Death Penalty News

Karen Conti was a fledgling lawyer in the early 1990s when she was asked to defend John Wayne Gacy, but she wanted "to look evil in the eye," so she took the case. As a fierce opponent of the death penalty, Conti became the only female lawyer on his death row defense team, which led to hours of talks with the "Killer Clown."

Convicted of killing two women ― including his wife ― and admitting to two more murders while on death row, Barnes destroyed numerous families. For his actions, the state of Florida will inject him with poison on Aug. 3 and his life will end. The pain and suffering he imposed on his victims' families will surely simmer on. But at least one family is hoping his execution brings them some sort of point to reset, or at least a chance to live the rest of their lives out from under his shadow of violence and blood.

Prosecutors in the penalty trial of Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz will begin their rebuttal case Tuesday, challenging his attorneys' contention that he murdered 17 people because his birth mother abused alcohol during pregnancy, a condition they say went untreated. Prosecutor Mike Satz's team is expected to call experts who will testify Cruz has antisocial personality disorder — in lay terms, he's a sociopath — and fully responsible for his Feb. 14, 2018, attack at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), people with antisocial personality disorder commit "exploitive, delinquent and criminal behavior with no remorse." They usually have no regard for others, don't follow the law, can't sustain consistent relationships or employment and use manipulation for personal gain, the NIH says. Prosecutors will want to reemphasize Cruz "understood exactly" what he was doing during the m...

A federal appeals court in Ohio has overturned the death sentence imposed on an African American defendant whose defense lawyer presented testimony from a clinical psychologist that one quarter of urban Black men were sociopaths who should be locked up or thrown away. In a unanimous ruling on August 22, 2022, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the “racialized testimony” offered by a defense expert at the trial of Malik Allah-U-Akbar “offends the Constitution on its face” and that Akbar’s defense counsel was ineffective in presenting it to the jury. The court, which referred to Akbar by his prior name, Odraye Jones, ordered that Akbar be granted a new sentencing trial. (Akbar legally changed his name while his federal habeas corpus proceedings were pending.) Akbar was convicted and sentenced to death for the November 1997 murder of an Ashtabula police officer who was attempting to serve an arrest warrant. He was represented by a court-appoin...