Death Penalty News

A new report finds that five of the 15 people executed in Florida this year were military veterans. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is defending his modern-era record for executions this year, saying he is bringing justice to the families of victims. But a new report reveals some troubling data: Five of the 15 convicted murderers executed this year in Florida were military veterans.

State is set to execute 4th U.S. vet during record-breaking year for number of executions in the Sunshine State. Aug. 11 (UPI) -- As Florida preps to execute its fourth U.S. veteran this year, more than 130 U.S. veterans in nearly every branch of service have requested for Gov. Ron DeSantis to end the state's executions of convicted vets. A coalition of American veterans will gather Wednesday morning in the state's capital of Tallahassee to issue a plea in a signed letter to DeSantis, imploring the two-term Republican to stop Florida's executions of American military service veterans.

South Carolinian Randy Poindexter writes about the effects 16 years of solitary confinement had on him ahead of South Carolina’s planned execution of Mikal Mahdi , who spent months in solitary as a young man. For 16 years, I lived in a concrete cell. Twenty-three hours a day, every day, for more than 3,000 days, South Carolina kept me in solitary confinement. I was a young man before I was sent to solitary — angry, untreated and unwell. I made mistakes. But I wasn’t sentenced to madness. That’s what solitary did to me. My mental health worsened with each passing day. At first, paranoia and depression set in. Then, hallucinations and self-mutilation. I talked to people who weren’t there. I cut myself to feel something besides despair. I could do nothing as four of my friends and fellow prisoners took their own lives rather than endure another day of torturous isolation.

SINGAPORE - Lawyer Too Xing Ji was in a taxi with a friend at dinnertime when he suddenly broke down in tears after sharing his experience of representing a prisoner on death row. This took place two weeks after Mr Too faced the Court of Appeal on May 23, 2019, and succeeded in getting a temporary reprieve for a drug courier on the eve of his scheduled execution.  The client is still on death row.

TAIPEI – Kneeling in front of a scrum of reporters, an anguished couple asked for their son to be put to death as soon as possible. “Only by doing so may the pains inflicted on the victims and the wounded and their families be slightly eased,” the sobbing father said outside a Taipei metro station. “Although he is our child, the crime he committed is unforgivable.”  The mother bowed repeatedly, her head hitting the ground each time. The scene dates back to May 2014, days after their then 21-year-old son Cheng Chieh went on a stabbing spree on the Taipei subway, killing four people and injuring 24 others.

Dr. Joseph Thornton, a psychiatrist who formerly treated death row prisoners as the medical director of a Florida maximum security prison, called for an end to the death penalty for those with severe mental illness: “We should not be executing anyone, let alone the sick and the broken,” he said.  “As someone with over 40 years’ experience seeing patients with serious mental illness who are stigmatized, ostracized and blamed for their symptoms, I believe that recovery care, not ostracization, respects life and saves lives.” In an op-ed in the Florida Times Union, Thornton used the case of Donald Dillbeck , who suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, mental health issues, and brain abnormalities, to illustrate the failures of the current system. 

  Donald Dillbeck didn’t mince words in the minutes before the state executed him Thursday night. “I know I hurt people when I was young. I really messed up,” Dillbeck, 59, said, strapped to a gurney in the Florida State Prison death chamber. “But I know (Florida Gov.) Ron DeSantis has done a lot worse. He’s taken a lot from a lot of people. I speak for all men, women and children. He’s put his foot on our necks.”

On January 3, 2023, Missouri is set to execute Amber McLaughlin (pictured), the first transgender person scheduled to be put to death in the United States. Tried as Scott McLaughlin, her jury rejected three of the four aggravating circumstances advanced by St. Louis County prosecutors but split on its sentencing verdict. The vast majority of death-penalty states require a unanimous jury vote for death before the death penalty may be imposed. But under Missouri law, a nonunanimous jury vote is deemed a hung jury, triggering a statutory provision that allowed McLaughlin’s trial judge to independently impose sentence. McLaughlin’s trial judge then relied upon the aggravating circumstances rejected by the jury to sentence McLaughlin to death.

