In New York, the man accused of killing ten people in a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022 in a racially-motivated shooting will be facing the death penalty, the Justice Department announced last week, according to ABC News. Payton Gendron, who was 19 at the time of the shooting, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in state court in February 2023. He had offered to plead guilty to the federal charges in exchange for taking the possibility of the death penalty off the table, but the DOJ has opted to seek a death sentence.
On Wednesday, just four days after DOJ announced it would seek the death penalty for Gendron, the department announced a plea deal with 23-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, who “murdered five people, injured 19 and attempted to murder 28 more in a willful, deliberate, malicious and premeditated attack at Club Q.” Investigators believe Aldrich targeted the club “because of the actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity” of its patrons. Aldrich agreed to plead guilty to “multiple concurrent life sentences plus additional consecutive sentences totaling 190 years” in exchange for DOJ agreeing not to pursue death.
In Utah, a circuit court judge dismissed a lawsuit by five people on death row challenging the state’s execution protocol, the Deseret News reports. In her dismissal, Third Circuit Court Judge Coral Sanchez wrote that “Plaintiffs’ interpretation of Utah’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments requires a painless execution, not just an execution without severe pain,” Sanchez wrote. “Plaintiffs. . . . fail to show or create a reasonable inference that the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments as intended…. required the State of Utah to adopt a method of execution that eliminated the risk of severe pain (or all pain) prolonged consciousness, or “botched” attempts.”
Utah’s execution methods include lethal injection or firing squad for those sentenced to death before May 2004. For those sentenced after that date, lethal injection is the only method. Utah has seven people on its death row.
In North Carolina, the state Supreme Court ruled that a Black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury was not a victim of racism despite the fact the prosecutor struck every Black person from the jury pool, the Charlotte Post reports. The defendant, Maurice Williams, was sentenced to death in 1996 in Forsyth County, which the Post says has a “history of striking Black jurors from capital trials at three times the rate of white jurors.”
In Oklahoma, the Court of Criminal Appeals issued a 100-day stay for James Chandler Ryder, originally scheduled to be executed on February 1, to give mental health experts time to evaluate his competency, the McAlester News reported. The 61-year-old Ryder was sentenced to death for the 1999 murder of Daisy Hallum and life without parole for the killing of Sam Hallum. According to the paper, documents from psychologists detailing Ryder’s severe mental illness date back 23 years, with the most recent evaluation conducted in August 2022.
In Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled earlier this month that it is unconstitutional to sentence a defendant under the age of 21 to life without the possibility of parole, WBUR reported. The 4-3 ruling expands the state’s existing law prohibiting a life without parole sentence for anyone under the age of 18. Massachusetts is the first state to set 21 as the minimum age. According to WBUR, the ruling means that “at least 100 people could be immediately eligible for parole.”
In Japan, there were no executions in 2023, the first time in three years there was no state killing, The Asahi Shimbun reports. The last person executed in Japan was Tomohiro Kato in July 2022. The state’s method of execution is hanging. There are 106 people on Japan’s death row.
