Death Penalty News

Saturday April 25th is National DNA Day , mark­ing the anniver­sary of the 1953 dis­cov­ery of DNA’s dou­ble helix struc­ture and the 2003 com­ple­tion of the Human Genome Project. Today, the Death Penalty Information Center is pleased to present a new resource exam­in­ing the con­tro­ver­sial role of ​“junk sci­ence” in cap­i­tal cas­es. When DNA test­ing became one of the most rig­or­ous­ly val­i­dat­ed tools in foren­sic sci­ence, its devel­op­ment also prompt­ed greater scruti­ny of oth­er foren­sic tech­niques. Many dis­ci­plines that were long accept­ed in U.S. court­rooms have now been found to lack ade­quate sci­en­tif­ic foun­da­tion and have become known as ​“junk science.”

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 on Wednesday to deny clemency for George John Hanson, who was sentenced to death for the 1999 murder of 77-year-old Mary Bowles. Bowles’ body was found lying in a ditch, covered by bushes, in a dirt pit near Owasso. It took almost a week for her body to be found, and because of an advanced rate of decomposition spurred by summer heat, her remains were identified using dental records. Autopsy reports suggest she was shot four to six times. A bullet lodged in Bowles’ chest matched Hanson’s handgun. His representation said there was no definitive evidence Hanson — who is also referred to as John Fitzgerald Hanson in court documents — was the one who shot and killed Bowles.

Convicted of killing his cousin and his cousin’s fiancée, the death row inmate hopes recanted testimony and other new details spur a review of his case LIVINGSTON — In 20 days, state authorities are scheduled to drive death row inmate Ivan Cantu from the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, past freshly built vacation homes on Lake Livingston, along wooded East Texas roads, to the notorious, red-bricked Huntsville Unit, where Texas will execute him. That is if Cantu’s third execution date isn’t canceled like the two before.

From bite marks to shaken babies, the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences is debunking bad science. Kate Judson is a lawyer who often deals with crimes that did not occur. As the executive director of the Wisconsin-based Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences (CIFS), her job is to examine ostensible scientific evidence to see whether it backs up prosecutors' claims.

A Maryland Supreme Court ruling questions how reliable ballistics science is and how it can be used in criminal trials. Attorneys for a convicted killer in Prince George’s County challenged whether crime scene analysts can definitively match bullets to a gun. Maryland's highest court ruled the idea of a perfect match doesn't match up with the science. The court placed limits on what forensic experts can say in all cases involving guns moving forward. Shell casings recovered at crime scenes are sent to a lab where technicians microscopically inspect them looking for evidence the casing can be linked to a weapon and, ultimately, a shooter.

Brown’s appeals ran out after almost 30 years on death row. Defense attorneys claim Harris County prosecutors hid evidence pointing to another suspect in the 1992 shooting deaths of four people in a Houston drug house. On Thursday evening, Texas executed Arthur Brown Jr. for the 1992 shooting deaths of four Houstonians in a drug house. Brown maintained his innocence till his last breaths, claiming the courts and prosecutors blocked him from evidence that proved he did not murder that night. “What is occurring here tonight is not justice, it’s murder of an innocent man for a murder that occurred in 1992,” Brown said on the death gurney, according to prison officials.

A wealthy dentist accused of fatally shooting his wife in the heart with a shotgun at the end of an African safari was found guilty of murder and mail fraud on Monday. A jury of 6 men and 6 women reached the verdict for Lawrence "Larry" Rudolph following a 3 week trial and a day and a half of deliberations. Rudolph, 67, was charged with foreign murder in the 2016 death of Bianca Rudolph in Zambia as well as mail fraud for cashing in $4.8 million in life insurance claims in what prosecutors describe as a premeditated crime. Some of the money was paid out of Colorado so he was tried in Denver federal court. He faces a maximum term of life in prison or the death penalty when he is sentenced in February. Rudolph maintained his innocence and the 2 adult children he had with his wife sat in court to support him during the trial. One of Rudolph's defense attorneys, David Markus, said they would appeal his conviction. "We believe in Larry. We believe in his family," he ...

