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In brief: November 2022

In Texas, Tracy Beatty was killed early last month despite valid questions about whether his crime qualified for the death penalty. Beatty was found guilty

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51 people on Louisiana’s death row ask governor for clemency

Three months ago, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards told an audience at Loyola University that he supported abolishing the state’s death penalty because it’s “so final. When you make a mistake, you can’t get it back. And we know that mistakes have been made in sentencing people to death,” according to nola.com. Now, 51 of the 57 people on Louisiana’s death row are asking Bel Edwards, whose term is up

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Missouri kills Michael Tisius, its third execution this year

“I am holding tightly to my faith. It’s all I have left to take with me. I am sorry it had to come to this in this way. I wish I could have made things right while I was still here,” Michael Tisius wrote in his last statement before the state of Missouri killed him earlier this month. Tisius was just 19 when he shot and killed two county jail

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Florida’s Catholic bishops urge DeSantis to stay Owen’s execution

Florida’s Catholic bishops are urging Gov. Ron DeSantis to grant a stay of execution to Duane Owen, and commute his sentence to life without parole, Crux, an independent news service that covers the Vatican and the Catholic Church, reports. Owen, sentenced to death for two separate murders, Karen Slattery, and Georgianna Worden, in 1984, is scheduled to be killed June 15.  “Taking Mr. Owen’s life will not restore the lives

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While we’re on the subject. . .

“Tonight, by killing Darryl Barwick, we the People of the State of Florida also killed the belief that redemption matters. That remorse matters. That people, especially those who are sentenced to die as teenagers, are capable of change. This execution cements the short-sighted notion that people are irrevocably defined by the worst thing they have ever done,” Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty Executive Director Maria DeLiberato, wrote after

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In brief: May 2023

(This post was updated on June 1, 2023.) In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis withdrew a hold on the June 15 death warrant for Duane Owen, Flaglerlive.com reported. On May 22, DeSantis issued a temporary stay of execution and appointed three psychiatrists to assess Owen’s mental competence. According to Flaglerlive, DeSantis said the psychiatrists found that Owen ” has the mental capacity to understand the nature of the death penalty and

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Senate passes CA bill allowing judicial review of old sentences

As originally written, California’s SB 94 would have allowed judges to review death and life-without-parole sentences for people imprisoned for at least 20 years. The Senate passed the bill last week with 22 votes, one vote more than needed, sending it to the Assembly, but not without significant amendments. It is now limited to those individuals serving a sentence of life without parole who have been imprisoned for 25 years

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CA Supreme Court slows pace on capital appeals

There are no death penalty cases on the California Supreme Court’s late-May calendar, the Horvitz & Levy blog At the Lectern notes, and points out that the last time the Court heard an automatic capital appeal was in February. The blog finds it interesting because after the Court upheld Proposition 66 in 2017, it stated that the initiative’s deadlines for court action on capital cases “must be deemed directive rather

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Florida governor signs death penalty bill for rape of a minor

Early this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would allow a person convicted of the rape of a minor to be sentenced to death. The bill establishes a minimum sentence of life without parole. The new law defies the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), which found that “the Eighth Amendment categorically rules out the death penalty in even the most extreme cases of

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SCOTUS grants Glossip a stay of execution

Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court granted Richard Glossip a stay of execution to give the Court time to review two pending petitions. Glossip was scheduled to be executed by Oklahoma on May 18. The stay doesn’t eliminate the possibility that the state will abandon its attempt to kill Glossip, who was sentenced to death in 1997, convicted of engineering the murder of Barry Van Treese, the owner of an

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