News and Updates (as of 12/22/96)

OCTOBER 30, 2024:

TEXAS:

Death Penalty Action Calls on Texas Legislature to Halt Executions in Wake of Roberson Case

As government infighting rages in Texas around the unprecedented lawsuit filed by Texas legislators which halted the recently scheduled execution of Robert Roberson, Death Penalty Action announced the launch of a new effort to highlight the issue of procedural bars - the legal excuse that courts use to refuse to hear newly discovered or freshly evaluated evidence that could have shifted the outcome of a case, had it been available at trial.

"How many Texas prisoners have been executed despite real evidence that should have been considered in court, but was procedurally barred because deadlines had passed," said Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action. "We are calling on Texas legislators to halt all executions while they study this question and fix the law."

Bonowitz outlined the concerns in an op-ed published today in the Dallas Morning News, which pointed to two 2023 executions in Texas where procedural bars blocked evidence from being considered because it was discovered too late.

• John Balentine's evidence of racial bias in his jury was rejected by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals because it was raised too late — procedurally barred.

• Arthur Brown was executed in 2023 after courts refused to consider newly developed evidence of his innocence. Brown’s appeals raised only in the weeks before his execution were rejected in state and federal courts because they were raised too late and with too little new information.P> The group also launched a petition addressed to the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee urging a halt to all Texas executions at least until the law is changed to ensure that newly developed or freshly evaluated evidence is fully considered in court.

"Arbitrary deadlines are no excuse to move forward with executions. Most Texans agree that finality should not be more important than fairess," said Bonowitz.

(source: Death Penalty Action)

****************

Prosecutors seek to recuse judge accused of bias in case of death row inmate who killed ex's family

Prosecutors in Harris County are looking to recuse Judge Natalia Cornelio from the case of death row inmate Ronald Haskell. In a situation that's pretty unusual, prosecutors accused Cornelio of being biased in favor of the man who murdered a couple and their four children.

Haskell was given the death penalty in 2019. He was convicted of capital murder in the 2014 shooting deaths of his family members in their Spring home. The question of recusal now centers on Haskell's appeals, as they work through the legal process.

Among the witnesses in Tuesday's hearing was Harris County DA's first assistant David Mitcham, who testified about Cornelio being opposed to the death penalty.

Court records also show that on June 27, 2024, Judge Cornelio issued a bench warrant for Haskell to appear in her courtroom a month later at midnight. However, the Harris County District Attorney's Office said that never happened, and they had no idea Haskell had been moved from TDCJ custody.

During his nearly 3-week stay at the Harris County Jail, Haskell was able to call his mom and even acknowledged the alleged secretive nature of this during one call, calling it "cloak and dagger," according to a jail transcript.

He was also reportedly taken to a private imaging clinic near the Texas Medical Center for a scan, as seen in still images from the body camera that were filed with the court. According to one of the witnesses, a Harris County Sheriff's Office transport deputy who took Haskell to his MRI testified that at one point, Haskell, as a death row inmate, was restrained only with plastic zip ties, and his shackles had been removed. In addition, the transport worker said Haskell was in a yellow jumpsuit, which indicates "high risk," but the transport deputy didn't know Haskell was a death row inmate.

This led the DA's office to file a motion for Cornelio to recuse herself, alleging that she was biased in his favor.

Attorney Brian Wice, who is not involved in this case, gave his opinion, calling this situation an "outlier."

"In a typical recusal hearing, it's over like that. Because motions are filed by the defense. Most are frivolous. This hearing is an outlier. A motion filed by the state, almost half a dozen witnesses and more likely to follow, " Wice said.

Testimony will resume another day, but a date has not been set yet.

(source: KTRK news)

*************

Roberson case must be a wake-up call to Texans----It is virtually impossible to be heard in court when new facts develop.

Last Monday overflow crowds inside the Texas Capitol were joined by thousands watching online from around the world to hear testimony in the case of Robert Roberson, the East Texas man who has served more than 20 years on death row for the death of his 2-year-old daughter.

For more than 10 hours, a House committee heard detailed testimony about the flaws and failures of a system that legislators thought they had fixed. A law enacted a decade ago was meant to allow reconsideration of a case when the science used to convict the prisoner had changed. The science used to convict Roberson has been debunked.

Celebrity experts like television personality Phil McGraw and writer John Grisham testified. So too did legal experts, lawyers, judges, advocates and common folks, like a juror in Roberson’s original trial who asserted that government officials seeking to carry out the execution were saying things she had never heard during the trial.

One of the common refrains we heard from some of the committee members questioning the witnesses was that they support the death penalty, but only if the state and jury are absolutely certain. Lawmakers who adamantly insist that capital punishment is appropriate are grappling with the fact that even after they thought they had fixed it, mistakes still happen.

More importantly, legislators are experiencing the frustration that protections in law which are supposed to exist for all citizens are simply unavailable. So often, we hear that a defendant had multiple appeals, but that makes it sound like the appealed issue was actually considered rather than dismissed or procedurally barred.

How many Texas prisoners have been executed in cases where newly developed or freshly evaluated evidence should also have been considered in court, but they were procedurally barred? This is something the Texas Legislature should examine thoroughly in light of Roberson’s near-execution.

Arthur Brown was executed in 2023 after courts refused to consider newly developed evidence of his innocence. Brown’s appeals raised only in the weeks before his execution were rejected in state and federal courts because they were raised too late and with too little new information.

How many executions have gone forward because prisoners or their advocates do not have the attention of politicians like Reps. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, and Joe Moody, D-El Paso, and a public relations machine geared to get their attention and that of major news organizations?

Moody, Leach and others on their committee intervened in the case of Melissa Lucio in 2022, and despite having been previously rejected, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed itself and granted an evidentiary hearing just two days before she would have been killed.

Roberson’s advocates have been making their case for months in the courts and with the public, and all of those efforts were not enough. If not for the legislators’ Hail Mary lawsuit, the execution would have gone forward.

What if the evidence developed too late was not about innocence, but raised issues of culpability such as mental capacity, or unfairness? Should a court be able to evaluate evidence that a member of a Black man’s jury turned out to be an outspoken racist, such as in the case of John Balentine who was also executed in 2023? The evidence of racial bias in his jury was rejected by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals because it was raised too late — procedurally barred.

We still don’t know if Roberson will get another day in court, but his case has exposed how virtually impossible it is to be heard in court with facts developed late in the game. He’s not alone. How do we ensure a similar pause for others?

Texas legislators should find a way to halt all executions at least until the law is changed to ensure that newly developed or freshly evaluated evidence is fully considered in court. Such reform should include not only questions of innocence due to developments in science, but also other new evidence of innocence, and questions of culpability and fairness.

(source: Op-Ed; Abraham Bonowitz is executive director of Death Penalty Action----Dallas Morning News)

**************

Ken Paxton calls on Rep. Jeff Leach to resign over texts to judge in Robert Roberson case----The AG also said he’d make a criminal referral against the lawmaker, who apologized for texting a Court of Criminal Appeals judge about a new trial for the death row inmate.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called for the resignation of state Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, on Tuesday, arguing that Leach cannot effectively serve in the Texas House after improperly pleading with a judge to reconsider a death row inmate’s case.

“His conduct demonstrates that he is unfit to serve in any capacity overseeing our judicial system and unfit to serve as a member of the Texas House,” Paxton wrote in a statement. “House Speaker Dade Phelan must immediately remove him as Chairman before he can do further damage, and Leach must resign.”

Paxton also announced that he was making a criminal referral against Leach, arguing that Leach “sought to alter the outcome of capital punishment proceedings by criminally attempting to influence a judge.”

In text messages to Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Michelle Slaughter on Oct. 24, Leach asked the judge to reconsider death row inmate Robert Roberson’s case, arguing that there were “too many holes and too much uncertainty” in the conviction and that Roberson “deserves a new trial.”

Slaughter, who voted with the court’s 5-4 majority to reject Roberson’s latest appeals, declined to engage with Leach’s request and reported the messages to the court.

Leach later apologized, saying in a statement that he believed he was “in the clear” because he was not a party to Roberson’s criminal case nor to any pending matters before the Court of Criminal Appeals.

According to Texas’ Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, lawyers are prohibited from attempting to influence a court about a pending matter before that court, or about matters that are “reasonably foreseeable” to be before that court. Violations of the rules could result in disciplinary action from the State Bar of Texas.

Leach, an attorney, serves as chair of the House Committee on Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence and as a member of the Texas Judicial Council.

“These entities set the policies for the state judiciary,” Paxton said. “Leach cannot effectively serve as chairman of his committee: he has confessed to ethical violations and to breaking the law.”

Paxton’s announcement escalates a sharp political battle between a bipartisan committee of Texas House lawmakers and the state’s top Republicans over Roberson’s capital murder case. The factions have traded bitter accusations of misconduct and issued competing narratives of Roberson’s case after the committee forced a delay of his Oct. 17 execution.

In response to Paxton’s announcement, Leach referred to his statement Monday on the text messages, adding, “The only news worth commenting on today is that my son Brady, a golfer at Allen High School, shot a 74 and won 1st place in his tournament this morning.”

Leach has been one of Roberson’s most vocal defenders, leading the committee’s push to stay his execution and highlight what the death row inmate’s advocates call a failure of the courts to implement Texas’ pioneering 2013 junk science law.

Roberson was convicted in 2003 for the death of his chronically ill 2-year-old-daughter, Nikki. He has maintained his innocence over two decades on death row, arguing that new scientific evidence the courts have failed to properly consider shows Nikki died of natural causes.

Leach, a former Paxton ally who represents part of the attorney general’s hometown of McKinney, also played a key role in the Texas House’s effort to impeach and remove Paxton from office last year.

He served on the House board of managers, which handled Paxton’s prosecution during the Senate trial in which he was ultimately acquitted.

In the trial’s closing arguments, Leach appealed to GOP senators in an emotional speech in which he described Paxton as a one-time friend and mentor whom he nonetheless viewed as unfit to serve due to his alleged abuse of his office.

Acknowledging that senators were about to take “the most difficult vote, the heaviest vote” they would ever cast, Leach described how, after years of frequent talks with Paxton about politics, policy and family, he found the attorney general’s once-open door “was closed, and I became increasingly concerned and alarmed at what I saw.”

In March, Leach trounced a Republican primary challenger that Paxton had backed.

“This is gaslighting and nothing but a political threat,” Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said about Paxton’s call for Leach to resign. “Leach is a Republican — just not Paxton’s flavor of Republican.”

************** Ken Paxton resisting Texas House members’ bid to hear Robert Roberson’s testimony----Members of a Texas House committee say in a Texas Supreme Court filing that Paxton’s office is blocking the death row inmate from complying with a legislative subpoena.

A bipartisan group of state lawmakers and Attorney General Ken Paxton remain at odds over whether death row inmate Robert Roberson should be forced to testify before a House committee at the Texas Capitol, a question now in the hands of the Supreme Court of Texas.

Members of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee who earlier this month successfully delayed Roberson’s execution — at least temporarily — argue in a Texas Supreme Court brief that they’re facing considerable opposition and stonewalling from the Office of the Attorney General in getting the state to comply with their subpoena for the death row inmate’s testimony about his case.

“The executive branch has shown no willingness to work out its differences with the legislative branch or meet its statutory duty to assist the committee,” the brief states.

Paxton’s office argues that state lawmakers usurped executive power by attempting to forestall the execution with a legislative subpoena in a case that’s already been litigated throughout the justice system.

The Criminal Jurisprudence Committee voted unanimously Oct. 16 to subpoena Roberson so he could offer testimony on his prosecution and efforts to appeal a 2003 conviction for the murder of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki. Roberson has maintained his innocence for more than 2 decades on death row.

The Texas Supreme Court temporarily stalled Roberson’s execution to allow him to testify at the Capitol 4 days after he was scheduled to die. But Roberson did not appear after Paxton’s office stepped in and said lawmakers could not legally compel Roberson to testify.

According to lawmakers’ retelling, Texas Department of Criminal Justice leaders worked with committee Chair Joe Moody, D-El Paso, and other lawmakers to coordinate logistical details of Roberson’s testimony, including what room it would be held in and how Roberson could securely travel from East Texas to the Capitol. But the Office of the Attorney General objected, writing in an email to Moody that only virtual testimony would be permitted due to “safety concerns.”

On the morning of the scheduled hearing, Moody called the Attorney General’s office to explain that virtual testimony would not work for Roberson because he has autism. Moody discussed alternative options, such as obtaining Roberson’s testimony in prison, a solution committee members brought up during the hearing. Even though Roberson did not appear, committee members took testimony from celebrities who doubt the inmate’s guilt and a juror who said new evidence would have prevented his conviction.

The following day, in a surprising turn of events, the executive branch said they wouldn’t permit any form of a hearing with Roberson. Instead, they asked for Moody and committee member Jeff Leach, R-Plano, to sign a letter admitting “that Roberson was a murderer, that they had overstepped their authority, and that no legislative committee should ever act similarly in the future.”

The committee rejected that offer, leaving the Court to address an unprecedented legal question about whether state lawmakers have the constitutional right to issue a subpoena that conflicts with criminal proceedings.

Gov. Greg Abbott also condemned state lawmakers, arguing Roberson’s case was already litigated through the justice system. Lawmakers maintain that issuing the subpoena was well within their rights, and they blame Paxton for refusing to work with the committee to find a mutually agreeable solution.

Paxton has issued a graphic press release in which he insisted on Roberson’s guilt and condemned the committee for “interfering with the justice system in an unprecedented way.” House leaders responded with a point-by-point rebuttal explaining how evidence that wasn’t considered at trial proves Roberson’s innocence.

Paxton’s office has not yet responded to the House panel’s Texas Supreme Court brief filed Monday. The state’s response is due to the Texas Supreme Court on Nov. 4. Roberson’s execution is halted until the case about the subpoena is resolved.

On Monday, Paxton’s office filed a letter to the court informing them that Leach had texted a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judge last week that Roberson deserves a new trial, an apparent violation of Texas’ disciplinary rules of professional conduct.

Leach later apologized to the Court and said he thought he was “in the clear” because he is not a party to Roberson’s case.

(source for both: The Texas Tribune)

****************

3 bodies were found burning in a Fort Worth dumpster. Now, the suspect goes on trial, as prosecutors seek death penalty----The victims were identified as David Lueras, 42, Lauren Phillips, 34, and Maricruz Reyes-Mathis, 33.

A man accused of killing 3 people whose bodies were found burning in a Fort Worth dumpster is going on trial this week.

Jason Thornburg was arrested in 2021 after the bodies of the victims were found in west Fort Worth on Bonnie Drive.

The victims were identified as David Lueras, 42, Lauren Phillips, 34, and Maricruz Reyes-Mathis, 33.

Jury selection in Thornburg's case began Monday, and the trial is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Thursday in the Criminal District Court No. 3 in Tarrant County. A standard plea offer hearing was expected to happen Tuesday.

Thornburg's case could be the 1st death penalty case tried in Tarrant County since 2019.

Prosecutors in 2022 decided to seek the death penalty against Thornburg, as then-Tarrant County District Attorney Sharen Wilson said the death penalty "is reserved for the worst of the worst criminals" and was "only fitting" for Thornburg's case.

According to the arrest warrant, Thornburg knew and met the victims at the Mid City Inn in Euless and that he confessed to his involvement in their deaths. He also "went into intimate details" about how he killed them, the arrest warrant stated.

The warrant also stated that he claimed he was being called to commit sacrifices and that he was also involved in 2 other separate killings, 1 in Texas and another in a different state.

The parents of victim Reyes-Mathis told WFAA that she stayed at the Mid City Inn and never said anything about Thornburg. They believe she didn't know him.

“She just ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time,” said mother Mary Hanshaw.

“I really believe that he deserves the death penalty,” Hanshaw added. “Please, don’t let him out on the street again.”

(source: WFAA news)

SOUTH CAROLINA----impending execution

‘Don’t take his life’: South Carolina man faces execution after state justice called his sentence invalid----Children of Richard Moore, 59, plead for his clemency as experts insist he should be ineligible for capital punishment

The children of a South Carolina man on death row are pleading for clemency days before his scheduled execution, in a case that advocates and a state supreme court justice say should not be eligible for capital punishment.

Richard Moore, 59, is due to be killed by lethal injection on Friday despite growing concerns about racial bias in his conviction and the highly unusual nature of his death sentence.

Moore, who is Black, was convicted by an all-white jury of an armed robbery and murder of a white convenience store clerk in 1999. Moore, however, was unarmed when he entered the store. The man working the counter, James Mahoney, pulled a gun on him, and as they scuffled, both men were shot – Moore in the arm, and Mahoney fatally in the chest.

Moore’s attorneys say he was defending himself, and under the modern death penalty in the last 50 years, no one in South Carolina has been executed for a robbery that began unarmed. Experts say his sentence was a product of discriminatory proceedings and violated legal standards stipulating executions be reserved for the most serious murders.

“He has always made an effort to be there for us and be a presence in our lives,” his son, Lyndall Moore, 30, told the Guardian. “He’s a human being. He made some mistakes, but he’s not a menace. He’s not a monster. There is no gain in allowing the state to take his life, it doesn’t make anything better … He’s a changed man. He deserves to keep living. We want him here.”

The looming execution comes amid rising opposition to the death penalty surrounding recent cases. South Carolina had not executed anyone in 13 years, but resumed killings last month, starting with Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah, 46, killed after the state’s lead witness said he lied at trial and Allah was innocent. Days later, Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, even though prosecutors backed his wrongful conviction claims. And in Texas earlier this month, Robert Roberson was minutes away from execution when the state supreme court intervened amid widespread support of his innocence.

Moore’s story reveals numerous flaws with the death penalty, advocates say.

A death sentence deemed ‘invalid’

Moore grew up outside of Detroit, Michigan, during the crack cocaine epidemic and struggled with addiction from a young age, his attorneys said.

The exact circumstances of the shooting on 16 September 1999 are unclear as there was no footage. Prosecutors relied on one witness inside, who testified he heard an argument and saw Moore with his hands on the clerk’s hands and that Moore pointed a gun and fired in his direction. The witness, who was not hit, said he played dead and did not see the rest of the encounter, but heard shots.

Moore has said he was trying to make a purchase, but was short on change, and when he refused to leave, the clerk pulled his gun, leading to the struggle: “He has always maintained that he did not go in intending to rob the store or kill anyone and this was simply a reaction to being threatened,” said Lindsey Vann, one of his attorneys.

A forensic investigator hired by the defense reviewed crime scene evidence and concluded in 2017 that the 1st shot was fired while they were both struggling over the gun. There’s no dispute that Moore arrived unarmed; Mahoney carried a gun on him and the store had 2 firearms behind the counter.

After the shooting, Moore took cash from the store.

In 2021, Moore’s lawyers argued before the state supreme court that his death sentence was disproportionate. Out of 183 people sentenced to death in the state since 1976, when capital punishment was reinstated, there has been no comparable case of a deadly robbery that began unarmed.

The court rejected the arguments. But in a dissent, Justice Kaye Hearn said Moore’s sentence was “invalid” and “disproportionate”, noting prosecutors’ “stunning admission” that they couldn’t identify a single similar case: “Richard Moore will be put to death for a sentence that I do not believe is legal.”

His case doesn’t qualify as the “worst of the worst” reserved for execution, she said: “Moore’s case highlights many of the pitfalls endemic to the death penalty, beginning with the role race plays … Moore’s death sentence is a relic of a bygone era, where he was convicted by a jury comprised of 11 Caucasians and 1 Hispanic.” (Moore’s attorneys say records show the Hispanic juror identified as white.)

Hearn also noted “alarming” disparities in Spartanburg county, where he was prosecuted. From 1985 to 2001, out of 21 death penalty cases, all but 1 involved white victims. And in the span of 8 years, prosecutors sought capital punishment in 43% of eligible cases involving white victims, but in none with a Black victim.

In a recent US supreme court petition, Moore’s team argued prosecutors unlawfully removed 2 qualified Black jurors.

He is the only remaining person on South Carolina death row convicted by an all-white jury.

One of Moore’s prosecutors was Trey Gowdy, who later served in Congress and led investigations into Hillary Clinton, and is now a Fox News host. Gowdy, elected prosecutor in 2001, said in an email his predecessor had initially chosen to seek the death penalty, adding “murder committed during the commission of a robbery” was “sufficient justification” for execution. He said no trial or appellate court ruled that he struck a juror based on race during his career.

Spartanburg county’s prosecutor declined to comment, and the state attorney general’s office did not respond to inquiries.

‘He lifts me up’

This is the 3rd time Moore has had a scheduled execution. The last 2 were postponed as drug manufacturers stopped supplying lethal injections, fearing public backlash, and his attorneys challenged other proposed methods. South Carolina has been able to resume lethal injections this year after passing a law shielding suppliers’ identities.

This month, Moore was forced to choose an execution method, selecting lethal injection, instead of electrocution or firing squad. His last hope is with the US supreme court and Republican governor Henry McMaster, who could grant clemency, a step no South Carolina governor has taken for any death row defendant in decades. 2 jurors from his trial wrote letters supporting his clemency petition this month.

His daughter, Alexandria Moore, 31, said he’d worked hard to be a devoted father since he was incarcerated when she was 6: “Despite everything, he has remained my dad. That has not gone away and it never will.” She recalled him teaching him Spanish and sending word puzzles and drawings through the mail when she was young. Her brother said he learned multiplication through his dad’s letters.

They’ve only ever been able to visit him behind glass.

Alexandria now has a 5-year-old daughter and a newborn, and her father has done regular video visits with his grandkids: “Even with the physical distance, he is very much here and a part of my girls’ lives and my life. My daughter dances for him and shows him her toys.”

“He deserves a fair chance. He deserves to be heard. People forget that people who are incarcerated are still human,” she continued. “These people are not just a number, not just an inmate, they are people with families and stories and they still deserve justice ... The death penalty is inhumane.”

Moore has leaned into his faith and painting over the years and connects with pen pals and friends around the world, his family said.

“He really works to keep his people supported,” said Vann, who has represented him for a decade, recounting his efforts to help a pen pal who suffered a death in the family. “He’s one of the most positive people I’ve ever known. Even when I’m so disappointed in a [ruling], he’ll remind me to stay positive, that we’ve still got more fight left in us and that he’s grateful for the advocacy our office has provided. He lifts me up when I should be the one supporting him.”

In recent phone conversations with his children, they’ve tried to hold on to optimism, said his son: “He’s cherishing the life he has and being hopeful.”

As the execution date nears, Alexandria said she’d been thinking of the saying: “People won’t remember what you did for them, they’ll remember how they made you feel.”

“I will always be a daddy’s girl, and that’s not because of what he’s done, it’s how he’s made me feel,” she said. “He has left and will continue to leave such a positive mark all over the world.”

(source: The Guardian)

FLORIDA:

Jury recommends death penalty in deputy's murder

The Gentry family filled the gallery in Courtroom 2B in the Highlands County Courthouse on Monday to witness the jury’s sentencing recommendation in the May 2018 murder case of Deputy Sheriff William Gentry Jr. while in the line of duty. The same jury that took just an hour to find Joseph Ables guilty of 1st-degree murder a week ago, took even less time than that to recommend the death penalty.

A jury of 12 voted unanimously to recommend in favor of the death penalty. As of 2023, the death penalty does not have to be recommended by a unanimous vote; 8-4 will suffice. The jury felt the State team of Bonde Johnson and John Kromholz proved all 6 aggravating factors, which were:

1. The capital felony was committed by a person on felony probation.

2. The defendant was previously convicted of another capital felony or a felony involving the use or threat of violence to another.

3. The capital felony was committed for the purpose of avoiding or preventing a lawful arrest or effecting an escape from custody.

4. The capital felony was committed to distribute or hinder the lawful exercise of any governmental function or enforcement of laws.

5. The capital felony was a homicide and was committed in a cold, calculated and premeditated manner without any pretense of moral or legal justification.

6. The victim of the capital felony was a law enforcement officer engaged in the performance of his or her official duties.

Gentry’s mother, brother, friends and former co-workers gave powerful and tear-filled victim impact statements Monday morning. His brother, Kevin Gentry, is also a deputy sheriff with the Highlands County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO). While the victim impact statements were being read, a pin dropping could have been heard if it weren’t for the sniffling in the gallery.

“William Gentry was the 1st deputy sheriff that I had the honor of swearing in,” Sheriff Paul Blackman said. “During his short time as a returning deputy sheriff, William was unbelievable. It seemed like his abilities, his diligence, his compassion, were even more so than they were.”

Blackman soon promoted William Gentry to a field training deputy.

Captain James McGann worked with Gentry and the 2 were good friends. McGann laughed through his tears as he described waiting with William Gentry’s mom, Susan, in the hospital. He shared that she told McGann about the special helmet William had to wear while playing football because he had a large head.

Gentry’s wife Jennifer told the jury how the two met, fell in love and married. She said that even 6 1/2 years after his murder, she deals with a myriad of emotions such as anger and guilt, “but mostly I feel profound sadness.” Despite looking strong, Jennifer Gentry said she is far from it.

“I am broken,” Jennifer said, wiping her tears. “Not in large pieces that you can pick up, but tiny pieces.”

She said the tiny pieces cannot be put together again because they are too damaged.

“You diligently work a little bit every day at the reconstruction, but the pieces don’t fit back together,” Jennifer said. “Some pieces are too damaged, some not even unrecognizable, and others completely missing.”

Retired Highlands County Sheriff Susan Benton and William Gentry’s former boss said it made her day to hear a good morning from him.

Kevin and Susan Gentry took the podium together to support one another. Kevin said William was his brother, mentor and best friend.

“One day we were best friends, and the next, worst enemies,” Kevin Gentry said. “My brother and I would love to hate each other and hate to love each other, but our bond was truly like no other.”

William Jr. was Susan and William Sr.’s 1st child. He was still their neighbor in Spring Lake at the time of his death. Susan said she loved to sit on her back porch and watch William play with his dogs in his own backyard.

“William was really happy with his commitment and the oath taken to protect and serve other people. My heart was in peace with his choice,” Susan Gentry said.

The next court date is at 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 10 for a Spencer hearing. A Spencer hearing is required before the judge can impose a sentence. The hearing gives the defense an opportunity to share any evidence or information with the judge in an effort to mitigate the sentence. In a Spencer hearing, the defendant can speak directly to the judge, instead of through the attorney, if he wishes. The prosecution can also speak to the judge.

(source: Highlands News-Sun)

TENNESSEE:

‘Innocent’ pastor faces execution in US state of Tennessee----The case of a pastor who has been on death row for almost 30 years symbolises the big problem with capital punishment.

A pastor ordained while he has languished on death row for almost 30 years is among convicted offenders now facing the prospect of executions being restarted in a US state.

There has not been an execution in Tennessee since early 2022 after revelations 2 inmates had been put to death with lethal injection drugs that had not been properly tested.

