Death Penalty News

A former Alabama death row inmate is seeking a new trial after finding evidence that his trial attorney was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. Robin "Rocky" Myers, whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison by Gov. Kay Ivey last year, says in his appeal that John Mays, who represented him at his trial for the murder of Ludi Mae Tucker in 1991, did work for KKK officials in the 1970s and '80s and spoke at their events. "In violation of his right to the assistance of conflict-free counsel, Mr. Myers, a Black man, was represented at trial by John Mays, who had demonstrably deep ties with the Klan for two decades leading up to this representation of Mr. Myers," said the appeal, filed in Morgan County Circuit Court.

Russell Moore was condemned to the electric chair in America for the brutal murder of a rich socialite. This is what he told us from there. Florida prison inmate number 083475, James Hudson Savage, Race Unknown, knew he’d never get out of his jail cell except in a body bag. In reality he was Russell Thomas Moore, a Yorta Yorta and Wemba Wemba Aboriginal from Murray River territory, who had been locked up on Florida’s death row. Incarcerated 16,000km from the home he never knew but had come to yearn for since being sentenced to die in Florida’s infamous electric chair, Russell feared he was doomed never to set foot on Australian soil again. In the end, he would instead be lowered into it, in a coffin surrounded by relatives who had never met him, but knew his tragic story. Even 20 years ago, in the cellblock of 1 of the 20 prisons he was shuttled between in the decades he spent in Florida’s prison system, Russell told me he didn’t expect to get out alive. At that point all hope had not ...

LIBERTY, Mo. — An avowed anti-Semite who shot three people to death at two suburban Kansas City Jewish sites in 2014 is asking the Kansas Supreme Court to overturn his death sentence, saying he should not have been allowed him to represent himself at trial. The appeal from Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. is scheduled to go before the state Supreme Court on Monday. He was convicted of one count of capital murder, three counts of attempted murder, and assault and weapons charges in August 2015. Miller's attorneys argue that the Johnson County Court judge who oversaw his trial should not have allowed him to represent himself. They say the judge did not consider whether Miller had mental health issues that would make him incompetent to represent himself in a complex capital case. RELATED | Kansas: Jurors recommend death sentence for white supremacist Miller, from Aurora, Missouri, also argues that the judge should have allowed him to present mitigating evidence during the penalty phase, and t...

Blanton remained free for almost 40 years after the bombing BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., the last of three one-time Ku Klux Klansmen convicted in a 1963 Alabama church bombing that killed four Black girls and was the deadliest single attack of the civil rights movement, died Friday in prison, officials said. He was 82. Gov. Kay Ivey’s office said Blanton died of natural causes. He was being held at Donaldson prison near Birmingham, prison officials said. In May 2001, Blanton was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Ivey, in a statement, called the bombing “a dark day that will never be forgotten in both Alabama’s history and that of our nation.” When asked by the judge during sentencing if he had any comment, Blanton said: “I guess the good Lord will settle it on judgment day.” Sen. Doug Jones, who prosecuted Blanton, said the fact that Blanton remained free for a...

Just after midnight on May 21, 1987, I watched as Edward slowly choked to death, gulping in cyanide gas, a means directly descended from the Zyklon B used on an industrial scale by the Nazis. A few minutes earlier, I had walked with Edward into the awful, oval Mississippi gas chamber, and hugged him before the guards strapped him tightly down to the chair. I then waited 10 minutes – it seemed hours, and it seemed seconds – in a witness chair, behind Edward, only able to see the back of his head. (This is a key part of execution protocol: they don’t want you to see the agony on a prisoner’s face as he or she dies.) Edward finally spoke, mostly to himself. “Well, I guess no one’s going to call. OK, let’s get this over with.” I hold myself responsible for Edward’s death. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to think about it. Paul Hamann filmed the two weeks running up to this catastrophic finale for his film, Fourteen Days in May (1987), so I have the dubious luxury of being able to ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson rarely slows down, friends and family say. It seems he’s always looking over details on death penalty cases from his Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative. If he’s not speaking on the criminalization of black men, Stevenson is researching another historical site connected to an episode of racial violence. But a new HBO documentary on Stevenson attempts to get him to sit, speak and explain why he believes the legacy of lynchings of African Americans in the U.S. is directly linked to those who have wrongly been put on death row. In his mind, racial structures of oppression have remained in the U.S. judicial system since the Jim Crow-era and the death penalty is merely their direct descendant. “Most people don’t know about our history of lynching,” Stevenson told The Associated Press in a phone interview shortly after receiving news Friday that the Supreme Court had overturned the death sentence for Curtis F...

King and two other white men were convicted in the brutal East Texas murder of James Byrd Jr.*, who was black. King has claimed he's innocent and hopes the U.S. Supreme Court will stop his death. It’s been more than two decades since an infamous hate crime in East Texas, where three white men were convicted of chaining a black man to the back of a pickup truck, dragging him for miles and then dumping the remains of his body in front of a church. On Wednesday evening, John William King, 44, is set to become the second man executed in the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. Lawrence Brewer was put to death in 2011 for the crime, and Shawn Berry is serving a life sentence. King had previously been involved in a white supremacist prison gang, and he is notoriously covered in racist tattoos, including Ku Klux Klan symbols, a swastika and a visual depiction of a lynching, according to court documents. But King maintains that he’s innocent in Byrd’s murder — claiming that Berry d...