Death Penalty News

A Broward County man is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday evening while his legal team mounts a furious, multi-pronged effort to halt the execution in federal and state courts. Richard Knight, who was convicted of the 2000 murders of Odessia Stephens and her daughter, Hanessia Mullings, faces a May 21 execution date at 6:00 p.m. ET. If carried out, it will mark the seventh execution in Florida this year and the 34th under Governor Ron DeSantis.

The ACLU is asking state and federal courts to order DNA and fingerprint analysis they say could prove innocence Death row exonerees and innocence advocates are calling on Gov. Bill Lee to halt the May 21 execution of Tony Carruthers to allow for DNA testing on evidence his attorneys said could prove his innocence.  “[DNA] doesn’t take sides,” Tennessee Innocence Project Executive Director Jason Gichner said. “It’s not pro-prosecution, it’s not pro-defense. Law enforcement uses DNA all the time to solve cold cases and at the same time we can use DNA to vindicate innocent people by testing evidence to prove that they didn’t commit the crime.” 

Richard Rojem’s death sentence was twice overturned by appellate courts, but his conviction itself has never been fully revisited. RICHARD ROJEM JR. had 20 minutes to address the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. Wearing a maroon prison uniform, he raised his cuffed right hand and swore to tell the truth, then gave his pitch for why his life should be spared. It would take less than 90 seconds.

With less than 2 weeks before his scheduled execution, an Oklahoma death row inmate’s spiritual advisor is making a more than 120-mile trek on foot to deliver a letter to Gov. Kevin Stitt asking for a temporary stay of execution. The letter, written by Anthony Sanchez, is asking Stitt for a 60-day stay of execution to allow time for Sanchez’s new legal team time to process new evidence.

BROOMFIELD, Colorado, April 21 (Reuters) - Colorado-based Biofire Tech is taking orders for a smart gun enabled by facial-recognition technology, the latest development in personalized weapons that can only be fired by verified users. But in a sign of the long, challenging road that smart guns have faced, a prototype twice failed to fire when demonstrated for Reuters this week. Company founder and Chief Executive Kai Kloepfer said the software and electronics have been fully tested, and the failure was related to the mechanical gun which was made from pre-production and prototype parts.

Arizona Executes 76-Year-Old Man after Refusing DNA and Fingerprint Testing In its third execution of 2022, Arizona executed Murray Hooper for a 1980 crime that was never analyzed using modern forensic methods. In the days preceding his execution, his attorneys continued to request DNA testing and pursued new claims of prosecutorial misconduct based on evidence not revealed until Hooper’s clemency hearing. All challenges to his conviction and death sentence failed. In an investigative report published the day before Hooper’s scheduled execution, Liliana Segura of The Intercept reviewed the issues of race, misconduct, and innocence that have been central to Hooper’s legal challenges. In an interview with Segura, Hooper continued to protest his innocence and wanted his story told even if he was executed. “Even if they got me, at least it’s out there,” he said. Hooper was sentenced to death in 1983 for the murders of Patrick Redmond and his mother-in-law Helen Phelps. The prosecution alle...

Posthumous forensic testing of evidence in the case of Ledell Lee, who was executed in Arkansas in 2017, has found DNA from an unidentified male on a bloody club used to kill Debra Reese 29 years ago and on a blood-soaked shirt that was wrapped around the weapon. The DNA results, released by the Innocence Project and the ACLU on April 30, 2021, raise additional troubling questions about Lee’s conviction. Lee, who consistently maintained his innocence of the crime, was executed on April 20, 2017. He was 1 of 4 men put to death in a span of 8 days as Arkansas rushed to conduct executions before its lethal-injection drugs expired. The state scheduled 8 executions over an 11-day period, jamming the courts with execution-related litigation and impairing judicial review of the cases. At the time of Lee’s 1995 trial, DNA testing techniques were unable to determine whether evidence from the scene implicated him. As technology improved, Lee sought new testing, including in a filing immediately ...

Lawyers’ request to conduct additional DNA testing before Ledell Lee was executed had been denied. For 22 years, Ledell Lee maintained that he had been wrongly convicted of murder. “My dying words will always be, as it has been, ‘I am an innocent man,’” he told the BBC in an interview published on April 19, 2017 — the day before officials in Arkansas administered the lethal injection. 4 years later, lawyers affiliated with the Innocence Project and the American Civil Liberties Union say DNA testing has revealed that genetic material on the murder weapon — which was never previously tested — in fact belongs to another man. In a highly unusual development for a case in which a person has already been convicted and executed, the new genetic profile has been uploaded to a national criminal database in an attempt to identify the mystery man. Patricia Young, Mr. Lee’s sister, has been fighting for years to prove that it was not her brother who strangled and fatally bludgeoned the 26-year-old...