But a recent announcement appears to have paved the way for capital punishment to resume in the southern state after a review of authorities’ past failures.

“We should have our protocols in place by the end of this calendar year or at the 1st week or 2 of January,” Commissioner Frank Strada told a hearing this month.

“We’ve been working with the Attorney-General’s office on writing those protocols to make sure that they’re sound.”

It means people like Pastor Kevin Burns, who has been on death row since 1995, could again be staring down either a lethal injection or the electric chair – which is still used in Tennessee.

Burns was convicted of felony murder in November 1995 over a fatal shooting for which he was present at but did not fire any shots.

Felony murder is a charge that can be laid when a person is killed during the commission of a separate crime.

It was the night of his 23rd birthday – April 20, 1992 – and the young musician had found himself with a group of men he had not met before.

They drove him to the scene of a fight and handed him a gun, before 2 men were shot dead during the confrontation in Memphis.

Panicked, Burns fled the state to Chicago before being arrested. 2 other men who were convicted of the shooting murders did not receive the death penalty and have already been paroled.

Burns has now run out of appeals and his only chance of escaping execution would be clemency issued by Republican Governor Bill Lee.

“I did make some decisions that I regret, but I did not murder anyone,” Burns has said.

His lawyer Richard Tennent has spoken about how Burns’ case has been a failure of justice, criticising the state-appointed legal representation who failed to argue his innocence at trial.

“They’re the reason he got convicted,” Mr Tennent told Nashville Scene in June 2023.

“Real lawyers should’ve won this trial. We shouldn’t have been arguing over whether he deserved a death sentence – we’d be arguing over whether he deserved any punishment at all.”

Burns met his namesake and now close friend, Pastor Kevin Riggs, when the later visited death row several years ago.

Mr Riggs, who ordained Burns in 2018 and has was co-authored books with the inmate, spoke at a meeting of Tennesseans for an Alternative to the Death Penalty (TADP) this month.

There is a grassroots movement for an alternative to the death penalty in the state where 45 inmates are awaiting execution. Some have been on the list since the early 1980s.

“I go to death row, I try to go most Fridays,” Mr Riggs said.

“I can tell you, over the last 3 or 4 weeks there’s been some anxiety about the new protocol.

“They are feeling it after years of not having to go through that.”

Kelley Henry, a lawyer who represents death row inmates, has said there was a federal challenge underway over several aspects of the state’s former protocols.

“The State, through the Attorney-General, agreed to permit that litigation to continue at a normal pace once a new protocol is announced,” she told Action News 5.

”Given the history of misrepresentations made by the state, any new protocol will require thorough review.”

Ms Henry said she did not expect any executions to be carried out until the federal case is completed.

Renewed debate over use of the death penalty in the US was sparked in September when an “innocent man” Marcellus Williams, 55, was killed via lethal injection in the state of Missouri.

He was put to death despite prosecutors raising objections and his alleged victim’s family agreeing he should serve a life sentence.

Capital punishment is a legal penalty in 27 states of the US but Tennessee is among 8 states where they are currently suspended.

Mr Riggs said Burns’ story was about a man in the “wrong place wrong time” who made “2 critical mistakes” by fleeing the scene and then the state.

“I think everybody can agree … There cannot be capital punishment when you didn’t kill anybody,” he said.

“The person who got the death penalty did not kill anyone.”

Stacy Rector, a Presbyterian minister who leads TADP, said she and members of the group were “very concerned” about news of the new protocol.

“We need to wait and see what they’re going to put forth,” she said.

“We obviously hoped that they would continue to work on this and allow the status quo to be in place given just how problematic lethal injection is.

“Regardless of how we carry out executions, the fact that we do it at all based on this system is the real issue. It is damaging and it is full of unfairness and error.”

Race has played a problematic role in death penalty sentences in Tennessee, with 74 per cent of death sentences imposed for crimes involving white victims since 1972.

That’s despite white people making up less than 1/2 of victims of crime in the state.

While some want to see executions wound back, Tennessee’s politicians have been busy expanding who can be killed by correctives.

In May, Governor Lee signed a bill that introduced the death penalty in Tennessee for people convicted of child rape, following in the footsteps of Florida.

Ms Rector hoped felony murder could be removed from the crimes that attract the death penalty, meaning people like Burns could not face execution.

(source: news.com.au)

*********

Photographing the Community on Tennessee’s Death Row

From 2010 to 2015 I was incarcerated in Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the Tennessee prison that houses death row for the men’s system. On one side of a gate, 250 of us lived in a “support staff” unit working maintenance, landscaping, kitchen service or whatever else kept the facility operational. On the other side of the gate were maximum-security prisoners and those in protective custody, and a unit just for the condemned.

I don’t know of anyone else housed in general population who ever got access to death row. But I had this privilege as a clerk for the chaplain, and as the editor of prison newspaper. The Maximum Times was the reason I could even, on rare occasions, bring in a camera. Over the years, all my copies of the paper and almost all of my notes from death row have been lost—destroyed by corrections officers during cell searches, or by toilet floods. But a few pages have survived, including a photocopy of the winter 2012 edition covering a remarkable event where church volunteers were allowed in with Christmas gifts.

I photographed everyone who wanted to be photographed, through the glass of their cell doors. Though it might seem like a small thing to an outsider, for many on death row these photographs may be the only ones in years or decades that were taken with their consent.

I didn’t know what events had brought any of them to death row. I wouldn’t have recognized them as the teenagers and young adults they were back then. I only experienced them as the men they’d become decades later. I was allowed to participate in workshops and group discussions, and thus got to know a few of the people living on death row.

My very first visit, I wondered if the point of the strip searches and multiple security checkpoints was keeping people in or keeping people out. I gained a new appreciation for the volunteers who trekked in each day. But once the last door slammed shut behind you, everything became still and quiet. Like a library. From behind the windows of the single-man cells, residents in white scrubs peeked out.

I had assumed everything would be doom and gloom. I was wrong.

Riverbend’s death row is unusual. For recent arrivals, it works more or less the way death row is expected to: Residents are allowed almost no privileges of any kind. This is called Level C. But as the years go by, death row operates more like the “step-down” programs familiar to many who’ve experienced solitary confinement.

At Riverbend, condemned prisoners who maintain “good behavior” can progress to levels B and then A, gaining access to things like dayroom activities and group workshops. People can eat together. For a time, they could even have jobs at a mini on-site call center. TVs and radios are common features of death row; human interaction, less so. Christa Pike, the only woman on death row in Tennessee, is housed at a different facility and has effectively spent the past 30 years in solitary.

Oscar Smith was writing poetry for an upcoming workshop when I first met him. Stephen West and Nicholas Sutton were putting the finishing touches on a mural depicting the United States flag with blood coming out of it, beneath hands joined in prayer. The mural was to be displayed at a college art exhibition. Officers who worked there spoke highly of these projects, and of the men who created them.

Those 3 men, along with Don Johnson and Edmund Zagorski, designed a curriculum for mentoring new arrivals on death row. “Being in this place—so close to where they want to kill us—will put you in depression,” Zagorski had pointed out at the time.

At a yoga class I was permitted to join, the volunteer facilitator took us through a series of calming exercises intended to help center oneself. At the end she asked the participants how the experience was for them, and Sutton responded that he hoped it would help keep him calm when he was strapped to the electric chair. Everyone else nodded in agreement.

All 27 states that still carry out the death penalty use lethal injection as the primary method of execution. Tennessee allows those sentenced to death before 2000 to request the electric chair—”Old Smokey.” 8 states currently allow the electric chair as an option, but Tennessee is the only one that uses it. No other state has executed anyone by electrocution since 2013.

Some of the people who have been executed in the US, and hundreds of the people who were condemned and eventually exonerated, were wrongfully convicted. But the state is never executing the same person as the one it convicted. None of us are the same person we were 20, 30, 40 years ago.

Various staff assigned to death row stated that prisoners including West, Zagorski and Sutton had stepped in to protect them during dangerous situations, and routinely de-escalated the violence in the unit.

For example, Sutton, who was 18 when he was first incarcerated, dedicated his adult life to violence reduction and risked his own safety multiple times to protect those around him, including saving an officer from being taken hostage during a riot. After Paul House, who spent over 22 years on death row before being exonerated, could no longer walk and was denied a wheelchair, Sutton carried him around on his back. After Lee Hall Jr. could no longer see and was denied a walking stick, Sutton became his guide, until officers came to guide the legally blind Hall to the electric chair in 2019.

In 2020, Sutton was denied clemency and executed via the electric chair, too.

When I was transferred away from Riverbend in 2015, there were 75 people on its death row. Today there are 45. Some were resentenced. Some died of natural causes. Sutton, Zagorski, West and David Earl Miller were executed on the electric chair. Johnson and Billie Ray Irick were executed by lethal injection.

Oscar Smith, now 74, is the oldest person on death row in Tennessee. He was the next person scheduled to be killed when the state paused executions in 2022, following an investigation into improper lethal injection practices. In the next few months, executions are expected to resume.

--

Tony has served almost 3 decades of a life with parole sentence in Tennessee. Before prison he lived as a closeted gay man; his Southern Baptist parents and an older brother have since died. While incarcerated he has worked as a tutor, clerk and newspaper editor. He’s also begun book clubs and writing workshops, and prisoner-led elder care programs. He writes about captivity in the hope of contributing to the prison reform movement. You can reach him by USPS.

Tony Vick #276187

South Central Correctional Facility

PO Box 279

Clifton, TN 38425-0279

[the complete article with its photos can be found at: https://filtermag.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/r8.jpg]

(source: filtermag.org)

OHIO:

The debate over the death penalty

The U.S. is among one of the leading countries in executions. Gallup polling shows that as of last year, 53% of Americans supported capital punishment for murder. But the support is on a downward trend, and concerns over the number of people on death row who have been exonerated is growing.

There are new calls to abolish the death penalty, and we’ll examine that question on Cincinnati Edition with a man who spent nearly 18 years behind bars, with most of that time on death row. Lamont Hunter was convicted for the murder of his 3-year-old son. Exonerating evidence later led to a new trial and lesser charges of involuntary manslaughter. Hunter speaks with us today.

Then, we talk with a prosecuting attorney who supports the death penalty and says efforts to abolish it are misguided. We’ll hear why he says justice demands this option remain on the table for families.

Hunter will be part of a talk at the UC College of Law on Nov. 1.

Guests:

Lamont Hunter, spent nearly 18 years incarcerated, with most of that time on death row

Pierce Reed, director of policy and engagement, The Ohio Innocence Project, University of Cincinnati College of Law

aErin Gallagher Barnhart, assistant federal public defender, Southern District of Ohio’s Capital Habeas Unit, Lamont Hunter’s attorney

Louis Tobin, executive director, Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association

Ways to listen to this show:

Tune in live at noon ET M-F. Call 513-419-7100 or email talk@wvxu.org to have your voice heard on today’s topic.

Catch the replay on 91.7 WVXU and 88.5 WMUB at 8 p.m. ET M-F.

(source: WUXU news)

KENTUCKY:

Prosecutors seek death penalty for Whitley County man charged in 4-year-old’s death

A Whitley County man charged in the death of a 4-year-old child could face the death penalty. On Monday, Whitley County Circuit Court officials confirmed that prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Adam Hayes, who is accused of murdering 4-year-old Chloe Darnell.

Hayes, along with Brittany Slaughter, faces updated indictments that now include charges of murder, abuse of a corpse, and tampering with physical evidence. According to court documents, both Hayes and Slaughter will appear in court for their next hearing on Nov. 18.

The case remains under investigation.

(source: WTVQ news)

**************

Kentucky court to seek death penalty against man charged in 2023 toddler's death

A Kentucky court filed an intent to seek the death penalty against a man who was charged with the murder of a 4-year-old in November 2023.

According to court documents filed on Monday, in the case of the death of 4-year-old Chloe Darnell, the Whitley County Court will seek the death penalty against Adam Hayes.

LEX 18 previously reported that along with Hayes, Brittany Slaughter was also charged with the toddler's murder in 2023 after family members reported that Darnell hadn't been seen since September 2023.

Darnell's body, according to the Whitley County Sheriff's Office, was recovered in November 2023 and both Slaughter and Hayes were arrested and charged for her murder.

(source: lex18.com)

INDIANA----impending execution

Indiana death row inmate Joseph Corcoran files to reopen appeal window in death penalty case

Legal counsel for an Indiana man on death row have petitioned for the Allen County Superior Court to throw out a 2-decade-old ruling that struck the option for post-conviction relief.

Joseph Corcoran was convicted of murdering 4 people in Fort Wayne in 1997 and was sentenced to death in 1999.

It wasn’t until earlier this summer, in June, that Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita filed to schedule an execution date — after the state obtained pentobarbital, a lethal drug increasingly being used around the country to carry out death warrants. Corcoran’s execution — scheduled for Dec. 18 — would be the 1st in Indiana since 2009.

In the Thursday filing, Corcoran’s Indiana public defender, Amy Karozos, maintained that her client “was and continues to be severely mentally ill.”

In the early 2000s, when the time was still ripe for Corcoran to initiate post-conviction review, he refused to sign the post-conviction petition, Karozos said.

Given recent, favorable exceptions made by state supreme court justices to allow tardy petitions — along with an increasing tendency nationwide to exempt those with mental illness from the death penalty — the lawyer argued for her client’s appeal window to be reopened.

“Corcoran has repeatedly refused to act in a competent manner which resulted in lost opportunities to save his life throughout this case and permit the State to assist in his suicide,” Karozos wrote in the motion, adding later that the state should have had to litigate a post-conviction case years ago “had Corcoran’s mental illness not severely interfered with his ability to sign his post-conviction petition in a timely manner.”

“Any prejudice the State of Indiana may suffer is outweighed by the ‘injustice’ suffered by Corcoran,” she continued.

Corcoran’s attorneys seek 2nd chance at petition

State attorneys originally offered Corcoran a life sentence if he would accept a plea or waive jury. He refused, prompting the state to file a request for the death penalty 2 days later, according to court records.

At sentencing, Corcoran stated that he wanted to waive all his appeals.

Indiana’s Supreme Court originally set a Sept. 9, 2003, deadline for Corcoran to sign and file his post-conviction petition, which could have removed him from death row.

Generally, post-conviction relief allows a criminal defendant to directly challenge the legality of a portion of their criminal trial, the judgment of their conviction, or the sentence they have received.

When that deadline day arrived, however, lawyers instead filed a motion asking the court to assess Corcoran’s competency based on his mental health history, a recent mental health exam, his department of correction records and observations made by his legal counsel.

Lawyers simultaneously submitted a post-conviction relief petition that lacked Corcoran’s signature.

Shortly after, the trial court struck the petition because it was not signed or verified by Corcoran by the Indiana Supreme Court’s deadline.

A post-conviction court held a hearing in October 2003 to determine whether Corcoran was incompetent to waive his appeals. Corcoran’s counsel presented 3 experts, including a board-certified forensic psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, and a neuropsychologist — all testified that Corcoran was incompetent to waive his appeals, Karozos said. The judge also questioned Corcoran during those proceedings.

The post-conviction court ultimately found Corcoran was competent to waive post-conviction based on his testimony. Even so, Karozos noted that the post-conviction court still acknowledged that Corcoran “is mentally ill.”

Another appeal followed in 2004, but a year later, the Supreme Court upheld the prior ruling that Corcoran was competent, and therefore, his incomplete petition for relief would not stand.

But in February 2005, Corcoran submitted to the Indiana Supreme Court a post-conviction petition with his signature. The high court justices dismissed the petition as untimely, however.

Corcoran’s lawyers are now leaning on an Indiana trial rule — Rule 60(B) — that would allow him to reinstate a petition for post-conviction relief following the dismissals.

That rule permits a trial court to relieve a defendant from a judgment for “any reason justifying relief from the operation of the judgment” that is not otherwise specifically mentioned in the rule.

To prevail, Corcoran and his legal team must demonstrate that:

he brought his claim within a reasonable time in light of the circumstances of the case

extraordinary or exceptional circumstances justify that relief; and

he has alleged a meritorious claim or defense.

Looking to other cases

Karozos argued in the newest filing that Corcoran is bringing his claim to the court within a reasonable time “in light of the circumstances.”

“The legal landscape in Indiana has changed since 2003 when Corcoran’s unsigned petition was struck, and his signed petition was dismissed,” the lawyer said.

She referenced, for example, a 2021 ruling by the Indiana Supreme Court that permitted a defendant facing execution to proceed with a post-conviction filing even though he refused to verify his petition by the deadline.

In that case, Isom v. State, public defenders submitted a petition for post-conviction relief on behalf of the defendant, Kevin Isom, without his signature. Isom, of Gary, was previously convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of his wife and her 2 children.

The post-conviction court, acknowledging the omission, issued an order giving Isom additional time to file the missing verification page. Isom still refused to sign the petition, concluding that his attorneys “were not up to the task of representing him,” according to court documents.

Isom’s refusal to sign meant he would forfeit his post-conviction challenge.

Still, after hearing oral argument, Indiana’s Supreme Court justices ordered the trial court to accept Isom’s petition anyway. The court eventually upheld Isom’s sentence, and he remains one of eight men on death row in Indiana.

“Corcoran should be treated the same as Isom given the change in how the Indiana Supreme Court has dealt with capital defendants who do not comply with the post-conviction rules in the time prescribed by the Court’s Order,” Karozos said, emphasizing that Corcoran has brought his motion “within a reasonable amount of time, given the 2021 opinion in Isom which changed the legal landscape.”

Corcoran’s lawyers additionally pointed to a move by the Marion County prosecutor in January 2024 to withdraw a death penalty request for a defendant, Elliahs Dorsey, who killed Indianapolis police officer Breann Leath.

“Equally as important is the fact that a regional consensus has emerged against executing the severely mentally ill has occurred in the past few years,” Karozos continued. “Every other contiguous death penalty state in this area of the Midwest has banned the death penalty for the seriously mentally ill.”

Corcoran’s lawyers repeatedly insisted he is “gravely mentally ill” and has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which they argued should further disqualify the inmate from capital punishment.

Larry Komp, lead federal attorney for Corcoran’s legal team, previously told the Indiana Capital Chronicle that a similar argument would be made in a separate clemency petition. A decision regarding the last-ditch plea will be left to Indiana’s governor.

(source: indianapublicmedia.org)

KANSAS:

Hearings begin on Constitutional Challenge to Kansas’ Death Penalty and Capital Jury Selection Process

“If you are charged with capital murder … you are less likely to get a fair trial,” Cassandra Stubbs, direc­tor of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, said in her open­ing statement.

On October 28, 2024, hearings began in Kansas’ Wyandotte County District Court regarding the constitutionality of the state’s death penalty and its capital jury selection process. A coalition of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, the ACLU of Kansas, the Kansas Death Penalty Unit, and the law firms Hogan Lovells and Ali & Lockwood brought the challenge. The team argues that the death penalty, which is rarely used in Kansas, is “arbitrary, racially discriminatory, unreliable, and unnecessary” and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of both the state and federal constitutions. The team also characterized as discriminatory the requirement for jurors to be “death-qualified,” or willing to impose a death sentence, to serve on a capital jury.

“Every person accused of a crime is entitled to a fair, impartial jury, but that’s never the reality in capital cases,” said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. “The evidence is overwhelmingly consistent that Black Kansans are disproportionately disqualified from serving on capital juries. Death qualification, like the death penalty itself, is unconstitutional and undermines justice for everyone. We are committed to ending both.” According to a press release from the ACLU, studies have demonstrated the practice of death qualification often excludes “Black people, women, and those of religious faith,” who often oppose the death penalty. This results in a capital jury that is “whiter, more male, more conviction prone, less likely to debate the evidence, and far more likely to sentence a defendant to death,” rather than a jury of one’s peers, which also contributes to the higher rate of wrongful conviction in capital cases.

The ACLU-led challenge is brought on behalf of pretrial capital defendant Antoine Fielder, who is accused of killing two sheriff’s deputies during prisoner transport, and another pretrial capital defendant, Hugo Villanueva. During opening statements, Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree argued that “neither of these arguments are ripe for hearing,” since neither defendant has been tried and convicted.

Kansas rarely uses the death penalty—a point highlighted in the defendant’s petition to support the determination of the practice as “unusual punishment,” which is constitutionally prohibited. The petition, referencing a 2024 report by Columbia Professor Jeffrey Fagan, notes that the “odds of any Kansan convicted of murder being sentenced to death are ‘less than one tenth of one percent,’” and referencing a 2024 report by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Frank Baumgartner, notes that “the death penalty has been imposed in less than 1% of all homicides in Kansas.” The state, which currently has 9 prisoners on death row, has not carried out an execution since 1965.

The death penalty in Kansas is unjust from start to finish and goes against all of the most fundamental principles of justice,” said Katie Ali, attorney at Ali & Lockwood. “From its disproportionate impact on Black Kansans to the high risk of wrongful convictions, it is clear that the death penalty serves neither fairness nor public safety. It’s time for Kansas to abandon this deeply unjust system.”

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)

IDAHO:

Idaho parole board denies new clemency review for death row prisoner awaiting execution

The Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole on Tuesday denied a request for another clemency hearing from the state’s longest-serving death row prisoner, one in a series of last-ditch efforts by Thomas Creech to stop his execution next month — the 2nd attempt this year to put him to death.

The state’s parole board met in closed session Tuesday afternoon to review Creech’s petition filed last week seeking a 2nd hearing to consider reducing his sentence to life in prison.

Creech’s attorneys allege that the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office presented “false evidence” at a clemency hearing held for him earlier this year when it asserted he was responsible for a man’s death in a 50-year-old cold case in Southern California.

The parole board later voted in a 3-3 tie, which upheld Creech’s death sentence. The next day, the state scheduled its 1st attempt to execute Creech, which failed when the execution team couldn’t find a suitable vein to establish an IV for lethal injection.

Creech was returned to death row, where he waited on the state’s next move for nearly 8 months.

Prosecutors provided no specific evidence at Creech’s prior clemency hearing of his involvement in the cold case, and he’s never been charged in the killing of Daniel A. Walker, 21, for which he denies any knowledge. Walker’s brother, Doug Walker, recently supported Creech’s push for a new clemency hearing, and submitted a signed letter stating he was concerned his family was “manipulated into participating” by the prosecutor’s office to provide a victim’s impact statement for the hearing.

Creech’s attorneys with the Federal Defender Services of Idaho did not immediately respond to a request from the Idaho Statesman for comment about the parole board’s ruling.

Separately, the legal nonprofit is suing the parole board and Ada County Prosecutor Jan Bennetts in federal court on the same grounds.

The Idaho federal judge presiding over that case was forced by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to recuse herself after declining to do so based on her decades-long friendship with Bennetts. The case has been reassigned to a visiting federal judge from Arizona, who is now overseeing Creech’s federal appeals.

On Monday, Doug Walker also submitted a “friend of the court” filing — known as an amicus brief — in the case, supporting a stay of execution for Creech. Bennetts, who is up for reelection next week, ignored a request for comment from the Statesman last week about Creech’s request for a new clemency hearing.

The Statesman renewed its request with her office Tuesday after the parole board issued its decision denying Creech’s petition.

APPEAL AWAITS IDAHO SUPREME COURT RULING

Creech, in attempts to avoid his Nov. 13 execution by lethal injection, has 2 other pending federal appeals.

In yet another appeal awaiting a ruling from the Idaho Supreme Court, his attorneys with the State Appellate Public Defender’s Office have argued that a 2nd execution attempt would violate Creech’s constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment.

Creech is the 1st Idaho prisoner to survive an execution, and just the 6th prisoner in U.S. history to survive one by lethal injection, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center.

2 of those survivors, both in Alabama, were put to death in follow-up executions earlier this year.

The state’s highest court last week denied Creech’s request for a stay of execution in the same case. In that decision, the court also chose to rule on his appeal solely on its legal briefs — before they were filed — rather than hold a hearing for oral arguments.

Creech, 74, has been incarcerated in Idaho for almost 50 years after his convictions for 5 murders, including 3 victims in Idaho.

His standing death sentence stems from Creech pleading guilty to the beating death of fellow maximum security prisoner David D. Jensen, 23, in May 1981. Before that, Creech was convicted of the November 1974 shooting deaths of 2 men in Valley County.

In a June phone interview with the Statesman, Creech acknowledged killing Edward T. Arnold, 34, and John W. Bradford, 40, in the incident. Creech, after he was imprisoned in Idaho, was later convicted of the shooting death of a man in Oregon and strangulation of a man in Northern California.

(source: idahostatesman.com)

NEVADA:

Las Vegas jury hands down death penalty for 2012 murder suspect----Robert Brown Jr. was found guilty for the 2012 murder of his girlfriend in Las Vegas.

A Las Vegas jury has handed down a death sentence to an ex-convict accused of killing his ex-girlfriend.

46-year-old Robert Brown Jr. is accused of killing his former girlfriend, 29-year-old Nichole Nick, and wounding her 58-year-old mother. Police also reported finding a bullet hole in Nick‘s 3-year-old niece’s bed, though the child was unharmed.

Brown has been in custody since Los Angeles police arrested him in April 2014.

In 1998, he was also convicted of attempting to kill his then-wife in California and would spend seven years in prison as a result.

(source: KVVU news)

USA:

Death Penalty Information Center executive director urges students to deepen death penalty dialogue----Elected officials interacting with the death penalty means the power to make change lies with voters

Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, spoke at an event on Oct. 22 at American University urging students to use their voting power to change the conversation around the death penalty.

Students for a Just Society and Students for Change welcomed Maher to discuss her recent research paper, “Lethal Election: How the U.S. Electoral Process Increases the Arbitrariness of the Death Penalty.”

Maher, in her conversation with Jason Fabrikant, a Justice, Law and Criminology professor at the University, shared how the Death Penalty Information Center acts as a database to track how the death penalty is being used around the country. Maher said she thinks it is overwhelmingly used in an unfair and “incredibly racist” manner.

“It’s not just a very severe punishment, it’s a deeply flawed practice,” Maher said.

Maher said elected officials play a vital role in every step of the death penalty process; how it gets used, who gets sentenced and executed and when those executions take place. According to Maher, this puts voters in a unique position to elect judges and prosecutors based on how they feel about the death penalty.

“We can say to those people that are running for elected office, this issue matters to us,” Maher said. “Whether you use the death penalty, how you use the death penalty matters to us. If you want my vote, this is what I believe. So you get to decide.”

Julia Landick, president of Students for a Just Society and a senior in the School of Public Affairs, said this need for students to vote and share their concerns with elected officials was the reason for crafting the event.

“We just wanted to provide another platform where people could come and learn more about why their voice is so important,” Landick said. “I think a lot of times young people feel like they can’t really do anything and that’s not the case as we learned tonight.”

Caroline Vuckovich, vice president of Students for a Just Society and a senior in SPA, agreed with Landick and said this event was important for them to organize because they are one of the few criminal justice organizations on campus.

