Death Penalty News

From 2010 to 2015 I was incarcerated in Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the Tennessee prison that houses death row for the men’s system. On one side of a gate, 250 of us lived in a “support staff” unit working maintenance, landscaping, kitchen service or whatever else kept the facility operational. On the other side of the gate were maximum-security prisoners and those in protective custody, and a unit just for the condemned.

Oklahoma on Thursday carried out the execution of convicted murderer Jemaine Cannon. Cannon was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 10:13 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. He was 51. Opponents of the death penalty gathered outside the Governor's Mansion in Oklahoman City to protest Cannon's execution. A Tulsa County jury convicted Cannon of murdering Sharonda White Clark, a 20-year-old mother of two, in 1995 at her Tulsa apartment after escaping from an Oklahoma Department of Corrections community work center in southwest Oklahoma.  Prior to his escape, Cannon was serving a 15-year sentence for a 1990 attack on an 18-year-old woman who spurned his advances. That woman was beaten in the head with an iron, a toaster and a hammer, and left permanently disfigured.  Clark’s body was discovered Feb. 5, 1995. She was reported missing after she failed to pick her children up from a day care center. Her injuries included three stab wounds in the neck from a butch...

SHERMAN, Texas (KXII) - The murder of Laura Thomas and her two children is a case prosecutor Kerye Ashmore can’t shake. “I think it’s important to remember the brutality of these murders,” said Grayson County First Assistant District Attorney Kerye Ashmore. A jury convicted Thomas of stabbing all three people to death and cutting their hearts out. Since the incident in 2004, Thomas has taken out both of his eyes and eaten one of them. His defense attorney argued he is too mentally ill for the death penalty to be constitutional. “The question is, is he so mentally ill that he does not know his execution is imminent and why he is being executed?” said Ashmore. “That’s an entirely different question.”

The cases of two defendants facing imminent execution raise concerns about the appropriateness of death sentences for those with severe mental illness or sharply-limiting mental disabilities.  Andre Thomas is scheduled for execution on April 5, 2023 in Texas, despite suffering from mental illness so acute that he cut out both of his eyes and ate one, claiming that it was necessary to prevent the government from hearing his thoughts.  Donald Dillbeck is scheduled for execution in Florida on February 23, even though he is inflicted with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder accompanied by disabilities similar to those the U.S. Supreme Court has found disqualifying for the death penalty ( Atkins v. Virginia ).

HOUSTON (AP) — Plagued by mental illness, Texas death row inmate Andre Thomas started hearing voices when he was 9 years old and first attempted suicide when he was 10, his attorneys say. Thomas’ psychosis, filled with religious delusions and hallucinations, became worse as he grew older. His family — beset by a long history of mental illness, addiction and poverty — was unable to help. His lawyers say in March 2004, when he was 21, Thomas’ mental illness erupted in a burst of horrific violence in his hometown of Sherman, Texas. He fatally stabbed his estranged wife Laura Christine Boren, 20, their 4-year-old son Andre Lee and her 13-month-old daughter Leyha Marie Hughes, cutting out the hearts of the two children. He later told police God had instructed him to commit the killings and that he believed all three were demons.

Arizona executes Clarence Dixon for 1978 murder of Deana Bowdoin Arizona executed Clarence Dixon at the state prison in Florence on Wednesday for the 1978 murder of 21-year-old ASU student Deana Bowdoin. Dixon was executed at 10:30 a.m., according to Deputy Corrections Director Frank Strada. "I do and always will proclaim my innocence — now let's do this shit," Dixon said in his last statement, according to Strada. Troy Hayden, a media witness from Fox News, said the execution team had trouble getting IVs into Dixon, who grimaced and appeared to be in pain while this was happening. The officers took 25 minutes to put in the IVs, Hayden said. The execution team had to insert an IV into Dixon's groin. He appeared to lose consciousness a few minutes after the drugs were injected, Hayden said. Dixon was the 1st man put to death by Arizona since the botched execution of Joseph Wood in 2014. Appeals for last-minute reprieve Dixon's attorneys made several attempts to st...