Childhoods spent in extreme poverty and neglect with rampant abuse and violence, no access to mental health support and complete apathy from the state; the people on death row in India are among its most marginalised, and their mental disorders were never brought to the justice system’s notice, pathbreaking research by Project 39A at the National Law University of Delhi shows. On a rainy morning in July 2017, Anand sat across a table from a young woman in the prayer room of Bherugarh Central Jail in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. Of average height and build, the 28-year-old, from a scheduled caste family of landless labourers, shivered intermittently. He had been in prison for 18 months now, 13 of them on death row, 12 days in solitary confinement. He had not yet seen his son; he couldn’t even remember his name. When he started to talk about his family, he began to cry. Then his interviewer asked him about life on death row, and he looked up at her and said in Hindi: “It is better to die than...

A death row inmate severed his own penis in his prison cell and asked to be placed on suicide watch. Henry Hodges, who was sentenced to death in 1992 for murdering a telephone repairman, began smearing feces in his cell because he was upset that officials wouldn’t let him have a special food package he ordered, his lawyer Kelley Henry said. Hodges was denied because he had clear conduct for 5 months instead of the 6 required, Henry said. A guard stopped feeding Hodges to curb him from continuing to smear feces. But Hodges responded by slitting his wrists with a razor in his cell on October 7, said his lawyer who visited him at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. After being transported to the infirmary, Hodges asked to be on suicide watch, Henry said. A ‘high-ranking correctional officer’ told a medic tending Hodges that he was manipulating them and could be placed on suicide watch in his jail cell, according to Henry. Once back in his cell, Hodges pulled together ...

On federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, life is bleak, the concrete cold, and the steel unforgiving. This place has a way of getting inside me, permeating my mood, inducing bleakness, coldness, unforgiveness. It’s much easier to slip away into a dissociative state and float outside yourself into world of fantasy rather than undergoing the harrows of deprivation in which I now lie. I lie in bed staring at the white ceiling, the metal bed frame pressing hard through the thin mattress. I turn onto my side, giving my back some much-needed relief. A few minutes ago, I’d stirred awake to find myself, once again, entombed in a small concrete cell, my mood supersaturated with the death-life of death row. I sense precipitation condensing on my eyes, tears forming on my lids. I can no longer shake this feeling of living death, of being alive and yet somehow dead–dead to the world and bereft of social stimulation. A tear slides down my cheek. I mourn what my life has become, what it has bee...

Had Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz been sent to Florida’s Death Row, his daily life while awaiting execution would not have been easy. But he would have enjoyed certain comforts: his own cell, meals delivered three times a day, clean clothes and towels brought to him, and no requirement to work. But after he’s sentenced to life in state prison next month, his existence behind bars looms as dreadful and possibly violent. When he’s eventually assigned to live among a prison’s population, corrections experts say, Cruz will likely have a cellmate, be ordered to perform a prison job and be forced to interact with other inmates at meal times and in a recreation yard. He’ll have to navigate the alien and often-violent social hierarchy of prison life — complicated by his notoriety as a mass murderer and history of mental-health disorders. RELATED | Florida | Nikolas Cruz has avoided the death penalty. Here’s what’s next for him now “I have never in my career encountered anybody like him...

Nikolas Cruz murdered 14 students and 3 staff members at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018. A defense mental health expert in the penalty trial of Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz can pinpoint when he realized the 23-year-old mass murderer still has "irrational thoughts" - the two were making small talk when Cruz began describing plans for an eventual life outside prison. Wesley Center, a Texas counselor, said that happened last year at the Broward County jail as he fitted Cruz's scalp with probes for a scan to map his brain. The defense at hearings this week will try to convince Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer that Center and other experts should be allowed to testify at Cruz's ongoing trial about what their tests showed, something the prosecution wants barred. "He had some sort of epiphany while he was in (jail) that would focus his thoughts on being able to help people," transcripts show Center told prosecutors during...