“We certainly feel a responsibility to cover this topic and provide a space for students to discuss it and learn about it,” Vuckovich said.

The nature of these officials being elected can also create problems, Maher warned. She said there are “conflicts of interest” in which elected officials feel pressured by the electorate and their fundraising needs to make decisions that do not always follow the rule of law.

“They’re putting their interests, their personal agenda, ahead of what the law might require or what the facts might demand,” Maher said.

Maher said elected officials are starting to notice a shift in public opinion on the death penalty. In a Gallup poll from October 2023, 53 % of Americans said they are in favor of the death penalty, which is significantly down from 64 % of Americans who were in favor only 20 years earlier in 2003.

“The more public opinion changes, and the more people like you voice your opinion and concerns about the death penalty, the more changes we’re going to see in their [elected officials’] attitudes and their behaviors,” Maher said.

This rises from the level of local and state elections to the presidential election as Maher said each of the current presidential candidates has different priorities and stances on this issue. However, Maher said that she does not believe the death penalty is a strictly 1-party issue, but instead, there are varying opinions on all sides.

“It’s more a product of religion, of culture, of local practice than it is a party affiliation,” Maher said.

Maher said changing public opinion about how those on death row are treated begins with making space for empathy and humanizing their stories as they have become so “demonized” by society. Maher said this starts with daily actions from everyone and grows bigger as people see others worthy of humanity even in light of what they have done.

“There still is nothing like it. You will never feel more challenged emotionally, intellectually, physically than when you do this work and it is going to break your heart every day,” Maher said. “But it is also, I know, the best thing I can do as a lawyer.”

(source: theeagleonline.com)

EUROPEAN UNION/IRAN:

Statement by the High Representative on behalf of the EU on the execution of Jamshid Sharmahd

The European Union condemns in the strongest terms the execution in Iran of German-Iranian national Jamshid Sharmahd. The European Union offers its condolences to Mr. Sharmahd's family and expresses its full solidarity with Germany.

Jamshid Sharmahd was illegally abducted to Iran and held for years under inhumane conditions without a fair trial.

The European Union continues to call on Iran to refrain from any future executions and pursue a consistent policy towards the abolition of capital punishment.

The European Union reiterates its call on Iran to end the distressing practice of detaining foreign civilians and dual nationals with a view to making political gains. Iranian restrictions on consular access to our citizens, the denial of consular protection and fair trial are not acceptable and stand in direct violation of international law.

The death penalty violates the inalienable right to life enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and it is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, incompatible with human dignity. The European Union reaffirms its strong and unequivocal opposition to the use of death penalty at all times, in all places and in all circumstances, especially taking into account the alarming increase in executions recorded in Iran last year and this year.

The execution of a European citizen is seriously harming relations between Iran and the European Union. In view of this appalling development, the European Union will now consider targeted and significant measures. (source: consilium.europa.eu)

OCTOBER 29, 2024:

TEXAS:

Challenging Robert Roberson’s execution makes Texas government work as intended----This case demonstrates that getting it right is a moral imperative and vital to moving us closer to a system that earns all Texans’ trust.

The standoff between the Texas Legislature and the executive branch in the shaken baby syndrome death penalty case of Robert Roberson is being characterized by some as “a way to destroy the legitimacy of a justice system.” However, it involves nothing more than each party zealously guarding its own constitutional prerogatives.

America’s founders intentionally did not create a parliamentary system. Instead, they birthed one that has branches with competing interests, believing that this mitigates against government encroaching on the rights of the people. There are several reasons why Texans need not worry that we are facing a constitutional crisis.

First, a recap of the recent legal maneuvers reveals that the legislative and executive branches are engaging in the healthy exercise of their respective constitutionally ordained muscles. In calling Roberson to testify, the Legislature used its power to subpoena any Texan, a power that undoubtedly exists regardless of whether the person is incarcerated. Conversely, the executive branch has the undisputed power to implement a death sentence ordered by the courts. Since a dead person cannot testify, something had to give, and the judiciary was called on to resolve this unprecedented conflict.

Second, each branch of government is making plausible arguments when confronted with novel legal questions, and courts are doing their due diligence to obtain briefings from each side before deciding the merits of the case. At the request of lawmakers, a district court in Travis County issued an order temporarily delaying the execution, giving the judiciary time to reconcile this conflict between the other two branches government before it would become moot by Roberson’s death.

When the attorney general appealed this ruling to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, another novel legal issue emerged. The validity of a legislative subpoena is a civil matter layered on top of a criminal case, raising the question of whether the appeal here lies within the top criminal court’s bailiwick or presents a civil controversy within the ambit of the Texas Supreme Court. For this reason, the Texas Supreme Court reinstated the restraining order that had been invalidated by the Court of Criminal Appeals. Once again, this was not a ruling on the merits, but a stopgap measure to allow for an unprecedented legal question to be carefully resolved.

Not only should Texans be reassured that their judiciary is discharging its duty to thoroughly review the challenging legal issues involved, they also need not worry that it will spur a flurry of such battles. After all, this is the 1st time in Texas history, and perhaps human history, that an execution has been delayed by a legislative subpoena.

While legislative subpoenas do not breed distrust in the system, the reality and perception of unremedied wrongful convictions can contribute to a crisis of legitimacy. A lack of public confidence in the system’s capacity for getting it right can lead to fewer victims and witnesses cooperating with police and prosecutors and, consequently, fewer crimes being solved.

If Gov. Greg Abbott or the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ultimately acts to commute or reverse this sentence, as they should given that the case has more holes than a donut shop, it will not erode the integrity of Texas’ death penalty or justice system.

Instead, it will demonstrate that, no matter how many years have gone by, getting it right is both a moral imperative in the case at hand and vital to moving us closer to a system that earns the trust of all Texans.

(source: Commentary; Marc A. Levin, of Houston, is chief policy counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice, a former staff attorney at the Texas Supreme Court, and a former law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit----San Antonio Express-News)

************

2-year-old's family steps into fray over Texas death penalty case----A Palestine state rep and the family of slain 2-year-old Nikki Curtis wrote a letter to lawmakers and filed a brief with the Supreme Court

A jury found Robert Roberson guilty of killing his 2-year old daughter years ago in East Texas. In the past few weeks, lawmakers have been locked in a legal battle to stop his execution. NBC 5 political reporter Phil Prazan takes a look at what comes next.

A death penalty execution remains on hold. A jury sentenced Robert Roberson to death 2 decades ago after they found him guilty of killing his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis.

But a last-minute legal battle between state lawmakers put the execution on pause. Since then, a war for public opinion has split state government.

Rep. Cody Harris, R - Palestine, tells NBC 5 that Roberson's legal team went through the lengthy appeal process years ago, including a 2016 evidentiary hearing in district court over new information. The conviction stayed on track. His execution was scheduled for October until a successful attempt by state lawmakers to put the execution on pause.

“For others to say, 'no y’all got it wrong. We just stepped into this and we’re just learning about it but y’all got it wrong.' That’s when as state representative of this area, I’ve got to step up and defend my community," said Harris.

Harris sent a letter to the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence, which stepped in with a subpoena to speak with Roberson.

In the letter, Harris wrote, along with members of the deceased girl's half-brother, aunt, and grandfather, “Nikki’s death is the real tragedy in this case, and her loss has left a profound hole in all of our hearts. We do not begrudge those who are speaking out on behalf of Mr. Roberson. We only wish that these facts were also included as part of the story.”

Harris then told NBC 5, "Nobody here in Palestine or I think the rest of Texas, wants an innocent man to be put to death. I certainly don’t. I know the family of Nikki does not want an innocent man to be put to death. But we firmly believe the judicial system has worked.”

Earlier this month, the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence subpoenaed Roberson for an interview, putting his execution on hold in a dramatic legal battle with the Texas Attorney General.

One of the advocates for a new trial was Allen lawmaker Jeff Leach.

"There are major problems," Leach said on Lone Star Politics, "So the Attorney General is just off. He’s ignoring, his office is ignoring a large part of the evidence here and that’s been the problem all along.”

Leach wants to take a look at the "shaken baby syndrome" evidence presented years ago to see if it's invalidated by the state's "junk science" law.

“Conservatives, we believe in the rule of law, we believe in limited government, we believe in protecting the fundamental liberties of people, most importantly the right to life," said Leach.

Legal briefs were due to the Texas Supreme Court on Monday. The justices may soon tell the public the next steps for Roberson's life.

(source: nbcdfw.com)

************

State Rep. Jeff Leach asked Texas judge to consider a new Robert Roberson trial in apparent conduct violation----Leach, one of the driving forces behind the effort to stop Roberson’s execution, later apologized to the unnamed judge, who told the lawmaker there were still pending matters before the court.

State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, texted a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals judge last week that death row inmate Robert Roberson deserves a new trial, an apparent violation of Texas' disciplinary rules of professional conduct.

In an Oct. 25 letter sent to Roberson’s attorney along with Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell, Texas’ highest criminal court detailed the text correspondence between Leach and an unnamed judge, in which Leach expresses hesitation about whether he can legally correspond with the judge but ultimately decides to make a plea to save Roberson’s life.

“I’ve wracked my brain about whether I should send you this message … about where I can even send you this message legally and ethically,” wrote Leach, who is a member of the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence and one of the driving forces behind the effort to stop Roberson’s execution. “There are too many questions and too many holes and too much uncertainty … and Robert Roberson deserves a new trial.”

Leach, who noted that he is not an active party to any matters before the court, added that only one judge on the bench needed to change their mind on Roberson’s case and allow the court to reconsider his request for a new trial. A 5-4 majority of the court rejected Roberson’s latest appeals.

“Only sending this message to you,” Leach wrote to the unnamed judge. “As my friend and as a wonderful Judge who I have so much faith in, I hope you’ll consider doing so.”

According to the letter, the judge wrote in response, “I cannot consider your message nor may I discuss any pending matters with you.”

Roberson currently has no pending matters before the Court of Criminal Appeals, which Leach pointed to in his correspondence to the high court.

“I was unaware there were any pending matters in front of the court,” Leach wrote.

According to Texas’ Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, lawyers are prohibited from attempting to influence a court about a pending matter before that court, or about matters that are “reasonably foreseeable” to be before that court. Violations of the rules could result in disciplinary action from the State Bar of Texas.

Leach did not immediately respond to The Texas Tribune’s request for comment.

The letter marks the latest episode in a roller coaster legal battle that Leach, state lawmakers and advocates first waged to spare Roberson’s life. The Texas Supreme Court halted Roberson’s Oct. 17 execution after the bipartisan criminal jurisprudence committee subpoenaed Roberson, asking him to testify at the Capitol 4 days after his scheduled execution and setting off a separation of powers conflict between the state’s executive and legislative branches. Roberson’s execution is delayed pending the resolution of that issue.

The Office of the Attorney General notified the Texas Supreme Court of Leach's text messages on Monday, arguing that the development "only underscored" the state's case that the committee overstepped in its intervention.

Roberson was convicted in 2003 in the death of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki, who he said he found fallen off of the bed at the family’s home in Palestine. Nikki was given a shaken baby diagnosis, but experts and lawmakers say evidence not presented at trial invalidates that theory and proves Roberson’s innocence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has repeatedly declined to stop Roberson’s execution.

The ongoing effort to save Roberson’s life has become a political battle waged in the public eye, as more elected officials continue to weigh in on the matter. Gov. Greg Abbott broke his silence on the issue on Oct. 21 with an amicus brief in which he criticized lawmakers for exceeding their authority, noting that the power to grant clemency in a capital case lies with the governor alone. The governor has the ability to grant a one-time 30-day reprieve in death penalty cases.

Attorney General Ken Paxton also issued a graphic press release last week, insisting on Roberson’s guilt. A group of state lawmakers responded with a 16-page rebuttal, pointing out credibility issues with witnesses who offered trial testimony disparaging Roberson and refuting Paxton’s claims that Nikki had extensive bruising when she arrived at the hospital.

Members of Nikki’s family — her brother, Matthew Bowman, her aunt, Jessica Rachelle Carriere, and her grandfather, Larry Gene Bowman — sent a letter to the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence saying they are convinced of Roberson’s guilt.

“We all kept an open mind and were ready to receive new information leading up to and during the trial that might have shown him to be innocent,” the family wrote. “The only thing we have ever wanted was to know what happened to Nikki, and what caused her death. After hearing countless hours of testimony that was presented, we remain convinced that Mr. Roberson is guilty and directly responsible for Nikki’s death.”

They said in the letter that they “witnessed the repeated abuse” by Roberson, and they condemned the “one-sided picture” of his case “that has been recently portrayed in the media.”

Shortly after, Roberson’s family released a statement in support of his innocence.

“No one who knew Robert well believed he was capable of harming any child,” Thomas Roberson, the death row inmate’s younger brother, said on behalf of himself, his partner, Jennifer Martin, and his brother, John Roberson. “And to this day, I am convinced that he could not have done what he was accused of doing.”

Thomas Roberson argued that people who did not know his brother were spreading false stories about him — repeating “things they cannot possibly know about.”

He described his brother as “someone who stood up for kids who were being picked on by others. I never saw him hurt or say a mean word to any child.”

And he added that Roberson fought for custody over Nikki after her mother had her children taken from her by Child Protective Services. He noted that Nikki’s maternal grandparents agreed that Roberson should take custody of her.

“People who never even knew my brother are saying things about him that are just not true. They seem to be saying these things to justify executing him,” Thomas Roberson said. “I do not understand what they are doing, but I do understand their pain.”

(source: The Texas Tribune)

****************

“Simply Untrue”: Lawmakers Refute Unprecedented Attack by Texas Attorney General in Robert Roberson’s Case

Innocence Texas

On October 23, 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a press statement, the original autopsy report, and other case records in an effort to “set the record straight” and “correct falsehoods” that he accused state lawmakers of making about Robert Roberson. In this unprecedented attack, AG Paxton also characterized the defense efforts as “11th-hour, 1-sided, extrajudicial stunts that attempt to obscure facts and rewrite his past.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott has also reacted aggressively to efforts to save Mr. Roberson from execution, alleging that lawmakers “stepped out of line” by issuing the subpoena that resulted in a stay of his execution.

Both the autopsy and a 2016 letter from the medical examiner state that 2-year-old Nikki Curtis died from blunt force head injuries, which AG Paxton says were inflicted by Robert Roberson and prove the case was not about “Shaken Baby Syndrome” (SBS). But former juror Terre Compton, who recently testified before members of the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence, said that “everything that was presented to us was all about shaken baby syndrome.” Ms. Compton added, “that was what our decision was based on. Nothing else was ever mentioned or presented to us to consider.”

In response to AG Paxton’s claims, a bipartisan group of legislators released their own report and characterized AG Paxton’s report as “misleading and in large part simply untrue.” State Reps. Joe Moody, Jeff Leach, and 2 others released a 16-page, point-by-point refutation to AG Paxton’s statement, identifying citations and trial exhibits to support their assertions. “We know that the laws our legislature created to correct those problems haven’t worked as intended for Robert and people like him. That’s why we’re here and why we won’t quit,” they said. Rep. Moody also released a personal statement in which he says the AG’s report is a “collection of exaggerations, misrepresentations, and full-on untruths.” Rep. Moody said that the Committee “didn’t issue the subpoena [for Roberson to testify] to create a constitutional crisis, and we weren’t interested in escalating a division between branches of government.”

This extraordinary exchange between the Attorney General and state lawmakers arose after the Texas Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence held a 2-day hearing on the discredited SBS hypothesis used to convict Mr. Roberson and the Texas “junk science” statute. In an unprecedented maneuver, the Committee issued a subpoena to Mr. Roberson to testify on Monday October 21st — 4 days after his scheduled execution. This legally binding subpoena resulted in a stay of execution just 90 minutes before it was scheduled to occur. Because the Attorney General objected, Mr. Roberson did not testify on October 21, 2024. AG Paxton said Mr. Roberson would only be allowed to testify over video “in interest of public safety,” which both the Committee members and counsel for Mr. Roberson say would not be effective because of Mr. Roberson’s autism.

Mr. Roberson was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003 for the death of his daughter, Nikki, who medical experts have since determined died from severe viral and bacterial pneumonia that doctors failed to diagnose, not from abuse or SBS. Despite 3 new expert reports showing Nikki died of pneumonia, no court has been willing to consider the evidence that clears Mr. Roberson from any crime.

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)

SOUTH CAROLINA---impending execution

Civis Advocatus: Richard Moore’s Death Sentence Should Be Commuted----“A question of proportionality, prejudice and political motivation…”

On November 1, 2024, Richard Bernard Moore is scheduled to die. If the State of South Carolina chooses to move forward with his execution, Mr. Moore would be the 1st person executed in modern history who was initially unarmed and defending himself when threatened.

As a society, we value justice and believe punishments should be applied fairly – without regard to race, status, or political ambition. Yet, when we look closely at the case of Richard Moore – a black man who has spent 20 years on death row after an all-white jury sentenced him to die – against the backdrop of a highly contentious political race, we must question whether death is justice. And as a society, we have the opportunity to look inward and answer the question, “Who do we want to be?”

Prosecutors wield immense power, yet they are also often politically vulnerable, pressured to show toughness on crime as a metric of success. Here, it appears as though political ambition overshadowed the pursuit of fairness and justice, making a death sentence more about public image than about the facts of Richard’s case.

Richard’s case was prosecuted by an elected solicitor who was politically incentivized to seek the death penalty. At the time, 2 candidates were campaigning for the position of S.C. seventh circuit solicitor – the top prosecutor for Spartanburg County. During the campaign, the two candidates publicly sparred over who was “tougher on crime.“ The defeated incumbent solicitor sought the death penalty in Richard’s case before he left office, leaving the newly-elected solicitor to choose between pursuing death in Richard’s case (despite it containing facts typically unsuitable for death penalty consideration), or instead pursuing a sentence of life in prison. The latter choice meant the incoming solicitor would being perceived as weak on the death penalty and soft on crime — 2 allegations his primary opponent leveled against him during the campaign.

In addition to concerns about proportionality and racial bias, the politically charged context of the decision to pursue the death penalty casts a shadow over the entire case. The newly-elected solicitor’s decision to press for the ultimate punishment — despite the fact Mr. Moore was unarmed when he entered the store — demands scrutiny and raises grave concerns about fairness. Even advocates of capital punishment agree it should be reserved for cases with clear, irrefutable evidence of guilt and a conscious decision to harm others.

Does Richard’s sentence represent justice? Or does it reflect societal prejudice? In Richard’s case, there is ample reason to question the proportionality of the punishment, the influence of racial prejudice, and the motivation of the prosecutor. Two political candidates were competing for the powerful position of head prosecutor, each challenging the other in a flex to show who was bigger, badder, and tougher. Caught in the crossfire of this competitive energy, we find Richard — who committed a terrible crime, but whose life was thrust into the center of this ego contest.

The decision of whether to seek death in a case should be made by prosecutors who are humble, disciplined, and measured enough to put aside ego – or personal or political gain. They should instead fairly and soberly weigh the interests of justice and society. The decision to pursue a death sentence should not be made with emotion, and certainly not with ego. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

There is no doubt Richard Moore took a life. His is not a case like many we have seen on the news in recent years. There is no new evidence or DNA or questions surrounding his guilt. It is a question of proportionality, prejudice, and political motivation. Is this the type of case that warrants death? Would a different prosecutor in a different situation have made a different decision today? Do we as a society feel justified in taking Richard’s life simply because he took the life of someone else? Does it matter that he was unarmed? Does it matter what he has done in the years following his crime?

Richard has served 20 years on death row, during which time he has been a model inmate, a dedicated father to 2 extremely bright and successful adult children, and now a loving grandfather. He has, by all metrics, embodied the religious concepts of repentance and returning to faith. Not only has Richard accepted responsibility, expressed remorse and acknowledged the unimaginable pain he caused to his victim’s family, he has made the decision to live a life that makes a positive difference in the lives of others. He has gone beyond repentance and has built a life of meaning – even in the face of hopelessness.

When the stakes are this high – and when the punishment irreversible – there is no room for error. We ought to be absolutely certain we are doing justice. In Richard’s case, there are simply too many factors that prompt hesitation and demand further scrutiny.

Killing Richard will no more safeguard the community or deter future crime than it will bring back Richard’s victim. But allowing Richard to live will allow us, as a society, to demonstrate a commitment to justice that is proportional, fair and untainted by the bias of race or political gain.

Many would argue that the death penalty erodes our collective humanity — that when our government takes a life, it sends the message that killing is an acceptable response to wrongdoing, perpetuating a cycle of violence. True justice should focus on rehabilitation and restorative approaches that can lead to healing rather than perpetuate suffering. By sparing Richard’s life, we can affirm the intrinsic value of every human life and commit to a more compassionate and just society.

(source: Civis Advocatus is a South Carolina attorney dedicated to truth, justice, and fairness in administering the laws of our state and our nation----fitsnews.com)

*****************

Death row inmate convicted by all-white jury asks SCOTUS to stop execution

A man who is scheduled to be put to death on Friday for the murder of an Upstate convenience store clerk has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

Richard Moore killed James Mahoney at Nikki’s Speedy Mart in Spartanburg County in September 1999. Moore was unarmed when he went to rob the store, but took one of Mahoney’s guns and killed him.

Moore was convicted and sentenced by an all-white jury. His defense team has also raised concerns about how he was found guilty of premeditated murder when he went to the store unarmed. An Amnesty International campaign has called for Governor Henry McMaster to grant clemency to Moore.

After a 13-year moratorium in South Carolina due to a lack of lethal injection drugs, the state executed Freddie Owens in September. Owens also killed an Upstate store clerk, 41-year-old Irene Graves, during a string of robberies in 1997.

Moore previously filed a federal lawsuit against McMaster, saying he cannot be impartial in a decision about clemency due to his former role as the state’s attorney general. A federal judge denied the request to have the state’s parole board decide on clemency.

In the newest filing, Moore’s defense asked the Supreme Court for an emergency stay of execution.

The request cites the jury during Moore’s trial, saying prosecutors excluded 2 qualified Black jurors because of their race.

(source: foxcarolina.com)

FLORIDA:

Jury unanimously recommends death penalty for man who murdered Highlands deputy

A jury has unanimously recommended the death penalty for the suspect responsible for the death of Highlands County Deputy William J. Gentry Jr.

Joseph Ables was convicted last week for 1st-degree murder, after shooting the deputy in May 2018. He was also convicted of animal cruelty for fatally shooting a cat.

Deputy Gentry, 40, was responding to a dispute in Lake Placid when a woman called about someone shooting her cat dead.

When the deputy approached then-69-year-old Ables, he shot him multiple times in the head, killing him.

Ables, a Marine, told the courtroom in closing arguments last week that he didn’t realize Gentry was a deputy and had acted in self-defense.

“That guy shows no remorse. He’s not remorseful for what he’s done. He’s not remorseful that he killed a cat. He’s not remorseful that he killed a deputy. There’s no remorse,” Kevin Gentry, Deputy William Gentry’s brother said. “I think the jury saw that, we saw it and I think they made the right decision.”

Ables had been arrested on May 6, 2018, on charges of homicide murder, possession of a weapon by a convicted felon, resisting an officer with violence, tampering with evidence, and violating probation.

The final sentence from the judge will be sometime in the future once pre-sentence court hearings are completed.

(source: WFLA news)

ALABAMA:

Alabama’s 2nd nitrogen gas execution raises questions about method’s future use

Before Alan Miller became the nation’s 2nd-ever person to be executed by nitrogen gas, men living on Alabama’s main death row met to discuss how to stay calm.

That’s according to Esther Brown, the executive director of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, a group led by incarcerated organizers. Brown’s phone rings every day with calls from people who are imprisoned and sentenced to death.

She said their mood was “very upset, very uptight,” as Alabama readied to use the novel method to put Miller to death — while keeping on pace toward the state’s busiest year for executions since 2011. The Yellowhammer State is set to lead the nation in executions this year, data from the Death Penalty Information Center show.

“Of course, we’re not doing well,” Brown said. “You know, it’s just — incomprehensible.”

Alabama followed through on its plans to execute Miller on the evening of Sept. 26, in a move that stoked outrage and grief among death penalty opponents. It also raised questions about the possible future of the controversial execution method in the Gulf South, while underscoring Alabama’s increasingly atypical use of capital punishment.

Alabama remains the only state to have tested out the nitrogen gas method, but Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma have legalized its use, according to reports.

As Alabama sets this new course for execution methods, William Berry, a law professor and associate dean at the University of Mississippi who often writes about capital punishment, said its eyewitness accounts show the nitrogen gas executions are “way more draconian and brutal” than imagined.

“It seems much more like the same kind of problems you had with electrocution, in terms of this brutality and unintended consequences,” he said. “I wonder the extent to which this will really catch fire and states will start doing this regularly, or not.”

Berry said nitrogen gas executions came into play in response to the availability of and challenges to drugs used for lethal injections. He added that other scholars have written that injection protocols were developed in part because of unpleasant effects — such as smells of burning flesh — related to the electric chair.

In January, Alabama’s attorney general touted nitrogen gas, saying that its “proven method offers a blueprint for other states.” He reaffirmed his stance in a statement after Miller’s execution. His staff didn’t fulfill a recent interview request.

“Tonight, despite misinformation campaigns by political activists, out-of-state lawyers and biased media, the State proved once again that nitrogen hypoxia is both humane and effective,” Marshall’s statement said that night.

“Miller’s execution went as expected and without incident.”

Method likely ‘dead in the water’

But Rev. Jeff Hood, an activist and spiritual advisor to people on death row in several states, said he thinks the method is likely “dead in the water,” and feels unlikely to become commonplace elsewhere.

He noted similarities in witness accounts between the second nitrogen gas execution and the 1st — of Kenny Smith in January — which he witnessed personally. Witnesses to the 1st nitrogen execution described a protracted process in which Smith shook and writhed.

“I could hear people in the witness room saying, ‘God, stop, stop, please stop,’” Hood said. “It was horrible.”

Condemnation arrived from all corners of the world, including a U.N. panel, which said it “amounted to torture.” In the American Medical Association’s journal, JAMA, doctors from the University of California San Francisco’s Hypoxia Research Laboratory said hypoxia, meaning low oxygen levels, has inconsistent and “frequently distressing effects” on people, such as “a feeling of suffocation,” and that extreme hypoxia isn’t well-studied in humans because it causes such stress.

Accounts of Kenny Smith’s execution were “proof of the inhumanity of the nitrogen hypoxia method,” they wrote.

Accounts from media witnesses to the 2nd nitrogen gas execution last month described Miller appearing to struggle against his restraints and gasp for air before dying. Miller, whose death sentence pertained to the shooting of three people, took several minutes to be pronounced dead.

Alabama has a 3rd gas nitrogen execution, of Carey Dale Grayson, set for Nov. 21. That case is undergoing court challenges related to the method.

‘Trending downward’

Related issues in the region have drawn national attention this year, starting when Smith was executed in January and Louisiana then legalized nitrogen gas executions, prompting outcry from groups including Jewish advocates.

