Death Penalty News

Correction officials confirmed Westville can accommodate firing squad executions as lawmakers, the governor, and the U.S. Justice Department push for changes to protocols. As Indiana inches toward what could be its fourth state execution since resuming capital punishment, prison officials confirmed the state’s next correctional complex is already equipped for an execution method Hoosier lawmakers have yet to authorize. The Indiana Department of Correction confirmed to the Indiana Capital Chronicle that the new Westville Correctional Facility, now nearing completion, is designed to accommodate both lethal injection and firing squad executions. Indiana law currently allows only lethal injection.

The Army is preparing to carry out the executions of the military's four death-row inmates if ordered to do so by the president, according to an internal planning document reviewed by ABC News. If carried out, it would mark the first time the military executed convicted American inmates in more than a half-century The plan, dubbed "Operation Resolute Justice" and issued internally in February, directs Army officials to coordinate with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to transfer condemned prisoners from the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the federal execution facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, where the Justice Department carried out a series of non-military federal executions during President Donald Trump's first term.

Eight federal inmates whose death sentences were commuted by former President Joe Biden shortly before he left office have been moved to a notorious federal supermax prison in Colorado. The inmates were moved from the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, to the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum (ADX) facility in Florence, Colorado, on September 23, Randilee Giamusso, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons, confirmed to Newsweek . Rejon Taylor, one of the inmates whose death sentence was commuted and the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that had sought to prevent transfers to the supermax prison, told Newsweek in a recent message that he expects he and the other remaining inmates may be moved there in the coming days or weeks. “I'm starting to feel a bit unsettled,” he said. Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment via email. The Department of Justice has been contacted through a contact form on its website. The Context President Donald Trump oversaw 1...

Officials took a former death row prisoner from his cell in Terre Haute and transported him to South Carolina over the weekend. Brandon Council, 40, is now likely to face state charges for a 2017 double murder that resulted in his original federal death sentence. Former President Joe Biden reduced that sentence to life without parole in a mass clemency decision last year. But prosecutors in South Carolina have indicated in recent months that they were considering re-charging Council with the murders of two bank tellers, Donna Major and Kathryn Skeen, in the 2017 armed robbery.

A group of federal inmates who were resentenced under the Biden administration filed a lawsuit trying to stop their move to a high-security Colorado prison. A federal judge has denied a legal attempt, for now, to prevent the U.S. government from transferring death row inmates whose sentences were commuted by then-President Joe Biden to the "Supermax" in Colorado, the highest-security federal prison in the country. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly in Washington, D.C., ruled Tuesday against issuing a preliminary injunction requested in a lawsuit brought by 21 of the 37 former death row inmates , all of whom saw their sentences changed to life without parole in December. "The Court cannot grant that relief — at least not now," Kelly wrote in his opinion, saying that the plaintiffs must first exhaust their administrative appeals within the federal Bureau of Prisons' transfer process. The decision comes as the BOP has said it would not transfer any of the plaintiff...

In an unusual move, two prisoners who are among the 37 federal inmates whose death sentences were commuted by President Joe Biden in December have refused to sign paperwork accepting his clemency action Two federal inmates, Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, are refusing to accept outing US President Joe Biden’s decision to commute their death sentences to life imprisonment without parole. Their refusal comes after Biden commuted the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates last month, sparing them from execution.

Under Trump, there were 13 executions in his last six months as president. Biden must clear death row now to stop that and what Albert Camus described as the most cold-blooded premeditated murder. On Jan. 14, 2021, I stood in a small chamber in the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, while the federal government carried out an execution. Relegated to a spot 6 feet away from the gurney, I prayed with Corey Johnson, the “Gentle Giant” as he was known on death row.  He was one of the last of 13 people executed under then-President Donald Trump, who carried out an unprecedented killing spree during the final six months of his presidency.

President-elect Donald Trump’s return to office is putting a spotlight on the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, which houses federal death row. In Bloomington, a small community of death row spiritual advisors is struggling to support the prisoners to whom they minister.  Ross Martinie Eiler is a Mennonite, Episcopal lay minister and member of the Catholic Worker movement, which assists the homeless. And for the past three years, he’s served as a spiritual advisor for a man on federal death row.

