Death Penalty News

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WBMA) — Alabama has executed Jeffery Lee, nearly three decades after he was convicted in the 1998 killings of two people during a pawnshop robbery in rural Dallas County. Lee, 49, was put to death by lethal injection Thursday evening at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. His execution came three months after a federal judge blocked Alabama's plans to execute him using nitrogen gas. He was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m. Central Time, according to the office of Governor Kay Ivey. 

There are 25 people on Alabama Death Row, despite their juries asking for life sentences. Gov. Kay Ivey could change that. A jury said they should live. A judge in Alabama decided they would die anyway. Now, it’s up to Gov. Kay Ivey to decide who the state should listen to. In Alabama, a jury’s decision wasn’t always the final word. And even though the state fixed that nine years ago, it’s still honoring old cases where a judge set aside the work of the jury—the only state in the nation to do so.

The group said 25 Alabama death row prisoners remained under sentences imposed through a practice the state abolished in 2017. We The Jury —a new coalition of jurors, judges, attorneys, elected officials, community advocates and activists—is urging Governor Kay Ivey to grant clemency to death row inmates who were sentenced by judicial override, a now-illegal sentencing scheme that allowed judges to override a jury’s life sentence recommendation in favor of the death penalty.

After a week of legal volleyball, Alabama death row inmate Jeffery Lee’s execution—scheduled for Thursday evening—was called off after federal courts called the state’s nitrogen gas execution method “likely unconstitutional.” The state took the fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping Lee could still be put to death tonight.  In an order issued at 8:10 p.m., the U.S. Supreme Court ordered that it would not lift a ban on Alabama executing Lee via nitrogen . In a short court order, the justices denied Alabama’s motion to go ahead with the execution.  Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch would have granted the appeal and let the execution proceed, according to the order. 

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama is waging a last-minute legal fight to execute a man with nitrogen gas on Thursday night, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to set aside a judge’s findings that the method violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Alabama’s nitrogen protocol is unconstitutional and blocked the state from using it to execute Jeffery Lee , 49. The Alabama attorney general’s office is appealing the decision. The outcome of the eleventh-hour legal battle will determine if Lee’s execution goes forward Thursday night with nitrogen gas. It could also help determine the future of the controversial execution method Alabama began using in 2024.

A Broward County man is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday evening while his legal team mounts a furious, multi-pronged effort to halt the execution in federal and state courts. Richard Knight, who was convicted of the 2000 murders of Odessia Stephens and her daughter, Hanessia Mullings, faces a May 21 execution date at 6:00 p.m. ET. If carried out, it will mark the seventh execution in Florida this year and the 34th under Governor Ron DeSantis.

In the aftermath of the 12-day war and amid a surge in executions, Iran's parliament has passed one of the most extensive espionage laws in the country's history. Legal experts say the law could send citizens to the gallows for offenses as minor as owning satellite internet equipment or sharing images on social media. President Masoud Pezeshkian on Thursday signed the “Law on Intensifying Punishment for Espionage and Cooperation with the Zionist Regime and Hostile Countries,” giving it immediate effect.  Human rights advocates warn the measure could further increase Iran’s already high execution rate .

Iran’s parliament passed a law on Sunday intensifying penalties for collaboration with Israel, the United States, and other hostile countries against national security and interests. The legislation classifies such acts as “corruption on earth”, punishable by death. “Any intelligence, espionage, or operational activity for Israel, the US, or other hostile regimes and groups or their agents against the country’s security or national interests is considered corruption on earth and punishable by death,” the law says.

Vietnam to remove death penalty for embezzlement, sparing tycoon's life HANOI — Vietnam will remove the death penalty for eight offenses from next month, including embezzlement and activities aimed at overthrowing the government, parliament said on Wednesday (June 25), sparing the life of a tycoon in a US$12-billion (S$15.3-billion) fraud case. The National Assembly, the country's lawmaking body, unanimously ratified the amendment to the Criminal Code earlier on Wednesday to abolish the death penalty for the crimes, it said in a statement.

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.