It isn’t yet clear how the outcome of the two nitrogen gas executions in Alabama impacted attitudes toward the method in Mississippi. A spokesperson for its attorney general and the sponsor of a related bill, who is no longer in the legislature, didn’t immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.

In Louisiana, where nitrogen gas executions were legalized earlier this year, Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement that she supported the bill that expanded the state’s execution methods. She said she would defend the law, adding that “victims of crime and their families deserve justice.”

House Rep. Nicholas Muscarello introduced the bill that ultimately legalized nitrogen gas executions. He said in an interview he had “no opinion” in response to some of the criticisms advocates have raised of the method.

“At the end of the day, my thought is if it’s deemed constitutional and it’s been challenged and upheld by the court, then that’s the method that should be an alternative to the lethal injection,” he said.

Questions about methods to put someone to death also have emerged amid a recent and unusual surge in executions. That’s likely due to a “confluence” of factors, including a perceived backlog, priorities of a small group of politicians and the dynamics of the U.S. Supreme Court, according to Berry, of the University of Mississippi.

But overall, he says the use of the death penalty remains rare.

“I think this is trending downward and slowly, I think, disappearing,” he added. “We’ll see if nitrogen hypoxia is something that actually accelerates that decline, or something that prolongs it.”

‘Forever etched in the memory’

Miller’s execution mobilized death penalty opponents to events across Alabama.

As the execution approached, rain-soaked advocates gathered on the Capitol steps in Montgomery, where 21-year-old TJ Riggs made an emotional speech calling on state leadership to end what he called the “barbaric suffocation” of Alabamians.

“How many more dates must be forever etched in the memory of our community, and of the men on the row?” Riggs, who is the death penalty abolition coordinator for Amnesty International in Alabama, said.

The following evening, a small group of about nine people gathered a little down the road from the William C. Holman Correctional Center in Atmore — where Smith was executed — to protest and hold a vigil. The sun set over a gravel-and-grass parking lot as they held up signs or raised hands in prayer.

Some, like social worker Tish Warr, openly wept. Warr said her mom was once incarcerated, and the family friend who walked her down the aisle at her wedding once had been on Texas death row but was re-sentenced and released.

“I believe that every person, every human inside of our Department of Corrections has a family and has an impact they have made on the world,” she told a reporter. “And I believe that every single person is capable of change.”

The prison is situated down a curving roadway, where it couldn’t easily be seen from where protesters gathered.

That week, Brown said previously, men at the prison had gathered together for their typical traditions the week of an execution. Those include sharing memories and prayers for the person who is about to die, whom they generally have lived with for years.

Miller was known as a quiet man who enjoyed watching television. He’d become closer to Smith, the previous person executed by nitrogen gas after both survived an earlier execution attempt by lethal injection.

Brown said some wear the white clothes they typically don for visitation. And later bang on doors as the person being executed is led to his death.

“They bang on it and [are] kicking it in the hope that the man can hear that, can hear them,” she said. “And as a way of saying, ‘We’re with you.'”

(source: WBHM news)

**************

Should we allow prisoners on death row to volunteer for execution?

On Oct. 17, while national attention was focused on whether the state of Texas would execute an innocent man, the state of Alabama put Derrick Dearman to death, with much less fanfare.

There was no real doubt about whether he killed 5 people with an ax and gun 8 years ago. As NBC News reports, after he initially entered a not guilty plea, Dearman “fired his 2 court-appointed attorneys and pleaded guilty.”

A gruesome crime, a cruel penalty. Some might think justice was done, case closed.

But there was an important and troubling wrinkle to Dearman’s journey to the death chamber that is worthy of attention: He “volunteered” for his own execution.

The Death Penalty Information Center defines volunteers as “individuals who waived at least part of their ordinary appeals or who terminated proceedings that would have entitled them to additional process prior to their execution.”

Dearman is not the only person in this country’s recent history to fit that description. The center reports that “Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 through to the date below, at least 165 defendants have been volunteers — approximately 10 % of all executions.”

Over the last 2 decades, 2004 was the high-water mark for volunteers. In that single year, 10 people out of the 59 put to death terminated legal proceedings so that they could speed up their date with death.

Those who believe death row inmates should be able to volunteer talk about the need to respect prisoners’ autonomy. Still others compare it to a kind of assisted suicide (with the state doing the assisting).

However, the comparison to assisted suicide is not apt. Nobody on death row can freely assess the options and give meaningful consent to waive meritorious legal appeals. And, even if they could, the state has an independent interest and duty to ensure that executions occur only in cases where there are no outstanding factual or legal issues.

Before looking more closely at why no one should be allowed to volunteer for their own execution, let’s consider Dearman’s case.

Over the course of the legal proceedings against him, Dearman was evaluated by several mental health experts — some retained by the prosecution, others by the defense. Not surprisingly, their opinions differed as to whether he was competent to enter his guilty plea.

In 2022, when the Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama first reviewed Dearman’s case, it noted that he was then claiming he was “not competent to plead guilty and waive his right to counsel or stand trial.” He told the court that his “’serious mental illness, neurocognitive dysfunction, and history of trauma’ established that he was ‘incapable of understanding the nature and object of the proceedings against him’ and that he lacked the ability to consult with counsel or assist in preparing his defense.”

That court was unpersuaded.

Among other things, it noted that the trial court had “specifically questioned Dearman about his alleged request that his attorneys not enter mitigation evidence during sentencing.” Dearman “explained his reasoning for his decision and emphasized that the decision not to present mitigation evidence was his own choice.”

But in April of this year, Dearman changed his mind. He informed Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, Attorney General Steve Marshall and others that he was dropping his appeals and wanted to be executed. At the same time, he fired the attorneys who were then representing him in the appellate process.

In an interview with AL.com, Dearman noted that “his attorney and his father tried to persuade him not to drop the appeals, but it didn’t matter. ‘I knew in my heart I was always going to make this decision.’” He explained that he had initially agreed to pursue appeals “for the sake of his family,” but had decided to give “the victims and their families to get the justice they rightly deserve to start the closure.”

But he also insisted that he did not want his decision to be taken as an endorsement of capital punishment. And in a truly revealing moment, Dearman said “dying is preferable to spending the rest of his life in Alabama’s brutal prison system.”

That preference appears to be one we should respect. But is it really? Or is it a choice made under duress? Dearman’s choice was like a “choice” made when someone puts a gun to your head and tells you that you have a choice: “Your money or your life.”

As Northwestern University Law Professor Meredith Roundtree puts it, prison conditions “contribute to the decision to abandon appeals by wearing the prisoner down to the point that he loses the will to live.” We could reduce the number of people who volunteer to be executed if we addressed the brutality that Dearman referenced and the dehumanizing way in which death penalty states treat those who are awaiting execution.

Many who oppose capital punishment think that their energy should not be spent preventing someone like Dearman from choosing to be executed. It seems much less important than preventing the execution of an innocent person. 

In my view, that is a false choice. Death penalty opponents and all Americans should recognize that neither should have a place in the American legal system. 

(source: Opinion; Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College----thehill.com)

MISSOURI:

Judge hears arguments over death penalty in Jefferson City double killing case

A Cole County judge heard arguments Monday over why a man accused of 1st-degree murder in the death of two people at a Jefferson City bar should not receive the death penalty.

The hearing began at 9 a.m. in the Cole County Circuit Court.

Multiple pieces of research were presented to the court by the defense's expert witness, Wanda Foglia a former law professor and current Capital Jury Project Investigator.

Folgia presented a slideshow featuring more than 100 slides showing discussing the influence of race, premature punishment decision making, death penalty bias, false beliefs in sentencing and more.

The research shows that jurors make sentencing decisions prematurely. The research states nearly half of the jurors in Missouri and across the nation say they decided the defendants punishment before the punishing phase of the trial even starts.

Foglio stated jury selection fails to exclude Automatic Death Penalty jurors, which are jurors who consider death as the only acceptable type of punishment for 6 types of murder that would include almost every capital case. She also stated this process creates bias for the death penalty. Some of those interviewed for the study said jury selection questions made them think the defendant must be or probably was guilty and the most appropriate punishment was probably death.

Foglia also pointed out that sometimes the directions given to the jury are unclear or the jurors are given so much information at once, it would be difficult for them to remember every direction they are told.

When it comes to false beliefs in sentencing, Foglia's research presented showed in all states, jurors underestimated how long a person not given the death penalty would spend in prison. Foglia explained that even though someone can be given a sentence of life in prison without parole, some jurors have a hard time believing that.

Damien Davis, of Kansas City, Missouri, was charged with 2 counts of 1st-degree murder, 2 counts of armed criminal action, 2 counts of unlawful use of a weapon and 1 count of illegal gun possession in the shooting death of 26-year-old Skylar Smock and 43-year-old Corey Thames on Nov. 26, 2022, at J. Pfenny's Sports Grill and Pub.

Police say Davis admitted to firing shots at Thames, but says he unintentionally shot Smock.

Cole County Prosecuting Attorney Locke Thompson filed a notice of intent in September 2023 to seek the death penalty.

In June, Davis' lawyer, Thomas Jacquinot, filed a motion to dismiss the death penalty. The motion argued Davis shouldn’t have been charged with 1st-degree murder, claiming he went into the bar unarmed, was attacked by Thames, took Thames’ gun and accidentally shot Smock, a bar employee, to death before shooting and killing Thames.

The defense also claims Davis feared for his life and fought with Thames for about 30 seconds. Davis' sole focus was on the Thames' gun, which the defense claims was unlawfully brought to the bar.

In August, the Capital Jury Project filed a motion to declare the death penalty unconstitutional, according to court documents.

(source: KMIZ news)

KANSAS:

Legal groups challenge the death penalty in Kansas, 60 years after the state’s last execution----National legal groups brought their challenge in Wyandotte County District Court.

Attorneys and expert witnesses from across the country crammed into a stuffy Wyandotte County District courtroom on Monday to put the death penalty on trial.

National legal advocacy groups set off a series of hearings to argue that the way capital punishment is applied in Kansas is unconstitutional.

It’s one of the earliest suits of its kind filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, a legal advocacy group, joined in this case by the Kansas Death Penalty Unit and law firms Hogan Lovells and Ali & Lockwood.

They filed motions in the separate cases of Hugo Villanueva-Morales, accused of killing several people in a bar shooting, and Antoine Fielder, accused of shooting and killing two Kansas City, Kansas, police officers in 2018. Last month, neighboring Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, another Black man.

Critics have long argued that capital punishment is inhumane, expensive and ineffective at deterring crime. Kansas is one of 27 states where the practice is still legal, though the last state execution here was in 1965.

Now, litigants are latching onto arguments against death qualification, a rule requiring that anyone serving on a capital jury must believe state execution is a valid form of punishment.

Megan Byrne, a staff attorney with the ACLU, said in an interview that Black people are struck from capital juries at higher rates, in part because of death qualification.

Byrne said it creates a self-reinforcing cycle of racial bias in capital trials.

“Death disqualification leads to non-diverse juries, which leads to disproportionate amounts of Black and brown people being convicted, which also feeds into understandable skepticism that Black and brown communities might have about the process — which will then get them kicked off of juries. And so it's really a feedback loop that needs to be broken,” she said.

Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree said the plaintiffs had brought the case to court prematurely. Neither defendant has been tried yet in a capital punishment trial, or faced a potentially biased jury.

Nevertheless, Byrne said she hopes the Wyandotte County district attorney will drop capital punishment charges against the defendants and appoint a committee to investigate their findings on the death penalty.

If that doesn’t happen, the plaintiffs could pursue their case until it reaches the Kansas Supreme Court.

The state’s highest court has previously declined to rule on the death penalty itself. But the ACLU and partners are hoping a new approach focusing on racist outcomes and death qualification — bolstered by recent studies in Kansas — could tip the scales.

A 2022 survey in Sedgwick County, Kansas, estimated that Black respondents were 50% more likely to be disqualified from a capital jury than their white counterparts. The ACLU says women and religious people are also excluded at higher rates.

Alex Valdez, a staff attorney on the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, hopes scholarly evidence, combined with diminishing approval of the death penalty in the American public, will help sway Judge Bill Klapper, who’s overseeing the case.

“It puts Judge Klapper in a very unique position where he's the 1st judge to really hear this full detailed history of the evidence that we're presenting,” Valdez said.

Court briefs point to similar arguments of racial bias in the institution of capital punishment succeeding in cases in Connecticut and Washington state, which recently ended the practice.

Carol Steiker, a subject matter expert at Harvard Law School, was the first witness to testify in Kansas on behalf of the ACLU. She said the evidence presented in this state could support similar efforts elsewhere.

“Each time a state abolishes the death penalty, it makes it easier for other states to do that,” she said.

(source: kansaspublicradio.org)

***********

ACLU starts hearings on Kansas death penalty by emphasizing evidence of racial bias

The death penalty creates racially biased juries, results in wrongful convictions and does not deter crime, attorneys seeking to overturn capital punishment in Kansas said in a court hearing Monday.

A coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union filed a challenge earlier this month seeking to overturn Kansas’ death penalty. Hearings on the issue began Monday in Wyandotte County District Court.

In an opening statement and through witness testimony, attorneys made the case that capital punishment is unconstitutional, in part because of how it skews the makeup of juries. Testimony is expected to last the rest of the week and resume with 1 more witness in January.

“If you are charged with capital murder … you are less likely to get a fair trial,” Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said in her opening statement.

The challenge comes in a pair of capital murder cases against Antoine Fielder and Hugo Villanueva-Morales. Fielder is accused of killing Wyandotte County sheriff’s deputies Patrick Rohrer and Theresa King in 2018 during an inmate transport. Villanueva-Morales is charged with capital murder in a 2019 mass shooting at a bar in Kansas City. He’s also charged with attempted murder, criminal possession of a weapon and several counts of aggravated battery.

Both are awaiting trial.

Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree argued in an opening statement that because neither defendant has been tried and convicted, the ACLU’s challenge is premature.

“At this point, the state stands by the law that neither of these arguments are ripe for hearing,” Dupree said.

Kansas is 1 of 27 states that still allows defendants to be sentenced to death and currently has 9 inmates on death row. It hasn’t carried out an execution since 1965, and it was among the slowest to reinstate the death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed for new capital punishment laws in 1976 — 4 years after it struck down previous laws across the country. Kansas didn’t adopt a new death penalty statute until 1994.

While Kansas courts have considered challenges to the death penalty before, the ACLU is seeking a finding that capital punishment is unconstitutional as it’s applied in cases. One of the witnesses called by the coalition argued the death penalty is “irretrievably broken.”

Attorneys in the case are also challenging Kansas’ practice of “death qualification” for prospective jurors. During jury selection in capital cases, attorneys can disqualify prospective jurors based on their views of the death penalty, which the ACLU argues “disproportionately discriminates against jurors who are Black, women and/or religious,” violating defendants’ rights to an impartial jury and excluding jurors’ rights to participate in democratic functions.

Witnesses called by the ACLU argued historic — and ongoing — racism in the criminal justice system make Black prospective jurors less likely to support the death penalty, resulting in juries that are disproportionately white.

Stubbs said in her opening statement that there’s “no question that death qualification results in juries that are more likely to convict.”

“If you have 2 people … and 1 person is charged with a theft and one person is charged with capital murder, the person charged with the theft is going to get a much, much more diverse jury,” Stubbs said in an interview following the hearing.

Not only are death penalty juries more likely to convict, according to 1 of the witnesses the ACLU called, they’re more likely to wrongfully convict an innocent person. Carol Steiker, a Harvard Law School professor and researcher, said pressure to solve high-profile murder cases can lead to poor police work, which is then presented to juries she argues are racially biased and prone to convict defendants.

“Those juries are way skewed in a way that is not the case … in sentencing on the noncapital side,” Steiker said.

Following Steiker’s testimony, the ACLU called as witnesses 2 historians who argued racism and racial terror is inextricably tied to Kansas’ history, pointing to the prevalence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 19th and 20th centuries and high-profile lynchings across the state.

“Segregation, racism, discrimination is not a southern phenomenon,” said Shawn Alexander, a professor of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas. “… It’s a national phenomenon, and Kansas is part of that and part of that history.”

Stubbs said the testimony demonstrated why Black Kansans are less likely to trust law enforcement or support the death penalty, leading to skewed juries.

The ACLU’s filings argue the Kansas Supreme Court invited this challenge to the death penalty in a decision 2 years ago concerning Jonathan and Reginald Carr, who were convicted in a series of murders in Wichita.

In the case, the justices wrote that allegations that capital juries have higher levels of racial bias and are prone to convict defendants “warrant careful analysis and scrutiny.” But the issue wasn’t sufficiently argued in the court record and the justices wrote in the decision that they couldn’t conduct “any meaningful review” of the issue.

(source: Allison Kite, Kansas Reflector)

OKLAHOMA:

Justice Gorsuch’s recusal may have doomed a man to death

There is considerable doubt about Richard Glossip’s guilt for a brutal 1997 murder in Oklahoma City, for which he has twice been sentenced to death. It also appears unquestionable that he has never gotten a fair trial.

Glossip’s case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, where his fate may actually be determined by the incoherence of the court’s recusal rules.

In a nearly unprecedented move, Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond has joined the defense seeking a new trial for Glossip, on the ground that crucial exculpatory evidence had been unconstitutionally withheld from the defense in his earlier trials.

Under most circumstances that would be enough to resolve the case in Glossip’s favor, but that is not what happened. The Oklahoma courts denied Glossip’s petition, despite Drummond’s intervention, and the Supreme Court appointed an amicus curiae to argue in support of the conviction.

Only 8 justices were on the Supreme Court bench when Glossip’s case was called on Oct. 9. Justice Neil Gorsuch had recused himself months earlier before the Supreme Court granted Glossip’s petition for review.

Although Gorsuch gave no reason for recusal, it was presumably because he had ruled against Glossip in 2013, in a different iteration of the case, regarding different legal issues, when still serving as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Gorsuch is among the court’s most conservative members, but his absence may nonetheless doom Glossip’s appeal.

It seems likely that there are 4 justices inclined to vote in Glossip’s favor. The 3 liberals — Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonya Sotomayor — made their sympathies apparent at the oral argument. Another justice, whose name has not been disclosed, must have provided the necessary 4th vote to accept the case.

It takes 5 justices, however, to reverse a conviction; a 4-4 tie would leave the death sentence in force. Thus, Gorsuch’s recusal has the same effect as a negative vote. Even a small chance of winning his vote would have been a conceivable advantage for Glossip’s case.

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia once explained, “The petitioner needs five votes to overturn the judgment below, and it makes no difference whether the needed fifth vote is missing because it has been cast for the other side, or because it has not been cast at all.”

In other courts, Glossip could have had the option of waiving Gorsuch’s disqualification. Both the Code of Conduct for the lower federal courts and the relevant U.S. recusal statute allow such waivers (also called remittals) in some circumstances if all parties agree to the judge’s participation following full disclosure. The states all have comparable provisions, including Oklahoma.

The Supreme Court’s recently adopted Code of Conduct, however, uniquely omitted a waiver provision, as noted in the court’s commentary, though without providing any explanation or rationale. Perhaps the justices consider it beneath themselves to obtain recusal waivers from litigants, no matter how potentially dire the consequences.

Another unique provision in the Supreme Court’s Code of Conduct could have averted Gorsuch’s recusal if applied. Under Canon 3B(3), “the rule of necessity may override the rule of disqualification.”

According to the Supreme Court’s commentary, such an override may be needed because the “absence of one justice risks the affirmance of a lower court decision by an evenly divided court,” thereby preventing a majority decision “on an important issue.”

Thus, the court continued, “much can be lost when even one justice does not participate in a particular case.”

How could the rule of necessity ever apply, if not in Glossip’s case? Can there be a worse result than the affirmance of the death penalty by an equally divided court? Is there a more important issue than preventing a possibly wrongful execution due to an avoidable recusal?

There is one more twist in the Supreme Court’s recusal practice. In other jurisdictions, disqualification cannot be waived if the judge previously served as a judge “concerning the proceeding or has expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case.”

Perhaps Justice Gorsuch believed this principle should apply to the current Glossip case, despite the rule of necessity and even though the proceedings are distinct and the issues are completely different. The 2013 appeal occurred long before the Oklahoma attorney general learned of the wrongfully withheld evidence and entered the case on Glossip’s behalf.

The legal questions that Gorsuch determined 11 years ago have no bearing on the case as it stands today, which turns on the findings of a 2022 independent investigation commissioned by a bipartisan group of Oklahoma legislators. Its conclusion was that “no reasonable juror hearing [the wrongfully withheld evidence] would have convicted Richard Glossip of 1st-degree murder.”

If Gorsuch still considers disqualification unwaivable, he should have said so.

In April 2023, all 9 justices signed a Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices, noting that “a justice may provide a summary explanation of a recusal decision.” Unfortunately, the provision is discretionary. Gorsuch has chosen to keep mum.

Under the Supreme Court’s jumbled recusal practices, Gorsuch is effectively voting to execute Glossip without reading the briefs or hearing the argument, disqualifying himself even from the petition to stay execution, which was necessary for the court to hear the case with Glossip still alive.

So yes, as the court’s commentary put it, “much can be lost.”

(source: Opinion; Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law----thehill.com)

USA:

Trump Executed Their Loved Ones. They Fear He’ll Have The Chance To Kill Others.

Christopher Vialva’s dying request before the federal government executed him in 2020 was that his mother help other family members of the condemned navigate the process. Before he died, Vialva gave his mom’s contact information to another man on death row, who helped put her in touch with the loved ones of people who received execution dates.

“I wanted to brief them on how the process went down and what to expect, down to the details as far as the physical signs of their loved ones dying. When they’re showing signs of asphyxiation,” said Vialva’s mother, Lisa Brown, noting evidence that the lethal injection drugs can cause the lungs to fill with fluid, creating the sensation of suffocating or drowning to death. “It’s like being waterboarded,” Brown said.

Vialva was 1 of 13 people Donald Trump’s administration executed during the final 6 months of his presidency. The killing spree ended a 17-year de facto moratorium on federal executions and left behind dozens of grieving family members, struggling to make sense of the government’s seemingly arbitrary decision to select their loved ones for execution among the dozens of people on death row.

Days after the Trump administration’s final execution, Joe Biden became the 1st president to openly oppose the death penalty. After campaigning to work with Congress to abolish the federal death penalty, his administration reinstated the moratorium and launched a review into death penalty policies and procedures.

But now, as he nears the end of his presidency, Biden has made no visible progress toward ending the federal death penalty. Abolition bills in the House and Senate have languished, with little push from the White House. The policy review is ongoing, and the Justice Department has continued to seek and enforce death sentences. For the 1st time since 2012, the Democratic Party platform does not call for abolishing the death penalty. Unless Biden uses his clemency power to commute the sentences of the people on federal death row, those who have exhausted their appeals will be vulnerable to execution if Trump is reelected.

“It mortifies me,” said Brown, who has stayed in touch with family members of those who have been executed, as well as people who remain on death row. “The fact that I know there’s going to be more families going through what I went through.”

Brown eventually connected with Bethany Bourgeois George, whose father Alfred Bourgeois was executed months after Brown’s son was killed. George is adamant that her father, who was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter, was innocent. George has spent the past 4 years consumed by her effort to clear his name, posting information about the case on a website, contacting reporters, and urging criminal justice advocates to examine the case.

After Bourgeois’ death, George struggled with suicidal thoughts. “I kept thinking about the areas that I had failed. What I could have done to make things different,” she said. “It became depressing because it felt like no one cared. Everyone’s fighting for the prisoners who have yet to receive an execution. Sometimes it feels like he’s just being forgotten. That hurts.”

“I just feel like I’ve been stuck in this limbo because I know what happened isn’t right. I really want justice for him,” she said.

Diane Mattingly, whose half sister Lisa Montgomery was executed in January 2021, has struggled with similar feelings of personal responsibility for her little sister’s death. Mattingly was 8 years old when child protective services agents removed her from the abusive home where she and Montgomery grew up. Mattingly didn’t tell her foster family about the extent of the abuse she had previously endured; she worried if they knew she had been beaten and raped, they would view her as damaged and wouldn’t want her anymore, she previously told Elle.

“So I decided not to tell them; to this day, it’s my biggest regret in life,” Mattingly said. “If I did speak up, maybe [they] would have gone back for Lisa. Maybe she could have been saved too. Instead, she suffered a lifetime of mental, physical and sexual abuse.”

Mattingly tried unsuccessfully for years to track down Montgomery. They couldn’t connect until Montgomery was charged with killing a pregnant woman, removing the fetus, and claiming the baby was her own.

“What happened to her created her,” Mattingly said of Montgomery. “I’m a success story simply because I got lucky and I got out. But if I would have stayed, I would have been damaged like her too.”

In an effort to save her sister’s life, Mattingly spoke extensively about theirtraumatic childhoods and Montgomery’s resulting mental illness. Before Montgomery died, she wrote in a letter to her friend, “I think my sister is my miracle.”

When Montgomery was executed, it compounded Mattingly’s grief over not being able to protect her baby sister. She went into a “depressive, hibernated state” and “couldn’t even talk,” she said. She felt deeply alone.

“You’re sitting there hurting just like everybody else hurts when they lose somebody,” she said. “People didn’t understand my grief because they saw her crime, not her as an individual or as a sister.”

“Lisa’s not here anymore,” Mattingly continued. “She’s not being punished. But we are.”

After Biden was elected, Brown participated in a video call organized by Death Penalty Action, an abolitionist group, with Department of Justice lawyers. “I chose to take them, step by step, through the day of my son’s murder,” Brown said. “That left them unable to ask any further questions because they were too tore up from what I had said.”

Department of Justice spokesperson Dena Iverson said in an email that the death penalty review is “ongoing” and declined to comment further.

Brown has also kept in touch with several men on federal death row, who have anxiously observed the Biden administration’s inaction on the death penalty. “I don’t think disappointed is a strong enough word,” she said. “Just imagine, every four years you have to worry about whether the next guy coming in is going to kill you.”

Billie Allen has been on federal death row since 1998 for a robbery and murder he has steadfastly insisted he did not commit. Allen was close with several of the people killed under Trump, including Vialva. Ahead of their deaths, he helped his friends prepare last-minute appeals, and raised money for their family members to travel to Terre Haute, Indiana, to say goodbye.

Allen, who is requesting clemency from Biden, sometimes wonders if he’d be among the first to be killed if executions resume, simply because his last name begins with the letter “A.” But he tries to focus instead on proving his innocence.

“Being innocent is a burden,” Allen said. “The fact that I have DNA results and an alibi witness that aren’t taken into account makes me fearful that no administration is going to do anything because it seems like people don’t care. And that’s just based on 26 years of experience from being on death row.”

“I want to know that at the end of the day that I did everything that I could do,” he continued. “So I’m worried, but I don’t let it overwhelm me, because I’ve seen what it can do to people.”

