Death Penalty News

SHELBY COUNTY, Ala. (WBRC) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up an Alabama death-penalty case involving Michael Anthony Powell, leaving in place a state appeals court decision that threw out Powell’s conviction. Two justices — Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — said the Court should have stepped in. In a written dissent, Alito argued the Alabama appeals court misapplied U.S. Supreme Court precedent about what prosecutors can and can’t say during closing arguments.

The Supreme Court these days is generally in the business of helping executions go forward. But on Thursday night, the court did something notable: It told Alabama no. Even then, the court wasn't unanimous. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the refusal to let the nitrogen gas execution of Jeffery Lee proceed. What prompted the rare rejection? In line with the typical shadow docket practice, the court didn't explain itself. Nor did the dissenters, who merely noted their disagreement. But a deeper look at the case helps us understand why a majority of the court was unwilling to help the state this time.

Court throws out state’s challenge to judicial finding that inmate convicted of murder is ineligible for death penalty The US supreme court on Thursday threw out a challenge by the state of Alabama to a judicial finding that a death row inmate convicted of a 1997 murder is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible under the US constitution for the death penalty. In this highly unusual move, and in a single-sentence, unsigned order, the court dismissed Alabama’s petition for review in Hamm v Smith without deciding it, effectively undoing its earlier decision to take up an appeal by state officials to the method used by a lower court to determine that Joseph Clifton Smith was intellectually disabled and therefore could not be executed.

A fractured Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a new trial for Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip, whose appeal drew national attention and support from the state’s conservative attorney general, in light of allegations that the state withheld evidence related to its main witness. The ruling is a major win for Glossip, whose 1998 conviction for arranging the murder of Barry Van Treese a year earlier has been called into question by him and, critically, the state attorney general after new evidence emerged in recent years.

Judicial appointments and the death penalty are among areas where a lame-duck administration can still leave a mark. Donald Trump’s second presidential term will begin on Jan. 20, bringing with it promises to dramatically reshape many aspects of the criminal justice system. The U.S. Senate — with its authority over confirming judicial nominees — will also shift from Democratic to Republican control.

BOSTON, March 21 (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Thursday directed the judge who presided over Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's 2015 trial to investigate whether two jurors were biased and should not have been seated, creating potential grounds to overturn his death sentence. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stopped short, opens new tab of granting Tsarnaev's latest bid to overturn his death sentence for his role in the 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded 260 others.

The U.S. Supreme Court did not intervene to stop the nation’s first execution by nitrogen hypoxia — a move that all three justices of the court’s liberal wing opposed. “With deep sadness, but commitment to the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment, I respectfully dissent,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissent issued Thursday afternoon regarding the then-pending execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith. Smith, 58, was put to death Thursday night.

Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed CS/HB 1297 into law, which made sexual assault and battery on children 12 or younger a capital offense, taking effect in October. Florida's Fifth Judicial Circuit could see the first application of the new law in a case now. Florida's Fifth Judicial Circuit, which covers Lake, Hernando, Sumter, Citrus, and Marion Counties is seeking the death penalty for Joseph A. Giampa, who reportedly captured video of himself abusing a minor.

The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution protects us from “cruel and unusual punishment” by the government. This seemingly simple language raises a host of complicated questions. “Cruel” by what standard? “Unusual” in what sense? Does this provision have a fixed meaning? Or does its meaning change over time? History offers a few clues. In 1689, England adopted a Declaration of Rights that prohibited “cruel and unusual punishments.” Some of the Founders argued that we needed a similar provision in our own Bill of Rights.

Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion ensures that innocent people will spend years behind bars. The Supreme Court just ruled that at least some federal prisoners who are completely innocent must serve out their entire sentence, with no meaningful way to challenge their unlawful conviction. One of the most fundamental principles of criminal law is that no one may be convicted of a crime unless the legislature previously passed a law making their actions illegal. If there is no law on the books that, say, marijuana possession is unlawful, then a judge cannot toss someone in jail because they were found with a joint.

Duane Owen is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Thursday in the 1984 bludgeoning death of Georgianna TALLAHASSEE — A U.S. Supreme Court justice Wednesday denied Palm Beach County killer Duane Owen's appeal to halt his execution, scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday. Owen is set to be executed for the 1984 bludgeoning death of Georgianna Worden at her Boca Raton home. Worden was a 38-year-old executive secretary and mother of two. Owen killed her while her children slept nearby. He also received the death penalty in the stabbing death of 14-year-old Karen Slattery, whom he had killed two months earlier while she babysat two children in Delray Beach.

The Marshall Project is a nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for our newsletters to receive all of our stories and analysis. Until his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court last year, Stephen Breyer spent 28 years hearing cases that profoundly shaped American life, including landmark decisions on LGBTQ rights , reproductive rights and criminal justice . Perhaps more than any of the other justices, Breyer was known as a pragmatist, guided by a belief that good government will outlast any one person or political fad. In his 2021 book, “ The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics ,” he argued that the court only has power when the public shares his faith in the importance of its role in our democracy.

