Death Penalty News

AUSTIN (Nexstar) — Under current Supreme Court precedent, states cannot execute someone for raping a child if the victim survives. That’s not stopping State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-McKinney. “We’re going to have a debate in this building behind me about the death penalty being on the table for any Texan who rapes a child,” Leach, the chair of the Texas House Committee on Judiciary & Civil Jurisprudence, said. Leach made the comments while hosting a news conference supporting his client, abuse survivor Cindy Clemishire.

SHELBY COUNTY, Ala. (WBRC) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up an Alabama death-penalty case involving Michael Anthony Powell, leaving in place a state appeals court decision that threw out Powell’s conviction. Two justices — Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — said the Court should have stepped in. In a written dissent, Alito argued the Alabama appeals court misapplied U.S. Supreme Court precedent about what prosecutors can and can’t say during closing arguments.

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.

On June 26, 2025, the United States Supreme Court issued a rare 6 – 3 rul­ing in favor of a Texas death row pris­on­er, Ruben Gutierrez, hold­ing that he may pro­ceed with his law­suit chal­leng­ing Texas’s post-con­vic­tion DNA statute on con­sti­tu­tion­al grounds. Mr. Gutierrez was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1999 for the mur­der and rob­bery of an 85-year-old woman but has long main­tained he did not know his code­fen­dants would kill the vic­tim. According to the deci­sion, ​“Gutierrez has stand­ing to bring his §1983 claim chal­leng­ing Texas’ post-con­vic­tion DNA test­ing pro­ce­dures under the Due Process Clause.” 

A fractured Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a new trial for Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip, whose appeal drew national attention and support from the state’s conservative attorney general, in light of allegations that the state withheld evidence related to its main witness. The ruling is a major win for Glossip, whose 1998 conviction for arranging the murder of Barry Van Treese a year earlier has been called into question by him and, critically, the state attorney general after new evidence emerged in recent years.

Judicial appointments and the death penalty are among areas where a lame-duck administration can still leave a mark. Donald Trump’s second presidential term will begin on Jan. 20, bringing with it promises to dramatically reshape many aspects of the criminal justice system. The U.S. Senate — with its authority over confirming judicial nominees — will also shift from Democratic to Republican control.

By a vote of 6-3 along ideological lines, the justices ruled that a federal appeals court was wrong when it ordered post-conviction relief for Danny Lee Jones, who contended that his Sixth Amendment right to have adequate representation by his lawyer was violated during the sentencing phase of his trial. Jones was convicted and sentenced to die in 1993 for the brutal murders of three people: Robert Weaver, Weaver’s seven-year-old daughter Tisha, and Katherine Gumina, Weaver’s grandmother. Jones beat each of his victims with a baseball bat.

Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed CS/HB 1297 into law, which made sexual assault and battery on children 12 or younger a capital offense, taking effect in October. Florida's Fifth Judicial Circuit could see the first application of the new law in a case now. Florida's Fifth Judicial Circuit, which covers Lake, Hernando, Sumter, Citrus, and Marion Counties is seeking the death penalty for Joseph A. Giampa, who reportedly captured video of himself abusing a minor.

The high court allowed the execution of James Barber despite botched attempts to execute other inmates last year. WASHINGTON — The three liberal Supreme Court justices took aim at their conservative colleagues for allowing the early Friday execution of an Alabama death row inmate who had raised claims about the state's history of botching the lethal injection process. The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, declined to block the execution of James Barber , who was put to death at about 2 a.m. local time. "This court’s decision denying Barber’s request for a stay allows Alabama to experiment again with a human life," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissenting opinion joined by her liberal colleagues, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

For some justices, the Eighth Amendment is nothing more than an annoying technicality. On November 17, 2022, Kenneth Smith spent four agonizing hours strapped to a gurney waiting for the state of Alabama to kill him. Smith, who was convicted of murder in 1988 and sentenced to die by lethal injection, could do nothing but watch as correctional officers poked and prodded his arms and hands, searching fruitlessly for veins. Then, without warning or explanation, the officers—it’s not clear if any of them were medical professionals—tried a different approach, jabbing a large needle underneath Smith’s collarbone, which made him cry out in pain and plead for his lawyers or the court to intervene. Smith’s death warrant expired at midnight, and because officials couldn’t find his veins in time, they had to stop the execution attempt. When they unstrapped Smith from the gurney, he was hyperventilating and couldn’t sit, stand, or walk without help. It was Alabama’s third failed execution attempt ...

In an unusual move, the Oklahoma attorney general had agreed with inmate Richard Glossip's request after concluding that his conviction should be thrown out. WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday blocked the execution of an Oklahoma death row inmate who claims he is innocent in an unusual case in which the state's attorney general agreed that the underlying conviction was unsound. The court in a brief order granted the request made by inmate Richard Glossip, who was convicted of arranging the murder of his boss at the Oklahoma City motel where he worked. The decision means that Glossip’s execution, scheduled for May 18, will no longer go ahead while his court challenge continues. The state has stopped short of saying Glossip is innocent, meaning there could still be a new trial if the conviction is thrown out.

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...

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.

In a 2015 dissent, the justice warned that the death penalty was cruel and unusual. The story of the man at the center of that Supreme Court case explains why. On June 30, Justice Stephen Breyer retired from the Supreme Court after   nearly 28 years. The next day, the state of Oklahoma set a Sept. 22 execution date for Richard Glossip, the man whose case was at the center of Breyer’s most powerful dissent. In 1998, a jury first convicted Glossip of murder and sentenced him to death. More than two decades later, the details of his case and the long and winding road the state has taken toward an execution has vindicated Breyer’s 2015 dissent in Glossip v. Gross . At the time, the court’s conservative majority rejected Glossip’s claims that Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol violated the Eighth Amendment’s provision against cruel and unusual punishment. Breyer vehemently disagreed. Though he did not write directly about Glossip’s case in his dissent, everything that has been learned...

ONE WEEK BEFORE he was killed in the death chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, Donald Grant asked a woman named Sue Hosch a question about his coming execution. “He asked me, did I think it was going to be botched?” Hosch recalled. “And I said, ‘I don’t know.’” As an activist who corresponded with men on death row, Hosch hoped that Grant would die peacefully — “you know, go to sleep.” But he told her that he was scared. Grant had good reason to be afraid. In his years on death row, he had seen neighbors taken to die whose executions had gone horribly wrong. Since 2014, Oklahoma’s 3-drug lethal injection formula had relied upon midazolam, a sedative that experts warned was inadequate to provide anesthesia. In a lawsuit, attorneys for people on Oklahoma’s death row argued that using midazolam put their clients at risk of “severe pain, needless suffering, and a lingering death.” After a series of disastrous executions made national news, officials announced that they would revise ...