(source: Jessica Schulberg, Huffington Post)

************

Why a Trump win could lead to record numbers of death row executions----The end of his 1st presidency saw a frenzied number of executions – levels not seen since 1896. Should Trump be re-elected, America must be prepared for worse to follow, writes Eric Lewis

Donald Trump has a long history of embracing, even fetishing, the death penalty and using it as a wedge in racial politics. He first came to national prominence by placing full-page ads in the New York Times in the wake of the so-called Central Park Five’s arrest for the brutal rape of a jogger and calling for New York to reinstate the death penalty.

5 minority teenagers were convicted without physical evidence and based upon coerced confessions; they were ultimately exonerated by DNA evidence. Trump has refused ever to apologise and even at last month’s presidential debate claimed there were people “on both sides of that”, and that the victim died, which was false.

Earlier this year, he called for capital punishment for drug crimes, saying “you’ll never solve the problem without the death penalty,” and lauded China’s liberal use of the death penalty for similar offences, after “quick trials”.

He has previously suggested that former chair of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley committed treason for which the death penalty was appropriate. And Trump has repeatedly called for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American – including again yesterday at a major rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York.

This is not just election year rhetoric for the Maga base. If Trump wins, his first presidency is a harbinger of what’s to come. In the waning days of 2020, Trump created a terrible assembly line of death, executing more prisoners on federal death row than in any year since 1896, during the 2nd term of Grover Cleveland.

13 executions were carried out in those last few months, ending a moratorium on the federal death penalty that had been in place for more than 40 years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Trump is likely to try to outdo Cleveland if he gets a 2nd term. Within the 900-page Project 2025 blueprint for a 2nd term is the recommendation that a Trump administration should “do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row”. In other words, they should all be put to death.

Trump has denied having anything to do with Project 2025, but his record is damning on its own. His administration first executed 6 white men and a Native American. 7 of the last 8 people executed were Black (the 8th was a brain-damaged woman).

Many had had their executions stayed by lower courts, only to have those stays promptly overruled by a Trump-controlled Supreme Court that has shown impatience bordering on anger in response to any delays.

Of the prisoners remaining on federal death row today, 56 % are Black, LatinX or Asian. Reprieve, the organisation that I chair in the United States, recently issued a comprehensive analysis of every botched execution in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated, which often resulted in prolonged and painful deaths.

There were 73 in total, an alarmingly high number in and of itself. But twice as many Black people were subjected to them as white people. Even in their final moments, Black defendants suffered the racism that pervades the “machinery of death” as Justice Blackmun called it in 1994, refusing to affirm any further death sentences. The current Supreme Court has no such reservations.

Project 2025 not only calls for emptying federal death row, it also advises how to refill death row with an expansion beyond Constitutional limitations. It recommends that the Justice Department pursue the death penalty “for applicable crimes – particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children – until Congress says otherwise through legislation”.

Supreme Court precedent precludes execution for non-homicides, even in the most horrific cases. In a 2008 decision, Kennedy v Louisiana, a quite conservative Supreme Court held that “where no life was taken in the commission of a crime”, the death penalty, even in a child abuse case, “is unconstitutional under the 8th and 14th amendments.”

Project 2025 is following the Trump playbook in inviting the Supreme Court to use its newfound numbers to overrule decisions that it does not like. In calling for executions of non-homicidal offenders, it is setting up a new Dobbs case – which overturned Roe vs Wade – for capital punishment.

Preventing a 2nd Trump administration would obviously be a way to save the lives of the 44 people on death row and the expansion of the federal death penalty. But Biden can do something now that does not rely on the vagaries of American politics. He can commute those sentences to life imprisonment.

As Trump illustrated with respect to his cronies and his promises to the 6 January insurrectionists, pardons and commutations are final and cannot be undone. Biden should use his power to save lives and limit the squalid, racist politics of capital punishment in the United States.

(source: Eric Lewis is a human rights lawyer who sits on the board of The Independent----independent.co.uk)

BANGLADESH:

Death penalty abolition not feasible in current context: Asif

Asif Nazrul, adviser on law, justice, and parliamentary affairs, said that abolishing the death penalty is not feasible given the current realities in Bangladesh.

He made these remarks during a meeting with UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, on Tuesday (October 29), later briefing reporters.

Asif Nazrul explained, “Mr Turk raised the issue, and I responded that it is not currently possible due to our penal system and a century-old judicial framework, both of which include provisions for the death penalty. The idea of abolishing it, especially amid ongoing trials for heinous crimes, including murders by fascists responsible for thousands of deaths, is not practical.”

He added that any significant legal reform must align with societal aspirations.

The UN has been involved in providing support for legal reforms, particularly in improving the standards of trials within the international criminal tribunal framework.

Asif Nazrul said, “They have assured cooperation in areas such as forensic support, technical assistance, and capacity building.”

Assuring Turk, Asif emphasised that justice in these tribunals is pursued not out of revenge but out of commitment to fairness, with transparency as a guiding principle: “Anyone is welcome to observe these trials.”

Asif also highlighted Turk’s support for the government’s reform initiatives, especially in the wake of the recent student-led uprising and transition to an interim government.

Turk expressed satisfaction with the government’s reform efforts.

Two key expectations were communicated by the High Commissioner, including the independence of the judiciary.

“I assured him of our commitment,” Asif said, noting that the Chief Justice has already proposed establishing a separate judicial secretariat—a concept accepted in principle, with further discussions planned to finalise details. Turk was also briefed on the proposed Judicial Reforms Commission.

Asif said the High Commissioner was informed of the government’s reform plans for both the High Court and lower courts, which aim to enhance judicial independence. Turk expressed satisfaction with these developments.

(source: jagonews24.com)

**********

Adviser: No abolition of death penalty before trials of fascists----‘Volker Türk expressed full support for the interim government’

The question of changing the death penalty provisions in Bangladesh will not arise before the trials of the fascists are completed, said Law Adviser Prof Asif Nazrul has said.

He made the comment in response to questions from journalists after a meeting with UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Tuesday.

Asif Nazrul said Volker Türk expressed full support for the current interim government and emphasized the need for an independent judiciary.

“I told him we are continuing our work,” he added.

Adviser Nazrul said Volker Türk raised the issue of the crimes tribunal and questioned whether the death penalty provisions could be abolished.

In response, he asserted: “The question of changing this does not arise before the trials of the fascists.”

Highlighting that the government’s journey towards elections has begun, the adviser said that a search committee has been formed for establishing the Election Commission.

During this time, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk addressed journalists, stating that he discussed the establishment of the rule of law and human rights issues with the law adviser.

He emphasized that these 2 matters are interconnected and urged the interim government to ensure human rights in its various reform initiatives.

Regarding the July deaths, he mentioned that a fact-finding committee is currently working on it, adding: “We are taking this matter seriously, and our headquarters is monitoring the entire situation.”

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Tuesday began his 2-day Dhaka visit to discuss human rights issues.

Toufique Hasan, director general of the Public Diplomacy Wing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, received him at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport.

Türk is scheduled to hold a number of meetings with senior officials and civil society representatives, among others.

During his visit, the high commissioner will meet Chief Adviser Dr Muhammad Yunus, said the UN office in Dhaka.

The UN rights chief will meet advisers for different ministries, the chief justice, the army chief and the heads of several reform commissions.

(source: dhakatribune.com)

***********

3 sentenced to death for killing mother, daughter in Habiganj in 2021----The condemned convicts are Manir Mia, 22, son of Mahib Ullah, Amir Hossain, 35, son of Alamgir Mia and Abdul Hannan, son of Tenu Mia of Bahubal upazila of the district

A Habiganj court today (29 October) sentenced three people to death in a case filed for killing a woman and her daughter in 2021.

Additional District and Sessions Judge Mohammad Yeasir Arafat handed down the punishment.

The condemned convicts are Manir Mia, 22, son of Mahib Ullah, Amir Hossain, 35, son of Alamgir Mia and Abdul Hannan, son of Tenu Mia of Bahubal upazila of the district.

According to the prosecution, the convicts stormed into the house of Sanjit Chandra at Putijuri in Bahubal upazila in a bid to commit robbery on 17 March 2021.

Being resisted, they killed Anjalai Malakar, 35, wife of Sanjit, and her 8-year-old daughter, Puja Malakar and managed to flee the scene.

Sanjit filed a case with Bahubal Police Station the following day.

Meanwhile, Prajit Sarkar, investigating officer of the case submitted a chargesheet against the 3 accused.

(source: tbsnews.net)

IRAN----executions

Prisoners in Kahnuj Prison Join the “No to Executions Tuesdays” Campaign

Prisoners in Kahnuj Prison have declared their support for the “No to Executions Tuesdays” campaign, the initiative calling for the abolition of the death penalty in Iran. According to reports obtained by Iran HRM, detainees in Kahnuj will join the campaign on Tuesday, October 29, 2024, by engaging in hunger strikes, demanding an end to capital punishment in Iranian prisons. With this addition, a total of 24 prisons across the country are now participating in the weekly protests.

Last week, prisoners in Sheiban Prison, Ahvaz, also joined the campaign by participating in a hunger strike as part of the “No to Executions Tuesdays” initiative. These weekly protests, which have gained support among inmates nationwide, continue to raise awareness about the frequency and conditions of executions within Iran’s penal system.

The prisons with hunger-striking participants in the “No to Executions Tuesdays” campaign now include:

Evin Prison (Women’s Ward, Wards 4 and 8)

Qezel Hesar Prison (Units 3 and 4)

Central Prison of Karaj

Greater Tehran Central Penitentiary

Khorramabad Prison

Arak Prison

Asadabad Prison, Isfahan

Nezam Prison, Shiraz

Bam Prison

Mashhad Prison

Lakan Prison, Rasht (both women’s and men’s wards)

Qaemshahr Prison

Ardabil Prison

Tabriz Prison

Urmia Prison

Salmas Prison

Khoy Prison

Naqadeh Prison

Saqqez Prison

Baneh Prison

Marivan Prison

Kamyaran Prison

Sheiban Prison, Ahvaz

These demonstrations, which have sparked significant attention both domestically and internationally, reflect a growing movement within Iran’s prison population against the death penalty. The weekly protests underscore an urgent call to pressure the Iranian regime to stop executing prisoners.”

(source: iran-hrm.com)

****************

EU ‘considering measures’ against Iran following execution of terror ringleader Jamshid Sharmahd

The European Union condemns the execution of 69-year-old German-Iranian Jamshid Sharmahd and will consider taking measures in response, the bloc’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said Tuesday. Sharmehed, the ringleader of the US-based Tondar (Thunder) terrorist group, who for years planned numerous terrorist operations against Iran, was executed on Monday.

“We condemn his killing in the strongest possible terms. The EU strongly opposes the death penalty at all times and in all circumstances. It is a violation of the right to life and the ultimate denial of human dignity,” Borrell wrote on X.

“The EU is considering measures in response,” he added.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also slammed Iran for the execution of Sharmahdn and described his death as a “scandal”.

“The execution of Jamshid Sharmahd by the Iranian regime is a scandal that I condemn in the strongest possible terms,” Scholz said in a post on X.

Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, also said in a post on X that Berlin has repeatedly made it clear to Tehran that “the execution of a German national will have serious consequences”.

Sharmahd, who was convicted last year, was executed on Monday, according to the Iranian Judiciary’s Mizan news agency citing a statement by the Tehran Prosecutor-General’s Office.

At the behest of his masters in Western intelligence agencies, Sharmard has for years designed numerous terrorist operations against the Islamic Republic of Iran. the statement said.

Sharmard, who was responsible for the martyrdom and injury of hundreds of innocent Iranians, was ultimately sentenced by a competent court and received his due punishment on October 28, it added.

The Revolutionary Court of Tehran had handed Sharmahd the death sentence for committing “corruption on earth” by planning and orchestrating terrorist acts in the Islamic Republic.

The terrorist ringleader, who held German citizenship but was also a US resident, led the pro-monarchist group.

He was behind a series of terrorist attacks, including a 2008 attack against a religious congregation center in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz, which killed 14 people, including 5 women and an infant, and wounded hundreds more.

(source: ipfnews.com)

**************

Mrs. Rajavi Strongly Condemns the Kidnapping and Execution of Jamshid Sharmahd

Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has once again condemned the kidnapping and execution of individuals abducted by the bloodthirsty Iranian regime. She called on the governments of Germany, Sweden, and France to immediately raise three cases of kidnapping leading to execution from these countries at the UN Security Council and demand punishment for the Iranian regime in this regard.

Mrs. Rajavi recalled that the Iranian Resistance had, 4 years ago, including in a statement on November 1, 2020, called for the oversight and action by the governments of Sweden, France, and Germany in the kidnapping cases and trials of Farajollah Kaab Osayved, Jamshid Sharmahd, and Ruhollah Zam by the terrorist dictatorship ruling Iran, and for the return of these three individuals to Sweden, France, and Germany.

The Iranian Resistance at that time called for action by the UN Security Council to compel the mullahs’ regime to fully respect the rights of Osayved, Sharmahd, and Zam according to international laws, and declared that the regime’s leaders and officials should be prosecuted and brought to justice for numerous kidnappings and assassinations outside Iran.

Mrs. Rajavi emphasized that even today, if there is delay in this important matter and if it is limited to only verbal condemnations, the regime will become more emboldened in kidnapping and hostage-taking. The gifting of terrorist diplomat-bomber Assadollah Assadi and Hamid Noury to this regime by the Belgian and Swedish governments has made it much more brazen in terrorism and committing crimes.

The mullahs’ Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS) and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) must be placed on the terrorist list. The agents and mercenaries of the MOIS and the IRGC must be expelled from Europe and EU countries, and the regime’s embassies, which are centers of terrorism, espionage, and bombing, must be closed.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)

(source: ncr-iran.org)

************

8 Prisoners Transferred to Solitary Confinement for Imminent Execution in Ghezel Hesar Prison

Yesterday, October 28, 8 prisoners in Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj, previously sentenced to death on drug-related charges, were moved to solitary confinement in preparation for their executions.

According to HRANA, the news agency of Human Rights Activists in Iran, these prisoners were transferred to solitary as part of the process to carry out their sentences. HRANA is actively investigating further details, including the identities of the prisoners, and will report as more information becomes available.

According to data gathered by the Department of Statistics and Publication of Human Rights Activists, Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj witnessed the highest number of executions in 2023, with Zahedan Prison following closely behind.

(source: en-hrana.org)

************

Mansour Hadadi and Esmail Shehbakhsh Executed in Birjand

Mansour Hadadi and Esmail Shehbakhsh (photo), 2 men on death row for drug-related offences, were executed in Birjand Central Prison.

According to Haal Vsh, a man was executed in Birjand Central Prison on 22nd October. His identity has been reported as Mansour Hadadi from Zabol who was sentenced to death for drug-related charges by the Revolutionary Court. He was executed without his family being notified and the right to a last visit with them.

Another man was also executed at the prison on 27th October. His identity has been reported as Esmail Shehbakhshi (Rahimdad Barahouyi Zirkari), a 47-year-old Baluch man from Zahedan. He was arrested in Birjand for carrying 60 kilograms of opium on 30 May 2021 and sentenced to death in “a case full of ambiguity.”

At the time of writing, their executions have not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

*************

Shahin Dehghani Executed in Malayer

Shahin Dehghani, a man on death row for drug-related offences, was executed in Malayer Prison.

According to HRANA news agency, a man was executed in Malayer Prison in Hamedan province on 22nd October. His identity has been reported as Shahin Dehghani who was sentenced to death for drug-related charges by the Revolutionary Court.

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

********

Hassan Dorostkar and Soleiman Malekinejad Executed in Dezful

Hassan Dorostkar and Soleiman Malekinejad, 2 men on death row for murder and drug-related charges, were executed in Maragheh Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Maragheh Prison in Eastern Azerbaijan province on 21st October. His identity has been established as Hassan Dorostkar who was arrested 4 years ago and sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

Another man was executed at the prison on 23rd October. His identity has been established as 35-year-old Soleiman Maleknejad from Shabestar who was on death row for drug-related offences for 3 years ago.

At the time of writing, their executions have not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

***********

Khaled Chenari and Abdolnabi Kalani Executed in Dezful

Khaled Chenari and Abdolnabi Kalani, 2 co-defendants on death row for murder, were executed in Dezful Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, 2 men were executed in Dezful Prison in Lorestan province on 27th October. Their identities have been established as 30-year-old Khaled Chenari (photo) and 26-year-old Abdolnabi Kalani who were sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder in the same case by the Criminal Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Khaled Chenari and Abdolnabi Kalani were arrested in the same case 3 years ago. They were transferred from Ramhormoz Prison for their execution in Dezful Prison.”

At the time of writing, their executions have not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 1 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

***********

Abdol Nazari Executed in Lorestan

Abdol Nazari, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Nourabad Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Nourabad Prison in Lorestan province on 16th October. His identity has been established as 46-year-old Abdol Nazari, a father of 4 who was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Abdol Nazari was arrested for the murder of his paternal cousin 5 years ago. There was a fight amongst a group over farm land and it was never established who had committed the killing but Abdol was ultimately sentenced to qisas.”

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

************

Kidnapped Iranian-German dissident Jamshid Sharmahd Executed; IHRNGO Calls for Strong International Reaction

Jamshid Sharmahd, a German-Iranian citizen kidnapped by Islamic Republic forces from the UAE in 2020, was executed at an undisclosed location.

Iran Human Rights condemns Jamshid Sharmahd’s execution and calls for a strong reaction by the international community to his execution and the wave of executions in Iran.

IHRNGO Director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said: “The execution of Jamshid Sharmahd is a case of extrajudicial killing of a hostage aimed at covering up the recent failures of the hostage-takers of the Islamic Republic. Jamshid Sharmahd was kidnapped in the United Arab Emirates and unlawfully transferred to Iran, where he was sentenced to death without a fair trial by the Revolutionary Court. The entire process, including his arrest, conviction, and execution, constitutes a serious violation of international law. The international community must condemn the extrajudicial killing of Jamshid Sharmahd in the strongest possible terms.”

According to the judiciary’s Mizan news agency, Jamshid Sharmahd was executed at an undisclosed location on 28 October after his sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court. He was sentenced to death for charges of “efsad- fil-arz (corruption on earth) by planning and directing terrorist acts” in February 2023.

Jamshid Sharmahd was a German-Iranian dissident activist who was kidnapped on a layover in Dubai when flying to the United States, his country of residence, from India. He last spoke to his wife on 28 July 2020. On 1 August, Minister of Intelligence and Security Mahmoud Alavi announced on state television that Jamshid Sharmahd had been arrested “following a complex operation” and aired a video of him stating his name while blindfolded with a black cloth. Charges related to a 2010 Mosque bombing, for which 3 men had already been executed, were brought against him.

After being held in pre-trial detention for over a year and a half, his 1st hearing was held on 6 February 2022. Presided by Judge Salavati, a “hanging judge” on the US sanctions list, Branch 15 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court held multiple public hearings on the accusations of “efsad- fil-arz by planning and directing terrorist acts”, including the 2010 bombing. He was sentenced to death on 21 February 2023. Jamshid was held in solitary confinement following his arrest and denied legal representation, due process and the right to a fair trial. The confirmation of his sentence by the Supreme Court was announced by authorities on 26 April 2023.

Arresting political dissidents outside of Iran is not unprecedented. Ruhollah Zam, the director of Amad News Telegram channel, was arrested in Iraq in October 2019 and transported to Iran. He was executed on 12 December 2020. Iranian-Swedish dissident, Habib Chaab was also kidnapped from Turkey in October 2020 and executed on 6 May 2023.

(source for all: iranhr.net)

***************

Iran executes German-Iranian Jamshid Sharmahd: judiciary

Iranian authorities on Monday executed German-Iranian Jamshid Sharmahd, who had been detained since 2020, the judiciary's Mizan website said.

"After going through the judicial process and the final approval of the court decision by the Supreme Court, the death sentence of Jamshid Sharmahd... was carried out this morning," the website said, following Sharmahd's conviction for "corruption on earth".

Sharmahd, a German citizen of Iranian descent in his late 60s, was seized by Iranian authorities in August 2020 while travelling through the United Arab Emirates, according to his family.

Iran, which does not recognise dual citizenship, announced his arrest after a "complex operation", without specifying how, where or when he was seized.

Sharmahd was sentenced to death in February 2023 for the capital offence of "corruption on earth", a sentence later confirmed by the Supreme Court in the Islamic republic.

He had been convicted of playing a role in a 2008 mosque bombing in the southern city of Shiraz, in which 14 people were killed and 300 wounded.

Sharmahd was also accused of leading the Tondar group that reportedly aims to topple Iran's government, which calls it a "terrorist" organisation.

Mizan said Sharmahd was "a criminal terrorist" who "was hosted by American and European countries and was operating under the complex protection of their intelligence services".

(source: Agence France-Presse)

OCTOBER 28, 2024:

TEXAS:

Robert Roberson, whose execution was stayed by Texas Supreme Court, expected to testify before legislative panel on Monday

Robert Roberson, the Texas man whose execution was halted by the state Supreme Court, is expected to testify before a legislative panel on Monday.

Roberson was set to become the 1st person in the U.S. executed for a shaken baby syndrome murder conviction before the court intervened late Thursday night in a dramatic turn of events.

Lawmakers are now seeking to reexamine the controversial medical theory that played a pivotal role in his conviction.

The Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence of the Texas House of Representatives will start hearing testimony at noon Monday.

Roberson issued a statement after his late-night stay of execution by the Texas Supreme Court, praising God and thanking his supporters.

Texas Supreme Court issues stay

That ruling came after a rollercoaster legal ordeal in which the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals earlier Thursday night denied a motion for a stay of execution, reversing a temporary order granted by Travis County Judge Jessica Mangrum. That state appeals court ruling was in response to an appeal from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton of Mangrum's ruling.

In an effort to delay the execution, Roberson was subpoenaed Wednesday night by a bipartisan group of Texas state lawmakers on the state House Criminal Justice Committee after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles earlier in the day denied Roberson's request for clemency.

"The underlying criminal-law matter is within the Court of Criminal Appeals' authority, but the relief sought here is civil in nature, as are the claims that have been presented to the district court," Texas Supreme Court Justice Evan Young wrote in his opinion. "Whether the legislature may use its authority to compel the attendance of witnesses to block the executive branch's authority to enforce a sentence of death is a question of Texas civil law, not its criminal law."

The execution warrant expires at midnight. A state prison spokesperson previously said staff and guards were in place and ready if all of Roberson's appeals had been exhausted.

The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday evening also denied a request to stay the execution, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing in her ruling that the "Supreme Court is powerless to act without a colorable federal claim, and because the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to recommend clemency, only 1 remedy remains: an executive grant of a reprieve delaying Roberson's execution by thirty days."

Such a reprieve would need to come from Gov. Greg Abbott.

"An executive reprieve of thirty days would provide the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles with an opportunity to reconsider the evidence of Roberson's actual innocence," Sotomayor wrote. "That could prevent a miscarriage of justice from occurring: executing a man who has raised credible evidence of actual innocence."

Mangrum's restraining order came after Texas lawmakers issued a subpoena to 57-year-old Roberson Wednesday night in a last-minute legal effort to stop his execution, which would be the first in the country connected to a shaken baby syndrome diagnosis. Roberson had been scheduled to receive a lethal injection at 6 p.m. Central Time Thursday for the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in the East Texas city of Palestine.

"This is an extraordinary remedy," Republican state Rep. Jeff Leach of Plano said during arguments Thursday. "But it is not undue."

Republicans and Democrats on the House Criminal Justice Committee believe Roberson deserves a new trial based on the medical theory that the death of his chronically ill daughter was caused by violent shaking, known as shaken baby syndrome, which has been widely dismissed by many experts as junk science.

Leach said over 80 legislators signed a letter "calling for the pause button into Roberson's execution," believing his testimony is vitally necessary.

"We have been joined by people from the far left of the Texas House to people on the far extreme right - people we have had hard times working together with other issues," state Rep. John Bucy (D-Williamson County) said in Huntsville Thursday. "We've come together because people in the House that have looked at this closely and looked at the evidence know that Robert Roberson is an innocent man and this execution should not move forward."

The subpoena came after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Wednesday denied a request for clemency for Roberson.

Over the last two days, Roberson's attorney with The Innocence Project expressed confidence that his life would be spared.

"We asked the Supreme Court to stop Texas from committing a devastating, irreparable mistake because Robert Roberson has not received due process," Roberson's attorney Gretchen Sween said in response to the decision from SCOTUS. "Yesterday, the Texas House of Representatives heard a full day of testimony documenting the failure of that process. No one who heard that testimony could be left with any doubt that Robert is completely innocent and never received a fair process."

Concerns Roberson's supporters raise

Roberson's lawyers and supporters don't deny that head and other injuries from child abuse are real, claiming doctors misdiagnosed Curtis' injuries as being related to shaken baby syndrome. They also claim that Roberson's conviction was based on faulty and now outdated scientific evidence related to shaken baby syndrome.

The diagnosis refers to a serious brain injury caused when a child's head is hurt through shaking or some other violent impact, like being slammed against a wall or thrown on the floor.

His supporters said new evidence has shown the girl died not from abuse but from complications related to severe pneumonia.

Those protesting Thursday's scheduled execution included the police detective who helped send Roberson to death row, Brian Wharton.

"Let me just say, Robert is an innocent man," said Wharton. "But more than that, he is a kind man. He is a gentle man. He is a gracious man."

The American Academy of Pediatrics, other medical organizations and prosecutors say the diagnosis is valid and that doctors look at all possible things, including any illnesses, when determining if injuries were attributable to shaken baby syndrome.

The Anderson County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted Roberson, has said in court documents that after a 2022 hearing to consider the new evidence in the case, a judge rejected the theories that pneumonia and other diseases caused Curtis' death.

Prosecutors maintain Roberson's new evidence does not disprove their case that Curtis died from injuries inflicted by her father.

What courts have said about shaken baby syndrome

In recent years, courts around the country have overturned convictions or dropped charges centered on shaken baby syndrome, including in California, Ohio, Massachusetts and Michigan.

In a ruling last week in a different shaken baby syndrome case out of Dallas County, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered a new trial after finding scientific advancements related to the diagnosis would now likely result in an acquittal in that case.

But the appeals court has repeatedly denied Roberson's request to stay his execution, most recently last week.

In the U.S., at least 8 individuals have been sentenced to death because of shaken baby syndrome, said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Two of these eight have been exonerated and Roberson is the only one to have received execution dates.

"According to the National Registry of Exonerations, at least 30 people across the country have been exonerated based on this discredited scientific theory," Maher said.

But Danielle Vazquez, executive director of the Utah-based National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, said a 2021 research article found that 97% of more than 1,400 convictions related to shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma from 2008 to 2018 were upheld and that such convictions were rarely overturned on the grounds of medical evidence.