DNA testing from a 1993 killing in Arkansas has revealed genetic material from a male other than the inmate executed for the murder four years ago, two groups said Friday. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Innocence Project released summaries of the testing of evidence from the 1993 murder of Debra Reese.  Ledell Lee, who was convicted of her murder, was one of four inmates executed by Arkansas in 2017. The city of Jacksonville last year agreed to allow new tests on fingerprints and DNA evidence after the groups had sued. The groups said the testing revealed DNA material from an unknown male other than Lee on the wooden club used to kill Reese and a bloody shirt that was wrapped around it.  The groups said the DNA profile did not match any in a national database. The groups also said that five fingerprints that had been discovered at the crime scene in 1993 were run in a national database but remain unidentified. “While the results obtained twenty-nine years after the...

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday denied a death row prisoner’s claim that prosecutors presented false evidence about fingerprints left on a 40-ounce malt liquor bottle, seriously limiting his path to a new trial . Two judges on the court rejected state District Judge DaSean Jones’ findings that caused him to recommend last year that Ronald Hamilton receive consideration of a new punishment, saying they were “not supported by the record or law.” Hamilton and his attorneys failed to show that the prosecutors misled the court or misrepresented any information to the jury during the punishment phase of the trial, judges Kevin Yeary and David Newell wrote in their opinion. Using false evidence to procure a conviction would violate due process. Attorneys representing Hamilton could not be reached for comment. The claim centered around fingerprints left more than 15 years ago on the half-empty bottle, which was found sitting outside a Houston convenience store. Defense attorne...

The justices of the Supreme Court of California reviewed a direct appeal from the appellant, Alfred Flores, III, who was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, and upheld the Superior Court’s conviction. In 2001, defendant Flores was arrested and tried for the murders of three teenage boys, identified as Torres, Ayala and Van Kleef, for refusing to join the El Monte Trece gang. Flores sought to recruit the victims because they were friends with another teenaged member of the gang. The prosecution theorized that the first victim, Torres, was killed after “disappointing” Flores by failing to show up at his initiation ceremony. The second victim, Van Kleef, was killed because he witnessed the Torres murder. The last victim, Ayala, was killed out of Flores’ fear that Ayala would implicate him for the Torres murder. The cause of death of all three victims was by gunshot. The jury convicted on all three counts of murder and Flores was sentenced to dea...

The last 3 men scheduled for execution in Georgia said they did not commit the killing and that DNA testing that was not available at the time of trial could prove it. In 2 of the cases, victim family members supported the request for testing. Prosecutors opposed the requests, and the courts refused to allow the testing. 2 of the 3 men were executed, with doubts still swirling as to their guilt. Shawn Nolan, a federal defender who represented Georgia prisoner Ray “Jeff” Cromartie, summed up the sentiments of the prisoners, families, and defense attorneys in these cases. “I’d like to know what the state is so scared of,” he said. “Why are they afraid of the truth? This is sad and so disturbing.” “We have the capability of testing a wide range of forensic evidence that we couldn’t test in the past,” said Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham. “It is a powerful tool to get to the truth and to get important answers as to whether the criminal legal sys...

An Arkansas city council has agreed to allow new tests on fingerprint and DNA evidence relating to a man Arkansas executed in 2017. The Jacksonville City Council voted Friday to allow the new tests on evidence that from Ledell Lee‘s family contends the tests could exonerate Lee of the 1993 slaying of Debra Reese. This comes after the American Civil Liberties Union and the Innocence Project asked a state judge to force Jacksonville authorities to release fingerprint tests and DNA they say supports claims convicted murderer Lee was innocent of the murder. The groups filed the lawsuit on behalf of Patricia Young, Lee’s sister. Lee insisted to the end that he was innocent of the slaying. “This lawsuit was always about finding the truth, and we’re glad the Jacksonville City Council has decided to do the right thing and allow this evidence to be tested,” said Holly Dickson, interim executive director and legal director of the ACLU of Arkansas.  “While nothing c...

New Analysis by Top Forensic Experts Provides Powerful New Evidence Supporting Lee’s Longtime Claim That He Was Innocent of 1993 Murder  LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The American Civil Liberties Union, the Innocence Project, the ACLU of Arkansas, Hogan Lovells US LLP, and Little Rock attorney John Tull today filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in state court on behalf of Patricia Young, the sister of Ledell Lee. The lawsuit asks the court to order the city of Jacksonville, Ark. to release DNA and fingerprints found at the scene of the crime — which do not match Lee’s — so that they can be tested and run through national databases for the first time. This comes as new analysis from top forensic experts provides reason to believe Lee may have been executed for a crime he did not commit.  Lee was executed on April 20, 2017 for the 1993 murder of Debra Reese. He maintained his innocence from the time of his arrest until his execution. When the Innocence Project and the AC...