Death Penalty News

Rhonda Carlson avoided the death penalty in a deal with prosecutors in exchange for testifying against her husband prior to his trial. HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama woman received a life sentence Wednesday for helping her husband plan the 2015 killings of his estranged pregnant wife, her unborn child and three others. Rhonda Carlson, 48, avoided the death penalty in a deal with prosecutors in exchange for testifying against her husband, Christopher Henderson, prior to his trial. She admitted to helping plan the attack and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. RELATED |  Man convicted of killing 5 in New Market receives death penalty A jury in July convicted Henderson in the shooting and stabbing deaths of Kristin Smallwood; her unborn daughter; her 8-year-old son Clayton Chambers; her 1-year-old nephew Eli Sokolowski; and her mother, Carol Jean Smallwood. He was sentenced to death earlier this month. The five bodies were found in a house that had b...

A federal appeals court granted stays of execution on Wednesday for 2 Oklahoma inmates who were scheduled to receive lethal injections in the coming weeks.  A 3-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit issued the stays Wednesday for death row inmates John Marion Grant, who was scheduled to die on Thursday, and Julius Jones, whose lethal injection was set for Nov. 18.  The court ruled that U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot in Oklahoma erred when he removed Grant, Jones and 3 other inmates from a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s lethal injection protocols because they did not designate an alternative method of execution.  The court determined that the inmates did identify alternative methods in their complaint, even if they didn’t specifically check a box designating which specific method they would use.  The panel wrote, “... We find nothing in the relevant case law that specifically requires a prisoner to designate a method of execution t...

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); October 26, 2021: A man sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder, was executed in Karaj Central Prison. According to Iran newspaper, a man was executed in Karaj Central Prison on the morning of October 20.  The unnamed man was sentenced to qisas for murder. The newspaper reports that he was sentenced to qisas for murdering his fiancée with the help of another woman. According to Iran Human Rights’ Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 211 of the 267 people executed in 2020 were sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for "premeditated murder." As there are no legal distinctions made between murder and manslaughter, whether voluntary or involuntary in Iran, those charged under the umbrella term of “premeditated murder” will receive the death penalty regardless of the intent and circumstances. Source: Iran Human Rights , Staff, October 26, 2021 🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an exis...

DUBAI (Reuters) – Saudi authorities on Wednesday freed a young Shi’ite Muslim whose death sentence had been commuted to 10 years in prison under recent legislative reforms, his father said in a Twitter post. Ali Al-Nimr, the nephew of prominent Shi’ite cleric Nimr al-Nimr whose 2016 execution sparked demonstrations in Saudi Arabia and Iran, was 17 when he was detained in February 2012 for participating in protests in the country’s Eastern Province. “Today on the 27th October 2021, my son was released,” his father Mohammed al Nimr said in a series of tweets, in which he thanked friends and family for their support throughout a difficult decade. He also thanked King Salman for “the historic decision in April 2020 which ruled to stop issuing and implementing death sentences against minors.” Nimr’s uncle, Jaafar Al Nemer, also tweeted news of his nephew’s release along with a photo of a smiling but tired-looking Nimr sitting in the back of a car. In February, Saudi’s state-backed Human Rig...

A clemency hearing for Oklahoma death row inmate Julius Jones scheduled for Tuesday has been delayed for a week while his legal challenge is pending in federal court. The 5-member Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board is now set to hear Jones’ request for clemency next Tuesday while an appeal by death row inmates is pending in federal court. Jones and 5 other death row inmates are seeking to be reinstated into a federal lawsuit challenging Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol.  A federal district judge on Monday rejected the inmates’ request, and their attorneys immediately appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. Jones, 41, maintains he is innocent of the 1999 shooting death of Edmond businessman Paul Howell and that he was framed by the actual killer, a high school friend and former co-defendant who was a key witness against him. Another clemency hearing that was scheduled Wednesday for Bigler J. “Bud” Stouffer II, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the sh...

