Death Penalty News

South Dakota man executed for 1992 stabbing death of doughnut shop co-worker (Reuters) - A South Dakota man convicted of fatally stabbing a former doughnut shop co-worker during a 1992 burglary was put to death by lethal injection on Monday night, after the U.S. Supreme Court denied three 11th-hour petitions to stay his execution. Charles Rhines, 63, whose lawyers argued that his death sentence was tainted by anti-gay bias toward him on the part of jurors, was pronounced dead at 7:39 p.m. CST at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls, prison spokesman Michael Winder said. Rhines’ execution had been scheduled for early in the afternoon but was delayed for several hours while state corrections officials awaited word from the U.S. Supreme Court on his final appeals. All three applications for a stay were rejected by the high court on Monday evening. Rhines, a high school dropout, was found guilty of murdering Donnivan Schaeffer, 22, an employee at Dig ‘E...

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KSFY) - Charles Rhine’s' execution by lethal injection is set for Monday afternoon. He's filed two separate appeals both currently circulating through courts on the grounds that the pentobarbital doesn't meet the "ultra-short acting" standard for lethal injection. He also asks that psychiatric and neurological experts be allowed to testify for Rhine’s' cognitive state. Some people say there is also new evidence of a few jurors' anti-gay biases that led to the death row sentence. Charles Rhines was sentenced to death in 1993 for the murder of Donnivan Schaeffer while he was burglarizing a Rapid City doughnut shop in 1992. He’s now waiting for execution on death row while his chaplains come to his aid. “Killing another person on death row doesn't solve that problem," Sister Patrick Murphy said. Sister Patrick Murphy and Deacon Denny Davis are opposed to the death penalty. They act as Rhines' chaplains before...

Convicted murderer Charles Rhines may have been victim of juror discrimination Attorneys representing an out gay man on death row in South Dakota are turning to the Supreme Court yet again in a last-ditch effort to block his execution in the midst of recent evidence suggesting he may have been sentenced to death because of his sexual orientation. Charles Rhines is facing execution at some point during a weeklong window beginning on November 3 for his role in killing Donnivan Schaeffer while robbing a donut store in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1992. But his attorneys conducted interviews with jurors involved in the case and yielded compelling testimony showing some of them thought it would be better for him to die than to co-habit with other men to whom he might sexually attracted. “We also knew that he was a homosexual and thought that he shouldn’t be able to spend his life with men in prison,” one juror, Harry Keeney, told Rhines’ legal team. Frances Cersosimo, another...

Charles Russell Rhines is scheduled to be executed the Department of Corrections  Monday, the Department of Corrections announced. Rhines, 63, was sentenced to death in 1993 for the 1992 murder of 22-year-old Donnivan Schaeffer inside a Rapid City doughnut shop. RELATED |  South Dakota: Gay Man on Death Row Mounts Last-Ditch Effort The execution will be at 1:30 p.m. at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls by lethal injection.  Rhines will be the 20th person executed in South Dakota since 1877. Rhines' execution comes after a lengthy list of appeals from the circuit courts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Most recently, Rhines protested the state's decision to use pentobarbital as the lethal barbiturate drug in his execution.  Rhines had requested the state execute him with an ultra-short-acting barbiturate and a chemical paralytic, something the state did when he was sentenced in 1993.  Current law allow...

Supreme Court rejects appeal alleging anti-gay bias tainted a death sentence A gay South Dakota prisoner’s claim that his death sentence was unconstitutionally tainted by homophobia was denied U.S. Supreme Court review. In rejecting Charles Rhines’ appeals on April 15, the justices declined to take up what would have been a hot-button case on multiple levels. It pits two evolving areas of the law against one another—gay rights and the sanctity of the jury room—at a time when capital cases have sparked sharp divides among the justices. But though heated dissents have been common of late, there wasn’t a peep of protest from any of the justices as the high court cleared the way for Rhines’ execution for a brutal 1992 murder. Lawyers supporting Rhines, however, spoke up after the denial. “Allowing Charles Rhines’ death sentence to stand defies Constitutional protections and breaks with Supreme Court precedent,” said Daniel Harawa, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal...

A divided three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday refused to hear the appeal of Charles Rhines , a gay man on death row in South Dakota , who argued that he should be allowed to present new evidence showing that anti-gay bias may have motivated the jury to sentence him to death. Several jurors came forward saying that other jurors were making comments about Rhines’s sexuality. One juror recalled that there was “a lot of disgust” during deliberations about how Rhines was gay. Another said that a juror said that Rhines wouldn’t mind life in prison. “It was not a joke,” she said. A juror recalled someone saying , “if he’s gay, we’d be sending him where he wants to go,” referring to life in prison. Six civil rights organizations , including the American Civil Liberties Union, American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, Lambda Legal, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and National LGBT Bar Association...

Three jurors have admitted their anti-LGBTI bias during sentencing Charles Rhines, a gay man from South Dakota, was convicted in the 1992 stabbing death of a donut shop worker. But instead of facing a long prison sentence, the jury gave him the death penalty. Their reason? Since he’s gay, he would ‘enjoy’ prison too much. In June, Rhines attempted to appeal this sentence.  Despite three of the jurors admitting their homophobic biases, the court refused to hear his appeal. Enter Civil Rights groups Now, six civil rights groups, including the ACLU and Lambda Legal, are urging the 8th Court Circuit to accept his appeal. According to the court filing, new evidence ‘suggests that at least some members of the jury accepted the notion that life in prison without parole would be fun for a gay person – so much so that they felt it was necessary to impose the death penalty instead. In other words, significant evidence suggests that the jury may have sentenced M...

His defenders say yes. South Dakota says no. The Supreme Court may soon weigh in. Before South Dakota jurors decided the fate of Charles Rhines in 1993, they sent a handwritten note to the judge. They had just found Rhines guilty of fatally stabbing 22-year-old Donnivan Schaeffer, an employee of Dig ‘Em Donuts in Rapid City, during a robbery a year earlier. But now they had some questions. If they didn’t vote for the death penalty, what would his life in prison look like? Would he be “allowed to mix with the general inmate population”? Would he be able “to create a group of followers or admirers”? Would he have a cellmate? The judge said he couldn’t answer, and the jury sent Rhines to death row, where he remains today. A few years ago, those seemingly innocuous questions became crucial to the last-ditch efforts to save his life. Rhines’s lawyers knew that the jurors had been told that Rhines is gay. They went looking for jurors, following a hunch that turned out to be co...

“[T]here is no principled distinction between racial bias and the anti-gay bias that infected Mr. Rhines’s sentencing decision.” -- Death Penalty Information Center A South Dakota man sentenced to death in 1993 by a jury that fretted a life sentence would only gratify his homosexuality hopes the Supreme Court will spare him. The jury’s ugly prejudices were clear to the original sentencing court at the time. As they deliberated sentencing, jurors sent a list of questions to the judge that centered on concerns that he might somehow enjoy prison. The questions included “whether he would be allowed to ‘mix with the general inmate population,’ ‘create a group of followers or admirers,’ ‘brag about his crime to other inmates, especially new and[/]or young men…,’ ‘marry or have conjugal visits,’ or ‘have a cellmate,'” his attorneys write in their petition for Supreme Court consideration. They argue that the court’s logic in a 2017 ruling that states must consider eviden...