Death Penalty News

Veteran prosecutor Fern Smith convicted both Tremane Wood and Richard Glossip. She calls a judge in both cases a friend. From her perch on the witness stand, 81-year-old Fern Smith cast a flinty stare at the defense attorney standing before her. Once a veteran prosecutor at the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office, she wore a black chiffon scarf, gold earrings, and an obstinate air, her gray hair pulled back in a tight bun. She did not look at Richard Glossip, sitting across the Oklahoma City courtroom alongside his lawyers. Smith had last seen him more than two decades earlier, not long after convincing a jury to sentence him to die.

A Texas appeals court has ordered a new trial for Randy Halprin because of antisemitic bias by the judge in his case A Texas appeals court ordered a new trial Wednesday for a Jewish man on death row — who was part of a gang of prisoners that fatally shot a police officer in 2000 after escaping — because of antisemitic bias by the judge who presided over his case. Lawyers for Randy Halprin have contended that former Judge Vickers Cunningham in Dallas used racial slurs and antisemitic language to refer to him and some of his co-defendants.

BOSTON — Attorneys for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are seeking to remove the judge overseeing the protracted legal battle over Tsarnaev's death sentence. Tsarnaev's lawyers said during a hearing in federal court in Boston on Wednesday that U.S. District Court Judge George O’Toole should be recused from the case, pointing to what they said were comments O'Toole made about the case on podcasts and at public events during the appeals process.

Last week brought new evidence of crippling flaws in America’s death penalty system. The number of people exonerated and freed from death row over the last 50 years reached 200 .

TOKYO - A Japanese high court judge was impeached Wednesday for posting on social media in 2017 messages that were found offensive to the bereaved family of a high school girl murdered two years earlier, marking the first time a judge has been dismissed over the expression of views. The Judge Impeachment Court deemed the series of posts made by Kiichi Okaguchi of the Sendai High Court, who is currently suspended from duty, constituted "gross misconduct" beyond the scope of freedom of expression.

Louisiana law allows a person in prison to file a petition to challenge their conviction or sentence on the basis of claims like innocence, police or prosecutorial misconduct, and ineffective assistance of counsel. State law also requires that a panel of three state appellate judges must review petitions written by incarcerated people themselves because they cannot afford a lawyer. But according to an investigative report from ProPublica, judges on Louisiana’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal secretly decided not to review petitions that were not written by lawyers—and instead directed staff director Jerrold Peterson to send out cut-and-pasted denials to at least 5,000 petitions that no judge ever read.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma appeals court on Thursday threw out a first-degree murder conviction because of a sexual relationship between the judge and a prosecutor in the case. In a 3-2 decision, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ordered a new trial for defendant Robert Leon Hashagen III, who was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of first-degree murder in 2021.  Hashagen’s attorneys later appealed after new evidence emerged of an undisclosed sexual relationship between the trial court judge, Timothy Henderson, and one of the prosecutors in the case.

Arizona Executes 76-Year-Old Man after Refusing DNA and Fingerprint Testing In its third execution of 2022, Arizona executed Murray Hooper for a 1980 crime that was never analyzed using modern forensic methods. In the days preceding his execution, his attorneys continued to request DNA testing and pursued new claims of prosecutorial misconduct based on evidence not revealed until Hooper’s clemency hearing. All challenges to his conviction and death sentence failed. In an investigative report published the day before Hooper’s scheduled execution, Liliana Segura of The Intercept reviewed the issues of race, misconduct, and innocence that have been central to Hooper’s legal challenges. In an interview with Segura, Hooper continued to protest his innocence and wanted his story told even if he was executed. “Even if they got me, at least it’s out there,” he said. Hooper was sentenced to death in 1983 for the murders of Patrick Redmond and his mother-in-law Helen Phelps. The prosecution alle...

Randy Halprin was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 in the killing of Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins. 1 of 2 living members of the "Texas 7" prison gang, all of whom were convicted in the murder of a North Texas police officer in 2000, could get a new trial over his judge's alleged anti-Semitic comments, according to sources. Randy Halprin was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 in the killing of Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins. But nearly 20 years later, witnesses have testified that the judge in Halprin's case, Vickers Cunningham, was known to make racial and anti-Semitic comments against Halprin, who is Jewish. Sources say prosecutors now agree that the 2003 trial judge exhibited bias against Halprin, which prevented a fair and impartial trial. This is another step in Halprin potentially getting a new trial. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals will have to sign off for that to happen. Tivon Schardl, Halrpin's attorney, wrote in a statemen...