(source: CBS News)

****************

Lawmakers could soon travel to death row to speak with inmate Robert Roberson----Rep. Jeff Leach says logistics are being worked out to keep everyone safe during what would amount to a field hearing

Texas lawmakers still don’t know when they will hear directly from a Texas man whose execution was suddenly halted after an unprecedented, last-ditch effort.

Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Collin County, said they’re working actively to make the testimony happen and he’s hopeful they’ll soon hear from Robert Robertson in person.

In fact, Rep. Leach thinks it’s so important for lawmakers to hear from him face-to-face, that members of the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee might soon meet with Roberson on death row at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston.

“Look, anything can happen logistically. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. We’re working collaboratively, and have been for many days now, with House Administration, with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, with DPS, with local law enforcement there to make this safe for everybody involved, most importantly him,” Rep. Leach told us on Inside Texas Politics.<>P> Roberson, 57, was set to be executed Thursday, Oct. 17, in connection with the 2003 conviction in the death of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis.

He has claimed his innocence for roughly 2 decades with his lawyer citing junk science as the reason for his conviction.

According to the Associated Press, Roberson would have been the 1st person in the U.S. to be executed over a "Shaken Baby Syndrome" conviction.

And that’s why Leach feels it’s so important to get this right and take the time to hear from Roberson.

“There’s a reason that we issued a subpoena. And what we did was unprecedented, I believe, anywhere in American history,” Leach said. “So, we did so because we have serious questions about this case, about the system, about his guilt or innocence, about whether a crime even occurred.”

The Texas Supreme Court ultimately blocked Roberson’s execution.

And a war of words between the varying branches of government has ensued ever since.

Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have made clear they want the execution to continue, with Abbott saying lawmakers “stepped out of line” and Paxton posting the entire autopsy report of the young victim, Nikki Curtis.

8 House Republicans filed an amicus brief in the Texas Supreme Court asking for justice for Curtis and urging the execution to continue.

But Rep. Leach argues that the legislative branch and the lawmakers seeking more information have a vital role to play in death penalty cases.

“We have seen a problem. We have seen a potentially innocent Texan within 20 steps and 20 minutes of being put to death by the state receiving a lethal injection of Pentobarbital, something all of us, every branch of government has to own when we do that,” he emphasized.

Rep. Leach stresses he and other lawmakers aren’t looking to release Roberson onto the street tomorrow, arguing instead for a new trial.

For now, the Texas Supreme Court has only delayed Roberson’s execution.

But the clock has been reset and there’s no new date yet.

(source: WFAA news)

SOUTH CAROLINA:

Richard Moore is to be Executed Nov. 1: A Former State Supreme Court Justice, Former Corrections Department Chief and Jurors are Among Thousands Advocating for His Clemency

Richard Moore, a 59-year-old father and grandfather, is scheduled to be executed in South Carolina on Nov. 1 for the 1999 killing of a convenience store clerk in a shootout, though Moore entered the store without a weapon. His attorneys said he never intended to kill anyone and the death penalty is not a fair punishment. Advocates for commutation include a former state supreme court justice, jurors, a former director of the state’s department of corrections and more.

Moore’s attorney, John Blume, said that when Moore entered Nikki’s Speedy Mart in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, he attempted to buy beer and cigarettes but did not have enough money to pay. Blume said Moore tried to use change from the coin plate on the store counter but the clerk, James Mahoney, placed a gun on the counter. Blume said the two struggled for the gun, then Mahoney pulled out a second gun. Moore was shot in the arm by Mahoney, who was shot by Moore and died. Blume said Moore took money from the register as an afterthought, fled the scene and was arrested as he sought help for his wounded arm.

Prosecutors came up with a narrative that Moore had done the “armed robbery” to support a drug addiction, despite the fact that Moore went into the store without a weapon. Moore’s lawyers throughout his trial, a post conviction relief hearing in 2011, and a habeas petition to the Supreme Court said that he had no intent to rob the store or harm the clerk..

“The state alleged that he went in there to commit a robbery to get drugs, but the problem with that is in general, people don’t go into a store to commit a robbery without a weapon,” Blume said. “Moore clearly went into the store without a weapon.”

According to a statement from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), “if executed, he would be the first put to death in the modern death penalty era who was unarmed initially and subsequently defended himself when threatened.” The DPIC also noted that Moore is “the only South Carolina death row prisoner to have been sentenced by a jury with no Black jurors, and if executed, he would be the first put to death in the state’s modern death penalty era who was unarmed initially and subsequently defended himself when threatened.

Moore’s advocates argue that his case was tainted with racism and was collateral “in a political football game in what otherwise should not have been a death penalty eligible case.” During the time of Moore’s trial, there was an election for solicitor (chief prosecutor) in which the incumbent lost and sentenced Moore to death in his final days in office, challenging that if his opponent overturned Moore’s death sentence, he was soft on crime.

The incumbent solicitor, Holman Gossett, had a history of seeking the death penalty in 43% of eligible cases, but never in a case where the victim was Black. According to DPIC, in 75% of death penalty cases nationally, the victim was white. The death penalty is also disproportionately applied to Black people, as they make up 34% of executions despite being 13% of the population. There have been 1,602 executions since 1970, and South Carolina was responsible for 44 of them. Moore would be the 21st person executed in the U.S. this year.

In addition, the prosecutors in Moore’s case struck all Black people from the jury, resulting in Moore receiving his conviction through an all white jury, the last person of color on South Carolina’s death row to be convicted by such a jury. Blume said that Moore filed a petition with the state supreme court for a retrial due to the role the all-white jury played.

“The punishment does not fit the crime,” Rev. Hillary Taylor, executive director of the South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (SCADP), said in an interview. “Richard Moore is not the worst of the worst; he was somebody who experienced racism in his trial process.”

Moore has exhausted all his appeals. In 2022, he filed a habeas petition with the state supreme court to challenge the proportionality of his death sentence to his crime. He argued that his sentence was excessive compared to other similar cases, but the Supreme Court denied this petition. State Supreme Court Justice Kaye Hearn wrote a dissent, in which she called the system broken and disagreed with the conclusion that Moore’s sentence was fair.

“Every murder is tragic, even heinous to the victim’s family, but the death penalty is such a final and devastating penalty that it should only be meted out in the worst of the worst cases,” Hearn said. “I just did not find that the facts of Richard Moore’s case rose to that level.”

At the time, Hearn had spent 13 years on the court and voted to affirm 11 death sentences, having never dissented. She said that Moore’s case is an outlier and called it a “relic of a bygone era. “I think it’s tragic, I do not believe Richard Moore deserves to die,” Hearn said. “I think that that tells me our system is not working as it should.”

Moore’s legal team has sent a clemency petition to South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster to stop the execution. However, the governor has stated that he has no intention of commuting Moore’s death sentence.

Jon Ozmint, former director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, contended In a letter to the governor that Moore’s death sentence should be commuted to a life without parole sentence because of the uncontested fact that Moore did not have a weapon when he entered the store so “he certainly did not plan to commit armed robbery.”

Ozmint wrote that Moore’s case “would not be considered for the death penalty in other counties in the state” and that he has watched as many other men “whose crimes were far more heinous and planned than Mr. Moore” never considered for death sentences and earned parole.

“If he intended to rob the store before he entered, he would have carried a gun,” Ozmint wrote. “Since he did not take a weapon, he clearly did not enter the store with intent to commit armed robbery.”

Ozmint wrote that he recommends commutation of Moore’s death sentence because he believes that it “would have a positive influence on hundreds of offenders who would be impacted by Richard’s story of redemption and his positive example.” He said that since Moore arrived on death row in October 2001, he has only had 2 minor discipline reports at the beginning of his sentence, and has become a “born-again follower of Jesus.” Ozmint believes that “SCDC needs good lifers, life without parole lifers, to serve as role models” and that Moore could be one of them.

“The staff there know who can be trusted and Richard is clearly one of several reliable and respected inmates on the row,” Ozmint wrote. “His story and his manner of living would allow him to be an influential force for good in the general population, with an ability to have a positive impact on the most recalcitrant and hopeless young offenders.”

In addition to Ozmint, Blume said that several jurors from his case and individual citizens have written letters of support to the governor asking for Moore’s life to be spared.

Advocates contend that executing Moore only creates more victims. He has two children and grandchildren who will lose him if the state proceeds with the death penalty. Blume said that with Moore’s guiding hand, his children were able to lead successful lives — his daughter joined the Air Force and his son was a high school valedictorian and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Blume said that executing Moore would be “continuing the cycle of violence on these children and grandchildren that he has.”

“My father is always supportive and has shown immense love throughout the distance, throughout these 2 decades,” Alexandria Moore told MSNBC in 2022. “Our relationship has remained strong. The distance between us, he doesn’t let it affect his parenting at all. It’s incredible the effort he puts in to make sure that I know he loves me.”

Blume also said that Moore is “trying to remain optimistic that … the governor will grant clemency, but he’s also trying to prepare for his execution.”

“He understands that the odds are long, but he wants to, and does remain, somewhat optimistic,” Blume said.

Last month, South Carolina resumed carrying out executions for the first time in a decade with Khalil Allah, also known as Freddie Owens, who was convicted for the murder of a woman who Allah maintained he did not kill. Two days before the execution, his codefendant withdrew his statement and said Allah was not even present when the robbery in which she was killed was happening. He said that Allah was framed, but the state proceeded with his execution anyway. There are more than 30 people on South Carolina’s death row.

There is a SCADP petition circulating, calling on the governor to stop Moore’s execution and grant Moore clemency, which has close to 4,000 signatures at the time of publication. An additional petition by Death Penalty Action has more than 7,300 signatures. Rev. Taylor said that SCADP will continue holding vigils and rallies to educate the public on Moore’s case and give people action steps for how to advocate.

(source: scheerpost.com)

INDIANA:

Indiana death row inmate Jospeh Corcoran files to reopen appeal window in death penalty case

Legal counsel for an Indiana man on death row have petitioned for the Allen County Superior Court to throw out a 2-decade-old ruling that struck the option for post-conviction relief.

Joseph Corcoran was convicted of murdering 4 people in Fort Wayne in 1997 and was sentenced to death in 1999.

It wasn’t until earlier this summer, in June, that Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita filed to schedule an execution date — after the state obtained pentobarbital, a lethal drug increasingly being used around the country to carry out death warrants. Corcoran’s execution — scheduled for Dec. 18 — would be the first in Indiana since 2009.

In the Thursday filing, Corcoran’s Indiana public defender, Amy Karozos, maintained that her client “was and continues to be severely mentally ill.”

In the early 2000s, when the time was still ripe for Corcoran to initiate post-conviction review, he refused to sign the post-conviction petition, Karozos said.

Given recent, favorable exceptions made by state supreme court justices to allow tardy petitions — along with an increasing tendency nationwide to exempt those with mental illness from the death penalty — the lawyer argued for her client’s appeal window to be reopened.

“Corcoran has repeatedly refused to act in a competent manner which resulted in lost opportunities to save his life throughout this case and permit the State to assist in his suicide,” Karozos wrote in the motion, adding later that the state should have had to litigate a post-conviction case years ago “had Corcoran’s mental illness not severely interfered with his ability to sign his post-conviction petition in a timely manner.”

“Any prejudice the State of Indiana may suffer is outweighed by the ‘injustice’ suffered by Corcoran,” she continued.

Corcoran’s attorneys seek 2nd chance at petition

State attorneys originally offered Corcoran a life sentence if he would accept a plea or waive jury. He refused, prompting the state to file a request for the death penalty two days later, according to court records.

At sentencing, Corcoran stated that he wanted to waive all his appeals.

Indiana’s Supreme Court originally set a Sept. 9, 2003, deadline for Corcoran to sign and file his post-conviction petition, which could have removed him from death row.

Generally, post-conviction relief allows a criminal defendant to directly challenge the legality of a portion of their criminal trial, the judgment of their conviction, or the sentence they have received.

When that deadline day arrived, however, lawyers instead filed a motion asking the court to assess Corcoran’s competency based on his mental health history, a recent mental health exam, his department of correction records and observations made by his legal counsel.

Lawyers simultaneously submitted a post-conviction relief petition that lacked Corcoran’s signature.

Shortly after, the trial court struck the petition because it was not signed or verified by Corcoran by the Indiana Supreme Court’s deadline.

A post-conviction court held a hearing in October 2003 to determine whether Corcoran was incompetent to waive his appeals. Corcoran’s counsel presented 3 experts, including a board-certified forensic psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, and a neuropsychologist — all testified that Corcoran was incompetent to waive his appeals, Karozos said. The judge also questioned Corcoran during those proceedings.

The post-conviction court ultimately found Corcoran was competent to waive post-conviction based on his testimony. Even so, Karozos noted that the post-conviction court still acknowledged that Corcoran “is mentally ill.”

Another appeal followed in 2004, but a year later, the Supreme Court upheld the prior ruling that Corcoran was competent, and therefore, his incomplete petition for relief would not stand.

But in February 2005, Corcoran submitted to the Indiana Supreme Court a post-conviction petition with his signature. The high court justices dismissed the petition as untimely, however.

Corcoran’s lawyers are now leaning on an Indiana trial rule — Rule 60(B) — that would allow him to reinstate a petition for post-conviction relief following the dismissals.

That rule permits a trial court to relieve a defendant from a judgment for “any reason justifying relief from the operation of the judgment” that is not otherwise specifically mentioned in the rule.

To prevail, Corcoran and his legal team must demonstrate that:

he brought his claim within a reasonable time in light of the circumstances of the case

extraordinary or exceptional circumstances justify that relief; and

he has alleged a meritorious claim or defense.

Karozos argued in the newest filing that Corcoran is bringing his claim to the court within a reasonable time “in light of the circumstances.”

“The legal landscape in Indiana has changed since 2003 when Corcoran’s unsigned petition was struck, and his signed petition was dismissed,” the lawyer said.

She referenced, for example, a 2021 ruling by the Indiana Supreme Court that permitted a defendant facing execution to proceed with a post-conviction filing even though he refused to verify his petition by the deadline.

In that case, Isom v. State, public defenders submitted a petition for post-conviction relief on behalf of the defendant, Kevin Isom, without his signature. Isom, of Gary, was previously convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of his wife and her 2 children.

The post-conviction court, acknowledging the omission, issued an order giving Isom additional time to file the missing verification page. Isom still refused to sign the petition, concluding that his attorneys “were not up to the task of representing him,” according to court documents.

Isom’s refusal to sign meant he would forfeit his post-conviction challenge.

Still, after hearing oral argument, Indiana’s Supreme Court justices ordered the trial court to accept Isom’s petition anyway. The court eventually upheld Isom’s sentence, and he remains 1 of 8 men on death row in Indiana.

“Corcoran should be treated the same as Isom given the change in how the Indiana Supreme Court has dealt with capital defendants who do not comply with the post-conviction rules in the time prescribed by the Court’s Order,” Karozos said, emphasizing that Corcoran has brought his motion “within a reasonable amount of time, given the 2021 opinion in Isom which changed the legal landscape.”

Corcoran’s lawyers additionally pointed to a move by the Marion County prosecutor in January 2024 to withdraw a death penalty request for a defendant, Elliahs Dorsey, who killed Indianapolis police officer Breann Leath.

“Equally as important is the fact that a regional consensus has emerged against executing the severely mentally ill has occurred in the past few years,” Karozos continued. “Every other contiguous death penalty state in this area of the Midwest has banned the death penalty for the seriously mentally ill.”

Corcoran’s lawyers repeatedly insisted he is “gravely mentally ill” and has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which they argued should further disqualify the inmate from capital punishment.

Larry Komp, lead federal attorney for Corcoran’s legal team, previously told the Indiana Capital Chronicle that a similar argument would be made in a separate clemency petition. A decision regarding the last-ditch plea will be left to Indiana’s governor.

(source: WTHI news)

OKLAHOMA:

Legal Docket: Death penalty doubts----The Supreme Court considers due process violations in a death sentence case

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: It’s Monday October 28th, and you’re listening to The World and Everything in It from WORLD Radio. Good morning! I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Legal Docket.

CLEMENT: Basically a bunch of Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the court…

That’s the voice of the very prolific Supreme Court advocate Paul Clement, along with Chief Justice John Roberts. The funny moment was that Clement was appearing for the second time on the same day, representing different clients. We cut that montage together to make the point that Clement is widely seen as the most experienced Supreme Court advocate among active attorneys, having argued more than 100 cases.

ROBERTS: That is a rare milestone …

Clement’s most recent appearance before the high court is in a case from Oklahoma involving a convicted killer named Richard Glossip.

CLEMENT: Glossip is facing the death penalty. And so as in any death penalty case, the stakes are incredibly high.

So Jenny, you got to talk to the famous Paul Clement in his office near D.C. That audio is from your interview with him.

ROUGH: Yes, quite the honor. His office is across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia. Paul Clement’s really been involved in highly consequential cases ranging from religious liberty to gun rights and when we talked, we discussed the case we’ll analyze today, a significant case on the death penalty.

EICHER: So a familiar name and familiar voice, as we’ve heard Clement in action over the years here, but the death penalty case has some familiarity to it as well. The Glossip case goes back over a quarter of a century. Richard Glossip was convicted in a 27-year-old murder-for-hire case and was sentenced to death in Oklahoma.

ROUGH: Glossip’s first case before the Supreme Court came in 2015. He challenged Oklahoma’s method of execution lethal injection.

But he lost. And now, Glossip’s back with a completely different challenge.

CLEMENT: So the Glossip case is a really interesting case.

Interesting for many reasons.

Normally, Supreme Court cases focus on a principle of law that’s at stake. But in death penalty cases, the focus tends to shift to what happened at trial. So let’s go back to that.

There are three key players to keep in mind:

Barry Van Treese, the murder victim. He owned a motel in Oklahoma City at the time he was killed.

Glossip, the prisoner. He worked for Van Treese as manager of the motel and lived on the premises.

And Justin Sneed, the motel handyman.

EICHER: The motel had fallen into disarray, both physically and financially. Van Treese suspected Glossip was stealing, so he paid Glossip a visit. During the inspection, Van Treese gave Glossip a deadline to produce missing receipts or be fired.

According to handyman Justin Sneed, Glossip offered to pay Sneed $10,000 to kill Van Treese. So Sneed sneaked into Van Treese’s motel room at night and beat him to death using a baseball bat.

Sneed testified to that.

ROUGH: He did, and he also testified that he had been prescribed the drug lithium.

Now, this is a medication used to treat bipolar disorder, a mental illness. But Sneed said he took lithium for a head cold. And he testified under oath that he’d “never seen no psychiatrist.”

EICHER: I’m assuming this detail is going to figure in the case later on, Jenny.

ROUGH: Big time.

EICHER: But let’s talk about the rest of the particulars: Sneed was a star witness in the case against Glossip and for cooperating with the prosecution the state agreed to spare Sneed’s life and he’ll serve a life sentence instead.

ROUGH: Glossip has admitted he helped Sneed cover up the crime but he maintains his innocence as to arranging the murder. Here’s Paul Clement again.

PAUL CLEMENT: So the whole question is really did Sneed commit the murder on his own and Glossip help out after the fact? Or did Glossip basically put Sneed up to do it?

A lot rests on the story Sneed tells.

CLEMENT: Sneed's testimony about Glossip is the central testimony in the whole case.

EICHER: And that brings us to Glossip’s latest challenge, and what this case is all about: the drug and the psychiatric treatment.

ROUGH: It all goes back to the lithium and the fact that Sneed denied that he was under psychiatric care.

As the execution date loomed last year for Glossip, the Oklahoma attorney general requested an independent review of the case.

Around that time, the state produced documents that it hadn’t disclosed before. Handwritten notes from the prosecutor, Connie Smothermon. The notes came from a pre-trial meeting with Sneed—the handyman. In one place, she wrote down the words on Lithium followed by a question mark. And in another place Dr. Trumpet, also followed by a question mark.

The assumption is that Dr. Trumpet refers to Dr. Trombka, the prison’s only psychiatrist at the time.

But her notes are very cryptic. So it’s hard to say for sure.

A medical record sheet did confirm Sneed took lithium for bipolar disorder. But prosecutors didn’t disclose that either.

EICHER: Glossip now argues that the state denied his due process rights. He says he didn’t get a fair trial because the prosecutors failed to turn over that evidence of mental illness to the defense. And he says prosecutors knowingly elicited false testimony from Sneed because they didn’t correct him about why he was on lithium.

Jenny, I remember talking with you a few weeks about this case when we did an overview of the Court’s term. You mentioned Paul Clement represents Oklahoma, not Glossip.

Normally, in a case called Glossip v. Oklahoma, Oklahoma would oppose Glossip’s argument that he’s entitled to a new trial. The parties are on opposite sides of the “v” so-to-speak.

But that’s not quite true here. This case is unusual.

CLEMENT: What makes it different from most capital cases is that the state, who is my client in the case—

ROUGH: Oklahoma

CLEMENT: They have confessed error. They have admitted that there were material errors, material that should have been given to the defense wasn't given to the defense or whether a particular line of cross-examination violated the due process clause because the prosecutors elicited false testimony knowingly.

In other words, Glossip and Oklahoma both agree that Glossip is entitled to a new trial.

CLEMENT: The state isn't saying that Mr. Glossip is completely innocent of the crime.

EICHER: Yet, Oklahoma still wants a re-trial. But it agrees that the due process rights of Glossip were violated. Strange.

ROUGH: But this case gets even stranger.

CLEMENT: And what makes the case even more extraordinary is that even though the state confessed error in the lower courts, the lower courts disregarded that confession of error and said, “That's all very well that the attorney general thinks that there was prosecutorial misconduct. But we don't think there's a basis for overturning the conviction.”

In other words, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals disagreed with the state’s confession of error and wants to leave the death sentence in place.

EICHER: So Glossip appealed to the Supreme Court and teamed up with the state of Oklahoma insofar as both filed briefs asking to set aside his execution to consider the due process claims.

Now, Jenny, how does oral argument work in a circumstance like this? I mean, the Supreme Court needs someone to argue the other side.

ROUGH: Right, and just to be clear, here’s what the “other side” is: specifically the lower court’s decision that Glossip’s due process rights weren’t violated.

Situations like these do sometimes happen. And when they do, the Supreme Court will appoint a lawyer to argue the other side.

In this case, Chief Justice John Roberts asked one of his former law clerks, Chris Michel, to do that.

EICHER: OK, so then that left Glossip’s attorney Seth Waxman and Oklahoma’s attorney Paul Clement, each to take a turn trying to persuade the court to order a new trial.

Then Chris Michel took a turn arguing it should not.

ROUGH: Exactly. Lots went on during oral argument.

We’ll emphasize 3 issues that I heard the justices raise.

The 1st centered the state’s inferences about the prosecutor’s notes. Justice Samuel Alito said that Glossip reads a lot into a few scribbled words: “lithium?” and “Dr. Trumpet?”

And Justice Clarence Thomas made much of the fact that the prosecutor Connie Smothermon didn’t have the chance to fully give her side of the story. Namely, she didn’t get to say what her own notes meant. She was frozen out of the process.

Let’s listen to Justice Thomas in an exchange with Clement about that.

JUSTICE THOMAS: Well, when I looked at the note of Ms. Smothermon, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. It had a few names. It had "lithium" and a question mark.

CLEMENT: I think you ultimately have to draw the most plausible inference from all the information available. And the most—

JUSTICE THOMAS: But you didn't, though. Her point is that you didn't ask her. You're drawing it from the note, which she thinks is inadequate information.

EICHER: The 2nd issue had to do with the significance of Sneed’s mental illness.

Chief Justice John Roberts asked: If the jury knew he was bipolar and had lied on the stand, would that have mattered? After all, the defense did know he was taking lithium — that part wasn’t hidden.

Let’s hear Roberts asking Glossip’s attorney Seth Waxman about that.

JUSTICE ROBERTS: Because the jury knew about the lithium. And what they didn't know is that it was prescribed by a psychiatrist. Do you really think it would make that much of a difference to the jury?

SETH WAXMAN: This is a witness who lied. It very well could have made a significant difference.

But then Chris Michel, defending the judgment of the lower court, said the defense has known about Sneed’s mental illness.

CHRIS MICHEL: Petitioner has known since 1997 that Sneed took lithium.

That’s 27 years. After Sneed’s arrest back then, he underwent a competency evaluation. All the attorneys received a copy of that resulting report.

MICHEL: It says, does this patient have a mental illness? And the answer is yes, underlined, exclamation point. If Petitioner thought that Sneed's mental health was important to his defense, surely, that would have been a bright red flag that he would have presented that defense at trial.

ROUGH: This relates to a 3rd issue, a highly important state law. And it might actually prevent the Supreme Court from overturning the conviction, even if Glossip’s due process rights were violated!

States have laws on the books that limit how many times a prisoner can attack his conviction and sentence, whether at the trial level or appeal. Such laws prevent prisoners from litigating over and over so that they’re never executed. It has to end at some point.

Here, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals held that Glossip’s most recent petition doesn’t meet the requirements to overcome the finality of the lower court judgment.

Justice Samuel Alito seemed to agree.

JUSTICE ALITO: But there is the Oklahoma statute. It has two requirements. They go through the two requirements, and they say that they weren't satisfied.

Basically, in order to get his conviction overturned, Glossip must show the prosecutor’s errors could not have been raised earlier. If the information was available to the defense, and it didn’t exercise diligence in raising it before, it can’t do so now. As we’ve talked about, there does seem to be some indication Glossip should have known about Sneed’s mental illness.

EICHER: But Glossip also must show the outcome of the trial would have been different, but for the errors. Justice Elena Kagan seemed to side with Glossip on this point. She said the jury might not have found him guilty if it had known Sneed lied on the stand.

JUSTICE KAGAN: The critical question that a jury is asking is, do I believe this guy and everything he says? And particularly, do I believe him when he points the finger at the accused? If he's lying, if he's trying to cover up something about his own behavior, I'm going to take that into account in deciding whether, when he accuses the defendant, he's telling the truth.

Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because he was involved in one of Glossip’s earlier cases on the Tenth Circuit. If the judgment is split 4 to 4, Glossip’s conviction stays in place and his execution will be rescheduled.

ROUGH: Right, and that’s a risk here.

And I should add, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board could recommend clemency. But so far, it hasn’t done that.

The Supreme Court may grant an evidentiary hearing on Glossip’s due-process claims. But the more I think about this case, I wonder whether the Oklahoma state law will prevent any further action. Then again, maybe not, because there was a ton of discussion about whether that bar can be waived.

Highly complicated, even for an experienced attorney like Paul Clement, whom I thank for making time to talk with WORLD listeners.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

(source: wng.org)

IDAHO:

Bryan Kohberger lawyers file briefs to remove death penalty option in Idaho case

Lawyers for Bryan Kohberger are filing over a dozen briefs to remove the death penalty option for their client.

These filings challenge objections from state prosecutors earlier this month who wish to see Kohberger executed if he is found guilty.

