Death Penalty News

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump signed a sweeping execution order Monday on the death penalty that directs the attorney general to “take all necessary and lawful action” to ensure that states have enough lethal injection drugs to carry out executions. Trump’s order, coming just hours after he returned to the White House, compels the Justice Department to not only seek the death penalty in appropriate federal cases but also to help preserve capital punishment in states that have struggled to maintain adequate supplies of lethal injection drugs.

Former President Donald Trump has signaled he will continue his administration’s aggressive pursuit of the death penalty if he is elected, while Vice President Kamala Harris has gone mum on the issue.  Trump made his most detailed comments yet on capital punishment since launching his campaign during remarks at the Arizona border on Thursday, at the same time that Harris has come under scrutiny for her silence on the matter.

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.” 

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.

Since reaching historic highs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, use of the death penalty in America has steadily declined, with a dwindling number of jurisdictions responsible for a growing portion of executions. While capital punishment remains legal in 27 states and for the federal government – and a majority of US adults say they’re in favor it for convicted murderers – the number of jurisdictions that keep the death penalty on the books versus those that actually use it to punish the so-called “worst of the worst” illustrates critics’ complaints of how arbitrarily it is administered.

CHICAGO (AP) — A day before the federal government executed a Texas man for the killing of an Iowa couple when he was 18, celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz pleaded with then-President Donald Trump — a former client — to call the execution off. During a Dec. 9, 2020, call to the White House, Dershowitz told Trump that Brandon Bernard, at 40, wasn’t the man he was when Todd and Stacie Bagley were killed in 1999 and that he deserved to have his sentence commuted to life in prison.

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.

President Joe Biden made history in 2021 when he became the first president to publicly oppose the death penalty. It wasn’t a position he spoke about often but tucked into his campaign platform was a promise to work with Congress to abolish the federal death penalty through legislation and incentivize states to do the same.  In July 2020, the Trump administration ended a 17-year de facto moratorium on federal executions and killed Daniel Lewis Lee. Over the next several months, former President Donald Trump and then-Attorney General William Barr raced to execute as many people as possible before leaving office. Dustin Higgs, a Black man scheduled to be executed on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, was the thirteenth and final person to be killed. Ultimately, he died in the early hours of the following day while suffering from COVID-19, just four days before Biden’s inauguration. Like many of the people executed before him, there were extensive unresolved legal issues in Higgs’ cas...

The first federal capital case tried under President Joe Biden ended with a split among jurors that means the life of an Islamic extremist who killed eight people in a New York City will be spared. It came at a rare federal death penalty trial in a state without the death penalty. That Biden’s Justice Department continued to pursue the death penalty for Sayfullo Saipov, who used a truck to mow down pedestrians and cyclists on a popular bike path, was a surprise to many given Biden’s opposition to capital punishment and his 2016 campaign pledge to end it federally. The jury’s failure to reach a unanimous decision means Saipov receives an automatic sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for the October 2017 attack.

The former president wants to expand the use of the death penalty, and expand the federal government's options for carrying out death sentences “WHAT DO YOU think of firing squads?” That’s the question Donald Trump repeatedly asked some close associates in the run-up to the 2024 presidential campaign, three people familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone. It’s not an idle inquiry: The former president, if re-elected, is still committed to expanding the use of the federal death penalty and bringing back banned methods of execution, the sources say. He has even, one of the sources recounts, mused about televising footage of executions, including showing condemned prisoners in the final moments of their lives.

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.

NEW YORK, Sept 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. government said it plans to seek the death penalty for the man charged with using a truck to kill eight people on a Manhattan bike path on Halloween in 2017. In a letter filed late Friday in Manhattan federal court, prosecutors said Attorney General Merrick Garland "decided to continue to seek the death penalty" against Sayfullo Saipov, and that they notified the defendant's lawyers and victims. David Patton, a federal public defender representing Saipov, declined to comment. The decision followed Garland's July 2021 moratorium on federal executions while the Department of Justice reviews its use of the death penalty. Executions had resumed in 2020 under Garland's predecessor William Barr, following a 17-year hiatus. Saipov, 34, an Uzbek national, has pleaded not guilty to a 28-count indictment, including for murder and for providing material support to Islamic State, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Prosecutors said...

