Death Penalty News

“If it needs to be done for them to heal,” Honie said minutes before his execution, “let’s do this.” Taberon Dave Honie died by lethal injection early Thursday, a quarter-century after he was sentenced to death for sexually assaulting and killing his ex-girlfriend’s mother in a brutal attack when he was 22 years old. Claudia Benn was his own daughter’s grandmother, and the murder divided the family, with Benn’s daughter and other relatives recently urging officials to carry out the death sentence as Honie’s daughter and others pleaded for his life.

IN the last 100 years, more than 40 women have been executed in the United States. But the death sentencing rate and the death row population remains very low for women in comparison to men. How many women are on death row in the US? According to the Death Penalty Information Center, women are rarely sentenced to death in the United States and executions of women are even rarer. As of April 1, 2021, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund said there were 51 women on death row across the United States. In total, there are around 2,500 people on death row in America. Actual execution of female offenders is quite rare. As of December 31, 2020, there have only been 575 documented executions, with the first recorded in 1632. The executions make up about 3.6 per cent of the total of 16,018 confirmed executions in the United States between 1608 and 2020. Who was the last woman to be executed in the US? Between 1973 and December 2020, 185 death sentences were given to female offenders, ma...

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — As many as 10 death row inmates in Oklahoma, more than one-fifth of the state’s prisoners condemned to die, could escape execution because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling concerning criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country. The inmates have challenged their convictions in state court following the high court’s ruling last year, dubbed the McGirt decision, that determined a large swath of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation. The decision means that Oklahoma prosecutors lack the authority to pursue criminal charges in cases in which the defendants, or the victims, are tribal citizens. Among the inmates likely to get a new trial in federal court is Shaun Michael Bosse, 38, who was convicted and sentenced to death in the 2010 killing of Katrina Griffin and her two young children. The victims were all found inside a burning mobile home near Dibble, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) south of Oklahoma City. Dozens of other inmates convicted in non-de...

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — National attention turned to Terre Haute in 2020 as federal executions resumed at the Federal Correctional Complex on the southside of town after a 17 year hiatus. This wasn’t the first time Terre Haute received such attention nor was it the longest time the country has gone without a federal execution. George W. Bush’s administration carried out three executions between 2001 and 2003 Juan Raul Garza, who was convicted of murdering three people while running a marijuana smuggling and distribution ring in Texas, was scheduled to be the first person to be executed by the federal government since 1963. Appeals in the case postponed the execution, and instead domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh was executed first on June 11, 2001. Garza was executed eight days later. The final execution before the hiatus came on March 18, 2003 when Louis Jones, Jr. was put to death for the rape and murder of United States Army soldier Tracie Joy McBride. While an official moratorium on f...

Only five states carried out a total of seven executions across the United States last year. That is the fewest state executions in nearly 40 years. However, that is not the full story when it comes to the death penalty in America. In the second half of 2020, in the midst of a pandemic and a reelection campaign, the Trump Administration decided to get back into the act of executing federal prisoners. After going 17 years without carrying out an execution the federal government carried out 10 executions in less than six months. By the end of 2020, the federal government had conducted more executions in five months than any other presidency since the turn of the 20th century, and scheduled more executions during a presidential transition period than any other administration in the history of the United States - knowing President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty. Whether it was a ploy to bolster his tough guy bona fides or a lowbrow pitch to his “law and ...

The execution of Lezmond Mitchell, a Diné citizen, was a long, grisly test case about tribal sovereignty. At 6:29 p.m. on Wednesday evening, the United States executed Diné citizen Lezmond Mitchell, the first Native person since 1902 to face the death penalty at the hands of the federal government. In 2001, Mitchell and a then-underage accomplice and fellow Diné citizen, Johnny Orsinger, stabbed and murdered Alyce Slim and her nine-year-old granddaughter, also both Diné, within the borders of the Navajo Nation in Arizona. The pair were swiftly caught and detained by local authorities after holding up a nearby trading post. A decision then fell before U.S. federal prosecutors. As outlined by congressional law, the Federal Bureau of Investigations maintains jurisdiction over Indian Country if the committed crimes fall under those outlined in the 1885 Major Crimes Act. This includes violent crimes such as rape, murder, and kidnapping. But in 2001, then–Attorney General John ...

The only Native American on federal death row was put to death Wednesday, despite objections from many Navajo leaders who had urged President Donald Trump to halt the execution on the grounds it would violate tribal culture and sovereignty. RELATED |  Trump and Barr Are on a Capital Punishment Killing Spree With the execution of Lezmond Mitchell for the grisly slayings of a 9-year-old and her grandmother, the federal government under the pro-death penalty president has now carried out more executions in 2020 than it had in the previous 56 years combined. Asked by a prison official if he had any last words for victims’ family members and other witnesses behind glass at the death chamber, Mitchell casually responded, “No, I’m good.” Moments later, prison officials began the lethal injection of pentobarbital inside the small, pale-green death chamber at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Mitchell lay flat on his back, his glasses still on and a medical ma...