The justices of the Supreme Court of California reviewed a direct appeal from the appellant, Alfred Flores, III, who was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, and upheld the Superior Court’s conviction. In 2001, defendant Flores was arrested and tried for the murders of three teenage boys, identified as Torres, Ayala and Van Kleef, for refusing to join the El Monte Trece gang. Flores sought to recruit the victims because they were friends with another teenaged member of the gang. The prosecution theorized that the first victim, Torres, was killed after “disappointing” Flores by failing to show up at his initiation ceremony. The second victim, Van Kleef, was killed because he witnessed the Torres murder. The last victim, Ayala, was killed out of Flores’ fear that Ayala would implicate him for the Torres murder. The cause of death of all three victims was by gunshot. The jury convicted on all three counts of murder and Flores was sentenced to dea...

Anthony Ray Hinton was mowing the lawn at his mother's house in 1985 when Alabama police came to arrest him for 2 murders he did not commit. One took place when he was working the night shift at a Birmingham warehouse. Yet the state won a death sentence, based on 2 bullets it falsely claimed matched a gun found at his mother's home. In his powerful new memoir , "The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row," Hinton describes how racism and a system stacked against the poor were the driving forces behind his conviction. He also writes about the unique and unexpected bonds that can form on death row, and in particular about his relationship with Henry Hays, a former Klansman sentenced to death for a notorious lynching in 1981. Hays died in the electric chair in 1997 - 1 of 54 people executed in Alabama while Hinton was on death row. After almost 30 years, Hinton was finally exonerated in 2015, thanks to the Equal Justice Initiative , or EJI. On A...

Criminal justice, education, environment, medicine—nothing was spared from the war on science. On a rainy day in April, 100,000 demonstrators—led by some of the nation’s most prominent scientists—converged on the National Mall for the first ever March for Science. It was Earth Day, and many of them were there to protest the environmental policies of a president who once insisted that global warming was a Chinese hoax. But climate change wasn’t the only thing on the marchers’ minds. Donald Trump, after all, has a history of making dangerously unscientific statements about everything from vaccines to criminal justice to football. Satellite marches took place across the country and around the world; organizers estimated that some 1.1 million people participated. Many politicians were apparently unimpressed. 2017 obviously wasn’t the first year to be plagued by public policy decisions that disregarded scientific facts, but the Trump era has taken this phenomenon to a whole new l...

The state's highest criminal court this week split over whether a ballistics expert's testimony was material to a 1992 Harris County death penalty verdict. In a ruling handed down Wednesday, the Court of Criminal Appeals denied 47-year-old Arthur Brown a new trial or new sentencing phase because a Houston police analyst overstated the proof that two guns connected to Brown were involved in the shooting of six people during a drug deal 25 years ago. The high court, with a single judge dissenting, said the analyst's possibly inaccurate testimony was not material to the jury's decision. Appeals Judge Elsa Alcala authored the dissent,  writing that she agreed with former Harris County District Judge Mark Kent Ellis who ruled that the firearms evidence introduced at Brown's trial was false or misleading. "I agree with the (trial) court's determination that this evidence was not only false or misleading but also material," she said. Alcala...

Most death penalty prosecutions are not DNA cases. Convictions rest on circumstantial evidence, on confessions, on eyewitness identifications, and on forensic testimony (such as ballistics evidence). In a rape case, if DNA testing establishes that the man convicted of perpetrating a rape could not have been the attacker, we can say with confidence and certainty that we made a mistake and sent an innocent man to prison. But what is the equivalent for a death penalty case that involves no DNA? If a man is convicted on the basis of testimony from a single witness, and that witness is later found to be a pathological liar, can we say that an innocent person is on death row? What if a man is convicted on the basis of testimony from a single witness who later recants and says that she was mistaken?  Because most death penalty cases do not involve DNA, they are neither black nor white; they are gray with ambiguity. And yet, despite the fact that DNA is not an issue in most death ...

Clinton Lee Young ‘I never professed to be an angel, but I didn’t kill anybody…’ - Clinton Young, 2013 Clinton Lee Young (born July 19, 1983) was convicted of murder and is currently awaiting execution in the state of Texas. On June 6, 2017, his execution was assigned to take place on October 26, 2017 . Young, from Ore City in Upshur County, was convicted and condemned for the November 2001 fatal shootings of Doyle Douglas in Longview and then Samuel Petrey a day or two later in a Midland oil field after carjacking him in Eastland, about 53 miles east of Abilene. The Case In the early hours of a cold November morning in east Texas, five people piled in a car for a short trip to Longview. Twenty four hours later, two men were dead and three men were in custody for murder.  Two best friends and one teenager just four months after his 18th birthday, who had only known these people a few short months were the three in custody. The two best friends made deals (...