In Texas, Tommy Lee Walker, a Black 19-year-old executed in 1956 for a rape and murder he didn’t commit, was exonerated last week, 70 years after he was executed. Rampant racial prejudice in Dallas exploded when Venice Parker, a white woman, was raped and killed in 1953, and rumors spread that a Black man had killed her, the Dallas Observer reported. Walker had never met Parker, there were eyewitnesses who testified they had seen him across town when the murder occurred, there was no forensic evidence implicating Walker for the crime, and he was with his wife as she was giving birth to their son at the time of the murder. After being coerced into giving false confessions, which contradicted each other, the Dallas Observer reports, Walker was sentenced to death by an all-white jury three months after his arrest. Electrocuted in May 1956, he died maintaining his innocence. His exoneration was the result of an investigation by journalist Mary Mapes and the Innocence Project.
In New York, jury selection in the trial of 27-year-old Luigi Mangione, accused of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan in December 2024, will begin September 8, CBS News reported. Mangione’s trial date will not be set until it’s decided whether he will face the death penalty, which is being sought by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. A trial will begin after that issue is decided by a judge.
In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey announced her support in a State of the State Address earlier this month for a bill that would expand the death penalty to a person convicted of the rape or sexual abuse of a minor, the Alabama Reflector reports. If the bill passes, Alabama will join Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho in defying the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), which found that “a death sentence for one who raped but did not kill a child, and who did not intend to assist another in killing the child, is unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments which ban cruel and unusual punishment.”
In Indiana, House Bill 1119, which would add firing squad and nitrogen hypoxia to lethal injection in the state’s execution protocol, passed the House last week in an 8-5 vote, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported. It now goes to the full chamber, where it is expected to pass. According to the Capital Chronicle, the bill specifies that the Indiana Department of Correction will choose the execution method, “and state employees could not be fored to participate.” The state’s primary method of execution is lethal injection, but it has been looking for alternative methods because of the challenges in obtaining lethal injection drugs and the high cost when a source is found. The state has executed three people, one in 2024, two in 2025, in the past 15 years.
The U.S. “will likely register the lowest national homicide rate in 125 years and the largest single-year drop on record,” the New York Times reported. The Times report was based on an analysis of 2025 crime data conducted by the Council on Criminal Justice. Stating the “strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents,” CCJ said the decrease “would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900.” These declines “are likely the result of a complex tangle of broad social and technological changes and direct policy interventions,” according to the report.