Death Penalty News

In the high-stakes theater of the American legal system, the trial is often sold as a quest for truth. We imagine a defendant standing before a jury of their peers, a fair fight where the burden of proof rests entirely with the state. But for those facing the ultimate punishment, the reality is far darker. The death penalty transforms the legal process into a high-pressure extraction, where the right to a jury trial is often a trap that leads straight to a coercive plea bargain.

Death penalty will soon be an option for prosecutors in some lewd conduct cases involving children younger than 12 years old Earlier this year, Idaho legislators passed a bill to allow some cases of lewd conduct with child under age 12 with aggravating circumstances to be punishable by death, despite knowing the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled a similar law unconstitutional. The bill did not allocate any additional money for the Idaho State Public Defender’s Office. Instead, the fiscal note says the office will have additional expenditures should a defendant be assigned a public defender by the court.

2/3 of Black women and more than 1/2 of Black men have been struck from jury service in Duval County death penalty cases, more than double the rate at which white prospective jurors are excluded, a study of capital jury selection in the Florida county has found. The study, Racialized Impacts of Death Disqualification in Duval County, Florida , conducted by University of Central Florida criminal justice professor Dr. Jacinta M. Gau, was the centerpiece of a challenge to the county’s capital-case jury selection practices brought by lawyers for the ACLU on behalf of Dennis Glover in his capital resentencing trial. Glover was unconstitutionally sentenced to death by a Duval County judge in 2015 following a non-unanimous sentencing recommendation by his jury. On October 21, 2022, State Attorney Melissa Nelson withdrew the death penalty from Glover’s case, avoiding a hearing on the jury issue, and the court resentenced Glover to life without parole. Dr. Gau reviewed transcripts and other mat...

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Henderson Hill, senior counsel at the ACLU, about his motion against the use of "death qualification" to disqualify opponents of capital punishment. MICHEL MARTIN, HOST : For decades, courts have automatically disqualified opponents of capital punishment from serving on juries in death penalty trials. This has been accepted law and practice. But the outcome of an upcoming murder trial in North Carolina could change that. Ahead of jury selection in the case, attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union have argued that removing jurors based on their unwillingness to impose the death penalty is racist and prevents defendants from having access to a fair trial. They'll make the same argument this fall in a sentencing hearing in a Florida case. We're joined now by ACLU senior counsel Henderson Hill, who is working on both cases, to tell us more about this. Mr. Hill, welcome. Thank you so much for being with us. HENDERSON HILL : Than...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The California Supreme Court on Monday upheld the conviction but overturned the 2005 death sentence for Scott Peterson in the slaying of his pregnant wife, and said prosecutors may try again for the same sentence if they wish in the case that attracted worldwide attention. Laci Peterson, 27, was eight months pregnant with their unborn son, Connor, when she was killed. Investigators said that on Christmas Eve 2002, Peterson dumped their bodies from his fishing boat into San Francisco Bay, where they surfaced months later. “Peterson contends his trial was flawed for multiple reasons, beginning with the unusual amount of pretrial publicity that surrounded the case.," the court said. “We reject Peterson’s claim that he received an unfair trial as to guilt and thus affirm his convictions for murder.” But the justices said the trial judge “made a series of clear and significant errors in jury selection that, under long-standing United States Supr...

When jurors in Walton County, Georgia, decided that Donnie Cleveland Lance should die for the 1997 murders of his ex-wife and her boyfriend, they didn’t know much about him beyond the crimes of which they had just convicted him. They didn’t know that Lance had ingested gasoline as a child, or that he was trampled by a horse as a teenager, or that he had breathed toxic fumes while cleaning the inside of an oil tank. They did not know that he suffered repeated head trauma from multiple car crashes, or that he had once been shot in the head. And they did not know, as four mental health experts would later testify at a post-conviction hearing, that together these incidents caused brain damage and dementia—new impairments on top of a low IQ that placed Lance in the borderline range for intellectual disability. Lance’s trial counsel had not prepared as though it were a capital case. The lawyer did not, as constitutional standards require, investigate Lance’s background or present ...

South Dakota has used capital punishment since 1877; state showing no signs of stopping now. Wild Bill Hickok died holding a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights — the dead man's hand. He was shot by Jack McCall, whose death later marked South Dakota's 1st recorded execution. McCall was hanged for the killing in Yankton on March 1, 1877. The ultimate punishment has been used sparingly since then, with a total of 20 men being put to death for "wantonly vile or heinous" crimes. After a string of 9 in the late 1800s, decades would pass between executions, the Argus Leader reported. Across the United States, the use of the death penalty has declined sharply over the last 25 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a national nonprofit that doesn't take a stance on the death penalty but often criticizes the way the sentence is administered. New death sentences have decreased by more than 85% since the mid-1990...

With trials approaching, death sentences are hanging over the heads of 2 suspects accused in the 2015 death of a Bonita Springs doctor. The victim’s husband Mark Sievers, 51, and Jimmy Ray Rodgers, 29, are co-defendants in the case. Both are charged with 1st-degree murder and will face the death penalty if convicted. Teresa Sievers, 46, was found dead, face down on the kitchen floor with the back of her head bashed in inside her family’s home at 27034 Jarvis Road on June 29, 2015. There are several differences between a death penalty trial and other criminal trials in Florida, including the size of the jury. The jury doubles from six people to 12 people during capital cases, according to the Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure. Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington D.C., said other differences can be found in the structure of the trial and qualifications of the jury. The jury selection process usually takes mo...

Harold Wilson was convicted of a triple murder in a Philadelphia crack house in 1989, and sentenced to die 3 times. Instead, he fought for his life. Wilson became the 6th person exonerated from Pennsylvania’s death row, and spent his later years a staunch and outspoken death-penalty abolitionist. He died May 18 of complications from a stroke. He was 61. Despite 17 years in solitary confinement, he told a Democracy Now! interviewer in 2005, “I never gave them that opportunity to dehumanize me.” He grew up on 18th Street in South Philadelphia, in a house spilling over with his 5 brothers and a sister, according to Avis Savage, a friend of 40 years.  An entrepreneur, he had 2 children and a couple businesses before he was charged and convicted in the 1988 hatchet slaying of Dorothy Sewell, 64, her nephew Tyrone Mason, 33, and Mason’s girlfriend, Cynthia Goines Mills, 40. “He was in shock for a long period of time. He didn’t understand how they were going to kill...