Death Penalty News

The only woman on Idaho death row is seeking to have her sentence reconsidered, but a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week has thrown her active federal appeal into question. Robin Row, 64, was convicted of murdering her husband and 2 young children after setting afire their Ada County home in February 1992 to collect money from their life insurance policies. A judge handed her a death sentence, making her just the 2nd woman in Idaho history to receive the death penalty. Attorneys representing Row have been appealing her case ever since, now nearly 30 years after she arrived on death row. Unlike her 7 male peers who are housed at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution near Kuna, Row is held at the state’s Women’s Correctional Center in Pocatello. Row’s current appeal before the U.S. District Court for Idaho argues that she had ineffective legal counsel, because evidence of brain damage was never introduced during sentencing. A U.S. Supreme Court decision late last month, however, is ex...

”The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.” A hard lesson that law students learn in criminal procedure classes is the difference between factual guilt and legal guilt . Factual guilt refers to what someone actually did. Legal guilt refers to what the prosecution can prove in accordance with law’s distinctive presumptions and burdens of proof. Being factually innocent is no guarantee of what juries and judges will decide as they apply those presumptions and burdens. Convicting the innocent is always tragic, but never more so than in death penalty cases. We know that 187 people have been wrongly convicted in capital cases and ultimately exonerated since 1973. And there is little doubt that innocent people have been executed in this country. On Monday, May 23, in Shinn v. Ramirez , the Supreme Court increased the chances that still more innocent people will be executed. In that case, the now-dominant six-Justice conservative majo...

In an opinion legal experts have blasted as “nightmarish” and “an abomination,” the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in two Arizona death penalty cases that 1990s amendments to the federal habeas corpus law permit state prisoners who were provided ineffective representation at trial and in post-conviction proceedings to argue that their counsel were ineffective but bar them from presenting evidence of their ineffectiveness that competent lawyers had discovered once the case had reached federal court. Barry Jones’ state court lawyers had failed to investigate available evidence that he was innocent and David Martinez Ramirez’s state court lawyers had failed to investigate evidence of intellectual disability that could have led a jury to spare his life. Having failed to investigate, neither set of lawyers presented the evidence to state courts. In a May 23, 2022 ruling in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez , Justice Clarence Thomas declared for the six conservative members of the Court that neither m...

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review two cases concerning the scope of death-row prisoners’ access to the federal courts in litigating the constitutionality of their convictions and sentences or the method by which states seek to execute them. On January 14, 2022, the Court granted certiorari in Nance v. Ward and Shoop v. Twyford . Nance is a Georgia death penalty case concerning the process by which prisoners may bring challenges to state execution practices. Shoop is an Ohio death penalty case concerning the extent to which federal courts may issue orders permitting the development of evidence relevant to the investigation and presentation of a state prisoner’s habeas corpus petition. The grants of review come as the Court is deciding appeals by Arizona prosecutors in Shinn v. Ramirez and Shinn v. v. Jones that seek to limit the evidence a federal court can consider in reviewing cases in which prisoners have been provided a series of ineffective lawyers in state court procee...

Arizona wants justices to make a ruling that would jeopardize our Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel. There have been 186 death row exonerations since 1973 in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center . That’s 186 formerly incarcerated people who were found innocent after having been sentenced to death. People who were able to be reunited with their families, get new chances at life — at freedom. Ten of them came from Arizona. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court is set to hear two little-noticed cases from Arizona, Shinn v. Ramirez and the companion case Shinn v. Jones , that could make it substantially harder for other innocent people to be exonerated. The cases raise fundamental questions about whether the federal courts must allow states to execute people whose convictions or sentences are illegal, including people who may very well be innocent. While the formal issues in the cases are highly technical, they both are of immense practical importa...