Death Penalty News

Patrick Crusius, who has admitted to killing 23 people and wounding 22 others in a racist mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart in 2019, will no longer face the death penalty, El Paso Matters has learned. District Attorney James Montoya, who took office on Jan. 1, called family members of those killed on Monday to inform them he wouldn’t seek the death penalty in the Aug. 3, 2019, mass shooting, multiple family members told El Paso Matters. The family members asked not to be identified because of a gag order in place since 2022 that prohibited lawyers and potential witnesses from discussing the case with the media.

A former suburban Houston police officer was executed Tuesday for hiring two people to kill his estranged wife nearly 30 years ago amid a contentious divorce and custody battle. Robert Fratta, 65, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the November 1994 fatal shooting of his wife, Farah. He was pronounced dead at 7:49 p.m., 24 minutes after the lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital began flowing into his arms.

SAN ANTONIO — Protecting the state's executioner is so important, state legislators passed a law in 2015, prohibiting the disclosure of their identity. There has been a lot of media coverage about Texas leading the nation in executions, but there has been little published about the executioner. News 4 interviewed retired death chamber warden, Jim Willett about his staff and his work at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. During the 3 year period Willett was the senior warden at the Walls Unit, he green-lighted 89 executions. It was his job to signal the executioner when it was time to deliver the deadly dose and he chose to do it in an understated way, by taking his glasses off. "For me the thought was, especially at first, was that this is gonna happen because I'm gonna tell somebody it's time to happen," Willett said. Willett said while it became routine, it never got easy. During the years he managed the death chamber from 1998...

Screenshot from "Monster's Ball" by Marc Forster (2001) IN Missouri, one of a handful of US states where the death penalty still applies, executioners are handed an envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills. On the envelopes are instructions not to open until services have been completed. The envelopes vary in weight, depending on the nature of the assignment. The nurse, for example, gets less than the anaesthesiologist. The anaesthesiologist gets less than the drug supplier. Until this week, that information was kept a closely-guarded secret. It was revealed when Buzzfeed audited payments and cash withdrawals from Missouri Director of Adult Institutions David Dormire. They found almost $US300,000 had been paid in cash to a small group of individuals since November 2013. Those individuals were responsible for ending the lives of America’s condemned. It’s easy to understand why the money is paid in cash. It’s part of a culture of secrecy that help...

Texas Death House, 'The Walls' Unit. The holding cells, where the doomed inmates spend their last hours, are on the left. The death chamber is located at the far end of the corridor.  Huntsville Unit, Huntsville, TX. New information in the case of Joseph John Cannon, being revealed for the 1st time today, casts a fresh look at the murder trial that reached the Supreme Court, prompted reaction from the Pope, and caused a nation to debate executing someone who committed at crime at age 17 . If Cannon was alive today, he would have turned 56 on January 13, 2016. But on April 22, 1998 the 38 year-old ate his last meal. Cannon ordered "fried chicken, barbecue ribs, baked potato, green salad with Italian dressing, chocolate cake or chocolate ice cream or both, a thick chocolate shake or malt and iced tea." The meal was delivered in the afternoon, not long after he entered a holding room located about 30 feet from where he was set to die. While eating, little d...

The walking scene from ' Monster's Ball ' (2001) by Marc Forster, with B.B. Thornton and Heath Ledger How does capital punishment affect the prison guards and wardens tasked with carrying it out? It was the late 70s, and Kathleen Dennehy was working at Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, the oldest running men's prison in the state. Opened in 1878, it has a vault filled with corrections records dating back to the turn of the century, both from the now-demolished state prison that preceded it and from MCI-Concord's prison cemetery. The weathered papers include death certificates, sentencing documents, and other records, including those of Sacco and Vanzetti, the famous 20s anarchists ostensibly sentenced to death for 1st-degree murder, but whose larger crime was being Italian. But one particular document - from the early 1900s, she estimates - caught her eye. "The wording was so unusual," says Dennehy, who now works for the Na...

The Walls Unit, Huntsville, Texas With 7 prisons, a cemetery for dead inmates and its infamous execution chamber, the business of detention and death is a way of life in the Texas town of Huntsville. In this neat and tidy city north of Houston, prisoners recognizable by their white uniforms, maintain public green spaces under a blazing sun and the gaze of a guard, sitting on the edge of a car. "These are trustees," says the corrections officer. The inmates in question are low-level criminals convicted of crimes such as car theft or burglary. Out of Huntsville's population of 38,000 people, 14,000 are prisoners while a further 6,000 are guards or employees of the Texas Justice Department. Instead of tourist signs pointing out antique shops, the tomb of famous Texas Governor Sam Houston, or other places of interest, a visitor is guided to the various prisons: the Wynne Unit, the Byrne Unit, Hollyday Unit. "Prison, it's an industry here,...

