Death Penalty News

Does the death penalty – ‘a life for a life’ – really help victims’ families achieve closure? A new documentary finds out For almost 20 years, Aaron Castro was certain about what had to happen. John Ramirez had to die. Ramirez’s execution was the only way to ensure he got the justice he deserved. And it was the only way that Castro, the son of Ramirez’s victim, could staunch his bleeding heart, soothe the constant anger boiling inside him, and achieve what had been eluding him for two decades: closure.

Jurors in the trial of convicted Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers likely will decide this week whether the shooter will join a long list of condemned men awaiting execution. It is the 1st of potentially 2 death-related decisions the jury will make. The jurors — 7 men and 5 women — convicted Bowers June 16 of all 63 federal charges filed against him in connection with the Oct. 27, 2018, shooting. The synagogue he targeted housed three congregations: Tree of Life, Dor Hadash and New Light. Eleven people were killed: Richard Gottfried, Joyce Fienberg, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil and David Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday. He was 81. Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known. Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, he had been held in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings from 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.

Though President Biden campaigned against capital punishment, Attorney General Merrick Garland is charting his own course in pursuing the death penalty in the trial of Sayfullo Saipov. On Halloween 2017, Sayfullo Saipov plowed a rented pickup truck down Manhattan’s crowded West Side bicycle path, smashing into pedestrians and cyclists, killing eight people and injuring more than a dozen, the authorities said.

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 ...

While the State of New York abolished the death penalty in 2004, capital punishment is still a federal court option, depending on potential charges. BUFFALO, N.Y. — The country's top federal prosecutor reiterated Friday that the U.S. Justice Department will be investigating the mass shooter case in Buffalo as a hate crime . And the big question that comes along with the potential federal case is whether the death penalty could be a part of it. With the suspect back in court Thursday, 2 On Your Side learned a grand jury already voted for an as yet still sealed indictment against him. That is even as he is being held without bail on a single state count of first degree murder. A conviction would carry a life in prison without parole sentence. But there might be more coming from federal prosecutors according to former U.S. Attorney Terrance Flynn. Flynn, who is now in private practice with the Harris Beach Law Firm, says, "Investigators from both of their offices will be talking ...

On January 17, 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad, shot through the heart, at Utah State Prison. He was the first person to be executed after the death penalty had been reinstated in the United States in 1976. This year, to mark the 45th anniversary of this execution, which coincided with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Death Penalty Action and a coalition of death penalty abolitionists gathered in Washington, D.C. calling for an end to the federal death penalty and all executions in the United States. After a 17-year hiatus, the U.S. resumed federal executions a year and a half ago. Between July 2020 and January 2021, the Trump administration executed 13 people who were on federal death row, a number surpassing the total number of federal executions that had taken place over the preceding 70 years (1949-2019) spanning 11 presidential administrations. Those who were executed under the Trump administration included: Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmon...

When authorities executed McVeigh 20 years ago, it was federal government’s first use of death penalty since 1963 The authorities had been preparing for thousands of protesters, both for and against the death penalty. As it was, just a couple of hundred showed up. Those that did, were far outnumbered by the media. Up to 1,400 reporters had gathered on the thick grass outside of Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary to cover the execution of Timothy McVeigh, both America’s deadliest domestic terrorist with white supremacist sympathies, and also an ordinary-looking veteran of the Gulf War, and a Roman Catholic born in upstate New York. In April 1995, with help of accomplice of Terry Nichols, a friend from army training, the disillusioned McVeigh had driven a truck bomb beneath the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and lit a two-minute fuse before fleeing the scene in a second vehicle he had parked nearby. The truck, a 1993 Ford F-700 rental vehicle, contained 4,800lbs of explosi...