Death Penalty News

Every Thursday at 9 a.m. when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals publishes its orders and opinions online, Melissa Lucio’s family, supporters and lawyers scan the court’s website for the death row inmate’s name. Caught between freedom and a potential execution for the last two years, waiting for every Thursday morning is all Lucio and her team can do. The 56-year-old, found guilty in 2008 of killing her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah Alvarez, has spent two of her 17 years on death row in a legal limbo as the CCA weighs a district judge’s 2024 recommendation to overturn her capital murder conviction because of withheld evidence. An additional ruling from the judge six months later declared Lucio “actually innocent” of killing Mariah.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court appeared likely Wednesday to give Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip at least another day in court in his long quest to throw out his murder conviction and death sentence. The justices heard arguments in a case that has produced a rare alliance in which lawyers for Glossip and the state argued that the high court should overturn Glossip’s conviction and death sentence because he did not get a fair trial. The victim’s relatives have told the high court that they want to see Glossip executed.

Convincing a Republican attorney general to advocate against a death sentence is a near impossible feat, but Supreme Court roadblocks could force Oklahoma to execute a man in a conviction it doesn’t accept. WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court handed Richard Glossip one loss in 2015 — and if not for a corrections department blunder, he’d be dead. Almost a decade later, Glossip returns to the high court a second time, bringing the justices mountains of support for another trial and hoping a procedural hurdle doesn’t end his case for innocence before it can begin.

In 1999, there were 98 executions in the United States. In that same year, there were 276 new death sentences, and the size of death row reached 3,625 prisoners across the country.  That year was not an anomaly: these statistics had been steadily rising over the preceding decade. States like Kansas and New York that had had abandoned the death penalty, reinstated capital punishment in 1994 and 1995 respectively. The federal death penalty was greatly expanded, and legislation was passed to shorten the appeals process.

The Cameron County District Attorney’s Office and appellate attorneys for Death Row inmate Melissa Lucio agree that favorable evidence was “withheld” from the defense during her 2008 trial. She was convicted in July 2008 of the murder of her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah Alvarez, and was sentenced to death. 

The Supreme Court’s liberal wing was so thoroughly convinced that prosecutors illegally withheld evidence in the case of a botched-prison-escape-turned-murder that they would have reversed a convicted man’s death sentence without even hearing argument. The Court’s conservative majority refused to hear the case, however, leaving the condemned inmate’s looming execution intact despite another man’s confession. David Brown is part of the “Angola 5,” a group of inmates took prison guards hostage during an attempted escape from the maximum-security state penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, in late December 1999. The original group consisted of six inmates, but one was shot and killed during the escape attempt. Capt. David Knapps, 41, was also killed, and all five inmates were charged with — and convicted of — first-degree murder.

About 4 months from now, on Dec. 3, 2020, Pervis Payne, 53, is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee, after spending 32 years on death row. Payne is an African-American who grew up in Tipton County, Tennessee, once one of the largest cotton-producing counties in the state. Both of his parents experienced first-hand life in the South under Jim Crow South. On June 27, 1987, 20-year-old Payne was found at the scene of a crime: murder and attempted rape. The victims were a neighbor of his girlfriend and the neighbor’s 2-year-old daughter. In court, Payne described what he saw as: “The worst thing I ever saw in my life.” Earlier that same day, Payne testified that he was waiting for his girlfriend at her apartment in Millington, Tennessee, when he saw a man covered in blood run out of the building. The man ran past him and dropped change and some papers while sprinting away. Payne picked up some of these items before entering the building. He then noticed that the door to...