Aaron Owens
November 4, 2020
Aaron Owens was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for two drug-related murders in Oakland in 1972 that he didn’t commit.
Aaron Owens was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for two drug-related murders in Oakland in 1972 that he didn’t commit.
Bill Richards came home from work in San Bernardino County in August 1993 and discovered the body of his wife, Pamela, who had been murdered. One month later, Bill was arrested and charged with the crime. After three mistrials, two because of hung juries, one because of problematic jury selection, Bill was found guilty in his fourth trial in 1997, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Bruce is a wrongful conviction survivor and an anti-death penalty advocate. He served 26 and a half years for the murder of his mother, a crime he did not commit. In 2009 he was exonerated and released.
In 1986 Gloria Killian was convicted and sentenced to 32 years to life in prison for murder and conspiracy she had no part in. The
Francisco “Franky” Carrillo, Jr., was sentenced to life in prison in 1992 for a fatal drive-by shooting in Los Angeles.
Gary Tyler was sentenced to death and spent 41 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
The State of South Carolina killed Brad Sigmon earlier this month. The 67-year-old Sigmon was seated in a chair with a hood over his head and a target pinned over his heart as a firing squad of three people aimed at him and fired their rifles. His death “was horrifying and violent,” Gerald “Bo” King, one of Sigmon’s attorneys, told CNN after witnessing the execution. Sigmon’s firing squad execution is
If things go as planned, South Carolina will kill Brad Sigmon on Friday by firing squad. It will be the state’s first execution by shooting in its history. The 67-year-old Sigmon chose a firing squad over the state’s two alternative options: electrocution (the default method) or lethal injection. Sigmon’s lawyer told NBC News that just the fact that Sigmon had to choose how to be killed “is horrifying.” Sigmon was
Like many of you, we’re shocked at President Trump’s executive order, “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” and believe it is a publicity stunt based on his usual rhetoric of fear and hatred. His intention is to reverse the progress that has been made in slowing down and, in some places, ending the killing of those imprisoned by the state. But knowledge is power. We know that the
President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row today, declining to commute the sentences of Robert D. Bowers, convicted of killing 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018; Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, with his brother, killed three people and
California Gov. Gavin Newsom “has demonstrated a callous disregard for the dark history” of the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons and jails, Jack Morris writes in his powerful CalMatters essay Morris points to Newsom’s two-time veto of of the California Mandela Act in 2022 and 2023, which would have limited the practice, and again this year when he killed AB280, which would have limited solitary confinement to
Curtis Lee Ervin was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder-for-hire of Carlene McDonald in 1986. Late last month, Federal Judge Vince Chhabria, at the request of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who “conceded that a Batson violation occurred” in Ervin’s case, ruled that Ervin should either be released or retried within 60 days. Ervin, now 71, has been on death row for 33 years. His case is one
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 degrees during the Fourth of July weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Elizabeth Nomura, an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, told the Chronicle that her organization had received “distressing” messages from several women at the prison, who reported temperatures over 95 degrees
“Amnesty International’s monitoring shows that in 2023 the lowest number of countries on record carried out the highest number of known executions in close to a decade,” AI states in its annual report, “The Use of the Death Penalty in 2023.” “These figures confirm trends of recent years that pointed to the ever-increasing isolation of retentionist countries.” Global use of the death penalty in 2023 increased 31% from 2022. The
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on Tuesday signed into law a bill that will allow a person to be sentenced to death for the rape of a child, the Center Square reports. Tennessee now joins Florida, which passed a similar bill in 2023, defying the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008). That decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy for the 5-4 majority, found that “a death sentence for
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