Death Penalty News

On November 8, 2023, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey scheduled an execution date for Kenneth Smith, marking the first attempt by a U.S. state to use nitrogen gas in an execution. Mr. Smith was convicted of the 1988 murder-for-hire death of Elizabeth Sennett in Jefferson County, Alabama and has been on death row for nearly 34 years.  Following the state Supreme Court’s 6-2 decision greenlighting Attorney General Steve Marshall’s request for an execution warrant, Gov. Ivey set a 32-hour execution date timeframe beginning on January 25, 2024. 

David Renteria's claim that he kidnapped 5-year-old Alexandra Flores under duress never made it to trial, according to court records The state of Texas is set to execute a man later this week who in 2001 kidnapped a five-year-old girl from an El Paso Walmart before brutally murdering her, leaving behind her partially naked and burned body- to this day, he says a gang made him do it. David Renteria, 53, is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He was sentenced to death for the murder of Alexandra Flores, according to court records and records with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The communist country has some of the toughest drug laws in the world, and is notoriously secretive about its executions. South Korean ex-police officer Kim Soon-sik, 63, and compatriot Kang Seon-hok, 30, were sentenced to death following a four-day trial in Ho Chin Minh City, state media said late Saturday. Chinese citizen Li Tian Guan, 58, and alleged Vietnamese ringleader Le Ho Vu, 36, were also handed death sentences.

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); November 9, 2023: State media have reported the execution of a man only identified as Akbar for murder in Tabriz Central Prison. According to Rokna, a man was executed in Tabriz Central Prison in the last week. The man only named as Akbar was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court. He had allegedly killed someone during a group fight on 7 August 2019.

The former president of China CITIC Bank Corporation Limited was given a suspended death by a court in Shandong province on Friday for accepting bribes of about 1 billion yuan ($137 million). The Intermediate People's Court in Jinan, capital of Shandong province, announced the death penalty with a two-year reprieve to Sun Deshun, saying that Sun will not be commuted or granted parole after the probation. In China, generally, criminals given a suspended death penalty will face life imprisonment if they have no new crimes during the two-year probation. If they continue performing well, they will obtain further sentence reduction.

Texas man executed after more than 30 years on death row A Texas man who spent more than 30 years on death row for a murder he committed during a robbery when he was 19 has been executed. Brent Brewer, 53, was put to death yesterday evening by lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary in the town of Huntsville, prison officials said. Brewer was sentenced to death in 1991 for fatally stabbing 66-year-old Robert Laminack the previous year, in a robbery that netted $140 in cash.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board narrowly voted Wednesday to recommend sparing the life of a man set to be executed later this month for what he claims were the self-defense killings of two men in Oklahoma City in 2001. The board voted 3-2 to recommend clemency for Phillip Dean Hancock, who has long maintained he shot and killed Robert Jett Jr., 37, and James Lynch, 58, in self-defense after the two men attacked him. Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt must now decide whether to grant clemency to Hancock, who is scheduled to receive a lethal injection on Nov. 30.

Saving souls, destroying bodies Since late 2021, Texas has been working to rehabilitate death row inmates through a new project known as the Faith-Based Program. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice writes that the Faith-Based Program “is based on the belief that individuals, no matter their past, can change if given the right tools and opportunity to do so.” Inmates and their attorneys have praised the program. They say it’s helping to improve relationships on death row. But that success hasn’t had any noticeable effect on executions. In fact, from late October until mid-November, TDCJ has scheduled lethal injections for three of the Faith-Based Program’s enrollees.

The 31-year-old convict killed a 46-year-old woman and her three-year-old neighbour on April 14, 2017. A sessions court in Mumbai Tuesday sentenced a 31-year-old man to death for setting ablaze two people — a woman and a child — in Bandra in 2017. Deepak Jath was found guilty of charges under Indian Penal Code charges sections 302 (murder) and 307 (attempt to murder) for killing Amravati Harijan, 46, and her three-year-old neighbour. 

A bill to repeal the death penalty in Pennsylvania has passed a committee in the commonwealth’s House of Representatives. The Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee voted 15-10 in favor of HB 999 on October 31, 2023. That vote is the first step toward abolishing the death penalty in Pennsylvania, which has had a formal moratorium on executions since 2015 and has not executed anyone since 1999.

Louisiana law allows a person in prison to file a petition to challenge their conviction or sentence on the basis of claims like innocence, police or prosecutorial misconduct, and ineffective assistance of counsel. State law also requires that a panel of three state appellate judges must review petitions written by incarcerated people themselves because they cannot afford a lawyer. But according to an investigative report from ProPublica, judges on Louisiana’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal secretly decided not to review petitions that were not written by lawyers—and instead directed staff director Jerrold Peterson to send out cut-and-pasted denials to at least 5,000 petitions that no judge ever read.

