Death Penalty News

OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has scheduled the execution of Air Force veteran and longtime death row prisoner Jim Pavatt for Nov. 12, as his attorneys continue to challenge his conviction and contend that prosecutors relied on false arguments, disputed forensic evidence and an alleged confession they later described as bogus. Pavatt, who served nearly 22 years in the Air Force and rose to the rank of master sergeant, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2001 killing of Rob Andrew in Oklahoma City. His execution is scheduled for the day after Veterans Day.

Twenty-two years ago [today], the unthinkable happened. Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked and crashed four passenger jets on U.S. soil in a coordinated suicide attack that killed 2,976 men, women and children in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field. The 19 hijackers are long dead. But for 20 years or more, five men accused of conspiring in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks have been in U.S custody – first, for about three years, as “high-value” detainees tortured by the Central Intelligence Agency and its affiliates at secret “black sites” around the world; ever since as prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday. He was 81. Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known. Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, he had been held in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings from 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.

When people have been asked about their biggest concern in politics, crime hasn't popped as the "top" priority in the past year. Shortly before the 2022 midterm elections, it was inflation for Republicans and abortion rights for Democrats that consistently ranked as the top issues. But that doesn't mean crime isn't seen as important and motivating in politics. It's partially why, in the year before a presidential election, the Biden White House is positioning the president to the middle on this issue and a host of other issues, including immigration and the priorities reflected in his budget proposal. The budget includes popular poll-tested items, like raising taxes on the wealthy to preserve Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and capping costs for prescription drugs.

A wealthy dentist accused of fatally shooting his wife in the heart with a shotgun at the end of an African safari was found guilty of murder and mail fraud on Monday. A jury of 6 men and 6 women reached the verdict for Lawrence "Larry" Rudolph following a 3 week trial and a day and a half of deliberations. Rudolph, 67, was charged with foreign murder in the 2016 death of Bianca Rudolph in Zambia as well as mail fraud for cashing in $4.8 million in life insurance claims in what prosecutors describe as a premeditated crime. Some of the money was paid out of Colorado so he was tried in Denver federal court. He faces a maximum term of life in prison or the death penalty when he is sentenced in February. Rudolph maintained his innocence and the 2 adult children he had with his wife sat in court to support him during the trial. One of Rudolph's defense attorneys, David Markus, said they would appeal his conviction. "We believe in Larry. We believe in his family," he ...

The Mississippi Supreme Court has denied additional DNA testing to death-row prisoner Willie Manning. Manning, who was sentenced to death in Oktibbeha County in 1994 and in 1996 for 2 separate crimes, has maintained his innocence of both crimes. He was exonerated of the 1996 conviction in 2015 after police and prosecutors unlawfully withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. Manning sought DNA testing in the 1994 case to challenge discredited hair comparison testimony presented by a prosecution expert. After initial DNA tests were inconclusive, the trial court in 2020 refused to authorize the transfer of the evidence to a different lab that was capable of conducting more sophisticated testing. On June 30, 2022, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld that ruling, holding that “Manning has failed to show that a full DNA profile, if gained from additional testing, would have raised a reasonable probability that the trier of fact would have come to a different outcome.” Manning, who is ...

Tehran (AFP) – Iran on Sunday put on trial the alleged leader of a US-based "terrorist group" accused of being behind a deadly mosque bombing in 2008, the judiciary said. Iran-born Jamshid Sharmahd, 66, who is also a German national and a US resident, is charged with spreading "corruption on earth", one of the most severe charges in the Islamic republic, and which carries the death penalty. "The trial of Jamshid Sharmahd, the leader of the Tondar terrorist group, was held in public this morning," the Judiciary's Mizan Online agency said. Sharmahd is "accused of corruption on earth by planning and directing terrorist acts," it added, citing the indictment. It includes "the bombing of a mosque in Shiraz (southern Iran) on April 12, 2008, which killed 14 people and injured approximately 300 others." Sharmahd appeared in court dressed in blue-striped prisoners' pyjamas. Iran, which does not recognise dual nationality for citizens, a...

