Death Penalty News

On January 21, 2023, Texas death row prisoner Terence Andrus hanged himself at the age of 34, a little more than 6 months after the U.S. Supreme Court denied review of his case for a second time. His lawyer, Gretchen Sween, told the Los Angeles Times that “he’d been careening toward the abyss,” since their decision. “He was broken.” In 2008, at the age of 20, Andrus killed two people during an attempted carjacking while high on PCP-laced marijuana. He was sentenced to death in 2012 by a jury that was unaware of his diagnosis of affective psychosis – a mood disorder causing hallucinations for which he was diagnosed in elementary school – parental neglect as a child, or the trauma he endured in juvenile detention. Beginning at the age of 16, he spent 18 months at an overcrowded juvenile detention center, where he was given high doses of psychotropic drugs and placed in solitary confinement, consisting of a cold and filthy cell for extended periods, either for engaging in self-mutilation,...

The US Supreme Court is often the last say on major cases that impact public life. So what kind of justice might President Trump's nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett be? From abortion to gun rights, here's a look at what she's said about major issues in the past. On her judicial philosophy Speaking in 2016 at Jacksonville University's Public Policy Institute , she told students judges should not be appointed based on policy preferences. "We should be putting people on the court who want to apply the Constitution." In her opening statement on 12 October, she tied herself once more to the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who she worked for as a clerk. "His judicial philosophy was straightforward: A judge must apply the law as written, not as the judge wishes it were. Sometimes that approach meant reaching results that he did not like. "But as he put it in one of his best known opinions, that is what it means to say we have a governm...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amy Coney Barrett paid homage to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her White House speech Saturday as a shatterer of glass ceilings. She said she would be mindful of the woman whose place she would take on the Supreme Court. She even commented that her children think their father is the better cook, much as Ginsburg used to talk about her husband's prowess in the kitchen. But the replacement of the liberal icon Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, by Barrett, who would be the fifth, would represent the most dramatic ideological change on the Supreme Court in nearly 30 years and cement conservative dominance of the court for years to come. Barrett, a judge on the federal appeals court based in Chicago, made clear in her Rose Garden address that she looks to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she once worked, and not Ginsburg, on matters of law. “His judicial philosophy is mine, too. Judges must apply the law as written. Judges are not po...

As an appeals court judge, Judge Barrett has issued opinions that have reflected those of her mentor, Justice Antonin Scalia, but with few of his occasional liberal rulings. WASHINGTON — Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, has compiled an almost uniformly conservative voting record in cases touching on abortion, gun rights, discrimination and immigration. If she is confirmed, she would move the court slightly but firmly to the right, making compromise less likely and putting at risk the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade. Judge Barrett’s judicial opinions, based on a substantial sample of the hundreds of cases that she has considered in her three years on the federal appeals court in Chicago, are marked by care, clarity and a commitment to the interpretive methods used by Justice Antonin Scalia, the giant of conservative jurisprudence for whom she worked as a law clerk from 1998 to 1999. But while Justice Scalia’s methods occasionally drov...

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday instantly upended the nation’s politics in the middle of an already bitter campaign, giving President Trump an opportunity to try to install a third member of the Supreme Court with just weeks before an election that polls show he is currently losing. The White House had already made quiet preparations in the days before Justice Ginsburg’s death to advance a nominee without waiting for voters to decide whether to give Mr. Trump another four years in the White House. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, vowed Friday night to hold a vote on a Trump nominee but would not say whether he would try to rush it through before the Nov. 3 vote in what would surely be a titanic partisan battle. The sudden vacancy on the court abruptly transformed the presidential campaign and underscored the stakes of the contest between Mr. Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger. It also bolstered Mr. Trump’s ...