A woman incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla died earlier this month during a heat wave that sent Chowchilla’s temperatures over 111
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
In her cover story for the New York Times Magazine, “He Was Sent to Prison for Killing His Baby. What if He Didn’t Do It?”
Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey has, for the second time in two months, refused to release a defendant whose murder conviction was overturned, NBC
Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia (1972), which found that the death penalty constituted cruel and unusual punishment, 200 death-sentenced men
In April, Alameda County (California) District Attorney Pamela Price announced that a federal district court judge had ordered the DA’s office to review all of
A woman incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla died earlier this month during a heat wave that sent Chowchilla’s temperatures over 111
In his first interview since surviving a botched execution in Idaho in February, Thomas Creech tells the New York Times, “I was thinking the whole
In Texas, Ramiro Gonzales was killed by lethal injection Wednesday. The 41-year-old Gonzales was sentenced to death in 2006 for the sexual assault and murder
In one week, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals denied two petitions filed by Richard Glossip for an evidentiary hearing to consider new evidence of innocence in his case. Glossip was scheduled to be killed on September 22. But Gov. Kevin Stitt stayed his execution until February 16, 2023, to allow time for the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to review his petitions for a new hearing. Both of those
In a bizarrely-worded statement, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey called for a temporary halt to executions last week. She announced the decision after corrections officials botched the failed execution of Kenneth Smith on November 17, the third execution this year that was botched and the fourth since 2018. (You can read a full account in the following article.) “For the sake of the victims and their families, we’ve got to get
“What has happened to Mr. Hastings is a terrible injustice,” Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said at a news conference announcing Maurice Hastings’ release late last month. “The justice system is not perfect, and when we learn of new evidence which causes us to lose confidence in a conviction, it is our obligation to act swiftly.” Hastings, now 69, was sentenced to life without parole in 1988 for the
In Texas, Tracy Beatty was killed early last month despite valid questions about whether his crime qualified for the death penalty. Beatty was found guilty of strangling his mother, Carolyn Click, in 2003 after a violent argument. But, as the Texas Tribune reports, Texas law requires that to charge a defendant with capital murder, special circumstances must be involved, such as killing a police officer or committing the murder during
For the second time in two months, Alabama botched an execution. Corrections officials ended their attempt to kill Kenneth Smith on November 17 after trying and failing for over an hour to find a usable vein for its lethal drugs. On Friday, a judge granted Smith’s lawyers’ motion to preserve evidence of his injuries from the botched procedure. They asked that “documentation of his injuries and notes, records, photographs, videos,
The problems with Alabama’s July execution of Joe Nathan James, Jr., during which it took the execution team three hours to kill him because of their difficulty finding a usable vein for the lethal injection drugs, make it clear that the men and women in the execution chamber need, and should be guaranteed the right to have their lawyers present, with access to a phone, during the execution process. So,
Andre Thomas The Court, in a 6-3 decision, rejected an appeal by Andre Thomas’s lawyers to review his case because it was tainted by racism. Thomas was sentenced to death in 2005 for killing his wife, their son, and her daughter in Sherman, Texas, in 2004. In his petition for writ of certiorari, his lawyers argued that three members of his all-white jury (Thomas is Black) had stated their opposition
The U.S. Supreme Court shot down an attempt by three California district attorneys to intervene in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection protocol earlier this month. San Bernardino, Riverside, and San Mateo County DAs Jason Anderson, Michael A. Hestrin, and Stephen M. Wagstaffe had petitioned the Court for a writ of certiorari in May. The lawsuit was filed in 2018 by five men on California’s death
Oklahoma killed Benjamin Cole last week, a severely mentally ill man who did not understand the legal proceedings surrounding his execution. The 57-year-old Cole was convicted of killing his nine-month-old daughter, Brianna, in 2002. “Ben lacked a rational understanding of why Oklahoma took his life today,” attorney Tom Hird said in a statement issued after Cole was killed. “Benjamin Cole was a person with serious mental illness whose schizophrenia and