Court documents argue that the move for the death penalty is "inconsistent, outdated or unconstitutional."

Kohberger faces charges for the deaths of four University of Idaho students in Moscow, which occurred in November 2022. His trial is scheduled for August of next year.

***********

Lawyers petition to commute death sentence of Idaho inmate

Lawyers for Thomas Creech, Idaho's longest-serving death row inmate, are seeking to commute his death sentence. They are pushing for Creech to serve life without parole instead of facing execution.

Creech's attorneys argue that commuting the sentence allows the family of a man killed in 1974 to ask him about their loved one's death. They believe this questioning is important for the family.

The attorneys have expressed their criticism of the state's actions, stating that Idaho is "making history in the worst way possible" by attempting to execute Creech again.

Creech's execution is currently scheduled for November 13. The outcome of the petition remains to be seen, as the legal process unfolds.

(source for both: khq.com)

USA:

Trump’s Promise: “We will have the death penalty for any illegal migrant who kills an American citizen or law enforcement officer”

With less than 2 weeks until Election Day, former President Donald Trump made a stop in the Lone Star State to talk about the border crisis.

The press conference was set up in short order at the Austin airport as Trump flew in to record a podcast interview with Joe Rogan later in the day.

Even before Trump took the stage, pictures adorned the front of the room depicting illegal aliens who had committed violent crimes in Texas, a result of the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policies.

Banners flanking each side of the stage read “Deport Illegals Now” and “End Migrant Crime,” setting the tone for the speech.

“Under Kamala Harris, Texas has become ground zero for the border crisis,” said Trump, highlighting the millions of illegal aliens that have poured across the southern border since 2021. The majority of those illegal crossings took place in Texas, which shares the largest land border with Mexico.

“I say 21 million, some say it’s more than that. And when you add in the gotaways…who knows,” said Trump. He also mentioned the 325,000 children that are missing after crossing the border unaccompanied.

“If that were a Republican it would be the biggest scandal in history.”

Alexis Nungaray, the mother of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray who was slain by illegal aliens in Houston, was also in attendance. She said Harris never reached out to her following her daughter’s murder.

“We will never forget Jocelyn,” said Trump. “We’ve all seen the pictures, and it’s emblazoned in our minds.”

He was also joined by members of the National Border Patrol Council, which has endorsed Trump’s candidacy. Trump reiterated his promise for the “largest mass deportation” in history.

“We will have the death penalty for any illegal migrant who kills an American citizen or law enforcement officer,” promised Trump.

While the remarks were focused on the border crisis, Trump weaved in other hot issues including election security.

On the topic of the election, which is just a week and a half away, Trump was positive.

“I’m not supposed to say it, but we are winning by a lot,” Trump said to applause and chants of “fight” from the crowd, a callback to the assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.

Other officials in attendance included Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Attorney General Ken Paxton, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, and Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham.

Vice President Kamala Harris was also in Texas, hosting a rally in Houston later in the evening alongside Democrat U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, who is challenging Cruz for his Senate seat. Trump took aim at her for coming to fundraise but not to meet with any victims of migrant crime.

Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said Trump hosting a press conference in Texas was “brilliant”.

“It’s aired all across the United States. It’ll be in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada. The podcast with Joe Rogan is also [a] brilliant move—14 and a half million people—largest podcast in the United States. They’re not all Texans.”

Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham agreed.

“We’re always excited to see President Trump visiting Texas right before the election. And our message to all of Texas is that simple question, were you better off four years ago than you are today? And that answer is absolutely yes,” she told Texas Scorecard.

With early voting numbers already high across the state, Republican Party of Texas Chairman Abraham George said he’s optimistic for Election Day.

“I think nationwide we’re going to be winning. But Texas is definitely staying red this time.”

(source: dallasexpress.com)

NIGERIA:

Experts Advocate Abolition Of Death Penalty In Nigeria

Legal experts have advo­cated the abolition of death penalty in Nigeria, saying its continuous use does not uphold justice or public safety.

They shared their views at a virtual dialogue organised by The Inclusion Project (TIP) to commemorate the World Day Against the Death Penalty which came under the theme, “Abolition Wave in Africa: Challenging Mis­conceptions and Lessons for Ni­geria."

The dialogue hosted experts from Ghana, Kenya, Sierra Le­one, and Nigeria to discuss the use of the death penalty and ad­dress the many misconceptions surrounding its abolition.

Pamela Okoroigwe, TIP’s director who moderated the session, stated that ‘Nigeria, the most populous African nation and often referred to as the “Giant of Africa,” remains one of the 14 countries in Africa that still re­tain the death penalty.’

Okoroigwe therefore stressed the need for reform and educa­tion regarding the ineffectiveness and challenges of capital punish­ment, emphasising the growing realisation that its continued use does not uphold justice or public safety.

She also provided a summary of TIP research on an analysis of perceptions about the use of the death penalty as a capital pun­ishment for offenders in Nigeria, showing over 60 percent of the respondents are against the use of the death penalty as a capital punishment.

The dialogue examined the experiences of experts from Ghana and Sierra Leone and how they worked to abolish the death penalty.

The expert from Kenya dis­cussed the strides that have been made in Kenya, and the expert from Nigeria presented the cur­rent situation in Nigeria.

The discussion also debunked the belief that the retention of the death penalty deters crime and reduces insecurity.

Professor Vincent Adzah­lie-Mensah, a former Amnesty International Board member and an advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in Ghana, confirmed that the crime rate in Ghana has not changed since the abolition bill was passed.

Adzahlie-Mensah stated that responsible governments abolish the death penalty as part of their duty to safeguard the well-being of their citizens.

Citing statistics, the professor noted that countries retaining the death penalty tend to have higher crime rates compared to those that have abolished it.

Moreover, he stressed the importance of political will and collaboration with key stakehold­ers to advocate for the abolition of the death penalty.

He explained that the death penalty disproportionately af­fects the poor, who often lack adequate legal representation, and spoke about its detrimental impact on the mental health of those affected.

On his part, Collins Okeke em­phasised that rather than relying on the death penalty, Nigeria re­quires a robust criminal justice system that focuses on proper in­vestigation and crime reduction.

Okeke highlighted the chal­lenges in Nigeria’s justice sys­tem, particularly its weaknesses and lack of capacity to appre­hend criminals effectively.

Recalled that Sierra Leone abolished the death penalty in 2021, followed by Ghana in 2023, and experts from both countries have observed no significant in­crease in crime rates.

Similarly, Simitie Lavaly, Commissioner at the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone, addressed the myth that crime rates would rise without the death penalty, explaining how Sierra Leone successfully abolished it and confirming that no executions have taken place since then.

Gatambia Ndungu, a member of the Makwanyane Fellowship in Kenya, asserted that “the death penalty does not advance our criminal justice system.”

He underscored the need for a more advanced system that uti­lises effective strategies for crime reduction.

Also, he expressed his griev­ances about the continued use of the death penalty in Kenya and outlined the efforts abolitionists in Kenya have made so far to ad­vocate for its abolition.

(source: independent.ng)

BANGLADESH: 5 get death for Zahid murder in Khulna

A court in Khulna on Monday sentenced 5 men to death in sensational Zahid murder case in Khulna's Khalispur area in 2016.

Justice Md Jewel Rana, a judge of Tribunal for Prevention of Offenses Disturbing Public Safety in Khulna, announced the verdict on Monday afternoon.

The condemned convicts are Md Abbas, Md Nosu Farzi, Md Riaz, Md Nadim, and Md Zabbar.

At that time, the court also fined Tk1,00,000 each of the convict.

However, 7 other accused were acquitted in the case as the charges against were not proved.

According to the case statement, on December 13, 2016, some people attacked on Jabed, elder brother of victim Zahid, in front of a local shop in the area. Hearing the news of attack, two younger brothers of Jabed--Md Sumon and Zahid--went to the place. When the duo arrived at the spot, the miscreants hacked Zahid indiscriminately, leaving him critically injured. Locals rescued him and took Zahid to Khulna Medical College Hospital where the on-duty doctors declared him dead.

Following the day, Zahid's brother Sumon filed a case with Khalishpur Police Station in the city, naming 12 people and 4 to 5 unnamed.

More than 7 years' of hearing, the court pronounced the judgement on Monday.

(source: observerbd.com)

IRAN----executions 4 Prisoners Executed in Dezful and Maragheh Prisons

The death sentences of 4 prisoners previously convicted on charges related to drug offenses and murder were carried out in Dezful and Maragheh prisons, according to the Iran Human Rights Organization.

The identities of these individuals are reported as follows: Khaled Chenari, 30 years old; Abolnabi Kalani, 26 years old; Soleiman Maleki-Nejad, 35 years old; and Hassan Dorostkar.

The report states that Khaled Chenari and Abolnabi Kalani were arrested 3 years ago on murder charges in a joint case and were sentenced to death by the judiciary. Their executions took place on Sunday, October 27, at Dezful Prison. Before their transfer to Dezful Prison, these 2 inmates had been held in Ramhormoz Prison.

On Wednesday, October 23, Soleiman Maleki-Nejad, who was arrested roughly 3 years ago on drug-related charges and subsequently sentenced to death, was executed in Maragheh Prison.

Hassan Dorostkar was executed in Maragheh Prison on Monday, October 21. He had been arrested 4 years ago on murder charges and sentenced to death by the judiciary.

At the time of this report, prison authorities and responsible organizations have not publicly announced these executions.

According to latest HRANA’s annual report over between October 10, 2023, and October 8, 2024, at least 811 individuals were executed by hanging in Iran, rising to 23.06% compared to the same period last year. Of these executions, four were carried out in public. Many of the defendants were denied a fair trial.

(source: en-hrana.org)

******

Over 100 Iranian activists join Warisheh Moradi’s hunger strike for civil resistance

More than 100 civil society activists in Iran have signed a statement declaring the start of a hunger strike on Saturday in solidarity with political prisoner Warisheh Moradi. According to the statement, which was circulated by the Free Women’s Society of East Kurdistan (KJAR), the activists aim to show support for Moradi’s struggle for human rights. It is not yet clear how long the solidarity hunger strike will last.

Moradi “has voiced her opposition to injustice, inequality and the increasingly unjust death sentences by starting an indefinite hunger strike,” the statement acknowledged. However, the signatories also called for an end to the strike due to Moradi’s deteriorating health, as reported by the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) on 24 October. Moradi’s hunger strike, which began on 10 October, is now in its 18th day.

The more than 100 signatories of the statement, who identify themselves as “a group of activists allied with all freedom-loving forces”, announced that their own hunger strike began on 26 October in solidarity with Warisheh Moradi’s action. “Civil resistance requires strength, endurance and perseverance, as this struggle is long and challenging,” the activists stressed, calling for the involvement of the entire civil society in the resistance against the Iranian regime’s inhumane sentences.

Another hunger strike initiative in solidarity with Moradi is taking place in Sweden. A 3-day hunger strike organised by the local KJAR committee aims to raise awareness of Moradi’s critical condition and to protest against the issuing and execution of death sentences in Iran.

The mother of executed political prisoner Ramin Hossein Panahi also expressed her solidarity with Moradi, stating, “Your courage and resilience are inspiring, but your health is more important to us.” In her message, she urged Moradi to end her hunger strike due to her deteriorating health. Mother Sharifeh also announced she would participate in a symbolic 1-day hunger strike alongside other civil rights activists to show support.

Warisheh Moradi is currently held in Evin Women’s Prison in Tehran. She announced the start of her hunger strike on 10 October with a letter expressing her intention to draw attention to the “domestic killings and daily executions carried out under the guise of political Islam”.

In a related development, since the beginning of the hunger strike, the Iranian state has sentenced Moradi and other political prisoners—Pakhshan Azizi, Narges Mohammadi, and Mehbube Razayi—to additional six-month prison terms for “disobeying orders”. Pariwash Moslem received a three-month sentence for “endangering prison security”.

(source: medyanews.net)

***************

Kurdish Political Prisoner's Death Sentence Overturned in Iran

Nayeb Askari, a 48-year-old Kurdish political prisoner from Urmia, has received a reprieve. His death sentence has been overturned and replaced with a 15-year prison term and a fine.

Askari, a former member of the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), was initially sentenced to death in absentia for "waging war against God."

In October 2023, the charge was revised to "armed rebellion," and the death sentence was upheld. However, a recent court decision has overturned the death penalty.

According to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, Askari surrendered to the IRGC intelligence in Urmia on March 24, 2021, after receiving verbal assurances of amnesty. Despite these promises, the IRGC later denied making any such commitments.

Following his surrender, Askari endured three months of solitary confinement and reported torture before being transferred to Urmia Central Prison.

The prisoner, who suffers from kidney stones and stomach issues, has staged multiple hunger strikes to protest his treatment.

Despite his health conditions and family circumstances, including his wife's pregnancy at the time of his arrest, he has been denied temporary leave and basic rights throughout his imprisonment.

(source: iranwire.com)

***************

Political Prisoners on Death Row in Iran

Iran consistently ranks among the world’s leading executioners, claiming the grim distinction of having the highest number of executions per capita. The Iranian regime extensively employs the death penalty as a tool not only for judicial punishment but also for political repression. The Iranian legal system, with its reliance on vaguely defined charges such as Moharebeh (waging war against God) and Baghi (rebellion), provides the state with broad latitude to impose capital punishment. These charges are frequently invoked not only in cases of violent crimes like murder but also to silence political dissent, protests, and religious beliefs that deviate from the state’s official ideology.

Human rights organizations have repeatedly condemned Iran’s widespread use of the death penalty, emphasizing that many executions follow deeply flawed trials, often lacking due process. Defendants are frequently convicted based on confessions extracted under torture or duress, raising serious concerns about the fairness of the legal proceedings. Despite international criticism, the Iranian judiciary continues to target vulnerable populations, including political prisoners, protesters, and ethnic and religious minorities, using the death penalty as a means of control and intimidation.

In recent years, the Iranian regime has intensified its use of capital punishment as a deterrent against political opposition, particularly following the widespread protests of 2019 and 2022. In response to these uprisings, the regime has escalated its repression by executing or sentencing to death those involved in protests, aiming to instill fear and suppress further dissent.

This report by Iran Human Rights Monitor (Iran HRM) seeks to document the harrowing experiences of political prisoners currently on death row in Iran. We have compiled the names and details of 61 political prisoners who have been sentenced to death, although this number is not exhaustive. It reflects the information we have gathered up to the end of September 2024.

The report is divided into 2 parts. The 1st section provides a list of the political prisoners facing death sentences, along with brief explanations of the circumstances surrounding their convictions. The second section delves into some sample cases, highlighting how these death sentences were issued based on confessions obtained through torture. These cases demonstrate clear violations of legal standards and underscore the lack of due process in Iran’s judicial system. By shedding light on these injustices, we hope to raise awareness and call for international intervention to prevent executions in Iran.

(source: iran-hrm.com)

OCTOBER 27, 2024:

TEXAS:

Letters to the Editor — Is Robert Roberson guilty or not?----Readers share their thoughts on the latest developments in the case of Robert Roberson, who has been convicted in 2003 of killing his 2-year-old daughter.

It’s about power, cruelty

Politics can be crazy and ugly. It’s not designed to propel the best candidates to election.

Now, however, we have entered a whole new level. The appalling story of Robert Roberson and his brush with the death penalty in Texas have revealed the “quiet part.” It’s all about power and cruelty.

In the face of scientific and legal arguments that Roberson is actually innocent of killing his baby daughter in 2002, every level of potential intervenors declined to step in to stop his execution.

The only way his execution was finally averted was by a bipartisan group of Texas legislators issuing a subpoena for Roberson to appear for a hearing four days later. Then came the crowning blow. Gov. Greg Abbott has claimed that the legislators exceeded their authority by stepping into the situation. Apparently, the governor’s ego was triggered by the idea that anyone would infringe on his sole authority to grant clemency.

Given the overwhelming evidence that, at a minimum, Roberson deserves to have the new science and information presented, I can’t imagine what reason there could be to deny that. It seems we’re back to the idea that it’s all about power and cruelty.

Jan McDowell, Carrollton

****

Proving authority

Re: “Court upholds stay of execution — Paxton had asked for it to be reversed, citing separation of powers,” Monday news story.

Right to life? Beyond a reasonable doubt? Why is Attorney General Ken Paxton hell-bent on murdering a Texas citizen when the evidence clearly raises a reasonable doubt? This poor man has already spent 20 years in prison for a crime that probably never happened. Paxton apparently thinks execution is acceptable in order to prove he has the power and authority to kill a person.

Steve McCluer, Far North Dallas

****

Where was governor?

Gov. Greg Abbott’s silence (until Sunday) on Robert Roberson has been deafening. Abbott was outspoken about pardoning Daniel Perry earlier this year. Perry, a self-proclaimed racist who threatened in multiple social media posts to shoot people with whom he disagreed, was lawfully convicted of murdering Garrett Foster after driving recklessly into a peaceful demonstration where Foster was protesting.

Abbott was so anxious to pardon Perry that he asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles for an expedited recommendation.

But our supposedly pro-life governor couldn’t bring himself to give Roberson a chance at life despite serious questions about the basis for Roberson’s conviction and a bipartisan effort to have his case reexamined. Abbott evidently is “pro” as to only certain lives.

Ann Ward Purcell, Dallas/Lake Highlands

****

Questions need answers

I have a couple of questions that The Dallas Morning News has not answered in its reporting on Robert Roberson. First, did Roberson violently shake his baby? Second, could such shaking have been the cause of death of the child? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then let’s forget about the death penalty and just lock him up for the rest of his life.

Gene Griffin, Lorena

****

Time for Abbott to step in

Re: “Abbott asks court to void subpoena — He says lawmakers ‘stepped out of line’ to delay man’s execution, compel testimony,” Tuesday news story.

So Gov. Greg Abbott is upset because “lawmakers stepped out of line” by pausing the execution of Robert Roberson. After watching the hearing and observing a statement that Texas was 20 minutes and 20 steps away from executing an innocent man, aren’t we fortunate they did step in?

If Abbott needs to be involved, he can redeem himself by watching Monday’s testimony and then order Roberson released from prison immediately.

Jeff Foster, Carrollton

****

Join civilized world

The ongoing controversy surrounding the attempt to execute Texas inmate Robert Roberson is an embarrassment that we in the United States have experienced time and again. The United States infamously joins China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Somalia in the top five countries in numbers of recorded executions. Rounding out the top 10 are Singapore, Iraq, Kuwait, Yemen and Egypt.

North Korea, a country that is governed by a dictator, also executes its citizens, but exact statistics are not available. Every European country has abolished the death penalty except Belarus and Russia, which has a moratorium. The United States stands out in North America as the only country that still has capital punishment, as our neighbors Canada and Mexico reject that practice.

Texas has spent over 20 years trying to kill Roberson. Even if the merits of his case did not put his conviction into question, as they do, it is time that our country joined the majority of the civilized world and did away with the policy of taking a human life as a punishment for crime.

Alan Kazdoy, Far North Dallas

****

Who is bigger danger?

In spite of new findings that shaken baby syndrome may be blamed for deaths attributable to other causes, Texas seems to be determined to execute Robert Roberson for this crime. Gov. Greg Abbott can ask members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles to review Roberson’s case.

Since the governor appoints these members, it would appear that if he wants the conviction overturned, the board would likely follow his wishes as it did in the case of Daniel Perry, who had been convicted of murdering Garrett Foster in 2020. Abbott then pardoned Perry.

But there were powerful conservative voices such as Tucker Carlson advocating for Perry. Roberson’s advocates appear to be either more liberal or lesser known, such as author John Grisham or a Palestine detective whose testimony helped convict him.

It would seem to be in the public’s best interest for the board to recommend clemency and for Abbott to sign a pardon. After all, who would seem to represent more danger to the public? Is it a man convicted of murdering someone he disagreed with or an autistic man whose trial never addressed the many underlying conditions his daughter had and likely caused her death? Just asking.

Phyllis Vaughn, Sherman

***************

Shaken Baby Syndrome Has Been Discredited. Why Is Robert Roberson Still on Death Row?----Convicted of a crime that never happened, Roberson’s case is a prime example of how the U.S. legal system often fails to recognize advances in scientific knowledge

In a last-minute effort to save the life of a man on death row, a bipartisan group of Texas legislators has just done something extraordinary: they have unanimously subpoenaed Robert Roberson, convicted in 2003 of killing his daughter based on the now-discredited theory of shaken baby syndrome, to testify before them five days after he was scheduled to be executed, effectively forcing the state to keep him alive.

Roberson is 1 of many people who have been imprisoned for injuries to a child that prosecutors argue resulted from violent shaking. But research has exposed serious flaws in these determinations, and dozens of other defendants who have been wrongly convicted under this theory have been exonerated. Yet Roberson remains on death row, even as politicians, scientists and others—including the lead detective who investigated him and one of the jurors who convicted him—have spoken out on his behalf. If his execution proceeds, they and many others believe that Texas will be killing an innocent man for a “crime” that never happened.

As our scientific understanding of shaken baby syndrome has evolved over the past 20 years, justice requires that courts reexamine old convictions in light of new findings. This is especially true for Roberson, who would be the first person in the U.S. to be executed for a conviction based on shaken baby syndrome. No matter one’s view of the death penalty, the ultimate punishment must be held to the ultimate standard of proof—and Roberson’s case falls woefully short of that standard.

The theory behind shaken baby syndrome dates back to the early 1970s, when two medical researchers—Norman Guthkelch and John Caffey—separately published the first scientific papers explaining that shaking an infant can cause fatal internal injuries even absent external injuries. Over time physicians and law enforcement officers, among others, widely began to rely on a triad of symptoms—brain bleeding, brain swelling and retinal bleeding—as definitive proof that someone had abused a child by shaking. To support this theory, researchers cited cases in which a child displayed these symptoms and a caretaker confessed to shaking the child, which ostensibly confirmed the triad as a reliable way to diagnose abuse.

There is no doubt that shaking a child can cause injuries, including those that comprise the shaken baby syndrome triad. Newer research, however, has shown that shaking is not the only way to cause those injuries: They can also result from an accidental “short fall” (e.g., falling off a bed) as well as from other medical causes (e.g., pneumonia, improper medication)—all of which were true of Roberson’s daughter. In fact, a 2024 study found that the injuries historically used to diagnose shaking are actually more likely to result from accidents than from shaking. In short, modern science understands that the presence of these symptoms does not necessarily mean that a child was abused, nor does their absence mean that they were not abused.

Why did clinicians wrongly trust this triad of symptoms for so long? The short answer is that correcting misconceptions requires a feedback loop that is often lacking in child abuse investigations. When a doctor diagnoses a living adult and prescribes a treatment, the effectiveness of that treatment provides feedback on the correctness of their diagnosis; if the treatment proves ineffective, doctors can learn from this misdiagnosis and adjust future diagnoses accordingly. Such feedback, however, is not always sufficient; for instance, doctors practiced bloodletting for centuries because it was generally accepted and seemed to work for some patients, though it was an illusory correlation. With respect to shaking, doctors rarely learn whether a child was actually shaken because the child is typically deceased or unable to articulate what happened, and thus doctors rarely receive feedback that the triad led to an incorrect diagnosis.

As for the studies that used a caretaker’s confession to establish that abuse occurred, it is now well-known that innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit, such that confessions are not synonymous with truth. Some scholars have even argued that the unique circumstances of suspected shaking cases (e.g., suspects’ emotional state) create an especially high risk of false confession.

Further complicating matters, child abuse determinations are subject to cognitive bias, in which extraneous information leads experts to interpret the same injury in different ways—at least one of which must be incorrect. In one study, for example, medical professionals more often judged the same childhood injury as abuse rather than an accident if told that the child’s parents were unmarried or drug users—both of which appear to be true of Roberson. Another study found that those same extraneous factors led emergency room doctors to misdiagnose accidental injuries as abuse in a staggering 83 percent of cases.

Even merely knowing about a criminal accusation can affect how a doctor appraises a child’s injuries. In one study, independent experts reviewed medical records from cases where, unbeknownst to them, a fellow expert had testified that the child was shaken. In 94 % of those cases, the independent experts concluded that the child’s “head injuries… possibly, or even probably, had a non-traumatic cause.”

Autopsy decisions are likewise unreliable. In a 2021 study, medical examiners’ opinions of whether a child’s death was an accident or homicide were heavily swayed by the child’s race and who brought them to the hospital, even though the child’s injuries and history were otherwise identical. In response, prominent medical examiners explained that manner of death is “not a ‘scientific’ determination” and “often does not fit well in court.” Yet jurors—including some from at Roberson’s trial—often hear and trust these tenuous opinions, which has led some scholars to argue that manner of death testimony should not be admissible in U.S. courts, as is the case in nearly every other country.

As research debunking shaken baby syndrome has grown, so too have successful legal challenges to criminal convictions that hinge on it, including another Texas case where—just eight days before Roberson’s scheduled execution—a man was granted a new trial on the grounds that “scientific knowledge has evolved” since his 2004 trial and “would likely yield an acquittal” in 2024. Before his 2016 death, even Guthkelch—one of the architects of the theory—lamented that his “friendly suggestion for avoiding injury to children has become an excuse for imprisoning innocent parents.” Roberson is one of those innocent parents.

Science is constantly evolving, and when it reveals a past mistake, we do not simply resign ourselves to it; we take corrective action. Our legal system should be no different. When Robert Roberson was convicted, the injury triad was widely accepted as proof of shaking—but as science has progressed, that is no longer the case. The law’s guarantee of due process must account for such progress, especially when a person’s life literally depends on it. For the law to ignore evolving scientific knowledge is not merely unfair; it is criminal.

(source: This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American; Jeff Kukucka is a professor of psychology at Towson University. His work aims to understand and minimize human error in forensic science and medicolegal decision-making. He is also co–vice chair of the NIST OSAC for Forensic Science’s Human Factors Task Group. He regularly testifies as an expert witness and consults with attorneys’ offices, crime labs, and other government agencies on these issues----David Faigman is the chancellor, dean and John F. Digardi Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly University of California, Hastings College of the Law). He also holds an appointment as a professor at the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine-----Scientific American)

SOUTH CAROLINA----impending execution

S.C. Rally Calling for Richard Moore's Clemency

South Carolinians for Alternatives to Death Penalty, outside the Statehouse on Saturday urging Governor McMaster to grant clemency to those on death row.

Including convicted killer, Richard Moore, who is set to die by lethal injection on November 1st for what would be the State's second execution since restarting the death sentence after 13 years.

“Someone has to speak out when wrong is doing, and that is where the issue lies at today," said Chairman of Prison Voices of South Carolina, Abdullah Mustafa.

Advocates speaking out sharing personal stories about how the prison system has impacted their lives.

“As somebody who has been incarcerated myself, growing up in prison from the ages of 16 to 25, I know what comes with being in that position," said Jhamori Smith, President of Rise & Shine Inspirations.

Jhamori smith spent nearly a decade incarcerated as a teen.

