In Alabama, corrections officials executed Carey Grayson last week by nitrogen hypoxia, al.com reports. The 50-year-old Grayson was convicted of the killing of 37-year-old Vicki Lynn Deblieux in 1994. According to al.com, Grayson and three other men were convicted of brutally killing Deblieux, whom they had picked up hitchhiking. Because Grayson was the only one of the four over the age of 18 at the time of the murder, he was the only one sentenced to death. Two other defendants were sentenced to life and will be eligible for parole in 2029; a third is not eligible for parole.
Also in Alabama, according to al.com, Republican state Representative Matt Simpson filed a bill to be considered in next year’s legislative session calling for the death penalty for the rape or sodomy of a child younger than six. The state law currently mandates a life without parole sentence for that crime. Florida and Tennessee are the only two states that have passed laws making child rape a capital crime, but several other states have made attempts unsuccessfully. In addition, Tennessee and Florida’s laws have not yet passed constitutional muster. Their laws defy 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 child rape” when “the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in death of the victim” because it violates the Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause. However, the Republican governors of both states are betting that the Republican conservative majority on the Supreme Court will overturn Kennedy, a 5-4 decision written for the majority by then-Justice Anthony Kennedy. Three of the four dissenters in Kennedy, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas, are still on the Court and have been joined by conservative justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.
In Texas, Randy Halprin, one of the so-called “Texas 7,” a group of incarcerated men who broke out of a Texas prison in 2000 and shot 31-year-old police officer Aubrey Hawkins while on the run, was granted a new trial by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas Public Radio reported. Halprin was sentenced to death under the state’s “law of parties,” which holds that all defendants involved in a murder are equally culpable regardless of whether they actually killed anyone. But in 2019, his planned execution was stayed six days before it was scheduled when his lawyers argued that the judge who presided over his case used antisemitic slurs when referring to Halprin. According to TPR, Judge Lela Lawrence May granted a new trial after concluding that his original trial was a “violation of due process, equal protection of the law, and free exercise of religion.”
In Idaho, a federal judge stayed the execution of Thomas Eugene Creech, scheduled to be killed on November 13, on procedural grounds, the Washington Post reported. The 74-year-old Creech suffered through a botched execution attempt in February when corrections officials repeatedly tried and failed for an hour to find a viable vein to insert an IV line for a lethal injection. According to the Post, Creech was sentenced to life in prison for two killings in Idaho in 1974 and later convicted of the murder of two additional people the same year in California and Oregon. He was sentenced to death in 1981 for the murder of David Dale Jensen in prison. Creech is the longest-serving person on Idaho’s death row.
South Carolina executed Richard Moore early this month, the state’s second execution this year, after a 14-year hiatus caused by an inability to procure lethal injection drugs. After the legislature passed a bill protecting the identity of lethal injection suppliers and execution team members, in 2023, the state announced it had procured lethal injection drugs and was preparing to begin state killing again, with lethal injection, firing squad, or electrocution as options for execution. Moore, sentenced to death for the killing of store clerk James Mahoney in 1999, is Black and was found guilty by an all-white jury. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Moore’s attorneys argued that Moore killed Mahoney after Mahoney shot him and that “no other South Carolina death penalty case had involved an unarmed defendant who defended himself when the victim threatened him with a weapon.”
