In the second of the New York Times’ three-part video series on the death penalty, “He Killed my Mom, He Shouldn’t Die,” Brett Malone walks the viewer through the story of the abduction and murder of his mother, Mary Ann Shaver Malone, in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2000. The man convicted of the crime, 43-year-old Jeremiah Manning, who has a severe intellectual disability, was sentenced to death and is now housed on death row in Angola Prison. Malone explains how he overcame the rage he felt toward Manning to where he now wants the State of Louisiana to commute his death sentence to life without parole. “For there to be healing, there has to be mercy,” Malone says. It’s a powerful argument against state killing conveyed in a four-minute, 32-second video by Kirk Semple, Emily Holzknecht, and Adam Westbrook.
An eight-episode series on “Earwitness” examines the case of Toforest Johnson, who has been on Alabama’s death row since 1998 for a crime he very likely didn’t commit. Three former state supreme court justices, two former governors, several former attorneys general, at least one, and, most significantly, the district attorney who prosecuted Johnson and obtained a death sentence for the 1995 murder of Deputy Sheriff Hardy have publicly called for a new trial for Johnson.District Attorney Danny Carr asked a circuit court judge in May for a new trial because he believes the conviction “is fundamentally unreliable.”
In her review of Bringing Ben Home, a book about the wrongful conviction and 30-plus years of imprisonment in a Texas prison of Ben Spencer, in the Texas Observer, Lise Olsen writes that author Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s book “is a compelling page-turner both about Spencer, a hard-working married Texan who was unjustly convicted of murder, and about the causes of his wrongful conviction that include mishandled and lost crime scene evidence, flawed eyewitness testimony, discounted alibi witnesses, a lying jailhouse snitch, and the failure to investigate an alternative suspect—a violent serial robber from the same neighborhood.”
“For innocent death-sentenced prisoners, the length of time between wrongful conviction and exoneration is increasing. In the past twenty years, the average length of time before exoneration has roughly tripled, and 2024 has the highest-ever average wait before exoneration, at 38.7 years,” an analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center reveals. Among the report’s more interesting findings: “the availability of DNA evidence does not appear to significantly affect the trend.”