Oklahoma plans to execute a person a month for the next two years, starting today. We get an update from Connie Johnson, former state senator and murder victim family member with the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and speak with world-renowned anti-death-penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean. “Our death penalty is broken. It always was from the beginning,” Prejean tells Democracy Now! “I recognize that this is torture and an abuse of human rights. In time, with our help, as we continue to get the word out, the American people are going to see that, too. And we are going to end this thing.” Oklahoma has a history of botched executions, wrongful convictions and prosecution misconduct. “We get it wrong here often,” says Johnson. “We don’t want anyone executed.” Transcript [Editor’s Note: After we broadcast, the state of Oklahoma executed James Coddington and at 10:16 a.m. he was pronounced dead by lethal injection.] AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. ...

In Oklahoma, 25 death row inmates have been placed in an execution queue that extends from August 2022 through Christmas 2024. If the plan survives court challenges and public resistance, 58 % of the people on Oklahoma’s death row, “including multiple prisoners with severe mental illness, brain damage, and claims of innocence,” will be put to death, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The 29-month schedule of executions was approved by an appeals court on July 1. “This rush to execute would be reckless in any state, but Oklahoma in particular has a horrendous track record for problematic executions,” said Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, the executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, an anti-death-penalty advocacy group affiliated with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy noted recent examples: the 2021 lethal injection of John Grant, “who convulsed and vomited repeatedly before dying”; the 2014 execution of Clayton Lockett, “who took mor...

The verdict capped a 2-week trial that featured the testimony of former captives who detailed relentless beatings, waterboarding and murder by an Islamic State cell known as the Beatles. A federal jury on Thursday convicted a British militant accused of being a member of the brutal Islamic State cell known as the Beatles in the abduction, abuse and deaths of 4 Americans, a major victory for U.S. prosecutors and the families of victims who sought to bring him to justice. The jury took a day to convict El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, on four counts of hostage-taking and 4 conspiracy counts related to the deaths of three American men and a young woman who were captured during the Islamic State’s rampage through Syria in 2012 and 2013. Mr. Elsheikh is the most prominent member of the Islamic State to be brought to trial in the United States. He was captured in Syria by a Kurdish-backed militia in 2018, along with Alexanda Kotey, as they tried to flee to Turkey. Mr. Kotey, 38, who was part of the B...

Since 1991, American support for the death penalty has steadily declined. According to Statista, in 1991, approximately 76% of Americans supported the death penalty. Alternatively, in a 2021 survey, only 54% of Americans reported supporting the death penalty. What does this decline in numbers indicate regarding the changes within American society and the overall political climate? After 16 years of being paused, the Trump administration, to the surprise of many, reinstated the federal death penalty, as reported by Business Insider in a 2019 article. In United States v. Tsarnaev [i], the First Circuit ruled in favor of vacating the death penalty sentence of the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, representing a pivotal shift away from previous support of the death penalty. The reinstatement of the federal death penalty allowed the government to order the death penalty as punishment for federal offenses. The Trump administration has identified the reason for reinstating the federal...

As President Donald Trump’s term closed, his Justice Department carried out 13 executions. Within a span of 4 days in January 2021, federal authorities put to death three people, including a mentally ill woman and an intellectually disabled man. Those were the last federal executions in 2021. After President Biden took office, the Justice Department announced a moratorium while it conducted a review. More than a pause is needed. Mr. Biden needs to fulfill his campaign promise to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and he should encourage states to follow suit. Despite Trump Attorney General William P. Barr’s unprecedented, unseemly push to kill as many federal death row prisoners as he could, 2021 saw historic lows in how many people were executed or sentenced to death across the federal and state justice systems. According to the Death Penalty Information Center’s annual year-end report, there were 11 executions in 2021, down from 17 executions in 2020. As of Dec. 13, 18...

In the nine months since Merrick Garland took the helm at the Justice Department, the U.S. attorney general has issued a moratorium on federal executions and retracted the agency’s plans to pursue capital punishment in a dozen pending cases, including one in the Houston area, officials said. These actions mark a significant policy shift, considering federal death row is home to less than four dozen prisoners. Garland’s position on execution stands in contrast to his predecessor, William Barr, who backed an unusual spree of 13 expedited executions during President Donald Trump’s last six months, including six carried out between the election and inauguration of Joe Biden. Federal executions had been on pause for nearly 20 years before Trump reactivated the death chamber. Garland announced on July 1 he would halt executions while he conducted a review of capital cases. In a memo at the time, the AG said he would continue a protocol adopted in 2019 that called for reassessing lethal injec...