Death Penalty News

WASHINGTON (DPN) — Nearly 17 years after an Army psychiatrist opened fire on unarmed soldiers preparing to deploy, the Pentagon has set a date to put him to death. Former Maj. Nidal Hasan is scheduled to be executed by firing squad at 1 p.m. Central Time on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, Texas—the same post where, on Nov. 5, 2009, he killed 13 people and wounded 32 others. If the sentence is carried out, it would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the Army’s first by firing squad since World War II.

Former Kansas corrections officials are urging Governor Laura Kelly to grant clemency to the state's death row inmates. Former Kansas Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz has several reasons why he thinks the state should abolish the death penalty. Werholtz, who served as secretary from 2002 to 2010 and returned on an interim basis in 2019, uses his discussions with peers and family members of victims as well as experiences of seeing wrongly convicted people getting exonerated as his guiding points.

It has been nearly 40 years since my mother, Marguerite, was murdered in a small town near Houston. It has been almost 19 years since the man who murdered her was executed. His death did not heal my pain — I still miss my mother every day — and it did not feel like “justice.” Instead, my personal experience with the death penalty left me firmly convinced that it is both a false promise to the families of murder victims and a failed public policy. That is why, as a current Kansas resident, I urge Gov. Laura Kelly to commute the death sentences of the nine men on Kansas’ death row to life without parole.

Amid public outcry about death row inmates applying for clemency, the government board that handles the process is being overhauled by a new state law with provisions taking effect July 1. Under the Kansas Constitution and state law, the governor has executive clemency power, which allows Gov. Laura Kelly to commute a sentence. Clemency applications are first submitted to the Prisoner Review Board, which reviews the case in accordance with state laws before ultimately submitting a recommendation to the governor, who makes the final decision.

TOPEKA — Gov. Laura Kelly denied a Kansas serial killer clemency from his death sentence on Thursday. She denied the request of John Robinson, an 82-year-old Kansas prison inmate convicted of killing eight women from the mid-1980s until he was arrested in 2000. The governor said he did not meet the criteria for clemency. “As the existence of a credible claim of innocence or evidence of manifest injustice are absent in his request,” Kelly said in a press release, “I have denied John Robinson’s request to commute his death sentence.”

TOPEKA — Attorney General Kris Kobach on Tuesday urged the governor to deny clemency to Kansas inmates who have been sentenced to death. Eight of nine people sentenced to death in Kansas formally filed clemency requests in May, according to a press release from the Attorney General’s Office. Kobach urged Gov. Laura Kelly to reject them.

20 years after being sentenced to death for the 2004 murders of Mikiala “Miki” Martinez and Darren Wornkey in Barton County, Sidney Gleason is asking the governor to commute his sentence to life without the possibility of parole. Gleason has applied for executive clemency.  Anyone wishing to comment should send information in writing to the Prisoner Review Board, Jayhawk Walk, 714 SW Jackson, Suite 300; Topeka, KS 66603-3722.  The Federal Public Defender’s office will publish a legal notice in the May 12 Great Bend Tribune and written comments should be submitted within 15 days of publication (May 27). 

The system is a pointless drain on state finances. Meanwhile, we keep discovering that innocent men have been wrongly sentenced to execution.  Imagine that well-meaning politicians created a government program that was supposed to help people. Now, imagine that same program getting 30 years of tax dollars and helping precisely nobody. Worse yet, imagine that the program’s mere existence actually hurts people in ways that no one originally considered. 

The day after Alabama carried out the first-known US execution using nitrogen gas, its attorney general sent a clear message to death penalty states that might want to follow suit: “Alabama has done it, and now so can you.” Indeed, in the weeks immediately following the January execution of Kenneth Smith, it appeared a handful of states were listening, introducing bills that would adopt the method known as nitrogen hypoxia or a similar one. Officials behind each framed the legislation as an alternative method that could help resume executions where they had long been stalled.

Kansas - A judge has denied a request by death-row inmates Jonathan and Reginald Carr to be resentenced in a December 2000 crime spree that included five murders. The Carr brothers filed motions in November requesting a new hearing to determine whether the evidence supports the death penalty. Their lawyers also sought new pre-sentencing reports and journal entries in the case.

After the recent nitrogen gas execution in Alabama of Kenneth Smith, state Attorney General Steve Marshall said that nitrogen gas “was intended to be — and has now proved to be — an effective and humane method of execution.” It is hard to imagine a statement so obviously disconnected from facts. Eyewitness accounts described Smith’s death as a harrowing experience of dry heaving, thrashing, straining against leather straps, seizures, and terror. It took about a half-hour for Smith to die, although the state had previously predicted it would be over in minutes.

Lethal injection only permitted method since death penalty reinstated in 1994 TOPEKA — Attorney General Kris Kobach introduced a bill in the Kansas Legislature allowing the state corrections secretary to decide between intravenous injection of drugs or inhalation of a gas inducing suffocation when executing individuals sentenced to death in state courts.