“The more people know about how the system of capital punishment really works, the less support they will have for that policy,” says Marc Bookman, the author of A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays . Bookman’s critically acclaimed collection of essays — described by Publishers Weekly as “a cogent and harrowing primer on what’s wrong with capital punishment” — channels his decades of capital litigation experience into 12 stories that exemplify the systemic failings of the death penalty, from racial bias and an incapacity to come to grips with mental illness to bad lawyering, bad judging, and an epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct. Bookman is the co-founder of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation (ACCR), a non-profit death penalty resource center. Prior to founding ACCR in 2010, he was a fixture in the homicide unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, representing defendants who faced the death penalty. In his time in homicide unit, the Defend...

Finding “brazen misconduct” by a prosecutor who withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and then secretly served as the trial judge’s law clerk in the case, a Midland County, Texas judge has recommended that death-row prisoner Clinton Young be granted a new trial. In a 30-page factfinding order issued on April 26, 2021, Senior Judge Sid Harle excoriated former assistant district attorney Ralph Petty and the Midland County District Attorney’s office for “shocking prosecutorial misconduct that destroyed any semblance of a fair trial” in Young’s case. That conduct, which Harle said was known to at least 2 senior members of the District Attorney’s office, included serving as part of the prosecution team that tried Young for murder and defended his conviction and death sentence on appeal while simultaneously acting as judicial clerk and legal adviser for the judge who was presiding over the trial and subsequent appeals in the trial court. Harle said that Petty violated Young’s due pr...

A mother convicted of murdering her four children after purposefully burning down their Santa Clarita Valley home more than 20 years ago had the death penalty in her case reversed Monday.   Sandi Dawn Nieves was sentenced to death approximately two years after she burned down her Cherry Creek Drive home on July 1, 1998, while all four of her daughters — Jaqlene Marie Folden, 5, Kristl Dawn Folden, 7, Rashel Hollie Nieves, 11, and Nikolet Amber Nieves, 12 — held a slumber party inside.   Shortly before Nieves was sentenced to death in October 2000, the jury found prosecutors proved Nieves asked the girls to hold a slumber party in the kitchen that night, and while they were on top of their sleeping bags, the mother wrote letters to people detailing her plan to kill herself and her children.   Nieves would go on to light a series of fires inside the home, using gasoline and burning items within the open oven in the kitchen. She survived the fire, along with h...

Sharon Keller, the longtime presiding judge of Texas' Court of Criminal Appeals, has tried to move on from several past ethical controversies — including blocking the last-minute appeal of a 2007 execution. A primary challenger hopes voters will reconsider them. It’s been more than a decade since Sharon Keller became an international figure in the death penalty debate. On the afternoon of Sept. 25, 2007, when attorneys for death row inmate Michael Richard asked if they could file an appeal at the court a few minutes past their deadline, Keller, the presiding judge of the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals since 2000, famously insisted “we close at five.” Richard was executed hours later. The incident earned Keller questions from the state Commission on Judicial Conduct and widespread criticism from Texas legislators, ethics experts and the impassioned authors of sharonkiller.com , a website sparked by the incident. Keller says the controversy is behind her. David...

Hector Medina was sentenced to death in 2008 after killing his two young children. Now, he's getting a new sentencing trial because his lawyer refused to present evidence to persuade jurors to opt for the lesser sentence of life without parole. The lawyer of a man sentenced to death for killing his two young children predicted that the case would be back in court 10 years later. She was off by a year. Nine years ago, Hector Medina was convicted of capital murder in Dallas County after he fatally shot his 8-month-old daughter and 3-year-old son in March 2007.  On Wednesday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted him a new sentencing hearing, where he will fight for the alternative to a death sentence — life without parole. The court ruled Medina didn’t get a fair trial in 2008 because his lawyer refused to present a defense at the punishment phase, the part of the trial after a capital murder conviction where jurors weigh factors that will lead either to a de...

An Irving father sentenced to death for the revenge killing of his children after their mother left him has been granted a new punishment trial. Hector Rolando Medina, 38, shot 3-year-old Javier and 8-month-old Diana in the head and the neck after his girlfriend left him in March 2007. He then shot himself in the neck outside his Irving home. Medina was convicted of capital murder in 2008 and sent to death row, after defense attorney Donna Winfield didn't call a single witness or present closing arguments during the punishment phase of the trial. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld a lower court's ruling that Medina should be granted a new punishment trial because of his defense attorney's "deficient performance." The Dallas County district attorney's office will decide whether to again seek the death penalty against Medina. The automatic sentence for capital murder in Texas is life without the possibility of parole. "These c...