Death Penalty News

A Hungarian national accused in the murders of two elderly, disabled men in South Florida faces second-degree murder charges. While some reports have discussed the potential for capital punishment, Florida law currently restricts the death penalty to first-degree murder convictions, and federal constitutional law prohibits automatic death sentences for any class of person, including undocumented immigrants. Zsolt Zsolyomi, 26, a native of Hungary, entered the United States on a 90-day visa waiver in 2022 but overstayed, rendering him an undocumented immigrant according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In the summer of 2024, he was arrested in Miami Beach on charges including petit theft and strong-armed robbery. ICE issued a detainer for his deportation, but he was released under supervision with an ankle monitor instead of immediate removal. He subsequently disabled the monitoring device and became a fugitive. Elderly gay men Zsolyomi allegedly altered his appearance...

Former Illinois death-row prisoner Gabriel Solache, a Mexican national whose death sentence was one of 157 commuted by Governor George Ryan in January 2003 , was exonerated on December 21, 2017 after twenty years of wrongful imprisonment, but immediately seized by agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). Cook County prosecutors dropped charges against Solache and his co-defendant Arturo DeLeon-Reyes after Circuit Court Judge James Obbish overturned their convictions, finding that disgraced Chicago detective Reynaldo Guevara had told “bald-faced lies” under oath when he testified to having no memory of interrogating Solache and DeLeon-Reyes and denied having beaten false confessions out of the men.  DeLeon-Reyes also was immediately arrested by ICE agents.  Solache and DeLeon-Reyes were convicted in separate trials, and Solache was sentenced to death, for the 1998 stabbing deaths of Jacinta and Mariano Soto during a home robbery. ...