Death Penalty News

Iwao Hakamada was held in solitary confinement for 45 years until DNA evidence emerged to undermine his conviction. The Tokyo High Court has said 87-year-old Iwao Hakamada, who spent more than 45 years on death row after a controversial conviction for murder, should be granted a retrial. Hakamada was given “temporary release” in March 2014 after new DNA evidence cast serious doubt on the reliability of his conviction and the court that initially convicted him called for a retrial.

Texas executed Larry Swearingen for a 1998 Texas slaying. His lawyer says bad science got him on death row. Swearingen consistently maintained his innocence in the strangling death of 19-year-old Melissa Trotter. Texas prosecutors, however, had no doubt he was her killer. For decades, a staunch claim of innocence and doubts over forensic science engulfed the death penalty case of Larry Swearingen. On Wednesday, he was executed in Texas' death chamber. The 48-year-old man lived on death row for nearly 2 decades, consistently expressing his innocence in the 1998 strangling death of Melissa Trotter, a 19-year-old community college student in Montgomery County he has said was his friend. Multiple state courts had previously taken five execution dates off the calendar over the years to look into different issues surrounding Swearingen’s conviction, but prosecutors and Trotter’s family remain firmly convinced he was her killer. After a late appeal was denied by the U.S...

As his scheduled death date approached, Larry Ray Swearingen still refused to accept that the Huntsville gurney could be his fate. The 48-year-old Montgomery County man was sentenced to die for the 1998 murder of Melissa Trotter, a college student who was raped, strangled and left in the Sam Houston National Forest with torn pair of pantyhose tied around her neck. But Swearingen always said he didn’t do it and, after eking out stays before each of the last five scheduled death dates, he was skeptical the Aug. 21 execution could come to pass. “I don't believe you're going to kill me,” he told the Houston Chronicle, likening the case against him to a house of cards. “I believe I will pull that one single card and it's gonna come tumbling down.” In recent weeks, the courts denied appeal after appeal, and the state parole board on Monday unanimously turned down his one shot at a commutation. He is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. The condemned man’s lawyers have re...

Texas lab now admits its experts overstated key findings in murder trial, but execution still set for Wednesday Shortly after 19-year-old Melissa Trotter disappeared from the campus of Montgomery College, north of Houston, the police suspected Larry Swearingen, a 27-year-old electrician, had killed her. They even tossed him in jail on traffic charges three days after Trotter vanished. Her body wasn’t discovered for another three weeks, in January 1999, in Sam Houston National Forest. She had been strangled with one leg of pantyhose. Though Montgomery County, Tex., sheriff’s deputies searched Swearingen’s trailer twice, it wasn’t until after Trotter’s body was found that a landlord discovered another leg of pantyhose in Swearingen’s residence. A lab technician from the Texas Department of Public Safety testified that it was “a unique physical match” to the hose wrapped around Trotter’s neck, “to the exclusion of all other pantyhose.” At trial, the Montgomery prosecutor told t...

Stymied by legal challenges, the state of California has not executed any of its more than 700 condemned prisoners since 2006. But if the machinery of death ever does rev back up, Kevin Cooper will be on the short list of people to receive lethal injections. He shouldn't be, and Gov. Jerry Brown needs to ensure that it doesn't happen. Cooper was convicted of horrific crimes. Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica, and 11-year-old houseguest Christopher Hughes were hacked and slashed to death in June 1983. The Ryens' 8-year-old son Josh miraculously survived having his throat cut. Even though Cooper has spent more than 30 years on death row for the murders, however, serious questions have lingered. For instance, Josh Ryen initially told hospital workers that the family had been attacked by 3 or 4 white men. Cooper is black. What's more, a woman said that on the day of the murders, her former boyfriend had been wearing a tan T-shirt ...

Decades after controversial bite mark testimony by then-forensic dentist Michael West helped send many defendants to death row, courts in the state are still wrestling with what action to take in the cases of those convicted. Bite mark forensic dentistry has been discredited over the years, and even West has testified that DNA evidence should be used instead of bite mark evidence. Last month, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a new trial for a former death row inmate convicted in part because of West's testimony and the court is awaiting a ruling by a circuit judge in another case in which West testified. Over the years, several men, including Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks,convicted at trials in which West's testimony or opinion was used have been declared wrongly convicted and released from prison after serving lengthy sentences.  No one knows for certain how many post-conviction cases there are involving the testimony of West, said Tucker Carrington, ...