a standard appeals process. At the Faulkner County Courthouse in Conway on Monday, his new attorney Lee Short called Gardner's former attorney to the stand. Thomas Scott Brisendine represented Gardner in the initial 2018 murder trial.

In 2008, a majority of the Supreme Court decided that executing a man who raped his eight-year-old stepdaughter so violently that she required emergency surgery violated the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. That’s the holding of Kennedy v. Louisiana , 554 U.S. 407. Four justices disagreed. Sixteen years later, multiple states have passed laws saying the majority was wrong, and they intend to prove it.

A Faulkner County judge has scheduled an August hearing to determine whether a death row inmate can bypass his attorney’s advice, drop his remaining appeals, and hasten his execution.  Scotty Ray Gardner, 65, is facing the death penalty for the 2016 killing of his girlfriend, Susan Heather Stubbs, in Conway.  In letters sent to Circuit Judge Chuck Clawson and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Gardner said he wants to end his legal battles, writing that he is tired of prison life and skeptical he will receive a fair hearing.  “It’s simple,” Gardner wrote in a September letter. “Come on with it.” 

An Arkansas man was released from prison Friday after serving more than three decades for a murder he said he did not commit. Charlie Vaughn had been incarcerated since 1991 for the 1988 murder, rape, and burglary of 81-year-old Myrtle Holmes.  DNA testing conducted in 1989 had excluded Vaughn as the source of the sexual assault, but he was charged anyway and later pleaded guilty to first-degree murder to avoid the death penalty, despite no physical evidence linking him to the crime.

MONTGOMERY, Ala.  — The execution of Anthony Boyd by nitrogen gas in Alabama on Thursday marked the longest use of the untested method in U.S. history, stretching nearly 40 minutes amid convulsions, labored breathing and witness accounts of prolonged agony.  At 37 minutes from the start of the procedure until death was declared, Boyd's final moments have reignited fierce debates over whether the oxygen-deprivation technique — touted by states as a painless alternative to lethal injection — constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Scotty Gardner wants out of “his cave” at the Varner SuperMax Prison south of Grady, Arkansas. In messages with USA TODAY, he described the conditions of his cell as, “a walk-in closet with a shower, toilet, a sink and drain in the floor that bugs crawl in and out constantly.” He also mentioned recurring issues with black mold and toilets that constantly overflow. To get out, Gardner is asking the state to be the first inmate executed since 2017. 

Ten Arkansas death row inmates filed suit Aug. 5 to block a new law allowing the state to administer the death penalty using nitrogen gas. Act 302, passed this year, was scheduled to take effect Aug. 5. It allows Division of Correction officials to choose between lethal injection or nitrogen hypoxia. The latter is the administration of nitrogen gas, which causes cells to die from lack of oxygen. The state has not executed anyone since 2017 because drugmakers do not want their products used in lethal injection, previously the only legal way of executing an individual in Arkansas. There are 23 prisoners on death row in Arkansas, according to the Arkansas Department of Corrections.

"The stuff that nightmares are made on." Reader discretion advised. A 45-year-old woman in Arkansas who lured a pregnant victim into an ambush and cut out her fetus in a botched scheme to “claim” the child as her own will face the death penalty after the state’s highest court rejected an appeal in which her lawyers argued that her upcoming state murder trial was barred by double jeopardy. The Arkansas Supreme Court last week denied the appeal of Amber Waterman, holding that her federal kidnapping convictions did not prohibit the state from pursuing murder charges against her for the 2022 slayings of 33-year-old Ashley Bush and her unborn daughter, whom she had named Valkyrie Grace Willis.

Bruce Ward, a convicted murderer who was the longest-serving inmate on Arkansas’ death row, has died, the state Department of Corrections said. He was 68.  The state Department of Corrections said Ward was pronounced dead Tuesday from natural causes. He had been held on death row at the Varner SuperMax unit in Gould, located 67 miles (108 kilometers) south of Little Rock.  Citing confidentiality, the department declined to provide any further details on Ward’s health or the circumstances surrounding his death. 

State lawmakers on Tuesday sent a bill to the governor’s desk that would allow executions by nitrogen gas in Arkansas.  If Gov. Sarah Huckabee signs House Bill 1489 into law, Arkansas would become the fifth state to authorize this method of execution. Alabama, the only state to have used nitrogen gas, has executed four inmates in this manner since January 2024.  Legislators in Nebraska and Ohio have filed bills similar to Arkansas’ as officials search for alternatives to lethal injection because of the cha llenges they’ve faced in securing the necessary drugs. South Carolina last week carried out the nation’s first execution by firing squad since 2010. 

The availability of DNA testing has had a profound impact on the American criminal justice system and on the way Americans think about that system. Time and again, DNA has shown that our criminal justice system is anything but foolproof. The Innocence Project reports that between the first DNA exoneration in 1989 and April 2023, “575 wrongly convicted people have been exonerated based on DNA tests that demonstrated their innocence.” During that same time period, DNA played a key role in the exonerations of 35 people who had been convicted of a capital crime. That is part of the reason why a majority of Americans now believe that the death penalty is applied unfairly.

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. 

