Death Penalty News

Death penalty will soon be an option for prosecutors in some lewd conduct cases involving children younger than 12 years old Earlier this year, Idaho legislators passed a bill to allow some cases of lewd conduct with child under age 12 with aggravating circumstances to be punishable by death, despite knowing the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled a similar law unconstitutional. The bill did not allocate any additional money for the Idaho State Public Defender’s Office. Instead, the fiscal note says the office will have additional expenditures should a defendant be assigned a public defender by the court.

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.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is currently incarcerated at the so-called “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” A decade after the fatal 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, a new Netflix true-crime docuseries is revisiting the unprecedented investigation and pursuit of the two home-grown terrorists that paralyzed the New England city. American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing centers on the tense, terrifying days that followed the April 15, 2013 tragedy, culminating with the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the arrest of his then-19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The Tsarnaev brothers planted and detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the marathon’s finish line, killing three and wounding hundreds. Following his arrest days later, Dzhokhar was indicted for 30 crimes, including 17 capital offenses. In 2015, a jury found Dzhokhar guilty of all 30 charges, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction and the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer. Though D...

Americans' right to legal counsel protects all of us against the government's power to lock us away, confiscate our possessions and deny us the ability to earn a living. Sixty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court's Gideon v. Wainwright decision established one of the most vital components of our justice system by recognizing that people accused of a crime have a Sixth Amendment right to effective legal counsel. That right protects all of us against the government's power to lock us away, confiscate our possessions and deny us the ability to earn a living. But six decades after the Gideon decision was handed down, the promise of that ruling – America's promise – remains unfulfilled.

At the urging of Governor Ron DeSantis, bills have been introduced in the Florida House and Senate that would allow death sentences even when the jury cannot come to a unanimous verdict on the proper penalty. The proposed legislation would also permit a presiding judge to override a jury’s recommendation of life and impose a death sentence. Death sentences would be allowed if at least eight jurors agreed, creating the lowest threshold in the nation for the imposition of a death sentence. Only Alabama currently allows death sentences when the jury is not unanimous, and it requires at least 10 jurors to agree on death.

Death penalty cases  are almost always legally complex , but many are also morally simple and straightforward. Occasionally such moral clarity breaks through the morass of legal maneuvering associated with those cases. Kenneth Smith, whom Alabama plans to execute using lethal injection on November 17, is one such case. He faces death even though  a jury that heard his case voted 11-1 to recommend that he be sentenced to life in prison without parole.  That alone should raise suspicion that something is amiss in the Smith case, but there is more. He faces execution because, at the time he was sentenced, Alabama was one of three death penalty states (the other two were Delaware and Florida) that  allowed  judges to override jury decisions in death cases. Judicial override  meant that elected judges could make their own determination  whether the aggravating circumstances in a death case outweighed the mitigating circumstances. Judges could impose a death...

After Charles Rhines, a gay man, was convicted of murder, jurors weighing a death sentence argued that sending him to prison for life would have been “sending him where he wants to go” because of all the men there. Advocates around the country are fighting jury discrimination after one man’s sexuality was a contributing factor in his 2019 execution. Charles Rhines confessed to murdering 22-year-old Donnivan Schaefer during a 1992 burglary in South Dakota. The defendant went to a Rapid City doughnut shop — from which he’d been fired weeks earlier — forced Schaefer into a storeroom, tied him up and stabbed him repeatedly in the stomach, according to CBS News. RELATED |  South Dakota executes Charles Rhines The controversy in Rhines’ case came during the sentencing phase of his 1993 murder trial, when jurors were left to decide between a sentence of life in prison or death by execution.  He received the death penalty — in part because the men and women tasked with deciding his fa...

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...

Washington (CNN)--The Supreme Court said Monday that state prisoners may not present new evidence in federal court in support of a claim that their post-conviction counsel in state court was ineffective in violation of the Constitution. The ruling is a major defeat for two inmates on death row who said they had compelling claims that their state lawyers failed to pursue.  In addition, it will make it harder for inmates across the country to prevail on claims that they received ineffective counsel at the state court level in post-conviction proceedings.  The 6-3 opinion was penned by Justice Clarence Thomas.  Thomas suggested that allowing such claims to go forward would cause unnecessary delays, and he said that federal courts "must afford unwavering respect to the centrality of the trial of a criminal case in state court."  "Serial relitigation of final convictions undermines the finality that is essential to both the retributive and deterrent functions of criminal ...

A Harrisburg, Pennsylvania trial court has granted the application of the Dauphin County District Attorney’s office to withdraw all charges against Samuel Randolph, IV, completing his exoneration of a double murder that sent him to Pennsylvania’s death row in 2003. On April 6, 2022, two days after the U.S. Supreme Court had declined to review the county prosecutors’ appeal of a federal court ruling granting Randolph a new trial, District Attorney Fran Chardo filed a motion to enter an order of nolle prosequi terminating the prosecution of Mr. Randolph. Chardo refused to concede Randolph’s innocence, saying that “retrial is not in the public interest at this time” because “[t]he police affiant and the police detective who handled the evidence collection in this case have both died” and “[o]ther witnesses have become unavailable for other reasons.” A federal district court overturned Randolph’s conviction on May 27, 2020, holding that the trial court had violated his Sixth Amendment rig...

The Supreme Court has reinstated the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In a 6-3 ruling on Friday, the court found that a federal appeals court was wrong to vacate the death sentence based on issues of jury selection and evidence. The vote was divided along lines of ideology, with outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Elena Kagan, and, in part, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting with the ruling. Three people were killed and 260 were injured, many seriously, in the 2013 bombing. Seventeen of those who were injured lost limbs. A police officer was killed during the ensuing manhunt. “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one,” conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. The court was looking at a ruling by a panel of three judges in the US Court of Appeals for the first Circuit. The panel agreed with Tsarnaev’s attorneys back in July that p...