In Alabama last Thursday, 64-year-old Keith Gavin was executed by lethal injection for the 1988 killing of William Clayton, Jr., a delivery truck driver, during an attempted robbery. Gavin was on parole for a murder committed in Illinois when he was arrested for Clayton’s murder, the Montgomery Advertiser reports. Before his execution, he filed a lawsuit to prevent state officials from conducting an autopsy on his body because his Muslim faith prohibits desecration of the human body. The court granted his request, according to the Montgomery Advertiser. It was Alabama’s third execution this year.
In Texas last Tuesday, Ruben Gutierrez’s execution was stayed by the U.S.Supreme Court 20 minutes before he was scheduled to be killed by the state by lethal injection, the Texas Tribune reported. It was the second time Gutierrez had been granted an eleventh-hour reprieve. The first was in 2020 when the Court stayed his execution one hour before he was scheduled to be killed because of a state law that barred him from having a spiritual adviser with him in the execution chamber. Gutierrez has maintained his innocence since he was sentenced to death for the murder of 85-year-old Escolastica Harrison during an attempted robbery in Brownsville in 1998.
As the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty reports, Gutierrez has maintained that unbeknownst to him, the two men he was with during the home robbery killed Harrison as he waited outside. His lawyers argued that there was no evidence tying Gutierrez to the scene, and DNA from the home was never tested. In addition, his death sentence was rendered by a 10-2 vote of the jury. A federal district court remanded his case for a new sentencing hearing based on ineffective assistance of counsel, which was then reversed by a federal appellate court.
In New York, the Justice Department will continue to seek the death penalty for Payton Gendron, despite his offer to plead guilty to federal charges that he killed ten people in a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022, WGRZ reports. Gendron previously pleaded guilty to state charges for the crime in exchange for a sentence of life without parole. But DOJ responded to two motions by Gendron’s lawyers to exempt him from the death penalty because he was 18 at the time of the crime by arguing that in Roper v. Simmons (2004), the U.S. Supreme Court held that only offenders under the age of 18 were exempt from the death penalty, making Gendron eligible for a death sentence.
In California, the number of death-sentenced people still housed at San Quentin Prison is now down to about 26 people, housed in either the Psychiatric In-patient Program (PIP) or in the Correctional Treatment Center (CTC). According to CDCR, the PIP “is designed to provide intensive treatment for patients who cannot function adequately or stabilize in an outpatient program or shorter-term inpatient program; the CTC “provides inpatient health care services to patients who do not require a general acute care level of essential services and need professionally supervised health care that cannot be provided on an outpatient basis.”
The timeline for transferring the last of the 634 people sentenced to death in California depends on the mental and physical condition of those remaining. You can find a breakdown of how many death-sentenced people each prison is housing on the CDCR website.
