Death Penalty News

The Supreme Court these days is generally in the business of helping executions go forward. But on Thursday night, the court did something notable: It told Alabama no. Even then, the court wasn't unanimous. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the refusal to let the nitrogen gas execution of Jeffery Lee proceed. What prompted the rare rejection? In line with the typical shadow docket practice, the court didn't explain itself. Nor did the dissenters, who merely noted their disagreement. But a deeper look at the case helps us understand why a majority of the court was unwilling to help the state this time.

Court throws out state’s challenge to judicial finding that inmate convicted of murder is ineligible for death penalty The US supreme court on Thursday threw out a challenge by the state of Alabama to a judicial finding that a death row inmate convicted of a 1997 murder is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible under the US constitution for the death penalty. In this highly unusual move, and in a single-sentence, unsigned order, the court dismissed Alabama’s petition for review in Hamm v Smith without deciding it, effectively undoing its earlier decision to take up an appeal by state officials to the method used by a lower court to determine that Joseph Clifton Smith was intellectually disabled and therefore could not be executed.

In a three-day span from March 18 to March 20, four men were exe­cut­ed in four dif­fer­ent states. Two of the men put to death, in Louisiana and Arizona, were the first exe­cut­ed in their state in years. While the close tim­ing of the exe­cu­tions result­ed from inde­pen­dent state-lev­el deci­sions and indi­vid­u­al­ized legal devel­op­ments rather than any coor­di­nat­ed nation­al effort, all four exe­cu­tions raised seri­ous constitutional concerns.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court appeared likely Wednesday to give Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip at least another day in court in his long quest to throw out his murder conviction and death sentence. The justices heard arguments in a case that has produced a rare alliance in which lawyers for Glossip and the state argued that the high court should overturn Glossip’s conviction and death sentence because he did not get a fair trial. The victim’s relatives have told the high court that they want to see Glossip executed.

At the Supreme Court Tuesday, a true crime drama that features a man who has been on death row for more than 25 years, always insisting he is innocent, and a conservative state attorney general in Oklahoma who agrees the prisoner got an unfair trial. Richard Glossip has had nine execution dates set over the years; he's eaten his last meal three times. He was tried twice and has had multiple appeals, including one that was heard by the Supreme Court involving the proposed method of execution. When the Supreme Court heard that case in 2015, Justice Samuel Alito made it clear that he viewed the appeal as nothing more than a stalling tactic, asking, "Is it appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty?"

A recent analysis by Bloomberg Law concluded that death-sentenced prisoners have fewer avenues to relief at the Supreme Court than ever before. Bloomberg identified 270 emergency requests to stay executions since 2013 and found that the Court agreed to block an execution just 11 times.  Since 2020, when the Court shifted to a 6-3 conservative majority following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Court has granted just two stays of execution. One, for John Henry Ramirez, challenged not the execution itself but the protocols for religious advisors in the death chamber. The Court granted Mr. Ramirez’s requests, and he was executed in 2022. 

Richard Glossip has had his last meal three times. It may be four if the US Supreme Court doesn’t agree at its private conference Tuesday to hear the Oklahoma death row inmate’s latest appeal. Glossip’s execution dates have been blocked nine times, most recently by the high court in May, since he was convicted in 1998 of hiring a man to kill the owner of the motel he managed. But his case is unusual: only one other inmate has had an execution put on hold since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, giving President Donald Trump his third appointment to cement a 6-3 conservative majority on the court.

WASHINGTON (CBSNewsTexas.com/AP) - The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that longtime Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed should have a chance to argue for testing of crime-scene evidence that he says will help clear him.   The justices, in a 6-3 decision, sent Reed's case back to a lower court for his constitutional challenge to the state's law on DNA testing. The issue before the high court was whether Reed, sentenced to death nearly 25 years ago, waited too long to file his lawsuit claiming that untested crime-scene evidence would exonerate him.  Texas courts and the federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that he missed the deadline. But the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, reversed the appellate ruling. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented. "If there is a mitigating factor to today's decision," Thomas wrote, it's that the outcome "is no barrier to the prompt execution of Reed's lawful sentenc...