Amnesty International has urged Iranian authorities to immediately quash the conviction and death sentence against Reza Razaei, a man accused of involvement in the killing of a security agent during nationwide protests last year. “If charged with a recognizable criminal offence, proceedings must meet international fair trial standards without recourse to the death penalty and exclude “confessions” obtained under torture,” the London-based human rights watchdog said on November 6. Razaei, a 34-year-old member from Iran’s oppressed Kurdish and Yaresan ethnic and religious minorities, was arrested on November 24, 2022 in Shahriar, Tehran province. He is currently being held in Dizel Abad prison in the southern province of Kermanshah.

MORGAN COUNTY, Ala. (WHNT) — The State of Alabama says it will be seeking the death penalty against a man facing multiple capital murder charges for a 2020 shooting in Danville. Carson Peters was indicted in August 2021 on four counts of capital murder and one count of first-degree assault in connection to the shooting that left three people dead and one injured in May 2020. On Friday, November 3, the State of Alabama filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty against Peters, who will go on trial at the end of the month. The start date for Peters’ jury trial is currently set for Nov. 29.

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); November 6, 2023: Ghasem Abasteh, a Kurdish-Sunni political prisoner sentenced to death without due process or a fair trial for charges of moharebeh (enmity against god) and efsad-fil-arz (corruption on earth) through “armed resistance and membership in a Salafi jihadi group,” was executed in Ghezel Hesar Prison after spending 14 years on death row.

A ruling Thursday by the Alabama Supreme Court moved the state closer to executing an inmate in a way no state has ever done. Alabama’s nitrogen hypoxia method, five years in the making, would use a gas mask to cause death. It is an alternative to the state’s standard method, lethal injection. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air people breathe. Almost all the rest, 21%, is oxygen. With nitrogen hypoxia, the inmate would breathe pure nitrogen and no oxygen until they die.

KUALA LUMPUR: The first case to review a sentence after abolishing the mandatory death penalty and life imprisonment will be heard in the Apex court on Nov 14. Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Law and Institutional Reforms) Ramkarpal Singh said the case under the Revision of Sentence of Death and Imprisonment for Natural Life (Temporary Jurisdiction of the Federal Court) Act 2023 or Act 847 will be heard at the Federal Court in Putrajaya. He said as of Oct 31, 924 applications for review of sentences have been submitted to court.

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); November 3, 2023: Seven prisoners, most of whom were on death row for murder, were executed in Ghezel Hesar Prison on 1st November. IHRNGO previously reported the execution of two other men including an Afghan national at the prison that day. With two months still remaining in 2023, the number of recorded annual executions has surpassed 600 for the first time since 2016. Underscoring the fact that more than 600 executions in the first 10 months is unprecedented in the last eight years, Iran Human Rights urges the international community to condemn the arbitrary executions carried out by the Islamic Republic in the strongest possible terms.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- For the first time since Gallup started asking about the fairness of the death penalty's application in the U.S. -- a trend that dates back to 2000 -- more Americans say it is applied unfairly (50%) than fairly (47%). This represents a five-point increase in the percentage who think it is applied unfairly since the prior measurement in 2018. From 2000 through 2015, between 51% and 61% of Americans thought capital punishment was used fairly in the U.S., but since 2016, readings on the measure have averaged 49%. The latest reading is from Gallup’s annual Crime survey, conducted Oct. 2-23.

New information is coming to light in the case of a Dothan woman accused of putting her baby in a trash compactor in the heat of August. Jakayla Williams, 18, is charged with one count of Capital Murder. Police arrested Williams in late August after investigators said she threw her newborn baby in a dumpster with a trash compactor after secretly giving birth in her Dothan home. During a preliminary hearing Friday morning, state prosecutors revealed they would be seeking the death penalty. Williams’ defense team, comprised of Aimee Cobb Smith and Clay Wadsworth, is seeking a reasonable bond for their client, claiming she needs mental health treatment.

Pennsylvania nurse is accused of killing 4 patients, injuring others with high doses of insulin A registered nurse in Pennsylvania faces charges she administered lethal or potentially lethal doses of insulin to numerous patients — including a 104-year-old — at health care facilities over the past 3 years, prosecutors announced Thursday. Heather Pressdee, 41, had been accused in May of killing 2 nursing home patients and injuring a third. She was arraigned Thursday on the additional counts, including two new homicide charges, and waived a preliminary hearing.