Death Penalty News

Arizona wants justices to make a ruling that would jeopardize our Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel. There have been 186 death row exonerations since 1973 in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center . That’s 186 formerly incarcerated people who were found innocent after having been sentenced to death. People who were able to be reunited with their families, get new chances at life — at freedom. Ten of them came from Arizona. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court is set to hear two little-noticed cases from Arizona, Shinn v. Ramirez and the companion case Shinn v. Jones , that could make it substantially harder for other innocent people to be exonerated. The cases raise fundamental questions about whether the federal courts must allow states to execute people whose convictions or sentences are illegal, including people who may very well be innocent. While the formal issues in the cases are highly technical, they both are of immense practical importa...

REDWOOD CITY, (KRON) — In a San Mateo County courtroom this week, Scott Peterson’s defense attorney said Peterson is broke. San Quentin State Prison’s high-profile inmate is requesting that the state and county pay for his legal expenses as he seeks a second trial. Peterson’s death sentence was overturned by the California Supreme Court and last month prosecutors abandoned re-seeking the death penalty. That means there won’t be a new sentencing trial. But Peterson is fighting for his double murder conviction to also be overturned because of one juror who is accused of lying to be picked for the jury that convicted him in 2004. RELATED | Scott Peterson trial: Attorneys defend ‘rogue juror’ accused of lying  Peterson’s wife, Laci, was eight months pregnant when she was murdered in Modesto and her body dumped into the San Francisco Bay in December 2002. To this day, Laci’s family believes that her husband deserves to be executed for a crime that shocked the world. So why did Laci’s fa...

Just ask a Dallas woman who spent a year in jail without talking to a lawyer. DALLAS - Shuranda Williams spent more than a year in the county jail here, waiting to talk to someone about fighting the murder charge she faces. The police have said she was involved in the 2019 killing of a suspected drug dealer; she insists she wasn’t. If she’s convicted of capital murder, Williams, 44, faces a minimum sentence of life in prison without parole. She wanted a lawyer to help her make her case and to argue for her release from jail, but she couldn’t afford to hire one. If prosecutors had announced they were seeking the death penalty, Williams would have been guaranteed a pair of lawyers whose expertise in capital cases has been vetted by a court-appointed screening committee. The government would have paid for an investigator and a mental health expert to examine her case. And under national legal guidelines , her lawyers would have had a special obligation to aggressively assert every possibl...

Virginia’s capital defenders have “worked themselves out of a job,” according to David Johnson, executive director of the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission. The commonwealth’s four capital defense offices, which opened in 2002, are credited with bringing about a dramatic decline in death sentences. That decline was a major factor in Virginia becoming the first southern state to abolish the death penalty. “The playing field was leveled, and with a level playing field, the death penalty was going away,” Johnson said. “It just changed everything.” While the effect of high-quality representation in capital trials has long been known anecdotally, recent research has provided the data to support that understanding. A 2019 article by Duke Law Professor Brandon Garrett found that the provision of capital trial representation was more closely correlated with a decline in death sentences than other factors, including state adoption of life without parole sentencing, changes in homicide rates,...

The Trump administration politicized capital punishment, going on an execution spree. They accomplished nothing except to strengthen arguments against the practice. The federal government should follow the example of Illinois and abolish the death penalty. Many people assume the death penalty is reserved for only the most heinous crimes in which the convicted person’s guilt is beyond question. But that’s just not so. Before Illinois did away with capital punishment 10 years ago this month, the courts overturned 21 such convictions because the evidence was flimsy to nonexistent. Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, for example, were sentenced to die in 1985 for a murder they had nothing to do with. At a second trial, Hernandez was resentenced to 80 years in prison, but Cruz remained on death row and probably would have been executed had an election not changed the composition of the Illinois Supreme Court. Both men ultimately were freed. Wrongful convictions happened in Illinois even t...

Courts handed out record 632 death sentences last year in a country where the criminal justice system lacks an international standard, legal experts say. When the judge read out a sentence of death, 17-year-old Muhammad Iqbal could scarcely believe it, and reached out for his brother. As guards converged upon him to escort him away from the courtroom and back to prison, the teenager was desperate to speak to his family. “The words ‘sentenced to death’, I didn’t know much at that time about appeals and everything else,” he recalls, sitting on a rope bed in the winter sunshine in his native Mandi Bahauddin, in central Pakistan. “I thought they were going to execute me [right then]. “My brother was in the courtroom at the time of the verdict, I called to him, to see him one last time and to say goodbye to him.” Iqbal, now 39, would spend 21 years on death row before a court ruled earlier this year that he had been sentenced incorrectly, commuting his sentence and releasing him on June 30....

"The man knew his life in this world was over and looked at us and said, “Mang yannang, Sir” (“Sir, I’ll go”). It was a heart-rending scene. The bag-like head-gear was brought down to cover the prisoner’s face and neck and the noose was put round his neck. I had a feeling of despair… Here was a man who had talked to me a few minutes ago, now being killed in cold blood before my very eyes and yet I could not do anything about it. I felt sick and horrible. I felt this was murder in the name of justice. If killing was bad, it was bad for the Government to kill too… The Deputy Fiscal nodded his head and the executioner pulled the lever. Instantly the scaffold opened up and the man dropped. I got near and peeped down and saw the body hanging, still trembling." – H.G. Dharmadasa, former Commissioner-General of Prisons The death penalty is a popular and populist solution that is touted by politicians and governments as a quick-fix to tackle crime, as demonstrated by President Maith...