You don't have to tell Daniel Troya and the 40 other denizens of federal death row locked in shed-sized solitary cells for 23 hours a day, every day, that elections have consequences. To them, from inside the U.S. government's only death row located in Terre Haute, Indiana, Tuesday's election is quite literally a matter of life and death: If Kamala Harris wins, they live; if Donald Trump wins, they die. "He's gonna kill everyone here that he can," Troya, 41, said in an email from behind bars. "That's as easy to predict as the sun rising."

A conversation with Death Penalty Action Co-founder and Executive Director Abe Bonowitz. Now that Joe Biden is a lame duck president, activists are holding him accountable to make good on his promise to end the federal death penalty during his remaining six months as president. Biden’s election campaign in 2020 had pledged to end the federal death penalty and incentivize the remaining 27 states that still allow executions to do the same. While he made history as the first president in the United States to openly oppose the death penalty, there has been no movement to actually end federal executions during his nearly four years in office.

The drug has been used by the feds and in other states, but officials are hushed about its origins, cost and standards for administration. Little is known about how Indiana acquired pentobarbital, a drug that state officials plan to use to restart executions for the first time in more than a decade. After state officials announced last week that Indiana will resume executions for the first time in over a decade, secrecy largely shrouds the new drug, pentobarbital, acquired for the impending lethal injections.

The United States ranks among the top countries using capital punishment, contributing to a worldwide surge in executions last year. That’s according to data released last week by Amnesty International, which opposes capital punishment in all cases. The London-based rights group’s annual report on the global use of the death penalty documents more than 1,100 executions in 2023.

A conservative plan for Donald Trump’s potential second term calls for the swift execution of everyone on federal death row, continuing the historic federal execution spree that took place during the Trump administration. Buried in a 2023 plan from the Heritage Foundation, dubbed Project 2025, former Trump Department of Justice official Gene Hamilton urges a second-term Trump to “do everything possible” to execute the remaining 40 people on federal death row, arguing the White House should push for these killings “until Congress says otherwise through legislation.”

U.S. prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Payton Gendron, the then-18-year-old man who in 2022 killed nearly a dozen Black shoppers at a Tops Friendly Market grocery store in Buffalo, New York. In a court filing Jan. 12, Trini Ross, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, informed the court and the defendant of the United States’ intent to seek the death penalty for Gendron’s crimes, in part because of the defendant’s expressed “bias, hatred, and contempt toward Black persons and his animus toward Black persons.” 

A prisoner has died at a high-security federal facility in Indiana, according to prison officials. It was the second time since December that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons reported a death at the U.S. Penitentiary-Terre Haute. RELATED | Man found dead on federal death row planned suicide in final weeks Staff discovered Mario Waters, 35, unresponsive after “a perceived altercation with another incarcerated individual,” the prison bureau reported Monday.

According to statements from several federal death row prisoners, the new “adverse conditions” on death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, contributed to the December 1, 2023 death of Nasih Khalil Ra’id. Fellow prisoners say Mr. Ra’id, whose given name at birth was Odell Corley, died by suicide .  Prison officials have not released the report from Mr. Ra’id’s autopsy or commented on the cause of his death.

The U.S. prison bureau transferred Nasih Ra'id to Terre Haute in 2005.  A man who died on federal death row last month told loved ones he planned to kill himself in the weeks before U.S. prison staff reported finding his body.   Friends of Nasih Khalil Ra’id said he had been struggling to cope with conditions at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. The facility houses the U.S. prison bureau’s “Special Confinement Unit,” or federal death row.

The man who killed 11 people at a Squirrel Hill synagogue has been moved to federal death row at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. Robert Bowers, 50, was sentenced to the death penalty on Aug. 3 after a jury heard from 51 witnesses over nine days of testimony in the penalty phase of the case. He arrived on death row Aug. 25. Bowers was found guilty of all 63 counts against him stemming from the Oct. 27, 2018, attack at the Tree of Life synagogue at Wilkins and Shady avenues.

Before 2020, there had been three federal executions in 60 years. Then Trump put 13 people to death in six months IN THE FINAL moments of Brandon Bernard’s life, before he was executed by lethal injection at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Dec. 10, 2020, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to entertain a final plea for mercy on Bernard’s behalf. The call was not with Bernard’s family or his attorneys. Nor was it with representatives from the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney office, who had recommended just days earlier that Trump spare Bernard’s life.

The ACLU of Indiana is suing the U.S. Bureau of Prisons over conditions on federal death row, which is housed in Terre Haute. A lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court accuses the bureau of holding 38 men in isolated conditions that constitute cruel and unusual punishment.