Death Penalty News

SHELBY COUNTY, Ala. (WBRC) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up an Alabama death-penalty case involving Michael Anthony Powell, leaving in place a state appeals court decision that threw out Powell’s conviction. Two justices — Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — said the Court should have stepped in. In a written dissent, Alito argued the Alabama appeals court misapplied U.S. Supreme Court precedent about what prosecutors can and can’t say during closing arguments.

The Idaho Supreme Court held Tuesday night that a second execution attempt of Thomas Creech does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment or imposing multiple punishments for the same offense. Earlier Tuesday, a federal judge in the district of Arizona said he will block the scheduled execution of Creech, according to the Idaho Statesman.  U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow said in court that a second execution attempt would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

📢 Click here to Google translate this article into your own language La vista de la cuarta apelación, puerta para un nuevo juicio, será telemática y  se celebrara el próximo 28 de febrero Pablo Ibar ya tiene fecha y hora para su vista de apelación. Será el próximo 28 de febrero a las 14.00 horas (hora local de Florida).

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (AP) — A juror in Scott Peterson’s two-decade-old murder trial will be granted immunity before testifying at a hearing that could determine whether a new trial is granted, authorities said. The offer to Richelle Nice will come before she testifies at a Feb. 25 evidentiary hearing, Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager announced Monday. Nice was Juror 7 in the trial that ended in 2004 with Peterson’s conviction for killing his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn son. Prosecutors say Peterson took his wife’s body from their Modesto home on Christmas Eve 2002 and dumped her from his fishing boat into the San Francisco Bay, where her body and that of her unborn son washed ashore separately in April 2003. Peterson’s lawyers want to overturn his murder conviction on grounds of bias and misconduct. They contend that Nice lied on a jury questionnaire when she denied having been the victim of a crime or involved in a lawsuit. Attorneys say Nice did ...

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...

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A federal judge has rejected a bid by the suspect in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting to have the death penalty removed as a potential sentencing option. Lawyers for Robert Bowers argued that capital punishment violates the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause and the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Senior District Judge Donetta W. Ambrose noted in a trio of rulings Monday that courts have consistently upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty. Bowers "has not identified a single case holding that the (federal death penalty) is unconstitutional,” she wrote. Defense lawyer Judy Clarke has made similar arguments in other high-profile capital cases. Her clients have included Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is appealing his 2015 death sentence, and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who entered a plea agreement that spared him the death penalty. In court filings, Clarke said that she has tried to negotiate...

Lawyers for Robert Bowers, accused of killing 11 worshipers at Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, are citing Colorado's new law abolishing the death penalty in an effort to spare Mr. Bowers from federal execution. Colorado abolished the death penalty on Monday, becoming the 22nd state to do so since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. Lawyers for Mr. Bowers say the Colorado law represents a "clear and dominant trend of death penalty abolition among the states" and that the federal government should follow suit. The lawyers — public defenders Michael Novara and Elisa Long and anti-death penalty lawyer Judy Clarke — are asking U.S. District Judge Donetta Ambrose to grant their motion to strike the death penalty as a sentence option on the grounds that it violates the U.S. Constitution. "Our nation is walking away from capital punishment," they said in a motion filed Tuesday. "Colorado’s abolition of the death penalty is the most ...

Washington D.C., Jan 21, 2020 / 06:00 pm (CNA).- The number of Republican state lawmakers opposed to capital punishment is growing, a conservative group claims, as anti-death penalty activists look forward to continued momentum from the right on this issue in 2020.  “The nation is down to only 25 states that still have an active death penalty system, of those, over a third have not used it in a decade or more,” Hannah Cox, National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, told CNA in a statement.  “We anticipate the downward trends to continue around capital punishment and expect to see more states join those that have repealed their systems over the next year.” At the national level, the parties are divided on the issue. The 2016 Republican Party platform stated that “The constitutionality of the death penalty is firmly settled by its explicit mention in the Fifth Amendment,” and that “With the murder rate soaring in our great cities, we ...

In my opinion the death penalty is constitutional. It is also my opinion that there exists overwhelming evidence that the death penalty is often dispensed in an unjust fashion. My opinion matters only because I am one of five members of a body that funds Dallas County's efforts to bring about the death of an individual who has committed capital murder. Ultimately, it is solely the discretion of the district attorney to seek the death penalty in any case. It's no secret that Dallas County is experiencing an increase in crime rates, which many of us, including me, view to be a serious crisis. Financially, seeking the death penalty is very expensive and only getting costlier. If the millions of dollars spent trying and appealing death penalty cases are redirected to law enforcement efforts right now, we have the ability to curtail a frightening trend in crime and hopefully save lives. I think that is a better use of funds, but that reallocation can only be set in motion if ...

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...

The death penalty is back in the news. Last week, President Donald Trump argued that capital punishment should be available to punish drug dealers who have contributed to the opioid crisis. Earlier this month, in contrast, the New Hampshire Senate voted to prospectively repeal the state's death penalty. These developments provide occasion to review the constitutional issues raised when the federal government or a state seeks to put a convict to death. The basic question is whether, as a general matter, imposition of the death penalty is consistent with the Constitution. Ordinarily, those who see an inconsistency argue that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments." To many who disagree, this argument is silly. The Constitution contains 2 due-process clauses that explicitly contemplate that the government may deprive a person of "life" (as well as "liberty" and "property") as long a...

(CNN) An Alabama death row inmate whose execution went wrong is asking that his death sentence be vacated. The attempted execution was "botched and bloody," as the inmate's lawyer put it, and left the inmate under "physical and mental duress." Doyle Lee Hamm was convicted in 1987 of committing murder during a robbery and sentenced to death. On February 22, the 61-year-old was being prepped for intravenous lethal execution at the Holman Correctional Facility when staff and medical personnel tried and failed for 2½ hours to find veins in his groin, feet and legs. A federal judge ordered a medical exam by an outside physician; it was completed Sunday by Dr. Mark Heath, an anesthesiologist who practices at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. In two civil actions filed Wednesday with the Alabama US District Court and the state circuit court, Hamm maintains that the execution was called off after "hours of physical and psycholo...

A day after another failed execution in Ohio, Gov. John Kasich's office says the state's capital-punishment protocol doesn't need to change. Meanwhile, civil-rights advocates say the latest failure could be used as evidence in future challenges to the constitutionality of Ohio's death-penalty law. Kasich was forced to grant a reprieve for Alva Campbell on Wednesday when a medical team in the death chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville determined that it couldn't find 2 suitable veins in his arms or legs to carry out his lethal injection. Campbell, 69, had been strapped to a gurney and poked and prodded for about 30 minutes when the team made the determination. The failure of the execution appears to be just the 3rd in modern U.S. history - and the 2nd to occur in Ohio during the past decade. Campbell's ill health presaged a difficult execution. But in 2009, the state also was forced to halt the execution of a younger...