Death Penalty News

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.

The Bureau of Prisons did not comment on Kaczynski's health conditions Unabomber Ted Kaczynski has been transferred from the Colorado supermax prison to a federal medical facility in North Carolina - a sign the infamous domestic terrorist's health is deteriorating. Kaczynski, 79 - a mathematics prodigy who gained notoriety for his manifesto after sending a series of bombs in the mail over 17 years that killed three people and injured 23 - has been moved to FMC Butner, which is known for treating inmates with significant health problems.  He was transferred on December 14 from supermax prison Florence-ADMAX - the 'Alcatraz of the Rockies' - where he has been serving multiple life sentences. The prison houses [inmates] such as World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev. His condition is unknown and the Bureau of Prisons refused to tell his brother David Kaczynski about any ailments. David found out about his brother's ...

It would be a hard slog for President Joe Biden to persuade Congress to abolish the federal death penalty as he promised, but the least he could do is to stop enforcing it. To the contrary, his Department of Justice is picking up where President Donald Trump’s left off in pushing for the execution of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving perpetrator of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, in which 3 adults and a child died and hundreds were wounded, many gravely. The First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld 27 of his 30 convictions but voided his 3 death sentences, ruling that prospective jurors should have been questioned individually on what they had read or heard about the intensely publicized case, and sent it back for a new trial just on the punishment. That, and the precedent at stake, are what the government’s recently filed Supreme Court brief aims to prevent. There is also a secondary issue over the judge’s refusal to allow testimony on earlier murders allegedly committed by Tsarnaev’s e...

LONDON (AP) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would have to be “almost dying” to get out of arguably the most notorious prison in the United States if convicted of espionage charges and sent there, a court at London's Old Bailey heard Tuesday. Assange, who is fighting an extradition request from the U.S., would likely be sent to the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, if convicted, according to Maureen Baird, a former warden at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. U.S. prosecutors have indicted the 49-year-old Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret American military documents a decade ago. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison. Assange’s defense team says he is entitled to First Amendment protections for the publication of leaked documents that exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have also said he is suffering from wide-ranging mental health i...

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A federal judge has rejected a bid by the suspect in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting to have the death penalty removed as a potential sentencing option. Lawyers for Robert Bowers argued that capital punishment violates the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause and the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Senior District Judge Donetta W. Ambrose noted in a trio of rulings Monday that courts have consistently upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty. Bowers "has not identified a single case holding that the (federal death penalty) is unconstitutional,” she wrote. Defense lawyer Judy Clarke has made similar arguments in other high-profile capital cases. Her clients have included Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is appealing his 2015 death sentence, and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who entered a plea agreement that spared him the death penalty. In court filings, Clarke said that she has tried to negotiate...

Update :  El Chapo was sentenced to life in prison . In the coming months, as the infamous drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera is finally sentenced and put behind bars, his American jailers will confront a question that long bedeviled their counterparts in Mexico: Given Mr. Guzmán’s Houdini-like talent for breaking out of prison — a trick he pulled off twice — where, and under what conditions, should he be incarcerated? Ultimately, prison officials will make that decision, but lawyers for the kingpin known as El Chapo warned him after his conviction this week on drug conspiracy charges that he is likely to be sent to the country’s most forbidding federal lockup, the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo., often referred to as the ADX. More colloquially known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, the ADX was meant to be both punitive and escape-proof, a penal fortress where inmates spend 23 hours a day inside their cells with little human cont...

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Judy Clarke Judy Clarke excelled at saving the lives of notorious killers. Then she took the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Clarke may be the best death-penalty lawyer in America. Her efforts helped spare the lives of Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called “twentieth hijacker” in the 9/11 plot), and Jared Loughner (who killed six people and wounded thirteen others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, at a Tucson mall). “Every time Judy takes a new case, it’s a soul-searching process for her,” Clarke’s old friend Elisabeth Semel told me. “Because it’s an enormous responsibility.” On rare occasions when Clarke withdrew or was removed from a defense team, a defendant received the death penalty. But in cases that she tried through the sentencing phase, she had never lost a client to death row. The administration of capital punishment is notoriously prone to error. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a hundred ...

The Boston Marathon finish line minutes before the blast. The Boston Marathon bombing trial shifts sharply in tone next week when prosecutors rest their case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and turn proceedings over to his lawyers, who have already admitted he planted explosives at the finish line in April 2013. One of Tsarnaev's lawyers, death penalty specialist Judy Clarke, opened the trial on March 4 with a blunt statement to the jury that "it was him" who killed 3 people and injured 264 in the attack. Clarke contended, however, that the 21-year-old played a secondary role to his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in planning and executing the plot. Her goal: Persuade jurors in federal court in Boston that Tsarnaev deserves a sentence of life in prison rather than the death penalty. It is an argument the defense team, which includes death penalty specialist David Bruck and Boston's top court-appointed lawyer, Miriam Conrad, will not be able to make in...