Death Penalty News

A Texas man sentenced to death row with the help of “hypnotized” witness testimony is asking a Dallas County judge not to set his execution date as his attorneys try to prove he was wrongfully convicted with junk science. The move from Charles Don Flores’ attorneys comes in response to the Texas Attorney General’s Office request that a Dallas judge set an execution date for Flores in a letter Monday. Tomee Heining, chief of the AG’s Criminal Appeals Division, offered several dates in November as available for Flores’ execution.

The Michigan Supreme Court ruled last week that a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without parole for young adults who were 19 or 20 years old at the time of the offense is a “grossly disproportionate punishment” that violates the Michigan Constitution. The decision extends to 19- and 20-year-olds the court’s 2022 ruling in People v. Parks , which applied the federal constitutional ban on automatic life-without-parole sentences for juveniles to 18-year-olds under the broader and more protective provisions of the Michigan Constitution.

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...

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 pending execution of Christopher Vialva, found guilty of murder he committed as a 19-year-old, ignores what the last 20-plus years of research has taught us about the developing brains of teenagers and adolescents, according to Dr. Jason Chein, psychology professor at Temple University. Science suggests that no person of this age should be eligible for capital punishment—regardless of personal history, intellectual capacity, eventual maturity, or the vileness of their crime, he writes. The federal government resumed executions this summer after a 17-year hiatus. Now it plans to carry out the first execution in nearly 70 years against an individual who was a teenager at the time of his crime. Christopher Vialva, who was 19 at the time of his offense, has a Sept. 24 execution date in federal prison in Indiana. More than two decades have passed since Vialva and four co-defendants, ages 15, 16, 16, and 18, committed their crimes. In an ill-planned effort to steal a car and money, the...

A Texas inmate received lethal injection Wednesday evening for fatally shooting an 82-year-old man nearly three decades ago, ending a five-month delay of executions in the nation’s busiest death penalty state because of the coronavirus pandemic. Billy Joe Wardlow was put to death at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the June 1993 killing of Carl Cole at his home in Cason, about 130 miles (209 kilometers) east of Dallas in the East Texas piney woods, near the Louisiana and Arkansas borders. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop the 45-year-old man’s execution. Wardlow was the first inmate in Texas to receive a lethal injection since Feb. 6 and the second in the U.S. since the nation began reopening following pandemic-related shutdowns. A judge had moved Wardlow’s execution date from April 29 to Wednesday after Morris County District Attorney Steve Cowan requested the change citing the statewide disaster declaration due to the virus. In Texas, the number o...

Wardlow has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that he was too young to get the Texas death penalty. His execution would be the first in Texas to proceed during the pandemic as the coronavirus rages across the state. On Wednesday evening, Texas plans to execute Billy Joe Wardlow for a 1993 East Texas robbery and murder. His lawyers are hoping the swell of the coronavirus pandemic and Wardlow’s young age at the time of the crime will persuade the courts or the governor to stop it. Wardlow was 18 when he killed 82-year-old Carl Cole in Cason. Wardlow shot Cole during an attempted robbery in which he said he had planned to steal Cole’s truck to leave the rural town and start a new life with his girlfriend. Prosecutors argued Wardlow intentionally killed Cole, shooting him between the eyes. Wardlow said he hadn’t planned to fire the weapon and shot Cole during an unexpected struggle. After the killing, Wardlow and his girlfriend fled and were later arrested in South Dakota...

There's one thing every person who knows Billy Joe Wardlow can agree on: he should not be executed. Wardlow was only 18 when he fatally shot 82-year-old Carl Cole during a robbery at the man's home in Cason, Texas on June 14, 1993. During his trial in 1995, Wardlow testified that he hadn't intended to kill Cole, but he was nevertheless convicted of capital murder. In order to sentence him to death in the state of Texas, jurors had to determine if Wardlow—who had never committed a violent crime before—would pose a danger to others in the future. They decided he would and gave him the death penalty. The 45-year-old's initial execution date of April 29 was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. He is now set to be put to death on July 8. But Wardlow's attorney Richard Burr has filed a petition urging the Supreme Court to commute his sentence to life in prison or stay his execution, arguing that at the time he killed Cole, Wardlow's brain had ...

Billy Joe Wardlow shot and killed an 82-year-old man when he was 18. But he says the fact that his brain was still developing at the time should bar his execution and, by implication, more than 40 others, too. A 2005 Supreme Court case outlawed the death penalty for defendants who killed when they were 17 or younger. At first glance, that wouldn’t seem to help Wardlow. But, facing a July 8 execution, the Texas death row prisoner cites that precedent plus more recent scientific evidence to argue the state’s unique system, which requires findings of “future dangerousness” to impose the ultimate punishment, is particularly ill-suited to the developing brains of those who were under 21 when they committed their crimes. That amounts to 45 current Texas inmates, including Wardlow, he told the justices in his June 10 petition , calling into question death sentences for what he concedes is “not an insignificant number of people.” That number alone could give pause to a Supre...