Death Penalty News

Juries in recent years have failed to agree on the death penalty in some gruesome cases, including mass killings at a Parkland, Florida high school and an Aurora, Colorado movie theater. Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray has announced that he is seeking the death penalty for Tyler Robinson, the man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk. This decision significantly raises the stakes for prosecutors. While they believe they have a strong case to prove Robinson's guilt, a death sentence is far from guaranteed. To secure it, prosecutors must convince every member of a 12-person jury to unanimously agree that the death penalty is the appropriate punishment for the crime.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she found it “distasteful” to affirm the death sentence of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev based on her personal opposition to capital punishment. “I found the vote distasteful to cast, and I wish our system worked differently,” Barrett writes in a passage of her new memoir, according to an excerpt published by the Free Press. “Yet I had no doubt that voting to affirm the sentence was the right thing for me to do.” Barrett’s memoir, “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution,” is scheduled to be published Sept. 9. The Trump appointee will mark her fifth anniversary as a justice this fall.

A federal court on Thursday denied a request by attorneys for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to remove the judge overseeing the protracted legal battle over his death sentence.  The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the argument made by Tsarnaev’s lawyers that U.S. District Court Judge George O’Toole should be recused from the case because, the lawyers contend, he is not impartial. During an August 2024 hearing, Tsarnaev’s attorneys pointed to what they said were comments O’Toole made about the case on podcasts and at public events during the appeals process. 

A federal judge in Boston is vigorously denying the marathon bomber’s last-ditch accusation that another magistrate must reexamine the killer’s death penalty sentencing.  In a stinging rebuke, Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. states he won’t step aside as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev fights for his life.  Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 of all 30 charges against him and remains locked up for life in the Colorado supermax prison ADX Florence.  Tsarnaev’s lawyers allege 2 jurors were biased when they agreed to sentence the bomber to death in June of 2015 for “using weapons of mass destruction” at the marathon finish line. The First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston has instructed O’Toole to take another look at the alleged bias of those jurors. 

As the city marks the 12th anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sits on federal death row for admittingly detonating bombs at the finish line that killed three people and injured more than 260 others. Yet, his fate remains uncertain after a decade of legal wrangling, as his lawyers continue to challenge his death sentence.  The federal judge who presided over his 2015 trial was ordered by an appeals court in March 2024 to investigate defense claims that two jurors were biased and should have been stricken from the panel. If he finds they were, then Tsarnaev is entitled to a new trial over whether he should be sentenced to life in prison or death, according to the appeals court. 

Federal prosecutors were directed by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi this week to pursue the death penalty against Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year in New York City. Mangione allegedly shot Thompson as the executive was headed to a health care conference on Dec. 4, killing the father of two on the street. The 26-year-old faces federal murder and stalking charges and 11 state charges, including murder and terrorism charges, which are not eligible for the death penalty.

President Biden used his clemency authority Monday to commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row to life without parole, in one of the most significant moves taken against capital punishment in recent presidential history. Biden did not commute the sentences of three men who were involved in cases of terrorism or hate-fueled mass murder, including Robert Bowers , convicted for the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue; Dylann Roof , convicted for the 2015 mass shooting at a Black church in Charleston, S.C.; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev , convicted of the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon.

Ron McAndrew is a former Florida State Penitentiary warden A pro-Trump former Florida prison warden who oversaw executions is urging President Biden to commute all federal and military death sentences before leaving office. "I voted for President Trump in all of his campaigns, and I agree with him on most of his positions, but not the death penalty," Ron McAndrew, former warden of the Florida State Penitentiary, wrote in a letter to the outgoing president. "I have written to President Trump personally to ask him to stop calling for more executions."

You don't have to tell Daniel Troya and the 40 other denizens of federal death row locked in shed-sized solitary cells for 23 hours a day, every day, that elections have consequences. To them, from inside the U.S. government's only death row located in Terre Haute, Indiana, Tuesday's election is quite literally a matter of life and death: If Kamala Harris wins, they live; if Donald Trump wins, they die. "He's gonna kill everyone here that he can," Troya, 41, said in an email from behind bars. "That's as easy to predict as the sun rising."