A special court on Tuesday convicted and sentenced a couple to four death sentences, double lifer and imposed a fine of Rs 6 lakh for killing their family members in 2019. Chennai: After killing his parents and brother with the help of his wife, by dousing them in petrol while in sleep and setting them ablaze, the accused Goverdhanan had claimed they had died after the AC in the room exploded. However, circumstantial evidence, medical report and the chemical analysis report went against the accused, who were pronounced guilty and awarded death penalty on three counts, Special Public Prosecutor N Vijayaraj said. P Velmurugan, District Judge, Sessions Court for exclusive trial of Bomb Blast Cases at Poonamallee pronounced the verdict.  Goverdhanan had been demanding money from his parents for long to start a new business venture and was agitated that his parents did not heed to it. In May 2019, the victims were found dead inside their locked house and Goverdhanan blamed an AC explosi...

OKLAHOMA CITY — Pam Carter wrote in 2000 that she still looked at the answering machine every day expecting a message from her mother. “Mom never failed to leave a daily message on my answering machine,” she wrote in a letter given to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. “It was usually just an ‘I love you.’” Her mother, Gay Carter, worked at the Dick Connor Correctional Center in Hominy in 1998 when inmate John Marion Grant pulled her into a mop closet and stabbed her 16 times. Five stab wounds struck vital organs. She died of internal bleeding. Grant on Thursday could become the first inmate executed in Oklahoma in nearly seven years since the state halted executions due to problems with the lethal-injection procedure. According to DOC protocol, he will be offered a mild sedative no later than four hours before the execution. If no stay is issued by a court, he will be given an opportunity to say his last words about 4 p.m. Thursday. He then will be administered a lethal dose of che...

"Abolishing the death penalty will not change the ideology of the current Supreme Court. Rather, it will take state and local officials and advocates to abolish," said Rachel A. Van Cleave, a professor of law and former dean at Golden Gate University School of Law. Since the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, many changes to criminal justice have been proposed and some have been enacted. However, none of these reforms will be meaningful unless and until we require the government to dismantle the laws and procedures that implement the death penalty, an inherently biased and horrific practice. The fact that the federal government and 27 states still have the death penalty reveals an attitude that is diametrically counter to the mindset necessary to end mass incarceration. Before discussing the death penalty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this term, consider the backdrop of last year’s Supreme Court term. From July 2020 through January 2021, the federal government...

Oklahoma’s 1st execution since January 2015 is set for Thursday, pending any last-minute action. John Marion Grant, 60, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. Grant received a death sentence for the 1998 killing of Gay Carter, a 58-year-old prison cafeteria worker, at the Dick Conner Correctional Center in Hominy, where he was serving sentences for 4 armed robberies. An Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board unanimously rejected clemency for Grant in 2014 and another board rejected clemency earlier this month with a 3-2 vote. Court documents state Grant dragged Carter into a mop closet and stabbed her 16 times with a shank after she took him off a kitchen job at the prison. Defense attorneys had argued Grant received ineffective counsel as his lawyers didn’t present mitigating evidence, such as his difficult childhood. Grant’s execution date was set for Oct. 28, 2015, before he and 2 other death row inmates received a last-minute stay of exec...

Today, an Oklahoma District Court held a hearing on the preliminary injunction to halt upcoming executions scheduled from October 2021-February 2022 for 4 people on the state’s death row. In response to this news, Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, said: “There is no humane way to kill a person – as Oklahoma has made abundantly clear. All executions must halt immediately as a 1st step towards full abolition. The Oklahoma Attorney General is pushing for the state to kill again, before a federal court decides the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection protocol. Oklahoma still has time to do the right thing and reverse course by rescinding the execution dates.” Kristina Roth, Senior Advocate, Criminal Justice Program at Amnesty International USA, added: “It is alarming to see Oklahoma continue to pursue executions in the midst of unsettled and serious legal questions about their constitutionality. These executions must be halted to allow the courts t...