The Death of Ricky Ray Rector Ricky Ray Rector grew up in Conway, Arkansas, just an hour’s drive from Bill Clinton’s own hometown of Hot Springs. From the very earliest days of his life, Ricky was considered different and strange. He had few friends, and while other children were out running around, Ricky sat under a tree playing alone with sticks. Those who saw him said he was dreamy and detached, “as if he were locked into some private daze of withdrawal.”

The mother a 14-year-old girl in Arkansas faces a capital murder case after state investigators found the teen was the victim of a homicide by compressional asphyxiation. Shelette Strong is accused of inflicting homicidal violence against daughter Ciana Roberts in a Tucker residence on Feb. 27, leading to the girl’s death 4 days later. “Deputies were dispatched to the 200 block of Beale Street in Tucker, Arkansas in regards to an unresponsive 14-year-old female. The child was identified as Ciana Roberts. Roberts was transported to Jefferson Regional Medical Center (JRMC) by Emergency Ambulance Services Inc. (EASI),” the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said. “Roberts was later airlifted by helicopter to the Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock.”

A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected arguments from Arkansas state officials Monday that they could not be sued by a prisoner on death row, Stacey Eugene Johnson, who is challenging a state law about new testing of old DNA evidence. Johnson was one of eight Arkansas prisoners scheduled for an unprecedented string of back-to-back executions in 2017 by then-governor Asa Hutchinson. He’s been on death row since 1997, when he was convicted of the 1993 murder of a Sevier County woman, Carol Heath. But the day before Johnson was to be put to death, the state Supreme Court stayed his execution and remanded the case to a trial court for a hearing on his petition requesting additional testing of physical evidence found at the crime scene, which Johnson claims could prove his innocence.  DNA technology has become considerably more accurate and sophisticated in the years since Johnson’s conviction.

Labs avoid producing the drugs, leading officials to turn to 'seedy individuals'  In 2018, the Director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections admitted defeat - he couldn't find any lethal injection drugs.  It had been three years since the last execution in the state, and Joe Allbaugh conceded in a press conference he had been calling 'seedy individuals' from 'all around the world - right down to the backstreets of the Indian subcontinent' - to find the necessary lethal cocktail.  But in detailing his 'mad hunt' to find the drugs, the former FEMA director inadvertently revealed a crisis that had been plaguing America's death row for years.  From basement pharmacies to expired execution drugs and agonizing deaths, an underground system is quietly propping up death rows across the nation. 

In the wake of Alabama’s failed attempt to execute Alan Miller last week, calls to suspend executions in the state are growing. Alabama scheduled Alan Miller’s execution for Thursday, September 22, at 6 pm. Earlier that day, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s injunction barring the State from executing Mr. Miller by lethal injection because it found it substantially likely that Mr. Miller had elected nitrogen hypoxia. The State then filed an emergency motion asking the Supreme Court to vacate the injunction and allow the lethal injection to proceed. Shortly after 9 pm, the Court granted the State’s motion without explanation over the dissenting votes of 4 justices. At 9:20 pm, officials at Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama, said that Alabama’s Attorney General had instructed them to begin the execution. Media, family members, and attorneys expected to be transported to the death chamber to witness the execution. But that did not happen. No witnesses or attorney...

LITTLE ROCK – Arkansas is actively searching for a new supply of lethal injection drugs, and the next governor will likely decide whether to use them. What that means is unclear with an election still months away and a hodgepodge of positions on capital punishment. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month upheld Arkansas’ execution protocol, but that decision has no immediate impact because the state Department of Corrections doesn’t have a supply of hard-to-find drugs used in Arkansas’ three-drug execution method. The state has struggled to obtain the drugs since 2018 when its supply of vecuronium bromide expired. Arkansas hasn’t executed anyone since 2017, when four inmates were put to death in quick succession before the state’s current supply of midazolam — the first of the three drugs used in the state’s execution protocol — expired. (Four others scheduled to die before the expiration had their lives spared by the courts.) Corrections spokeswoman Cindy Murphy said ...

Two deputies suspended, one Mulberry police officer on leave after video of brutal beating of homeless man goes viral In the video, three police officers are seen beating and kicking one of the accused in their custody on the ground. The video shows one officer punching the suspect in the head several times and another kneeling on the suspect’s body and another kicking him. (CNN) — Three Arkansas law enforcement officers have been removed from duty and are under investigation, their departments confirmed, after bystander video captured them appearing to punch and knee a suspect during an arrest Sunday. Two of the officers in the video are deputies with the Crawford County Sheriff's Office and the third is an officer with the Mulberry Police Department, the agencies confirmed in statements Sunday. The video, which was posted on social media, shows the officers restraining an individual near a curb, appearing to throw punches at the person's face and kneeing the individual in the...

Dr. Chris Jones, the Democratic nominee for Arkansas governor, said he has concerns about state executions and would consider commuting death penalty cases to life sentences, if elected governor. He also challenged his Republican opponent, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to an eight-hour debate to discuss issues affecting the state. Jones appeared on this week’s edition of Talk Business & Politics. He officially received the Democratic Party of Arkansas nomination for governor last weekend. Jones is the first African-American selected by a major political party as a nominee for Arkansas governor. “It was humbling,” Jones said when asked to reflect on the gravity of the moment. “When I think about the fact that my family has been in Arkansas for over 200 years, and my grandfather drove a truck and had a third grade education, and the reason he did that was because his brothers bound together so they could make sure their sister could go to school. And then now to fast forward and think abou...