Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has filed a motion with the state Court of Criminal Appeals to postpone Richard Glossip’s May 18 execution to August
(Update: Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Arizona Supreme Court ended a standoff over the execution of Aaron Gunches on Wednesday, after this story was
“It is not for nothing that some critics refer to it as the ‘criminal legal system.’ The word ‘justice’ must be earned, and too often,
In Texas, corrections officials executed two men this month, Gary Green and Arthur Brown, Jr. Texas has killed five men this year. With last week’s
A state district judge withdrew the April 5 execution warrant for Andre Thomas earlier this month to give Thomas’s lawyers time to prepare for a
Declaring that he wants to “literally transform this place,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that San Quentin State Prison will convert from a
Bucking a trend of decreasing support for the death penalty in the United States, Republican-dominated legislatures in South Carolina and Florida are attempting to expand
Florida corrections officials killed Donald Dillbeck last Thursday. They did so despite the extensive evidence of his horrific sexual and physical abuse as a child,
Former Death Penalty Focus board member Donald Spoto died earlier this month. He was 81. His death from a brain hemorrhage was announced by his
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
“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
(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
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
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
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
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
In Texas, a district court judge withdrew the April 26 execution date for Ivan Cantu. CBS Texas reports that the postponement was granted to give more time to review Cantu’s claims that he was convicted in 2001 based on false testimony and questionable evidence. Cantu was sentenced to death for the 2000 killings of his cousin, 27-year-old James Mosqueda, and his cousin’s girlfriend, 22-year-old Amy Kitchen, during a robbery. In
“It’s official. The death penalty is no longer in state law,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee tweeted last week after signing SB 5087. In a follow-up tweet, he laid out a timeline of the steps that led to abolition. It began in 2014 when Inslee issued a moratorium. Four years later, the state Supreme Court found state killing unconstitutional in State v. Gregory “because it is imposed in an arbitrary and
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