Arizona plans to execute Clarence Dixon , 66, on Wednesday, even though he is blind, physically frail, and has a documented history of severe mental illness. He is also a member of the Navajo Nation, which opposes the death penalty on cultural and religious grounds. Mr. Dixon was sentenced to death in 2008 for a killing that happened 30 years earlier, while civil commitment proceedings were pending. In 1977, Mr. Dixon was charged with assault for hitting a stranger with a metal pipe. He was diagnosed with severe depression and schizophrenia, adjudicated incompetent to stand trial, and sent to a state hospital for treatment, Slate reports. One of his doctors wrote, “I have a strong feeling that without presence of the mental disturbance, the act of violence would not have taken place.” In January 1978, Mr. Dixon was found not guilty by reason of insanity by then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day O’Connor, who ordered prosecutors to keep him in custody until civil commitmen...

Across the country, the death penalty is in steep decline. But in September, the state’s attorney general sought execution dates for nine men, and its Supreme Court set dates for two of them. In April 1996, Tony Carruthers, charged with kidnapping and murder, stood in a Tennessee courtroom. Despite the severity of the case against him—he was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and faced the death penalty—he did not have an attorney by his side. Carruthers represented himself.  Two years earlier, Carruthers and James Montgomery were arrested in Memphis, accused of killing Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois, and Anderson’s friend Frederick Tucker. The three disappeared on the night of Feb. 24, 1994, and their bodies were found seven days later, buried beneath a casket in a local cemetery. By the time his trial began in 1996, Carruthers had gone through six attorneys. He asked to have another attorney appointed to him, but the judge refused. He was convi...

An Alabama inmate spared from execution by questions over whether dementia had erased memories of his crime has died on death row at the age of 69, state officials said Monday. Vernon Madison spent more than 3 decades on Alabama's death row for the killing of a police officer in 1985. His last scheduled execution was halted in 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Madison's case. His attorneys said strokes had left him with severe dementia and no memory of the murder. The Supreme Court last year ordered a new state hearing to determine whether Madison could understand why he was to be executed. But Madison didn't live to see his case move forward. Madison died Saturday at Holman Correctional Facility, where death row inmates are housed in Atmore, state Department of Corrections spokeswoman Samantha Rose said. She said an autopsy is pending, but officials do not suspect foul play. The Equal Justice Initiative, a group whose director argued Madiso...

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has had three opportunities to grant clemency to death-row inmates and denied it on each occasion. The day after Lee Hall was executed, Gov. Bill Lee said that the life-and-death decisions he has to make about death row inmates weigh on him, particularly as a man of faith, but he said that the state process works and it worked when Hall took his final breaths. Hall was the third Tennessee citizen Lee participated in killing through the state's machinery of death in 2019. I have disagreed with Lee in the pages of The Tennessean on the issue of the death penalty. However, this time I am in full agreement with him. If the state of Tennessee wishes to kill its citizens by appropriating about $5 million per person, locking them in a cage for 30 years, escorting them to the electric chair, strapping the individual into the chair and electrocuting him, it can certainly do so. If this utilitarian approach is what Lee means when he says the state process w...

Hall is the second functionally blind prisoner executed in the United States since 1976  Lee Hall has been executed by electric chair, after 28 years on death row, for the 1991 Chattanooga murder of his estranged girlfriend Traci Crozier. He was pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m. His last words were, "People can learn forgiveness and love to make this world a better place." Hall is just the 2nd legally blind prisoner to be executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Crozier had left Hall in the spring of 1991, reportedly after he’d become abusive. On April 17, 1991, Hall threw a lit container full of gas into Crozier's car while she was in the front seat. Despite the severe burns covering her entire body, Crozier remained conscious and alert enough to express concern to emergency responders about her hair. She survived until the next day. Hall has repeatedly expressed remorse for Crozier’s death. In a court filing from last year,...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced Wednesday that he won't stop the state from putting a blind inmate to death in the electric chair later this week, clearing the way for the execution unless a federal court intervenes. Lee Hall, a 53-year-old inmate who became blind from glaucoma during is decades in prison, is scheduled to be electrocuted Thursday for his conviction in the 1991 killing of his estranged girlfriend. Hall had his sight when he entered death row nearly three decades ago, but attorneys for the condemned prisoner say he’s since become functionally blind due to improperly treated glaucoma. Earlier this year, Hall chose the electric chair over lethal injection as allowed under state law. If the execution goes forward, he is believed to be just the second blind prisoner who will be executed since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976. “Unless the federal courts intervene, Tennessee will become the firs...