Death Penalty News

After 20 years in prison, Williams is free-but justice has not been served. On the evening of January 4, 1998, in Shreveport, Louisiana, a group of neighborhood friends came up with an idea - they would order a pizza. The deliveryman, 23-year-old Jarvis Griffin, arrived at the house where a group of friends, including 16-year-old Corey Williams and 20-year-old Chris Moore (nicknamed "Rapist"), were hanging out. At the time, according to court filings from Williams' attorneys, Williams was known as someone who would take the fall for anyone, "what one might refer to as a 'chump,'" a family member said. He reportedly had an IQ of 68, had been institutionalized multiple times for intellectual disability, and suffered from a severe case of lead poisoning. After delivering the pizza and collecting his money, Griffin returned to his car. Soon afterwards, he was slumped over the wheel, dead from gunshots. Witnesses, including Williams himself, in...

A legal team has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its claim that Louisiana  prosecutors withheld evidence for a murder trial that ended in a guilty verdict against an intellectually disabled teenager accused of killing a pizza deliveryman. Corey Williams was 16 years old when police arrested him in the shooting death of Jarvis Griffin two decades ago in Caddo Parish, where prosecutors have been widely criticized for their aggressive approach to seeking the death penalty . Earlier this week, a group of 44 former prosecutors and Justice Department officials - former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey among them - filed a brief in support of a petition by Williams' lawyers asking the court to review and reverse his murder conviction. Before the shooting, Williams was hospitalized for extreme lead poisoning, still sucked his thumb and frequently urinated on himself, according to his lawyers. A district court judge overturned Williams' death sentence in 2...

On trial for his life, Robert McCoy claimed he was the innocent victim of a police conspiracy - despite a mountain of evidence that he had killed 3 members of his estranged wife's family in northwestern Louisiana. But his lawyer, Larry English, saw the case as unwinnable, and decided to focus on sparing McCoy from execution. English outlined his strategy: admit guilt from the start, then ask the jury for mercy. McCoy refused. English insisted. They argued, behind closed doors, before the judge and in front of the jury. McCoy tried to fire English, but the judge said it was too late. In August 2011, the jury convicted McCoy of 1st-degree murder, and sentenced him to die. More than 6 years later, McCoy sits on Louisiana's death row and is still fighting. He wants a new trial, arguing that his constitutional rights as a criminal defendant - specifically, the ability to mount his own defense - were violated. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on...

Rodricus Crawford in Nov. 2016, shortly after his release from death row. Caddo Parish Prosecutors Drop Charges After Medical Evidence Suggests No Crime Occurred At the request of local prosecutors, a Caddo Parish, Louisiana trial court has dismissed all charges against Rodricus Crawford, making him the 158th person exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973 and the second to be exonerated this year.  Mr. Crawford had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 2012 for the murder of his 1-year-old son, Roderius Lott, despite medical evidence that the child actually died of a combination of pneumonia and sepsis. “In many respects, this case may reflect both the past and future of the death penalty in America,” said Robert Dunham, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “A jurisdiction with a history of racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, and overuse of the death penalty chose to pursue a death sentence against a grieving f...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a direct challenge to the constitutionality of the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment, rejecting an appeal by a Louisiana death row inmate convicted of killing three brothers. Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer objected to the court's decision not to hear the appeal by Marcus Reed, a drug dealer convicted in the 2010 shooting deaths of the three brothers, including a 13-year-old, over the theft of marijuana and an Xbox videogame console from his home. The court's action came at a time of deep divisions among the eight justices over the death penalty, with Breyer and other liberals expressing doubt about whether capital punishment remains acceptable under the U.S. Constitution four decades after the court reinstated it. Breyer, renewing his concerns over how the death penalty is administered in America, noted that Reed was sentenced to death in Louisiana's Caddo Parish, a county that he said has apparent...

Rodricus Crawford Rodricus Crawford, a local man previously convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, was released from jail for now after a judge in Caddo District Court assigned him a $50,000 bond on Tuesday. The Caddo Parish Sheriff's Office confirmed that Crawford bonded out of jail on Tuesday evening. Crawford was convicted in 2013 of the first-degree murder of his 1-year-old son, Roderius Lott.  The Louisiana Supreme Court last week vacated the trial court's verdict , and now Crawford has the opportunity for a new trial. Crawford had been on death row in Angola. The case has drawn attention from the national media. At the hearing on Tuesday, the defense requested that Crawford's bond be set at $25,000, while the prosecution asked for $50,000. While Judge Brady O'Callaghan said the bond amount was "inappropriately low," he agreed to give the state's recommendation the benefit of the doubt. "The charge a...

Rodricus Crawford The Louisiana Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out the conviction and death sentence of a man whose case drew national attention to the state's use of the death penalty. In its decision , the court said it was sending the case of Rodricus Crawford back to a lower court for a new trial, citing racial discrimination issues in the prosecution's picking of jurors. "I am so thankful that they did the right thing in this case. It was a terrible tragedy since Day 1, and his conviction was a total injustice and the court really stepped up and fixed it, and I am looking forward to continuing to work with the DA's office in order to reach a just outcome," said Cecelia Kappel, Crawford's attorney. She said she had spoken to Crawford's family who called the court's decision "a miracle." The case put Caddo Parish and former District Attorney Dale Cox in the spotlight over the use of the death penalty. The Death Penal...

Louisiana's Death Chamber The unexpected victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton has spilled a series of questions about how a Trump presidency might impact the death penalty -- for decades a lightning rod for debate in criminal justice. 19 states have outlawed death sentences while a relatively small number of other states -- including Louisiana -- regularly sentence people to death, reflecting the deep divide on the issue. But Louisiana experts say they don't expect the incoming 45th president to significantly impact the existence or use of capital punishment in the state. Trump has branded himself as a law-and-order candidate and has trumpeted the use of the death penalty in certain situations. At the same time, most voters in 3 states that considered death penalty measures took pro-capital punishment positions. It all points to a détente for states like Louisiana, a pro-death penalty state that incarcerates more people per-capita than anywhere else in ...

'Less than half of Americans say they support the death penalty.' Although the death penalty is still considered constitutional by the Supreme Court, Americans’ appetite for this barbaric practice diminishes with each passing year. The signs of capital punishment’s impending demise are all around. For the first time in nearly half a century, less than half of Americans said they support the death penalty, according to a Pew Research poll released last month. While that proportion has been going down for years, the loss of majority support is an important marker against state-sanctioned killing. At the same time, executions and new death sentences are at historic lows, and each year they go lower. In 2015 only 49 new death sentences were handed down, the lowest one-year total since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. Since there were about 14,000 murders around the country last year, it’s easy to imagine that the small number of newly c...