Since reaching historic highs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, use of the death penalty in America has steadily declined, with a dwindling number of jurisdictions responsible for a growing portion of executions. While capital punishment remains legal in 27 states and for the federal government – and a majority of US adults say they’re in favor it for convicted murderers – the number of jurisdictions that keep the death penalty on the books versus those that actually use it to punish the so-called “worst of the worst” illustrates critics’ complaints of how arbitrarily it is administered.

A growing number of Republican state lawmakers are backing efforts to repeal the death penalty, marking a notable shift in conservatives' views on the matter. 8 states have had Republican-sponsored bills to repeal the death penalty introduced during their current legislative sessions, according to the group Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty: Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Washington state. Demetrius Minor, national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, told the Washington Examiner that the Republican lawmakers behind these bills are "making a strong statement about the failures of the death penalty.” “Their actions continue the trend of GOP state legislators moving away from capital punishment,” Minor said. “They know that the death penalty does not align with their conservative principles of valuing limited government, fiscal conservatism, and life.” Some of these lawmakers acknowledged a personal shift o...

The Kansas Supreme Court has upheld the state’s death penalty against 2 death-row prisoners’ challenges that capital punishment violates the “inalienable” right to life enshrined in the Kansas state constitution. In separate decisions rendered in the cases of brothers Reginald and Jonathan Carr on January 21, 2022, the court held that the right to life guaranteed in Section 1 of the Kansas Constitution’s Bill of Rights “is not absolute or nonforfeitable” and is forfeited “once a defendant has been convicted of capital murder beyond reasonable doubt.”  The court found that numerous constitutional violations had occurred in the brothers’ joint trial in 2002 but affirmed their convictions and death sentences nonetheless, ruling that each of the violations constituted “harmless error” and cumulatively did not affect “the jury’s ultimate conclusion regarding the weight of the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, i.e., the death sentence verdict.” The court had previously overturned...

The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday affirmed the death sentences of Reginald and Jonathan Carr, brothers from Wichita who were sentenced for a series of crimes in December 2000. The Carr brothers murdered 5 people and robbed and kidnapped another in a series of 3 crimes, culminating in a quadruple murder of 4 people in east Wichita.  One person who was shot in that incident survived. Each brother was found guilty of multiple offenses, including multiple counts of capital murder. After a separate sentencing proceeding, the jury sentenced the brothers to death. The Carr brothers appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, which issued its opinion affirming one capital murder conviction for each brother, among other lesser convictions.  The Court, however, vacated the death sentence in each case, concluding that the Carrs’ Eighth Amendment rights to individualized sentencing were violated in Sedgwick County District Court. The State sought and was granted a writ of certiorari by the Uni...

A white supremacist who in 2014 killed three people at Jewish sites in Overland Park has died in prison, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections. F. Glenn Miller Jr., convicted of capital murder in 2015, died Monday at the El Dorado Correctional Facility. Miller’s cause of death is pending an autopsy, but a preliminary assessment indicates he died of natural causes, prison officials said. He was 80. Miller’s April 13, 2014, rampage outside the Jewish Community Center and the Village Shalom care center took the lives of Reat Underwood, 14; his grandfather William Corporon, 69; and 53-year-old Terri LaManno, who worked with visually impaired children. Jurors found the murders especially heinous and sentenced Miller to death. Miller, who lived in Aurora in southwest Missouri, was also sentenced to more than 32 years in prison for other crimes, which included attempted murder for shooting at people who were not struck by his gunfire. During the trial, Miller represented himself...

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...

2 death-sentenced prisoners in Kansas have filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the state’s policy of automatic solitary confinement for death-row prisoners is unconstitutional.  The 2 prisoners, Sidney Gleason and Scott Cheever, have been held in isolation for 14 and 12 years, respectively.  Seven of the 10 people on Kansas’ death row have been kept in solitary confinement for more than 10 years. The prisoners’ lawsuit asserts that the practice of incarcerating all death-row prisoners in automatic, indefinite solitary confinement “is extreme, debilitating, and inhumane, violates contemporary standards of decency, and poses an unreasonable risk of serious harm to the health and safety of Plaintiffs.”  The suit alleges that prisoners are denied “meaningful human contact for years on end.” The lawsuit describes the conditions on death row, saying that prisoners are confined in cells “roughly the size of a typical spot in a parking lot” for 22 to 24 hours a day.  Priso...

A Kansas man accused of killing his two sons and taking his two daughters from their home before being stopped in Oklahoma was charged today with capital murder in the boys' deaths. Donny Ray Jackson Jr, 40, was also charged with two alternative counts of first-degree murder, Leavenworth County Attorney Todd Thompson said at a news conference. The capital murder count covers both boys' deaths and, if Mr Jackson is convicted, could result either in the death penalty or life in prison without parole. Mr Thompson said his office is still considering whether to seek the death penalty. Mr Thompson said he had discussed the charges with the children’s family, who he said were “doing as well as can be expected.” Law enforcement officers went to the family home Saturday afternoon in Leavenworth after one of the siblings didn’t show up for a soccer game. The bodies of 14-year-old Logan Jackson and 12-year-old Austin Jackson were found and their two younger sisters, three-year-old Aven J...