Death Penalty News

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the murder conviction and death penalty of a man found guilty of killing his ex-girlfriend at a Shelby County hotel. Michael Dale Rimmer’s first conviction in 1998 was overturned, but another Shelby County jury convicted him in 2016 of murdering Ricci Lynn Ellsworth. On Feb. 7, 1997, Ellsworth left home to go to work at the Memphis Inn. Investigators say Ellsworth disappeared, leaving behind her purse, her wedding band, her car and a chaotic and bloody crime scene. Her body was never found. Years before her disappearance, Ellsworth and Rimmer had a tumultuous romantic relationship,. He was convicted of raping her in 1989 after they broke up, and authorities say he told a fellow inmate he would kill her when he was released. When she disappeared, witnesses at the Memphis Inn described a man matching Rimmer’s description with blood on his hands putting something heavy, wrapped in a blanket, in the trunk of a maroon Honda. Accordin...

The North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday vacated the death sentence of Marcus Reymond Robinson of Fayetteville, who in 2012 was the 1st of 4 people to use the state's controversial Racial Justice Act to be removed from death row. Robinson is in prison for the murder and robbery of 17-year-old Erik Tornblom in Fayetteville in 1991. The Racial Justice Act of 2009 allowed death row inmates to petition the courts to review whether racial bias in the criminal justice system influenced their trials and the jury decisions to sentence them to death. It was lauded by some for its effort to address decades of systemic racism in the criminal justice system and criticized by others as part of a long-term effort to abolish the death penalty. Robinson and three other defendants used the Racial Justice Act in 2011 and 2012 to persuade Cumberland County Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks that the prosecutors in their murder trials were racially biased in their selection of jurors...

Former Pennsylvania death-row prisoner Kareem Johnson has been exonerated, 13 years after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death by a Philadelphia jury. On July 1, 2020, the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas completed his exoneration, formally entering an order dismissing all charges against him in his capital case. On May 19, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had barred his reprosecution because of prosecutorial misconduct that exhibited a conscious and reckless disregard for his right to a fair trial . Johnson is the 3rd death-row exoneration in 2020 and the 170th death-row exoneration DPIC has confirmed in the United States since 1973. He is the 3rd former Philadelphia death-row prisoner exonerated in the last 6 1/2 months. Walter Ogrod was exonerated in June 2020 and Christopher Williams was exonerated in December 2019. Johnson’s wrongful conviction and death sentence were a product of official misconduct, false forensic evidence, and ineffective representation....

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Tuesday denied Ohio death row inmate Romell Broom’s request for habeas relief and held that a second execution attempt would not constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Ohio had previously tried to execute Broom by lethal injection in 2009, but officials were unable to maintain a viable IV connection to his veins. Broom was convicted of two counts of kidnapping, two counts of rape (one against a child), two counts of attempted kidnapping, one count of the aggravated murder of a 14-year-old, one count of aggravated robbery and one count of robbery, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. Broom was sentenced to death, which was affirmed on appeal. The execution was scheduled for September 15th, 2009, but, after two hours and 18 failed attempts, the medical team at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility was unable to deliver the injection. According to Broom’s petition, the...

Mark Heyer, whose daughter, Heather Heyer, was killed in 2017 while protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, says he does not want federal prosecutors to pursue the death penalty against the man who killed his daughter.  James Alex Fields, Jr., a 21-year-old who identifies as a neo-Nazi, was tried in Virginia state court and convicted of murder and a litany of other crimes for driving a car into a crowd of protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others.  On December 11, the state-court judge accepted the jury’s sentencing recommendation and sentenced Fields to life in prison plus 419 years and a fine of $480,000. However, Fields still faces federal hate crime charges arising out of the incident, including one murder charge for which prosecutors could seek the death penalty. Mark Heyer told BuzzFeed News, “I don’t relish the thought of [Fields] getting the death penalty. That’s my belief. I’d rather him get his heart straight...

This case is about the constitutional protection every person in America deserves. It is not about whether Marcus Reymond Robinson, Quintel Augustine, Christina Walters and Tilmon Golphin deserve our sympathy. They don't. Golphin and his brother killed a Cumberland County deputy and a state trooper in a 1997 traffic stop. Walters led some gang members on an initiation ritual that saw 2 women randomly kidnapped and killed in 1998. Augustine killed a Fayetteville police officer in 2001 - although he claims he was wrongfully convicted and is factually innocent. And Robinson killed a teenager in a 1991 robbery. The crimes was horrific enough that they challenged our opposition to the death penalty. But that's the other factor here: The public and even many politicians are losing their taste for executions. The last one in North Carolina was 12 years ago and there are none scheduled, despite having 143 inmates on death row. If this state is caught up in the national t...

Romell Broom, shortly after the failed execution attempt COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Cuyahoga County prosecutors are urging the Ohio Supreme Court to schedule a second execution for Romell Broom, whose 2009 death by lethal injection was botched. Romell Broom, convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering 14-year-old Tryna Middleton in 1987, has "successfully stalled his execution" by creating a bottleneck of appeals that lasted seven years and went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, prosecutors said in a motion filed Monday afternoon. "At some point, this Court must declare that the debate is over; that finality has attached; and that the parents of Tryna Middleton have waited long enough for justice," assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor Christopher Schroeder said. Broom's lawyers have not responded to the motion. Broom became the first person in Ohio to survive an execution attempt when, in 2009, executioners couldn't find a vein sturdy eno...

Former detective Armando Saldate PHOENIX - A retired Phoenix police detective whose credibility was attacked in a now-dismissed murder case that sent an Arizona woman to death row for 22 years has lost his bid to refuse to answer certain questions in her wrongful-conviction lawsuit. The detective, Armando Saldate, had agreed to answer questions about the investigation that led to Debra Milke's conviction in the 1989 killing of her 4-year-old son, Christopher. But Saldate did not want to give up his right to decline questions about misconduct allegations against him. His request to decline questions about matters not directly tied to the criminal case was denied Thursday. U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver said the request may be premature and would have to offer more facts in the future to support any refusal to answer questions. Lawyers for Saldate had said he would refuse all questions in Milke's lawsuit, including those about her criminal case, if his request ...

Justice Stephen G. Breyer WASHINGTON — Continuing his sustained critique of the American capital justice system, Justice Stephen G. Breyer on Monday issued an unusual dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case of a Florida death row inmate who said his conviction had been based on flawed evidence and false testimony. Justice Breyer did not discuss the evidence against the inmate, Henry P. Sireci. Instead, he again urged his colleagues to reconsider the use of the death penalty, which he said was unreliable, arbitrary and shot through with racism. In the process, he addressed two other recent death penalty cases, from Ohio and Alabama, in which he said the court had also gone astray. In Mr. Sireci’s case, Justice Breyer returned to a longstanding concern, saying the court should have considered whether the inmate’s four decades on death row violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. “He has lived in prison under threat of ex...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected appeals by a convicted murderer who said he should not be executed because Ohio tried unsuccessfully to put him to death once before and three other death row inmates, putting a spotlight again on divisions among the eight justices over capital punishment. The justices spurned the request by Romell Broom as well as appeals by convicted murders Henry Sireci in Florida, James Tyler in Louisiana and Sammie Stokes in South Carolina. The court let stand a March ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court that the state could try to execute Broom, convicted of raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl named Tryna Middleton in 1984, a second time. His 2009 lethal injection attempt was stopped after authorities were unable to get a needle into his vein to administer the drugs. Justice Stephen Breyer, an outspoken critic of the way the death penalty is implemented, and fellow liberal Justice Elena Kagan said in the brief order they supported taking u...