It's the first time the party has not opposed the practice nationally since 2016 and the first time since 2004 that it has been omitted entirely. The Democratic Party has omitted the death penalty from its national platform for the first time in 20 years, following back-to-back cycles of opposing the practice outright. The news came on Aug. 19, when the delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago voted to approve the new document, which is to guide the party’s electioneering for the next four years. 

BOSTON — Attorneys for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are seeking to remove the judge overseeing the protracted legal battle over Tsarnaev's death sentence. Tsarnaev's lawyers said during a hearing in federal court in Boston on Wednesday that U.S. District Court Judge George O’Toole should be recused from the case, pointing to what they said were comments O'Toole made about the case on podcasts and at public events during the appeals process.

BOSTON — A veteran prosecutor who nailed the Pentagon leaker and an ex-Harvard professor with ties to China has been put on the Boston Marathon bomber’s last-ditch death penalty appeal.  Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Casey is “counsel for the United States” against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who has won his appeal to determine if he deserves a new death penalty trial. 

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.

President Joseph Biden's stated opposition to the death penalty is running counter to his administration's decision on the fate of the racist who murdered 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022. "It's really out of synch with what Biden said during his campaign," said Karen Pita Loor, a clinical law professor at Boston University who has written of the Department of Justice's decision to seek the death penalty in another case.

President Joe Biden’s promise to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level and work to end capital punishment in states seems to have gone dormant as the Department of Justice continues to press for the death penalty in certain cases and Biden—the first president to openly oppose the execution of prisoners—stays quiet on the issue as they continue in states. Biden pledged to push for the death penalty’s elimination on the campaign trail in 2020 and did order a moratorium on carrying out federal death sentences, but since then his administration has been largely silent on the matter. The nonpartisan Death Policy Information Center says there are 43 federal death row prisoners with sentences dating back as far as 1997, with the most recent death row inmate, Brandon Council of South Carolina, sentenced in 2019.

Jurors in the trial of convicted Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers likely will decide this week whether the shooter will join a long list of condemned men awaiting execution. It is the 1st of potentially 2 death-related decisions the jury will make. The jurors — 7 men and 5 women — convicted Bowers June 16 of all 63 federal charges filed against him in connection with the Oct. 27, 2018, shooting. The synagogue he targeted housed three congregations: Tree of Life, Dor Hadash and New Light. Eleven people were killed: Richard Gottfried, Joyce Fienberg, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — One by one over the past two weeks, members of Jewish congregations in Pittsburgh have come to the witness stand in federal court and relived the horror of that October morning, when a gunman used high-powered weapons to kill 11 worshippers and badly injure others. Police officers have testified about responding to a scene of horrific carnage and immediately coming under fire themselves, some suffering life-altering wounds from a gunman raging against Jews in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. All of this is being entered fastidiously into the record for the benefit of the jurors and alternates in a federal courtroom in Pittsburgh. So are hundreds of court exhibits showing the aftermath of the violent invasion of sacred worship that day in the Tree of Life synagogue building.

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.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is currently incarcerated at the so-called “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” A decade after the fatal 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, a new Netflix true-crime docuseries is revisiting the unprecedented investigation and pursuit of the two home-grown terrorists that paralyzed the New England city. American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing centers on the tense, terrifying days that followed the April 15, 2013 tragedy, culminating with the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the arrest of his then-19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The Tsarnaev brothers planted and detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the marathon’s finish line, killing three and wounding hundreds. Following his arrest days later, Dzhokhar was indicted for 30 crimes, including 17 capital offenses. In 2015, a jury found Dzhokhar guilty of all 30 charges, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction and the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer. Though D...

CHICAGO (AP) -- Rejon Taylor hoped the election of Joe Biden, the first U.S. president to campaign on a pledge to end the death penalty, would mean a more sympathetic look at his claims that racial bias and other trial errors landed him on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana. But two years on, Justice Department attorneys under Biden are fighting the Black man's efforts to reverse his 2008 death sentence for killing a white restaurateur as hard as they did under Donald Trump, who oversaw 13 executions in his presidency's final months. "Every legal means they have available they're using to fight us," said the 38-year-old's lawyer, Kelley Henry. "It's business as usual." Death penalty opponents expected Biden to act within weeks of taking office to fulfill his 2020 campaign promise to end capital punishment on the federal level and to work at ending it in states that still carry out executions. Instead, Biden has taken no steps toward fulfil...