Death Penalty News

The protocol that took effect in 2025 sheds new light on Tony Carruthers’ botched execution, when Dr. Mark Fowler spent nearly an hour trying, and failing, to place a secondary IV line Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol adopted a year and a half ago appears to include reduced training in IV placement. That’s the part of the process prison staff failed to complete last month before aborting the execution of Tony Carruthers. Filings from ongoing litigation over the protocol show concerns about the executioners’ training and qualifications aren’t new. 

Dr. Joseph Antognini travels across the nation, being paid over $500 an hour by government officials who rely on him to vouch for their execution protocols. This [article] is part of “ Operating Capital ,” an ongoing Lens discussion about Louisiana’s resumption of executions. Earlier this month, Dr. Joseph Antognini, a California-based retired anesthesiologist, walked into the execution chamber at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He tried on the air-tight mask that prison staff plan to use to execute Death Row prisoner Jessie Hoffman , using nitrogen hypoxia, a method that Louisiana executioners have never before used.

The state criminal appeals court shut down a district attorney’s argument that John Henry Ramirez should not be executed because the death penalty was “unethical.” The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Thursday denied a motion to postpone the execution of a prisoner scheduled to be killed next month for the murder of a convenience store worker. The rejection was the latest twist in the tumultuous case of John Henry Ramirez, who won notoriety when he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court — not to spare his life, but to allow his pastor to lay hands on him and pray in the execution chamber. Mr. Ramirez won that appeal, and his execution date was set for Oct. 5. But then came a reversal unrelated to Mr. Ramirez’s religious freedom case: The district attorney of Nueces County, Mark Gonzalez, filed a motion withdrawing his office’s request for a death warrant, citing his “firm belief that the death penalty is unethical.” The withdrawal would most likely have postponed Mr. Ramirez’s execution ...

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama judge accused of violating judicial rules with her opposition to the death penalty went on trial Monday on ethics charges that could result in her removal from office. Jefferson County Circuit Judge Tracie Todd , who was suspended with pay after investigators accused her of wrongdoing in April, became embroiled in the debate over capital punishment and issued erroneous decisions that violated orders by higher courts, according to charges filed with the Court of the Judiciary, which hears complaints against state judges. Todd, who ruled the state’s capital punishment law unconstitutional five years ago, made public comments and took actions that showed she was improperly embroiled in the issue and lacked the “detachment and neutrality” required of a judge, alleged the Judicial Inquiry Commission, which investigates complaints and files charges. “Judge Todd abandoned her judicial role to become an advocate,” commission attorney Elizabeth Bern told the n...

For decades, Ralph Petty spent his days as a prosecutor for the Midland County District Attorney’s Office trying criminal cases before a slate of judges and winning hundreds of convictions in the process. The chain-smoking assistant DA was known as a legal scholar to his peers in this west Texas community where the wind blows hard and uninterrupted, and oil pump jacks dot the flat countryside. But in his free time, Petty did something that now casts doubt on hundreds of cases he prosecuted. For years, he moonlighted as a paid clerk for the same judges before whom he argued his cases on behalf of the state. In some cases, he helped write the judges’ orders on his own cases. According to attorneys for at least one of those defendants, death row inmate Clinton Young, working as a judicial clerk gave Petty access to confidential information that gave him an unfair advantage as a prosecutor. Even if he did not use this information, Young’s attorneys said, Petty’s special relationship with t...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — An Arkansas disciplinary panel dismissed an ethics case against a judge who faced the possibility of removal from the bench for participating in an anti-death penalty demonstration the same day he blocked the state from using an execution drug, the commission's counsel said Wednesday. The Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission dismissed the case Tuesday against Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen because too much time had passed between the complaint being filed and the commission taking up the case, according an email that counsel Marie-Bernarde Miller sent to attorneys in the case.  Miller said Wednesday that the panel would issue a written order in the next day or two elaborating on its reasons for the dismissal. Griffen was accused of violating ethical rules after he was photographed in April 2017 lying on a cot outside the governor's mansion wearing an anti-death penalty button and surrounded by people holding signs o...

LITTLE ROCK -- A disciplinary panel dismissed ethics charges Friday against the Arkansas Supreme Court's justices over their decision to prohibit a judge who participated in an anti-death penalty demonstration from hearing any execution-related cases. The Arkansas Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission voted unanimously to dismiss the charges that the court's seven justices violated ethics rules when they disqualified Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen. The court last year prohibited Griffen from hearing death penalty cases after he was photographed laying on a cot during a demonstration outside the governor's mansion wearing an anti-death penalty button and surrounded by people holding signs opposing executions. Earlier the day of the demonstration, Griffen blocked the state from using a lethal injection drug over the claims the drug supplier had been misled by the state. A three-member panel earlier this year said the justices never gave Gr...

The following letter will be presented to the United States Senate on Oct. 4. It will be updated as more signatures are received. Judicial temperament is one of the most important qualities of a judge. As the Congressional Research Service explains, a judge requires “a personality that is even-handed, unbiased, impartial, courteous yet firm, and dedicated to a process, not a result.” The concern for judicial temperament dates back to our founding; in Federalist 78, titled “Judges as Guardians of the Constitution,” Alexander Hamilton expressed the need for “the integrity and moderation of the judiciary.” We are law professors who teach, research and write about the judicial institutions of this country. Many of us appear in state and federal court, and our work means that we will continue to do so, including before the United States Supreme Court. We regret that we feel compelled to write to you, our Senators, to provide our views that at the Senate hearings on Sept. 27, Judg...

Florida lawyer Patrick Megaro is facing an official complaint by the North Carolina State Bar for allegedly defrauding death-row exonerees Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, and taking 1/3 of the compensation granted to the 2 men. Half-brothers McCollum and Brown were exonerated in 2014 after spending 30 years in prison, some on death row, for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. ➤ FIND related content here Both men are intellectually disabled, a factor that made them more vulnerable to wrongful conviction, and, the Bar complaint says, vulnerable to exploitation by Megaro. After McCollum and Brown were exonerated and formally pardoned by Governor Pat McCrory, they sought compensation from North Carolina for their wrongful convictions and incarceration. Megaro became McCollum's and Brown's lawyer in March 2015, after 2 women who claimed to be advocating on behalf of the brothers persuaded them to fire the lawyers who had been representing them in their comp...

"Architects should not design spaces for solitary confinement. It's a form of torture that's recognized by the entire international human rights community. We're enabling and frankly participating in human rights abuse." The number of prisons in the U.S. has exploded from nearly 500 in the 1970s to almost 2,000 today, becoming a source of business for the architects who design them. But some in the profession are urging fellow architects to stop designing solitary confinement units in prison, saying that doing so perpetuates human rights abuses.  NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent David Tereshchuk reports. DAVID TERESHCHUK: California-based architect Raphael Sperry has mounted a campaign. He wants his fellow-architects to stop designing solitary confinement units in prisons – and execution chambers, too. RAPHAEL SPERRY: If you're hiring an AIA architect, we are like the best. We're committed to the highest standard… DAVID TERESHC...