Death Penalty News

Roberts was convicted of a 1992 murder and sentenced to death, despite the jury's recommendation for life imprisonment. His lawyers and activists argue he suffers from severe mental illness, citing family history and documented psychosis. Alabama’s next execution is temporarily on pause in order to assess if the inmate in question is mentally competent enough to be put to death. David Lee Roberts, a now 59-year-old who was convicted of the 1992 murder of Annetra Jones, was set to be executed by nitrogen gas on Aug. 21 as of June 2025.

Editor's note: This is the last in a four-part series on letters that Iwao Hakamada wrote while on death row. About a decade after cursing God, Iwao Hakamada was baptized Catholic at the Tokyo Detention House on Dec. 24, 1984. “Since I have been given the Christian name Paul, I am keenly feeling that I should be aware of the greatness of Paul.” (June 1985)

Alan Dershowitz is now involved in effort to avert execution scheduled for Oct. 10 Attorney Alan Dershowitz has joined a last-ditch effort to avert the execution of a Jewish man on death row in Texas. Jedidiah Murphy, 48, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Oct. 10. The date coincides with World Against the Death Penalty Day, a day of advocacy by death-penalty opponents. Murphy murdered 79-year-old Bertie Cunningham on Oct. 4, 2000, in Garland, Texas. He was high on cocaine when he shot her, stole her car and bought alcohol and cigarettes with her credit cards. He has been on death row in Livingston, Texas, since 2001.

A military judge at Guantanamo Bay has ruled one of the five defendants charged over the 9/11 attacks is not fit to stand trial in a death-penalty case. The defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, associated psychotic features and a delusional disorder. His lawyer has long claimed his client was "tortured by the CIA". Al-Shibh was scheduled to face pretrial proceedings on Friday. Colonel Matthew McCall in the US base on the eastern tip of Cuba accepted the findings of the doctors which said in August that al-Shibh was too psychologically damaged to defend himself.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on Sunday evening vacated its own July 25 stay of execution for Johnny Johnson, a St. Louis-area man who is now once again scheduled to die Aug. 1.  Catholics in St. Louis and across Missouri — as well as Pope Francis himself — had advocated for a stay of Johnson’s execution, citing the Church’s teaching on the admissibility of the death penalty as well as arguments from Johnson’s attorneys that he is not mentally fit to understand his punishment.  “We are disappointed that the stay has been reversed and that the execution will presumably proceed, especially with questions surrounding Mr. Johnson’s mental capacity,” said Jamie Morris, executive director and general counsel for the Missouri Catholic Conference.

Duane Owen is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Thursday in the 1984 bludgeoning death of Georgianna TALLAHASSEE — A U.S. Supreme Court justice Wednesday denied Palm Beach County killer Duane Owen's appeal to halt his execution, scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday. Owen is set to be executed for the 1984 bludgeoning death of Georgianna Worden at her Boca Raton home. Worden was a 38-year-old executive secretary and mother of two. Owen killed her while her children slept nearby. He also received the death penalty in the stabbing death of 14-year-old Karen Slattery, whom he had killed two months earlier while she babysat two children in Delray Beach.

A woman with severe mental illness who cycles in and out of Delta County Jail is often placed in solitary confinement by mental health workers after she’s seen eating feces or attacking other people at the facility. But when she’s isolated, her mental health worsens and she usually begins to harm herself, said Joel Watts, a therapist at the jail who sometimes decides if people with mental illness should be placed in isolation, for how long and when they should be released. “We have limited resources. If we don’t put them in isolation, they become a danger to themselves, to others and to staff,” he said. “But it’s a Catch-22. In putting them in isolation, we know they’re going to get worse.” These are difficult decisions, Watts said, because “the way to protect them is the way that harms them the most.”