Six years ago, Louisianans were weighing the merits of requiring juries to arrive at unanimous verdicts, then the law in every other state save for Oregon. The most vocal opposition to the idea came from district attorneys, some of whom warned that a slew of hung-jury verdicts would result if Louisiana stopped allowing convictions on 10-2 or 11-1 votes.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WAFF) - An Alabama House committee rejected a bill that would have impacted sentences for dozens of death row inmates. The proposal would have required courts to resentence people sentenced to death by a judge who overrode a jury’s recommendation of life in prison. That practice was outlawed in 2017. Representative Chris England passionately argued it should be retroactively applied for more than 30 death row inmates who were sentenced to death over a jury’s recommendation.

Amnesty International and the ACLU of Alabama held a rally at the Alabama statehouse on Thursday in support of HB27, later marching to Gov. Kay Ivey's office to submit petitions calling for clemency for an inmate currently on death row. Robin "Rocky" Meyers was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 1994. The trial judge then went over the jury and imposed a death sentence through judicial override.

This rush to execute before revisiting a condemned practice not only appears hypocritical but also cruel. Later this week, unless the extraordinary happens, the State of Alabama will execute Kenneth Eugene Smith. His case, entangled in a web of legal technicalities and ethical debates, epitomizes the complexities and contradictions of the American justice system. Smith, convicted in a 1988 murder-for-hire plot resulting in the death of Elizabeth Sennett, faces execution by nitrogen hypoxia, a method untried and raising serious concerns about its humaneness.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The final hearing before the penalty phase of Johnathan Quiles’ trial was held Friday. On Thursday, Action News Jax broke the news live on air that the jury found Quiles guilty of raping and killing his 16-year-old pregnant niece, Iyana Sawyer. Sawyer was killed back in December of 2018. At the time, investigators say Quiles had shot and killed Sawyer before leaving her body in a dumpster. Sawyer’s body was never found, but the jury was convinced Quiles killed her . “Not having the body, not knowing where she rests, it’s a continued open wound, and it will always be an open wound,” Sawyer’s family attorney, John Phillips, told Action News Jax.

TALLAHASSEE — A new state law lowering the number of jurors required to recommend death sentences has spurred a rash of litigation, triggered conflicting judicial rulings and infused an additional level of uncertainty in capital cases. The changes have caused what numerous attorneys called “chaos” in the death-penalty system. The law allows death sentences to be imposed based on the recommendations of eight of 12 jurors, an easier threshold than a previous requirement of unanimous jury recommendations. The change — prompted by Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz receiving a life sentence after a jury did not unanimously recommend death — gave Florida the lowest death-penalty jury standard in the nation.

Florida’s new death sentencing law cannot apply to defendants who committed their crimes before the law was passed earlier this year, Florida Circuit Judge Kevin Abdoney rules. Florida law previously required that a sentencing jury must unanimously vote for death before the court could impose a death sentence, but in April of 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law that allows a jury to recommend a death sentence with as few as 8 votes. The ruling in Bryan Riley’s case means that the new law will not apply in his capital trial because doing so would violate the United States Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws, or laws that retroactively impose criminal liability or punishment.

The resentencing hearings of several death-sentenced men in Florida came to an abrupt halt last week as the Florida Supreme Court considers the effect of the state’s new capital sentencing law. Earlier this year, the Florida legislature passed a new capital sentencing law to allow juries to impose a death sentence if at least 8 out of 12 jurors vote in favor. But several death row defendants who were scheduled to be resentenced objected that the new law unfairly made their chances of being sentenced to death more likely. The Florida Supreme Court will now determine whether the old law, requiring a unanimous death sentence, or the new law, requiring only 8 jurors in favor, will apply when they are resentenced.

Duane Owen is scheduled to be executed in Florida on June 15, 2023. If it occurs, his execution will be the fourth execution in Florida this year, after a three year pause in executions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Mr. Owen was convicted in 1986 of crimes that occurred in 1984. Mr. Owen’s attorneys have presented evidence that he is incompetent to be executed. They argued it was error for the Florida courts to find that “the psychiatrists that only briefly examined Owen were more credible than the neuropsychologist who spent over 13 hours with Owen conducting interviews and testing.”