Death Penalty News

A man's fate hangs in the balance after decades on death row. The complexities of capital punishment in Florida are revealed. James D. Ford spent nearly every moment of the last 25 years in a six-foot by nine-foot cell on Florida’s Death Row. From the moment a judge in Charlotte County in southwest Florida handed down his death sentence in 1999, Ford’s only option was to wait. He waited as his lawyers unsuccessfully submitted appeal after appeal to Florida’s higher courts. He waited for rulings on motions meant to turn his death sentences into lifetime confinement. After his appeals lapsed and his sentence stood, he waited for his death warrant.

Mahila Court Judge R. Sathya awarded death sentences to the accused, A. Thanish Patel The Mahila Court on Thursday awarded death penalty to a 34-year-old man hailing from Gujarat for sexually assaulting and murdering a mentally retarded 17-year-old minor boy in the district in December 2019. Mahila Court Judge R. Sathya awarded death sentences to the accused, A. Thanish Patel, on three counts for the sexual assault under the provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act, 2019 and a life sentence for murder under the Indian Penal Code Prosecution sources, said Patel, then working as a heavy vehicle operator in a private crusher unit near Kolathur, had kidnapped the boy from the bazaar area in Keeranur sub division in a two-wheeler and took him to a desolate spot where he sexually assaulted the minor on December 18, 2019. Patel had also inserted a stick in the minor's anus causing grievous internal injuries to the boy. A local resident who noticed the ...

The girl's mother said her husband had been raping their daughter for long which resulted in her pregnancy. A special court in Rajasthan's Kota awarded death penalty to a 45-year-old man for repeatedly raping and impregnating his 17-year-old mentally unsound daughter before killing her. At the special court under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, Judge Ashok Choudhary said the crime was shameful for "human society". He also imposed a fine of Rs 20,000 on the convict, according to Premnarayan Namdev, Public Prosecutor, POCSO court-1. Namdev said the girl was found dead at her house in Nayapura police station area of the city on May 13, 2015. Her father, who worked as a guard at a warehouse in the city, himself lodged a report at Nayapura police station on the day she was killed, alleging that when he returned home in the evening he found his daughter dead, the public prosecutor said. Based on his complaint, police lodge...

Bruce Webster has been on death row for 23 years. Last month he got a stunning reprieve. A federal judge ruled that new evidence had come to light suggesting Webster has a mental disability, making him ineligible for execution. It’s the first time someone has been saved from the death penalty by a post-conviction diagnosis of mental infirmity from newly discovered evidence, his lawyers say. “It is so unusual and in many ways unprecedented,” said Steven Wells, an attorney at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney which represented Webster. Judge William T. Lawrence from the Southern District of Indiana ruled that the records weren’t available to the defense at the time of Webster’s original sentencing, so introducing them now was valid grounds for reconsideration. Webster was one of five men convicted of kidnapping 16-year-old Lisa Rene from an apartment near Dallas in 1994. They were looking to get revenge on her brother after a $5,000 drug deal went bad. They took Rene t...

Tennessee plans to kill Billy Ray Irick next month by lethal injection. If the execution goes through on August 9, a few weeks before his 60th birthday, he will be the 7th person put to death in the state since 2000, the year executions returned to Tennessee. On death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, a short drive from downtown Nashville, Irick has faced at least 3 previous execution dates, most recently in the fall of 2014. But there is an urgency this time, his longtime attorney, Gene Shiles, says. "This one feels much more ominous." Irick was convicted in 1986 of raping and murdering a 7-year-old girl named Paula Dyer in Knoxville. He was arrested and confessed soon after the crime. Irick had stayed with the child's family for 2 years prior to the murder, according to court filings; defense attorneys "attempted to create reasonable doubt about the identity of the perpetrator" during the guilt phase of the trial, yet called "no witnes...

LINCOLN (AP) — Attorneys for a Nebraska death row inmate whose case inspired the 1999 movie "Boys Don't Cry" say he should be found ineligible for execution because he has the intellect of a child. John Lotter was sentenced to death for his role in the 1993 killings of Teena Brandon, who was a transgender man and went by Brandon, and two witnesses, Lisa Lambert and Philip DeVine, at a farmhouse in Humboldt, about 75 miles south of Omaha. The Lincoln Journal Star reports that Lotter's lawyers filed a motion stating that recent IQ testing shows that Lotter, 46, is intellectually disabled and therefore can't be put to death under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling forbidding the execution of the intellectually disabled. Nebraska law says an IQ of 70 or below is presumptive evidence of an intellectual disability.  Court records show Lotter scored a 67 last year, which would be the equivalent IQ of an 8-year-old. The judge will need to grant an evidenti...

The top prosecutor in Harris County is proposing a new way for Texas to determine if a death-sentenced inmate is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution: use the current clinical books. When determining whether someone with a death sentence has a mental disability, Texas has long used outdated standards partially created by elected judges. Now that those standards have been ruled unconstitutional, one district attorney wants the state to use a markedly different measuring stick: current medical science. Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg sent a brief to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Wednesday afternoon in the case of Bobby Moore, a man convicted in the 1980 shooting death of a Houston supermarket clerk.  Ogg now says Moore is intellectually disabled, but the questions surrounding the prisoner's mental capacity led to a March Supreme Court ruling that invalidated Texas’ method of determining intellectual disability for death row inmat...

Tomas Gallo smiled and laughed as Harris County jurors decided his fate for the rape and murder of his girlfriend's 3-year-old daughter.  Gallo had covered the girl's body with bruises and bite marks before sexually assaulting and bludgeoning her while her mother was at work just a few days before Christmas in 2001. He then cleaned up the blood-spattered bathroom, dressed the child in clean clothes and called her mother to say the girl was not breathing. Jurors agreed he should be sentenced to death, despite his lawyers' arguments that he was intellectually disabled. Now, however, Gallo and at least nine other death row inmates from across Texas - including five others from Harris County - are seeking to have their death sentences thrown out in exchange for life in prison under a ruling earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court that changed how Texas determines intellectual disability. Some, including Gallo, could eventually walk free, since life withou...

"They started making me out to be a total idiot and retard from day one." The oldest Arkansas death row inmate and his victim's family agreed on one thing Wednesday: Jack Greene is "totally competent" for his upcoming execution. However, Greene's attorneys have argued he is too mentally ill to legally be put to death. Now the decision is in the hands of the Arkansas Parole Board, who will send its recommendation to Gov. Asa Hutchinson in the next 72 hours. "I've been jacked up like this for 12 out of the last 13 years," Greene told the board during his clemency hearing at the Varner Unit Wednesday morning. Instead of sitting in a chair next to his attorney, the 62 year old stood for the entire hour and a half, breathing heavy, contorting his body in pain and leaning against the table in front of them. He frequently touched his left ear and nose, which were both clogged with tissue. "They [attorneys] started makin...

In the United States, it's believed those with intellectual abilities far below average aren't executed. In 2002, the Atkins v. Virginia decision, ruled it unconstitutional to carry out death sentences against the intellectually disabled. However, the practice continues, revealing a pattern characterizing many cases in the justice system. How can an unconstitutional practice continue? Just as it happened in a pivotal case in 1986, by treating a psychologist's evaluation of the prisoner as though it were free from bias, totally objective, when that was simply not the case. In that instance, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, which heard the final appeal to reverse the death sentence of Jerome Bowden, the Board ignored the perfectly valid intelligence test showing Bowden at age 14 to had an I.Q. of only 59. They brought in a psychologist of their choice, Dr. Irwin Knopf, had him evaluate the I.Q. of Bowden, who was poor, African American, and a gentle soul with ...