The chamber has repeatedly passed legislation in recent sessions eliminating the death penalty in cases of severe mental illness, but hardline conservatives are now pushing back. A measure to bar the death penalty for defendants with severe mental illness hit an unexplained snag in the Texas House of Representatives Thursday, one day after the chamber had initially approved the bill. House Bill 727, by state Rep. Toni Rose, D-Dallas, tentatively passed Wednesday on a 84-61 vote. But a final vote scheduled for Thursday was postponed until next week without a given reason. Lawmakers will sometimes postpone votes on their bill if they do not expect it to pass. Rose passed similar measures out of the House in the last two legislative sessions, but is having more difficulty this year as hardline conservatives oppose the measure, arguing it will make it too hard to impose the death penalty, and that defendants could fake mental illness.

HOUSTON (AP) — Plagued by mental illness, Texas death row inmate Andre Thomas started hearing voices when he was 9 years old and first attempted suicide when he was 10, his attorneys say. Thomas’ psychosis, filled with religious delusions and hallucinations, became worse as he grew older. His family — beset by a long history of mental illness, addiction and poverty — was unable to help. His lawyers say in March 2004, when he was 21, Thomas’ mental illness erupted in a burst of horrific violence in his hometown of Sherman, Texas. He fatally stabbed his estranged wife Laura Christine Boren, 20, their 4-year-old son Andre Lee and her 13-month-old daughter Leyha Marie Hughes, cutting out the hearts of the two children. He later told police God had instructed him to commit the killings and that he believed all three were demons.

On January 21, 2023, Texas death row prisoner Terence Andrus hanged himself at the age of 34, a little more than 6 months after the U.S. Supreme Court denied review of his case for a second time. His lawyer, Gretchen Sween, told the Los Angeles Times that “he’d been careening toward the abyss,” since their decision. “He was broken.” In 2008, at the age of 20, Andrus killed two people during an attempted carjacking while high on PCP-laced marijuana. He was sentenced to death in 2012 by a jury that was unaware of his diagnosis of affective psychosis – a mood disorder causing hallucinations for which he was diagnosed in elementary school – parental neglect as a child, or the trauma he endured in juvenile detention. Beginning at the age of 16, he spent 18 months at an overcrowded juvenile detention center, where he was given high doses of psychotropic drugs and placed in solitary confinement, consisting of a cold and filthy cell for extended periods, either for engaging in self-mutilation,...

Tracy Beatty is scheduled to die by lethal injection on November 9th in Huntsville, Texas for the 2003 murder of his mother. This is not Tracy Beatty’s 1st scheduled execution. He was previously scheduled to be executed in 2009, 2015, and 2020. All were stayed. Beatty has been on Texas death row since 2004. At his 1st trial, forensic psychiatrists claimed he was not mentally ill and had a normal intelligence quotient. Currently, lawyers for Tracy Beatty are fighting to stop their client’s scheduled execution because he has a severe mental disability. Executions of the mentally disabled are prohibited under the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. On Sept. 19 and 22 of this year, Beatty was examined by 2 medical professionals. In the process, these specialists criticized the fact that despite repeated requests, Beatty’s handcuffs were not removed, preventing them from conducting a full examination. According to Dr. Bhushan Agharkar and Dr. Daniel Martell, Beatty is said to be clearly...

A death row inmate severed his own penis in his prison cell and asked to be placed on suicide watch. Henry Hodges, who was sentenced to death in 1992 for murdering a telephone repairman, began smearing feces in his cell because he was upset that officials wouldn’t let him have a special food package he ordered, his lawyer Kelley Henry said. Hodges was denied because he had clear conduct for 5 months instead of the 6 required, Henry said. A guard stopped feeding Hodges to curb him from continuing to smear feces. But Hodges responded by slitting his wrists with a razor in his cell on October 7, said his lawyer who visited him at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. After being transported to the infirmary, Hodges asked to be on suicide watch, Henry said. A ‘high-ranking correctional officer’ told a medic tending Hodges that he was manipulating them and could be placed on suicide watch in his jail cell, according to Henry. Once back in his cell, Hodges pulled together ...