For some justices, the Eighth Amendment is nothing more than an annoying technicality. On November 17, 2022, Kenneth Smith spent four agonizing hours strapped to a gurney waiting for the state of Alabama to kill him. Smith, who was convicted of murder in 1988 and sentenced to die by lethal injection, could do nothing but watch as correctional officers poked and prodded his arms and hands, searching fruitlessly for veins. Then, without warning or explanation, the officers—it’s not clear if any of them were medical professionals—tried a different approach, jabbing a large needle underneath Smith’s collarbone, which made him cry out in pain and plead for his lawyers or the court to intervene. Smith’s death warrant expired at midnight, and because officials couldn’t find his veins in time, they had to stop the execution attempt. When they unstrapped Smith from the gurney, he was hyperventilating and couldn’t sit, stand, or walk without help. It was Alabama’s third failed execution attempt ...

WASHINGTON (CBSNewsTexas.com/AP) - The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that longtime Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed should have a chance to argue for testing of crime-scene evidence that he says will help clear him.   The justices, in a 6-3 decision, sent Reed's case back to a lower court for his constitutional challenge to the state's law on DNA testing. The issue before the high court was whether Reed, sentenced to death nearly 25 years ago, waited too long to file his lawsuit claiming that untested crime-scene evidence would exonerate him.  Texas courts and the federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that he missed the deadline. But the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, reversed the appellate ruling. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented. "If there is a mitigating factor to today's decision," Thomas wrote, it's that the outcome "is no barrier to the prompt execution of Reed's lawful sentenc...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is hearing the case Monday of a Christian graphic artist who objects to designing wedding websites for gay couples, a dispute that's the latest clash of religion and gay rights to land at the highest court. The designer and her supporters say that ruling against her would force artists — from painters and photographers to writers and musicians — to do work that is against their faith. Her opponents, meanwhile, say that if she wins, a range of businesses will be able to discriminate, refusing to serve Black customers, Jewish or Muslim people, interracial or interfaith couples or immigrants, among others. The case comes at a time when the court is dominated 6-3 by conservatives and following a series of cases in which the justices have sided with religious plaintiffs. It also comes as, across the street from the court, lawmakers in Congress are finalizing a landmark bill protecting same-sex marriage. The bill, which also protects interracial marria...

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...

The Supreme Court struck down a New York law Thursday that only lets firearm owners receive a concealed carry license if they have “proper cause,” a blow to gun control advocates that marks the court’s most significant Second Amendment ruling in over a decade and could roll back gun control measures across the country. KEY FACTS The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that New York’s concealed carry law violates the Fourteenth Amendment, by stopping “law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs” from practicing their Second Amendment right to bear arms. The challenge, brought by gun owners in the state, argued New York’s law that only gave licenses to firearm owners who have “proper cause” was unlawful under the Second Amendment, because licenses are too often denied and the decisions are left up to the personal discretion of individual licensing officers. Justices agreed that the law was overly burdensome, with Justice Clarence T...

The only woman on Idaho death row is seeking to have her sentence reconsidered, but a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week has thrown her active federal appeal into question. Robin Row, 64, was convicted of murdering her husband and 2 young children after setting afire their Ada County home in February 1992 to collect money from their life insurance policies. A judge handed her a death sentence, making her just the 2nd woman in Idaho history to receive the death penalty. Attorneys representing Row have been appealing her case ever since, now nearly 30 years after she arrived on death row. Unlike her 7 male peers who are housed at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution near Kuna, Row is held at the state’s Women’s Correctional Center in Pocatello. Row’s current appeal before the U.S. District Court for Idaho argues that she had ineffective legal counsel, because evidence of brain damage was never introduced during sentencing. A U.S. Supreme Court decision late last month, however, is ex...

”The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.” A hard lesson that law students learn in criminal procedure classes is the difference between factual guilt and legal guilt . Factual guilt refers to what someone actually did. Legal guilt refers to what the prosecution can prove in accordance with law’s distinctive presumptions and burdens of proof. Being factually innocent is no guarantee of what juries and judges will decide as they apply those presumptions and burdens. Convicting the innocent is always tragic, but never more so than in death penalty cases. We know that 187 people have been wrongly convicted in capital cases and ultimately exonerated since 1973. And there is little doubt that innocent people have been executed in this country. On Monday, May 23, in Shinn v. Ramirez , the Supreme Court increased the chances that still more innocent people will be executed. In that case, the now-dominant six-Justice conservative majo...

In an opinion legal experts have blasted as “nightmarish” and “an abomination,” the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in two Arizona death penalty cases that 1990s amendments to the federal habeas corpus law permit state prisoners who were provided ineffective representation at trial and in post-conviction proceedings to argue that their counsel were ineffective but bar them from presenting evidence of their ineffectiveness that competent lawyers had discovered once the case had reached federal court. Barry Jones’ state court lawyers had failed to investigate available evidence that he was innocent and David Martinez Ramirez’s state court lawyers had failed to investigate evidence of intellectual disability that could have led a jury to spare his life. Having failed to investigate, neither set of lawyers presented the evidence to state courts. In a May 23, 2022 ruling in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez , Justice Clarence Thomas declared for the six conservative members of the Court that neither m...