California brand new execution chamber State Sen. Joel Anderson has been an advocate for streamlining the execution process in California, which can last for decades as appeals are heard. In a blog post published on Patch last September, Anderson compared the number of inmates executed in Texas with the number in California, “where the average time from sentencing until punishment is about 25 years.” “In the last 20 years, California has executed only 13 murderers while Texas has executed over 400. Justice delayed is justice denied,” Anderson wrote. Two measures to help “streamline” the state’s death penalty process were defeated Tuesday by Democrats on the Senate Public Safety Committee, according to a press release from state Sen. Joel Anderson, the plan’s chief advocate. Only two votes favored the measures—Anderson’s and fellow Republican Tom Harman’s. At least four Democrats on the seven-member panel opposed the plan, said Anderson aide Jim Kjol. Anderson—whose 36t...

WASHINGTON — "I can see their faces in my nightmares," said Allen Ault, a former Georgia prison warden among a growing number of ex-jailers and executioners opposed to the death penalty in the United States. Across the country, prison workers who once supported the death penalty are beginning to lend their voices, alongside other prominent figures, to the campaign to abolish capital punishment in favor of life imprisonment. In his role as the director of the Georgia Department of Corrections in the 1990s, Ault supervised five executions in a death row that he had built 20 years earlier. Ault would give the order to pull the switch on death row inmates strapped to an electric chair. It is "the most premeditated murder that one can do, there's no other way to describe it," Ault said, calling putting inmates to death an "inhumane job for people who have a conscience and who value life." He was among six retired prison wardens who urged Georgia offic...

Jim Willett Jim Willett, the warden of the prison here, awakened a little before 5 a.m. on Tuesday in his home, which his wife, Janice, had decorated for Christmas. He had not been looking forward to the day. ''My first thought was, 'Today's an execution,' '' he recalled later that morning. '' 'I wonder what he'll be like.' '' Mr. Willett said he was hoping that the man who was to be put to death shortly after 6 p.m. would not resist and that the execution would proceed smoothly. His job requires him to stand at the head of the person strapped on the gurney and to signal the anonymous executioner in the next room to inject the sedative and two lethal chemicals through a syringe. In his two and a half years as warden, Mr. Willett has given the signal -- raising his glasses -- that has killed 84 people. ''Just from a Christian standpoint, you can't see one of these and not consider that maybe it's not right,...

"The Walls" in Huntsville, TX  Every execution in Texas since 1924 has been carried out in the Huntsville Unit, which has been aptly dubbed "the Walls." The Rev. Jesse Jackson has marched here; Katie Couric has reported live from here. Residents say they can tell when there's a controversial execution — they notice the strangers in town. "Inside Huntsville, people don't even know when there's an execution," unless it's high profile, said Bill Williamson, a state police officer whose father worked at the Walls. "They know it's a part of life, and that's what happens." But Huntsville's residents have a precarious relationship with its prisons. In addition to the Walls, there are four more prisons within Huntsville's city limits and five more nearby. The prison system is one of the biggest employers in Huntsville (note to the unemployed: they're hiring), and practically everyone in town falls within a couple...

Located about 70 miles north of Houston’s suburban sprawl, Huntsville is a curious mix of college town and the crown jewel of the Texas criminal justice system. It is the home of Sam Houston State University and 17,000 college students. Just blocks away from the university sits the Huntsville unit of the Department of Criminal Justice (left) where about 1,700 men are incarcerated. It is also home to the state’s death chamber, where seven men have been executed so far this year. If former South Dakota residents Kevin Varga and Billy Galloway are executed as scheduled on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively, they will be the eighth and ninth people to die there in 2010. That number is expected to rise to 11 before the month is over. Varga, along with fellow South Dakotan Galloway, were sentenced to death a decade ago in connection with the slaying of Maj. David Lawrence Logie on Sept. 9, 1998. Locals estimate that more than half of Huntsville is probably employed by the state’s crimi...

Joking about executions was more than some students and college professors were ready to hear, especially when the stand up comic was in charge of executing so many Texas prisoners. The warden who oversaw the Walls Unit in Huntsville, giving the order to go ahead with 89 executions, joked about sending inmates to their death as he spoke to a University of Houston Downtown lecture Tuesday night, but some students and staff expressed discomfort as they talked about it outside the event. Jim Willett had copies of his two books for sale as he addressed the UHD Criminal Justice Lecture Series. Now head of the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, he never focused on one single theme or message as he addressed a room full of around 80 students, faculty and visitors. He began telling several stories and then stopped, midway, and told the audience he needed to back up or he had forgotten details. In answering one student's question, Willett said an inmate had clearly told the priso...