In a 4-1 vote, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied clemency to Richard Fairchild, the third of 25 people the state scheduled for execution between August 2022 and December 2024. Fairchild’s attorneys argued that he was represented at trial by incompetent counsel who never presented evidence of Fairchild’s severe childhood abuse and of his repeated traumatic brain injuries. Fairchild’s clemency petition also detailed the debilitating effects of his serious mental illness and organic brain damage. Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Conner stated that the parole board made the right decision because a jury decided that Fairchild’s execution was a “just and appropriate punishment.” One of Fairchild’s attorneys, Assistant Federal Public Defender Emma Rolls, responded to the decision by saying that “despite having lost touch with reality, Richard remains remorseful for his crime and continues to have an unblemished prison record. There is no principled reason for Oklahoma to execute hi...

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied clemency for an Oklahoma death row inmate scheduled to be executed next month on his birthday. Board members voted 4-1 Wednesday to deny clemency for Richard Fairchild. An Oklahoma County jury in 1996 found Fairchild, 62, guilty of 1st-degree murder and sentenced him to death for the murder of 3-year-old Adam Broomhall. Court records show Broomhall was killed after suffering 4 to 6 blows on the front of his head after being burned by a water heater during a drunken rage by Fairchild. Attorneys for Fairchild argue their client suffers from mental illness and is greatly impaired because of numerous traumas to his brain throughout his life which has led to organic brain syndrome. “As Richard Fairchild’s brain has deteriorated, he has descended into psychosis, a fact well-documented in his prison records,” said Emma Rolls, an attorney for Fairchild in a press release following the board’s vote. “Yet despite having lost touch with reality, Richard...

STAVANGER, Norway (AP) — Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik goes to court, Tuesday, after 10 years behind bars, claiming he is no longer a danger to society and attempting to get an early release from his 21-year sentence. The far right terrorist has shown no remorse since slaying 77 people in a bomb and gun massacre in 2011, and families of victims and survivors fear he will grandstand his extreme views during the hearing, which experts say is unlikely to deliver him an early release. Randi Rosenqvist, the psychiatrist who has followed up Breivik since his 2012 jailing, says “I can say that I do not detect great changes in Breivik’s functioning,” since his criminal trial when he bragged about the scale of his slaughter, or his 2016 human rights case, when he raised his hand in a Nazi salute. “In principle and practice someone seeking parole would have to show remorse, and to show that they understand why such acts cannot be repeated,” she said. She will give evidence at his...

A study on the mental illness and intellectual disability among death row prisoners has shown that over 62 per cent had at least one mental illness, half of them contemplated suicide in jail and experienced adverse childhood and traumatic life experiences. Project 39A, a criminal justice program at the National Law University Delhi, conducted a study on 88 death row prisoners, three female, and 85 male, and their families across Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Karnataka, Kerala, and Madhya Pradesh. The findings of the study titled "Deathworthy: A mental Health Perspective of the Death Penalty" presented empirical data on mental illness and intellectual disability among death row prisoners in India and the psychological consequences of living on death row. The report which was released after five years of research also established correlations between conditions of incarceration and ill-health. [ I don't need 5 years of research to correlate incarceration on death row and ill health/...

HOUSTON (AP) — The longest serving death row inmate in the U.S. was resentenced to life in prison on Wednesday after prosecutors in Texas concluded the 71-year-old man is ineligible for execution and incompetent for retrial due to his long history of mental illness. Raymond Riles has spent more than 45 years on death row for fatally shooting John Thomas Henry in 1974 at a Houston car lot following a disagreement over a vehicle. He is the country’s longest serving death row prisoner, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Riles was resentenced after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled in April that his “death sentence can no longer stand” because jurors did not properly consider his history of mental illness. Riles attended his resentencing by Zoom from the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, which houses the state’s death row inmates. He said very little during the court hearing. Riles’ attorneys asked that he appear via Zoom because they were concerned his various health is...