Death Penalty News

The ruling throws another wrench into the long-running death penalty case involving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the deadliest U.S. terrorist strikes. A U.S. military judge has thrown out Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's 2007 confession to FBI agents about his alleged lead role in the 9/11 attacks, ruling that it wasn’t given voluntarily and can’t be used against him at trial. The Aug. 28 ruling by the trial judge, Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, throws yet another wrench into the long-running death penalty case on the eve of the 25th anniversary of America’s deadliest terrorist strike that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Is the use of pentobarbital a humane choice for an execution? On May 22, Oscar Smith, who was convicted of killing his wife and her two teenage sons, was executed in Tennessee by lethal injection. The state used the chemical pentobarbital only instead of the three-drug cocktail previously employed in its lethal injection protocol. Lethal injection has been used in 98% of U.S. executions since 1982. Smith’s execution was delayed multiple times because the drugs that were to be used for lethal injection three years ago had not been properly tested for bacterial toxins. His execution earlier this year was Tennessee’s first use of the death penalty since 2020 when Nicholas Sutton was executed by electrocution. Smith had been on death row for 35 years. He was convicted in the 1979 deaths of his grandmother, a high school friend and another man, The Tennessean newspaper reported.

Tennessee will execute Oscar Franklin Smith this week while a lawsuit challenging the state’s new lethal injection protocol makes its way through the court system. There was a possibility of the Thursday execution being called off. Anti-death penalty advocates and attorneys for Smith spent weeks asking Gov. Bill Lee to halt capital punishment until the court ruled whether the protocol is constitutional, which could take until at least January 2026.  On Tuesday morning, Smith’s attorneys announced Lee had denied the reprieve. An anonymous executioner will inject Smith, who was convicted of murdering his wife Judith Smith and her two sons Jason Burnett and Chad Burnett in 1989, with a lethal dose of pentobarbital at 10 a.m. He will be the first person in Tennessee put to death using this method.

NEW YORK - After Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin canceled plea deals for the alleged 9/11 mastermind and two accomplices, there's mounting pressure for new action.  The trial has been delayed for years. Victims' families and survivors say they want the feds to set a trial date and seek the death penalty.   Beth Murphy was battling melanoma in 2001. For the past 23 years, she's been fighting for justice for her husband Kevin Murphy, who worked on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center. Their children were 4 and 7. "I was battling melanoma. All my lymph nodes were taken out of my right leg. He was crying at my bedside. A week later, he was murdered," Beth Murphy said. 

The US defence secretary has revoked plea deals for the suspects behind the 9/11 attacks, two days after sixteen years of legally fraught prosecution processes reached a conclusion.  Llyod Austin’s announcement has reinstated the possibility of a death penalty for the alleged architect of the attacks on the Twin Towers, according to a memo sent to Susan Escallier, who is overseeing the war court proceedings. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and his accomplices Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi had reached plea deals with the head of the military tribunal in Guntánamo Bay on Wednesday after lawyers had requested that the men receive life sentences in exchange for the guilty pleas.

A military judge at Guantanamo Bay has ruled one of the five defendants charged over the 9/11 attacks is not fit to stand trial in a death-penalty case. The defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, associated psychotic features and a delusional disorder. His lawyer has long claimed his client was "tortured by the CIA". Al-Shibh was scheduled to face pretrial proceedings on Friday. Colonel Matthew McCall in the US base on the eastern tip of Cuba accepted the findings of the doctors which said in August that al-Shibh was too psychologically damaged to defend himself.

Twenty-two years ago [today], the unthinkable happened. Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked and crashed four passenger jets on U.S. soil in a coordinated suicide attack that killed 2,976 men, women and children in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field. The 19 hijackers are long dead. But for 20 years or more, five men accused of conspiring in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks have been in U.S custody – first, for about three years, as “high-value” detainees tortured by the Central Intelligence Agency and its affiliates at secret “black sites” around the world; ever since as prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.

