Death Penalty News

April 16 (UPI) -- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed the death warrant for a man convicted of killing a 34-year-old mother of two in 1995 in a southern Hillsborough County motel room. The Republican governor signed the death warrant for 62-year-old Glen Rogers on Tuesday, setting his execution for 6 p.m. EDT on May 15. It is the fifth death warrant DeSantis has signed so far this year. Rogers, a so-called drifter suspected of being responsible for several killings around the country, was convicted of first-degree murder in May 1997 for the stabbing death of Tina Marie Cribbs. He was sentenced to death in the case that July.

Lawyers’ request to conduct additional DNA testing before Ledell Lee was executed had been denied. For 22 years, Ledell Lee maintained that he had been wrongly convicted of murder. “My dying words will always be, as it has been, ‘I am an innocent man,’” he told the BBC in an interview published on April 19, 2017 — the day before officials in Arkansas administered the lethal injection. 4 years later, lawyers affiliated with the Innocence Project and the American Civil Liberties Union say DNA testing has revealed that genetic material on the murder weapon — which was never previously tested — in fact belongs to another man. In a highly unusual development for a case in which a person has already been convicted and executed, the new genetic profile has been uploaded to a national criminal database in an attempt to identify the mystery man. Patricia Young, Mr. Lee’s sister, has been fighting for years to prove that it was not her brother who strangled and fatally bludgeoned the 26-year-old...