Fred Guttenberg, the father of a Parkland school shooting victim, said he wants to see Nikolas Cruz "removed from this earth the fastest way possible" as the 23-year-old waits for a jury to sentence him early next year. Guttenberg said that result could come "through a death penalty conviction or time in a prison with a general population," he told CNN on Monday. "But he serves no useful purpose, and I'd like to be able to move on from ever thinking of him again." Last month, Cruz pleaded guilty to killing 17 people during a 2018 shooting spree at his former high school in Parkland, Florida, in what became the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history. His guilty plea to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder means 12 jurors will decide whether he gets the death penalty or life in prison without parole. Jury selection is scheduled to begin January 4. Last week, the families of dozens of Parkland shooting victims reached a record $13...

Delays are the inevitable result of an irreconcilable conflict: US government’s desire to convict and execute the men and the fact that defendants are also victims of CIA torture THE CONVERSATION — As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 passed, the five men accused of responsibility for the attacks were still awaiting trial in the Guantanamo military commission. This case is the largest criminal prosecution in United States history in terms of number of victims. The charge sheet lists the names of 2,976 people who were direct casualties of two hijacked commercial airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center and caused the twin towers to collapse, another that crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth, probably aiming for the US Capitol building, that was brought down in a field in western Pennsylvania when several passengers overpowered their hijackers. Yet two decades after the US‘s worst terrorist attack, the 9/11 case remains mired in the pretrial phase with no start date for the tria...

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody has filed motions in a Florida trial court seeking to block DNA testing that the local elected State Attorney had agreed to and a judge had granted in two 45-year-old Orange County death penalty cases. In pleadings filed June 1 and June 2, 2021 in the Florida Ninth Circuit Court, Moody objected to DNA testing for Tommy Zeigler and Henry Sireci, both of whom were sentenced to death in 1976 and have long asserted their innocence. Six of Ziegler’s jurors voted to sentence him to life, but his trial judge override the jury’s life recommendation and sentenced him to death. Moody argued that State Attorney Monique H. Worrell lacked authority to consent to the testing, that Ziegler’s and Sireci’s requests for testing did not meet the requirements of Florida state post-conviction law, and that Worrell failed to notify the state attorney general’s office before agreeing to make the evidence available for evaluation by independent laboratories. Both prisoner...

A Democratic senator has asked attorney general Merrick Garland to facilitate ‘proper oversight’ into concerns on the investigation The FBI is facing new scrutiny for its 2018 background check of Brett Kavanaugh, the supreme court justice, after a lawmaker suggested that the investigation may have been “fake”. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who serves on the judiciary committee, is calling on the newly-confirmed attorney general, Merrick Garland, to help facilitate “proper oversight” by the Senate into questions about how thoroughly the FBI investigated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing. The supreme court justice was accused of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford and faced several other allegations of misconduct following Ford’s harrowing testimony of an alleged assault when she and Kavanaugh were in high school. Kavanaugh denied the claims. The FBI was called to investigate the allegations during the Senate confirmation process but was later...

MINNEAPOLIS – Grief and anger turned to violence Wednesday night as Minneapolis saw another day of protests following the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who was pinned down by a white police officer who held his knee to Floyd's neck. Demonstrators gathered earlier in the day near the local police precinct, and soon video on social media showed people smashing windows, looting a nearby Target and buildings on fire. It was the second night of tense protests following Floyd's death. The city's mayor and Floyd's family have called for the arrests of the officers involved in his death, and the federal authorities promised Thursday a "robust criminal investigation."  The four officers were fired shortly after video of the encounter spread on social media showing Floyd struggling and telling the officers he couldn't breathe. Floyd's death has sparked a national outcry for justice and other cities saw protests Wednesday night...

Netflix is now the premier purveyor of true-crime nonfiction, and few of those offerings are more binge-worthy than Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist , writer/director Barbara Schroeder and co-director Trey Borzillieri’s four-part series about 2003’s “Pizza Bomber Heist.” That crime was committed by 46-year-old Brian Wells, who robbed an Erie, Pennsylvania, PNC Bank with a shotgun made to look like a walking cane and a collar around his neck that was attached to a bomb. When that device went off, it begat a tale of intrigue and insanity that soon came to involve a corpse stuffed into a freezer in the garage of 59-year-old Bill Rothstein, who claimed he’d put it there on the orders of his 54-year-old girlfriend, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong—an intelligent and cunning woman with severe mental-health issues who, two decades earlier, had gotten away with killing a boyfriend. And that, believe it or not, isn’t even the half of it. Featuring an am...