Family members of some of the victims of 9/11 have asked the Biden Administration to abandon current plea negotiations with Guantánamo detainees that would remove the possibility of death sentences for the men accused of planning the 9/11 terror attacks. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants have been held for more than twenty years, first at CIA black sites where they were subject to “enhanced interrogation techniques” and then at Guantánamo, but none has proceeded to trial. The request came after family members were notified by the Pentagon on August 1st, 2023 about the possible plea deal.

Alabama, for some reason, has now volunteered to be the guinea pig state responsible for developing the newest execution method. Attorney General Steve Marshall is on a crusade to stop what he considers murder. In a court filing this week, he expressed intent to prosecute people who make travel arrangements for pregnant women to have out-of-state abortions. Marshall misses the deep irony in this announcement, following his enthusiastic race to invent the newest method for state murder: nitrogen hypoxia to carry out the death penalty. Marshall is at once proclaiming absolute intolerance to the killing of a fetus, and yet leading the charge on new ways to kill adult human beings. 

In dismissing a confession in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. has shaken a foundation of U.S. government cases at the post-9/11 court. In late 2006, in an effort to turn the page on a legacy of state-sponsored torture, prosecutors for the George W. Bush administration began an experiment at Guantánamo Bay. They set up teams of law enforcement officers to try to obtain voluntary confessions from men who had spent years in brutal conditions in isolated C.I.A. prisons.

Plea agreements under consideration may mean that the suspected architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and his fellow defendants never face the death penalty WASHINGTON (AP) — The suspected architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and his fellow defendants may never face the death penalty under plea agreements now under consideration to bring an end to their more than decadelong prosecution, the Pentagon has advised families of some of the thousands killed.  The notice, made in a letter that was sent to several of the families and obtained by The Associated Press, comes 1 1/2 years after military prosecutors and defense lawyers began exploring a negotiated resolution to the case. 

On August 18, 2023, a military judge in Guantanamo Bay overseeing the pretrial capital prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi national accused of organizing the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, excluded Mr. al-Nishiri’s confessions as the product of torture. “Exclusion of such evidence is not without societal costs,” said the judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., in a 50-page decision. “However, permitting the admission of evidence obtained by or derived from torture by the same government that seeks to prosecute and execute the accused may have even greater societal costs.” This decision raises serious questions about the admissibility of confessions made under similar circumstances by the five detainees accused of the 9/11 terror attacks and may affect the plea negotiations currently underway for these men.

The Saudi defendant, accused of orchestrating the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, was waterboarded and subjected to other forms of torture by the C.I.A. in 2002 in a secret prison network. The military judge in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case on Friday threw out confessions the Saudi defendant had made to federal agents at Guantánamo Bay after years of secret imprisonment by the C.I.A., declaring the statements the product of torture. The decision deprives prosecutors of a key piece of evidence against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 58, in the longest-running death-penalty case at Guantánamo Bay.

The prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others held at Guantanamo Bay has been troubled by repeated delays and legal disputes. WASHINGTON — The suspected architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and his fellow defendants may never face the death penalty under plea agreements now under consideration to bring an end to their more than decadelong prosecution, the Pentagon and FBI have advised families of some of the thousands killed. The notice, made in a letter that was sent to several of the families and obtained by The Associated Press, comes 1 ½ years after military prosecutors and defense lawyers began exploring a negotiated resolution to the case.

The federal government is reportedly negotiating plea deals that could take the death penalty off the table for the five defendants charged with planning and executing the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including self-proclaimed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, according to an exclusive CBS News report. The men are still being held at Guantanamo Bay and have yet to face trial for the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. Mohammed and the four other defendants have been charged with terrorism, hijacking, and 2,976 counts of murder for the role they played in the 9/11 attacks. Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty for all five men. The defendants, who were charged in 2008, have yet to face justice, due, in part, to delays stemming from their lawyers’ efforts to get information from the CIA about enhanced interrogation techniques, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. News of the possible plea deals has angered family members of some of the victims.  “The families are outraged,...