The image of gunmen in a row firing in unison at a condemned prisoner may conjure up a bygone, less enlightened era. But the idea of using firing squads is making a comeback. Idaho lawmakers passed a bill this week seeking to add the state to the list of those authorizing firing squads, which currently includes Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma and South Carolina. Fresh interest comes as states scramble for alternatives to lethal injections after pharmaceutical companies barred the use of their drugs. Some, including a few Supreme Court justices, view firing squads as less cruel than lethal injections, despite the violence involved in riddling bodies with bullets. Others say it’s not so cut-and-dry, or that there are other factors to consider.

Conservative super-majority especially unwilling to consider appeals, in stance that has flown under the radar On Monday, the US supreme court issued an order in the pending execution of Robert Fratta, a former police officer from Houston who was sentenced to death for the 1994 murder-for-hire of his estranged wife. Lawyers for the condemned man had petitioned the court in a last-ditch effort to save his life. They argued that critical evidence at his trial given by a key witness had been tainted, as she had been encouraged under hypnosis to change her testimony.

Oklahoma will soon begin executing death row inmates at a pace of about 1 man per month, with plans to put to death 25 prisoners over the next 2 years despite cries by critics and experts who point not only to outstanding questions of the mental fitness or possible innocence of some but also the state’s recent history of botched lethal injections. “It’s just yet one more reckless move by Oklahoma,” Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor, told CNN of the state’s scheduled execution timetable, which she said is in line with its staunch, decadeslong record of capital punishment. “If there was going to be any state that was going to do something so obviously irresponsible and unjust … it would be the state of Oklahoma, given the history.” James Coddington is the 1st scheduled to be executed on August 25. He would have been followed about a month later by Richard Glossip, who has maintained his innocence and on Tuesday got a 60-day stay of execution so an appeals court can comple...

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday that a federal court can’t order a state to transport a death row inmate to a medical facility for testing without a showing that the information sought would be useful in the prisoner’s habeas case. At issue was a federal court order requiring Ohio to transport death row inmate Raymond Twyford for a neurological examination. Twyford claimed that his trial lawyer had been ineffective for failing to investigate his head injury after he shot himself at age 13. Twyford was convicted for killing a man who allegedly raped his girlfriend’s daughter. At trial, Twyford’s lawyer had pursued another theory: that Twyford committed the murder to save the rape victim from the type of abuse that Twyford had suffered as a child. A federal court had used the All Writs Act to order Twyford’s transportation to the hospital for tests. The law authorizes federal courts to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeab...

The Supreme Court has reinstated the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In a 6-3 ruling on Friday, the court found that a federal appeals court was wrong to vacate the death sentence based on issues of jury selection and evidence. The vote was divided along lines of ideology, with outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Elena Kagan, and, in part, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting with the ruling. Three people were killed and 260 were injured, many seriously, in the 2013 bombing. Seventeen of those who were injured lost limbs. A police officer was killed during the ensuing manhunt. “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one,” conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. The court was looking at a ruling by a panel of three judges in the US Court of Appeals for the first Circuit. The panel agreed with Tsarnaev’s attorneys back in July that p...

Hamm v. Reeves , a death penalty order that the Supreme Court handed down Thursday night, is an epilogue to a longstanding tension between drug companies that do not wish their products to be used to kill people, and states that are willing to use unreliable drugs to conduct executions if effective sedatives are not available. It’s also unsettlingly cruel. The upshot of the Court’s 5-4 decision in Hamm is that a man was executed using a method that may have caused him excruciating pain, most likely because that man’s disability prevented him from understanding how to opt in to a less painful method of execution. There is significant evidence that Matthew Reeves, a man convicted of murder that the state of Alabama executed after the Supreme Court permitted it to do so on Thursday, had an intellectual disability. Among other things, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in a 2021 dissenting opinion, an expert employed by the state gave Reeves an IQ test and determined that “Reeves’ IQ was wel...