In April, a jury found El Shafee Elsheikh guilty on four counts of hostage-taking and four counts of conspiracy after a two-week trial. ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A federal judge on Friday sentenced a key member of an Islamic State cell known as the Beatles to eight concurrent life terms without parole in the abduction, abuse and deaths of four Americans in Syria, ending a wrenching effort by their families to bring the militants to justice. In April, a jury found El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, guilty on four counts of hostage-taking and four counts of conspiracy after a two-week trial. Former captives detailed relentless beatings, sexual abuse, waterboarding and killings by three young Britons, who were nicknamed the Beatles for their accents and their incessant banter. The relatives of the four Americans — the journalists James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff as well as the aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig — watched intently, linking arms and grasping hands, as Judge Thomas S. Ellis III of Fed...

Botched executions are a repeated feature of the death penalty system in the United States. But from listening to the after-the-fact accounts of state officials, you would never know. They seem to have developed a shared vocabulary for reassuring the public that there was nothing to see or worry about, even when an execution goes wrong. Take the case of John Marion Grant, put to death by the state of Oklahoma in October of last year. This week an autopsy report was released that revealed just how badly botched his execution was and just how absurd was Oklahoma’s head-in-the-sand response to it. Grant’s execution made headlines when witnesses provided disturbing eyewitness accounts of his suffering. Dan Snyder, a local television reporter and one of the five media members present, offered a minute-by-minute account of what happened. Snyder reported that shortly after the start of the midazolam, the first drug in Oklahoma’s drug cocktail, things started going wrong. Midazolam is a se...

Alabama and Mississippi have undertaken preparatory steps towards resuming executions in the face of continuing legal challenges to their methods of execution. On August 2, 2021, Alabama’s Department of Corrections (ADOC) notified a federal judge that it had “completed the initial physical build on the nitrogen hypoxia system” that would use nitrogen hypoxia to kill prisoners. The method is untested, and the state also indicated in its filing that it had yet to develop an execution protocol for the method. The filing came in a case in which death-row prisoner Charles Burton has challenged Alabama’s refusal to allow his spiritual advisor to accompanying him to the execution chamber to provide religious support. In a status report filed in Burton’s case, the Alabama Attorney General’s office said that a safety expert had visited the prison “to evaluate the system.” “As a result of the visit,” state prosecutors wrote, “the ADOC is considering certain additional health and safety measures...

A 25-year-old woman in Ohio who has been charged with murder in the death of her 4-year-old daughter will face the death penalty if convicted, prosecutors said. Tianna Robinson allegedly beat and strangled her daughter, Nahla Miller, until her heart stopped, according to a statement on Monday from Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph T. Deters. Robinson was arrested on April 13 and is being held in a Hamilton County jail on a $2 million bond, according to jail records.  CNN has reached out to Robinson's attorney for comment but has not yet heard back. "Nahla was transported to [the] Children's Hospital where she remained until she was removed from life support on April 21," Deters' statement said. "Investigators believe Nahla had been abused for months," the prosecutor's statement said. "The Coroner's Office has ruled Nahla's death a homicide. The cause of death was determined to be strangulation and blunt force trauma, resulting in signifi...

Six years ago this month, the Islamic State (IS) published its first video in what would become the prevailing image of the war: a jumpsuit-clad hostage kneeling before a knife-wielding executioner. For the parents of slain Americans James Foley , Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller, justice has remained elusive. But two of the families told Al-Monitor they were given fresh hope after a phone call with Attorney General William Barr on Aug. 6. Barr told them federal prosecutors will take the death penalty off the table as a potential sentence for two men alleged to have tortured and killed foreign hostages. News of the call was first reported by NBC News. This decision would make it possible for the United Kingdom, the suspects’ home country, to share evidence that could be key to putting El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey behind bars in the United States. If the British government doesn't provide its evidence within six weeks, Barr told the families that Ko...