Saturday he joined this group emphasizing the need for the rehabilitation of inmates to help limit crime..

“Anything that makes a person better, I think, is rehabilitation. Anything that deteriorates a person’s health or actually takes their life, I feel like is insanity," he added.

While time is ticking for clemency to be granted to Moore, they say that they will continue to advocate for reform in South Carolina’s justice system

"We got an issue, from the Governor all the way down when it comes down to public servant leadership, we don’t have it. We will continue to organize and mobilize. There has to be a movement, this has to turn into a movement," said Mustafa.

(source: WACH news)

****************

Attorney for SC death row inmate pushes for clemency ahead of scheduled execution

In 1 week, South Carolina inmate Richard Moore is scheduled to be the 2nd person executed in the state this year.

Moore was sentenced to death by a jury for killing store clerk James Mahoney in Spartanburg county back in 1999. As his execution day draws closer, Richard Moore’s attorney Lindsey Vann continues to argue that he was wrongfully convicted, and his case is caught in the middle of a number of racial and political factors.

Vann said due to an all-white jury issuing his judgement, a contentious political race between solicitors at the time of his trial, and what they feel is a conflict of interest with the governor — Richard Moore should be removed from death row.

Prosecutors said Richard Moore was robbing the store, but Richard Moore said he was defending himself after Mahoney pulled a gun on Richard Moore in an argument over him not having enough change for the items he was buying.

Vann also said the state had Black jurors who were qualified to hear the case and struck them from the jury.

Vann argues that pursing the death penalty against Richard Moore was a political move by the prosecutors in the case, Holman Gossett and Trey Gowdy.

“Holman Gossett made the death penalty an issue in the case. He said Trey Gowdy is not going to be tough on crime. He’s not going to use the death penalty,” Vann said.

According to the Greenville News, Gossett had a history of seeking the death penalty against Black defendants when the victim was white, and almost never pushed for the death penalty when the victim was Black.

“He actually used a letter that Trey Gowdy had sent, when he was in college, saying that the death penalty shouldn’t be used in a particular case. So the primary rolls around. Trey Gowdy won, and before Holman Gossett left office, he chose to seek the death penalty in Richard’s case.”

Gowdy chose to carry on with the death penalty in this case after Gossett left office, Vann said.

Moore’s son, Lyndall Moore, expressed how he’s navigating his emotions ahead of the execution date.

“I’ve said this before, but what’s kind of unique about is, most people don’t really have a date. Or they don’t really know when a parent dies,” he said. “If they go forth with this execution, I kind of have that if that happens. It makes it important for me to take advantage of the time.”

Lyndall Moore said his father has been in prison since he was 4 years old.

“This isn’t planned, premeditated type of case that you think of when you think of a death penalty case,” he said. “He didn’t walk into the store planning to kill anyone. I don’t even think he walked into the store thinking that a killing could happen because he didn’t have a weapon to carry something out like that.”

The defense argues Richard Moore acted in self-defense. The prosecution hasn’t provided comment ahead of this story.

The former solicitor Holman Gossett prosecuted the case — died in July of 2023 and the deputy solicitor at the time of the trial — who is the current solicitor in Spartanburg County declined to comment.

Gov. Henry McMaster was the attorney general during Moore’s trial.

Richard Moore’s attorney’s have filed a lawsuit that said McMaster should not be the one to grant clemency — claiming that in the past — McMaster said that he would not.

South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (SCDAP) Executive Director Hillary Taylor also argues race played a factor in how the prosecution tried the case.

“Holman Gossett had almost exclusively tried black defendants with white victims for the death penalty. All but 1 one of 16 cases out of Spartanburg County in the modern death penalty era have been Black defendants with white victims. Right off the bat, that shows you that the death penalty is not tried for the worst of the worst,” said Taylor.

Richard Moore has many hoping for a breakthrough — like former death row inmate Raymond Patterson who was granted release after who was in prison with Moore.

“Anybody who comes in, we try to make them feel like they are not alone. That they’ve got people backing them up,” Patterson said. “They need to do away with the death penalty because like I said, the death penalty is not a solution to a problem. It’s not used fairly. It’s used as a token for the Black, the poor, the poor white.”

Meanwhile, Richard Moore’s son is coming to grips with a challenging reality as the potential end draws closer.

“You know we think about it of course. I think about how I imagine I’ll be feeling afterwards,” he said. “It’s not done until it’s done, you know? He’s still here. So, I’m going to keep living and he’s going to keep living because he’s still here.”

Richard Moore’s execution is scheduled for Nov. 1. He chose lethal injection for his execution.

(source: WIS news)

FLORIDA:

Death penalty to be decided on Monday

Just 2 days after a jury found Joseph Edward Ables guilty of the 1st-degree murder of Highlands County Sheriff Deputy William Gentry Jr., the penalty phase of the trial commenced Thursday morning at the Highlands County Courthouse in Sebring and continued on Friday afternoon. Victim impact statements were heard by Judge Angela Cowden and the jury Friday.

The State, comprised of Assistant State Attorneys Bonde Johnson and John Kromholz, and the defense team of Debra Tuomey and Bjorn Brunvand once again appeared in front of Cowden. Convicted murderer Ables was dressed for court and sat next to his lawyers on Thursday and Friday.

The State is seeking the death penalty for Ables, while his lawyers are trying to save their client’s life with the mandatory life without the possibility of parole sentence. The defense’s attempt at mitigation is based on his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from serving in the Vietnam War.

In order for the jury to consider the death penalty, the State has to prove at least 1 aggravating factor. The State will be introducing 6 aggravating factors including:

1. The capital felony was committed by a person on felony probation.

2. The defendant was previously convicted of another capital felony or a felony involving the use or threat of violence to another.

3. The capital felony was committed for the purpose of avoiding or preventing a lawful arrest or effecting an escape from custody.

4. The capital felony was committed to distribute or hinder the lawful exercise of any governmental function or enforcement of laws.

5. The capital felony was a homicide and was committed in a cold, calculated and premeditated manner without any pretense of moral or legal justification.

6. The victim of the capital felony was a law enforcement officer engaged in the performance of his or her official duties.

Det. Christopher Cloud with the Highlands County Sheriff’s Office was called to the stand by the State on Friday. The detective has had to listen to thousands of inmate phone calls at the jail. Johnson played several recordings between Ables and his friend. The purpose of the recordings that took place in the months leading up to the trial was to show a normally functioning Ables. This was to refute Thursday’s testimony of Dr. Mark Rubino who ran tests on Ables at the request of his lawyers Tuomey and Brunvand.

Rubino was asked to look for traumatic brain injuries. Rubino said the tests he ran showed Ables has Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Marc Glickstein, a diagnostic radiologist, however, said the tests show normal atrophy of a person in his late 70s. Basically, Glickstein said the scan could have some characteristics of a brain who had Alzheimer’s disease but the clinical signs would have to back it up. He said doctors should treat the patient not the scans.

The jury heard Ables and his friend in several conversations on the recorded conversations. Ables appeared to sound normal. He asked his friend to call “Court TV” to ask them to cover the trial.

On Thursday, the defense called Dr. Glenn Peterson (PHD) to the stand. The college professor spoke about his own experiences with PTSD. He said he didn’t realize he had it until 20 years later when he was a father to an infant with special needs. Peterson said he and Ables both had issues with their fathers. In addition, Peterson said Vietnam veterans being spit and treated poorly was a myth and that he never was treated poorly.

The State brought in two law enforcement officers from other counties in Florida. The previous convictions were not allowed in court in the guilt phase because it could have prejudiced the jury.

One incident he was convicted of was using pepper spray on a couple in a movie theater. The spray also hit other people and an off-duty police officer who was doing security that day. Another conviction was from when he hit another co-worker on the back of his neck. The retired law enforcement officer said he had a razor blade in between his knuckles and caused the man to have a four-and-a-half-inch laceration to the back of his neck.

The jury did know Ables was on felony probation when he shot and ultimately killed Gentry as there was a conversation between the dispatcher and Gentry that was played. However, they did not know that it was for the 2016 assault on a person 65 or older in Lake Placid. He was convicted of using pepper spray on a neighbor when his dog defecated on his lawn.

Dr. James Campbell, psychologist testified Ables does have PTSD on Thursday. Johnson walked Campbell through nearly every month for several years of records of the Veterans Affair’s Hospital where there was no mental health care provided because Ables declined therapy and medications. There were other times when Ables was on the medications and participated in therapy.

Johnson was able to show Ables only routinely went for therapy and/or medications. His medical records showed those were the times Ables was in trouble with the law. The progress notes from the VA said he would call and needed a letter for his lawyer for court etc. Campbell did agree with Johnson’s observation but said it did not change his diagnosis of Ables having PTSD.

Cowden asked Ables if he was going to testify on his own behalf.

“I do not wish to testify,” Ables said Friday afternoon.

Victim impact statements started Friday afternoon. They will finish up on Monday. The jury should begin deliberating Ables’ fate by noon.

(source: midfloridanewspapers.com)

***********

State Attorney Seeks Death Penalty Against Man for Rape, Murder of Teen in Orlando

The State Attorney is seeking the death penalty against a man for the rape and murder of a teen in Orlando.

Ninth Judicial Circuit State Attorney Andrew Bain’s office filed a Notice of Intent to Seek the Death Penalty in the capital felony 1st Degree Murder case against 28-year-old Jerry Dorisme after an Orange County grand jury indicted him for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a juvenile female.

On July 4, 2024, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office responded to a man-down call at an apartment complex in the 4400 block of S. Rio Grande Avenue. After arriving on scene, deputies found a juvenile female victim who had been stabbed. Medical personnel transported her to a local hospital where they pronounced her dead.

Through investigative means, OCSO deputies developed Dorisme as a suspect. Detectives located him and arrested him 1 week later.

The decision to seek the death penalty is based on the facts of the offense and the defendant’s prior record. According to the State Attorney’s office, the statutory aggravating factors the State intends to prove are:

The defendant is a convicted felon previously convicted of a capital felony or a felony involving the use or threat of violence to another person.

The defendant committed the capital felony while engaged in the commission of, or an attempt to commit, sexual battery and kidnapping.

The capital felony was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.

The State Attorney’s office presented sufficient evidence to a grand jury on August 28th to secure an indictment against Dorisme for 1st Degree Murder (with a Weapon), Kidnapping with Intent to Inflict Bodily Harm or Terrorize (with a Weapon), Sexual Battery (with a Deadly Weapon or Physical Force) and Attempted Sexual Battery (with a Deadly Weapon or Physical Force).

(source: West Orlando News)

PENNSYLVANIA:

Poplawski, on death row for killing 3 Pittsburgh cops, raises new questions about jury's conduct

Richard Poplawski, convicted of killing 3 Pittsburgh police officers 15 years ago, claimed in a recent court filing that the jurors who sentenced him to death may have been unduly influenced during a field trip they took during an off day in the trial.

Poplawski, 38, is asking an Allegheny County Common Pleas judge to provide additional funding so that investigators can question the Dauphin County jurors who heard the case.

The court has so far prohibited the defense team from contacting the jurors at all, the filing said.

The panel, chosen from the Harrisburg area because of pre-trial publicity, voted for the death penalty in 2011 after finding that Poplawski ambushed and killed Officers Eric G. Kelly, Stephen J. Mayhle and Paul J. Sciullo II on April 4, 2009, at his home in Pittsburgh’s Stanton Heights neighborhood. They were responding to a domestic dispute between Poplawski and his mother.

The state Supreme Court upheld Poplawski’s punishment on direct appeal in 2015.

He is now pursuing an appeal under the Post Conviction Relief Act, which provides a way for defendants to challenge their convictions.

The case, now assigned to Judge Kevin G. Sasinoski, is scheduled for a hearing on Nov. 18.

In a Sept. 27 motion, Poplawski’s appellate attorneys, Douglas Sughrue and Corrie Woods, asked for additional funding and time to file an amended petition.

The motion notes that Vickie Piontkowski — who is studying Poplawski’s background to find evidence that might mitigate his culpability — has conducted a significant portion of her work but still needs funding for 500 more hours over another 1 to 2 years to complete her investigation.

Piontkowski wrote in a court filing that the mitigation investigation done for Poplawski prior to trial was inadequate.

For example, she said it did not include include interviews with his mother’s mental health providers, people he served with during basic traning in the Marines and other relatives.

As part of the defense’s ongoing investigation, Poplawski’s attorneys also said that they have obtained information that jurors in his case may have been subjected to external influence.

More local events

Although the jury was sequestered throughout the trial at the DoubleTree Hotel in Pittsburgh — and kept under guard by the Allegheny County Sheriff’s office — the motion notes that on an off day, deputies took them on a field trip.

On that day, June 26, 2011, jurors visited several locations, including houses of worship on the North Side, Downtown and in the Hill District. They also went through the South Side and Mt. Washington, visited the Pittsburgh Steelers’ offices and what was then Heinz Field, and took an after-hours tour of the Heinz History Center.

The defense motion notes that public consciousness and comment on Poplawski’s trial was at a “fever pitch, and almost exclusively against him.”

The filing notes a letter to the editor in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in which the writer said Poplawski deserved the death penalty. It also mentions a sign in a South Side bar: “Free Fries if Poplawski Fries.”

“It is unknown whether the jurors’ routes on their ‘field trip’ passed by the sign urging petitioner’s death,” the motion said.

Poplawski is currently being housed at the State Correctional Institution at Somerset.

(source: community.triblive.com)

OKLAHOMA:

When prosecutors ‘take a dive’ — the purported ‘error’ in Richard Glossip’s case

Earlier this month, Amherst College Professor Austin Sarat criticized Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito for asking pointed questions about death row inmate Richard Glossip’s claim that his 2004 murder conviction should be overturned. After all, Oklahoma’s new attorney general, Gentner Drummond, supports Glossip’s contention that the trial prosecutors withheld evidence.

This popular narrative, however, is a manufactured and bogus claim. The prosecutors never withheld evidence. The case’s true lesson is about the emerging dangers of prosecutors confessing phantom “errors,” and sometimes even throwing cases on purpose.

In 1988, an Oklahoma jury convicted Glossip of hiring his friend, Justin Sneed, to murder Barry Van Treese. Following a reversal for ineffective assistance of counsel, a jury again convicted Glossip in 2004. He was again sentenced to death.

After nearly 2 decades of appeals, Glossip now argues that the trial prosecutors hid evidence that Sneed was taking lithium for a mental disorder under the direction of a psychiatrist — evidence that his attorneys could have potentially used to impeach Sneed as a witness.

Glossip’s argument is based on just 4 words in one prosecutor’s notes during a pre-trial interview of Sneed. The words read: “on Lithium?” And “Dr. Trumpet?”

Drummond has joined Glossip in concluding that these 4 words mean the prosecutor knew about Sneed’s possible psychiatric prescription. But this ignores the important context surrounding these few words. In truth, the prosecutor was simply writing down what Sneed said in recounting his questioning by defense investigators. Hence the 2 question marks and the surrounding information about the defense team that is contained in the notes.

Surprisingly, Drummond never directly asked the prosecutor what her notes meant. Even more surprisingly, Drummond did not disclose to the Supreme Court the other prosecutor’s notes of the same interview.

Those notes directly record Sneed recounting being “visited by 2 women who said they rep[resented] Glossip.” Thus, as I explained in my amicus brief on behalf of the Van Treese family, the prosecutors’ notes cannot possibly reflect information withheld from the defense. Rather, the notes show them writing down information about what the defense team had asked Sneed.

In a letter accompanying my brief, both prosecutors state specifically that their notes merely reflected that Sneed was relating information the defense already possessed. Contrary to Sarat’s claim that prosecutors “withheld evidence” from the defense, the prosecutors only wrote down evidence that the defense already had.

The Glossip case mirrors an unfortunate trend. Recently other prosecutors have also confessed phantom or illusory “errors.” Earlier this year, the Third Circuit unanimously rejected Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s confession of error in a death penalty case. The circuit affirmed a trial court order sanctioning the DA’s Office for failing to fully investigate the purported error and for misrepresenting that the office had properly informed the victim’s family what was happening.

Another example comes from a Texas death penalty case, in which a new Travis County DA was elected on an anti-death penalty platform. Just a few days later, the DA’s Office confessed error regarding Areli Escobar’s capital sentence for the rape and murder of Bianca Maldonado, his 17-year-old neighbor. The significance of that local prosecutor’s dubious admission remains pending before the Supreme Court to resolve, after it decides Glossip’s case.

A final example comes from Los Angeles, where George Gascón was elected district attorney with the help of significant outside campaign money. He then set about reversing capital judgments in the county by systematically conceding error regardless of the facts of particular cases. Gascón is running for reelection in November.

What appears to be motivating prosecutors to “take a dive” in these cases is that, at least in their jurisdictions, it’s good politics. But enmeshing victims’ families in unfounded litigation based on bogus errors is cruel. And the larger casualty is public confidence in the criminal justice system. The public sees headlines about prosecutors admitting errors and wrongly assumes that the system can’t be trusted to reach accurate results.

Fortunately, at least a partial remedy is at hand in Glossip and other cases subject to judicial review. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that “it is the uniform practice of this court to conduct its own examination of the record in all cases where the Federal Government or a State confesses that a conviction has been erroneously obtained.” Far from being blameworthy, Justices Thomas and Alito were just taking seriously their obligation to review the facts when they asked tough questions.

The Supreme Court and, more broadly, courts throughout the country should closely scrutinize prosecutors’ confessions of “error” to ensure they are true. And in Glossip, where the alleged error is simply concocted, the court should affirm Glossip’s sentence. The victim’s family deserves some small measure of closure, more than 10,139 days after Barry Van Treese’s murder.

(source: Opinion; Paul Cassell is a former federal judge and a professor of criminal law at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. He is representing the Van Treese family pro bono in the Glossip case----thehill.com)

IDAHO:

Kohberger's defense takes aim at Idaho’s death penalty

Bryan Kohberger’s defense beat back at prosecutors’ plan to give an Ada County jury the option to hand the University of Idaho homicide suspect a death sentence in the latest court filings of the closely watched case.

Kohberger’s attorneys this week filed more than a dozen briefs to support their ongoing effort to strike the death penalty as a possible sentence for the man suspected of killing 4 U of I students in November 2022. The filings came in response to objections earlier this month from state prosecutors who want capital punishment for Kohberger if he is convicted of murder.

The new defense briefs, each signed by Kootenai County public defender Jay Logsdon, aimed to pick away at prosecutors’ arguments about the appropriateness and their authority in Idaho to seek a death sentence for Kohberger. Logsdon countered in his briefs that many of the grounds for doing so are inconsistent, outdated or unconstitutional, based on U.S. and Idaho laws and legal precedents.

In 2015, when the Idaho Supreme Court ruled on contemporary standards of decency concerning the death penalty, 32 U.S. states had active capital punishment programs, Logsdon wrote in one challenge. That total has since dropped to 27 states, including Idaho, but with 6 of those states maintaining governor-imposed execution moratoriums, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

“The evolving standards of society, and the unusualness of the death penalty, have changed,” Logsdon argued. “This court should take these changes into account and strike the penalty in this matter.”

Kohberger’s murder trial was set to take place in Moscow, but his attorneys successfully argued the location should be changed over concerns of local juror bias.

The Idaho Supreme Court moved the trial to Boise, where it is now overseen by Judge Steven Hippler of Idaho’s 4th Judicial District in Ada County. Kohberger’s trial is scheduled for summer 2025.

Kohberger is accused of killing the 4 U of I students at an off-campus home in Moscow almost 2 years ago. The case, including a nearly 7-week manhunt for a suspect that ended in eastern Pennsylvania with his arrest, drew global interest and continues to garner national attention ahead of his scheduled trial in Boise.

The victims in the early morning attack were Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene; Kaylee Goncalves, 21, of Rathdrum; Xana Kernodle, 20, of Post Falls; and Ethan Chapin, 20, of Mount Vernon, Wash. Each of the students was stabbed to death with a large knife, according to the local coroner.

Kohberger is charged with 4 counts of 1st-degree murder and 1 count of felony burglary. Prosecutors last year issued their intent to seek the death penalty, citing 5 aggravating factors, including that the killings were “especially heinous” and that the defendant would be a “continuing threat to society.”

Logsdon separately targeted each aggravator. He wrote that the heinousness standard was adopted by the state’s highest court, but Idaho law does not allow a defendant to be put to death on any grounds unless approved by the Legislature. In addition, Logsdon argued that someone’s future potential to commit a crime is not legally sufficient to sentence someone to death.

“… Idaho’s scheme fails utterly to define those who should be death eligible,” he wrote.

Earlier this month, based on a separate challenge, prosecutors withdrew 1 of their 5 initial aggravators, leaving 4 remaining. If the jurors convict Kohberger, they need only to establish 1 aggravating factor to give him the death penalty if it remains a possible sentence in the case.

Kohberger, who will turn 30 next month, has been in police custody for about 22 months following his December 2022 arrest on suspicion of the homicides. He was unanimously indicted in May 2023 on the 5 felony charges by a Latah County grand jury, and a judge entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf when he remained silent.

(source: Bonner County Daily Bee)

NEVADA:

Jury Delivers Rare Death Penalty Sentence in Nevada for 2012 Murder

In a significant decision, a Nevada jury sentenced Robert Brown, 54, to death on October 9th for the 2012 murder of his girlfriend, Nichole Nick. This marks the 1st death penalty verdict in Nevada in over 5 years, a surprising outcome in an era where such sentences have become less common.

Brown was found guilty of breaking into Nick’s apartment, killing her, injuring her mother, and firing toward a young child. The events unfolded after an argument between Brown and Nick just hours prior. Despite little media attention since Brown’s arrest in 2014, the case resurfaced with this high-profile sentencing. The jury took about two hours to reach their decision.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Jay Raman highlighted Brown’s violent past during the penalty phase, which included a prior carjacking conviction and aggressive behavior while in custody. Raman urged the jury to consider the severity of the crime, arguing that the death penalty was the appropriate punishment.

Defense attorneys presented a different narrative, focusing on Brown’s mental health struggles, past trauma, and efforts to portray him as someone whose life still held value despite his actions. Attorney Lance Maningo emphasized that “an eye for an eye is not the answer,” advocating for a life sentence instead.

Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson acknowledged that Brown’s history and the nature of the crime played a crucial role in seeking the death penalty. He pointed out that while death sentences are less common today, the gravity of this case warranted it. Yet, defense attorneys and observers noted that the decision seemed unexpected compared to other cases that might more clearly justify capital punishment.

With Nevada’s lengthy appeal process and challenges in obtaining lethal injection drugs, it remains uncertain when or if Brown’s sentence will be carried out. The state’s last execution occurred in 2006, and the road ahead for Brown, like many others on death row, is likely to be a long one.

(source: thenevadaglobe.com)

NIGERIA:

Mixed reactions trail NBA’s call for abolition of death penalty

Earlier this month, the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, reiterated its call for the abolition of the death sentence.

The Association believes it not only denies the right to life but also often reflects the failures of the country’s justice system to protect the most vulnerable in society.

The NBA’s position was reinforced through its president, Afam Osigwe, in his opening remarks at a high level technical consultation jointly organised by the National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, Avocats Sans Frontières France, and the Legal Defence and Assistance Project (LEDAP) to commemorate the World Day Against the Death Penalty.

According to the NBA president, the event observed annually on October 10, serves as a powerful reminder of the global movement to challenge the use of capital punishment.

“It is a day that calls us to reflect on the death penalty, not only from a legal perspective but also from a moral, ethical, and human rights viewpoint,” he said.

He equally noted that the event equally presented an opportunity to consider whether the death penalty truly delivers the justice it promises or whether it perpetuates harm and injustice.

Arguing strongly against the practice of death penalty, he quoted the former South African President, Nelson Mandela, as having said: “To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity,” and submitted that death penalty, in its ultimate finality, not only denies the right to life but also often reflects the failures of a country’s justice system to protect the most vulnerable in the society.”

Osigwe further argued that in many parts of the world, there is a growing consensus that the death penalty is an outdated and ineffective form of punishment.

“Over 140 countries have abolished the death penalty or introduced moratoriums on its use. This is a testament to the global recognition of the inherent value of human life and the belief that the justice system must reflect a higher standard of humanity and dignity,” he stated.

He also called attention to the United Nations General Assembly, which he said had passed multiple resolutions urging member states to move towards a moratorium on the death penalty, with the ultimate goal of abolition.

“This global trend aligns with the understanding that the right to life is the foundation of all human rights, and no justice system should take that right away without grave and careful consideration,” he added.

Arguing against the continued practice of death penalty in Nigeria, he said even though it remains a legal instrument in Nigerian to punish offenders of such crimes as armed robbery, terrorism and murder, the danger in the practice is the potential judicial error of wrongly pronouncing an innocent guilty, and ultimately sending such a fellow to an early grave for an offence he or she never committed in the first place.

He said: “In Nigeria, the death penalty remains a legal punishment, and executions are still carried out for various crimes, including armed robbery, terrorism, and murder.

“While it is understandable that the state must protect its citizens and maintain law and order, we must carefully consider the impact of the death penalty on the broader society, as well as the risks it poses to justice itself.

“We cannot ignore the troubling realities of wrongful convictions, the potential for judicial error, and the disproportionately high number of people from vulnerable and marginalised communities who are on death row.

“The death penalty in such cases becomes not just a punishment for the crime but a reflection of the failures of our criminal justice system to provide a fair and equitable process for all.

“As members of the legal profession and human rights community, we must ask difficult questions. Does the death penalty really deter crime? Is it administered fairly, without prejudice or discrimination? And most importantly, are there more humane and effective ways to deliver justice and protect society without resorting to the taking of life?”

He said the association believes that a justice system that upholds the rights of every individual is the foundation of a peaceful and progressive society.

However, beautiful as the NBA’s argument and presentation may sound, some Nigerians are not buying into that.

The thinking in some quarters is that if criminals are not afraid to go into crimes that attract capital punishment even with the existing law on death penalty, it simply means that when it is finally abolished, there would be an astronomical rise in such offences.

It is their belief that the death sentence still restrains a large or sizable number of evil-minded individuals from committing such grave crimes as murder, armed robbery, terrorism, among others.

One of those kicking against the NBA’s position is a public affairs analyst, Emmanuel Aziken.

He disagreed with the NBA, noting that even the Holy Book, the Bible, recommended an eye for an eye.

He argued that whoever that kills maliciously should equally be killed, but emphasized such a sentence should only happen when a thorough investigation has been carried out to prove the person’s guilt or culpability.

It is his considered opinion that if the death penalty is abolished, the rate of murder would increase as people would no longer be restrained.

The life sentence, according to him, is not enough punishment for malicious murder since there are chances of a state pardon even before such a convict spends 10 years in jail.

“One day, one drunk in power will just come and say he is using his prerogative of mercy to grant pardon to such a wicked soul and there is nothing anybody can do about that.

“Just take a look at the rate of malicious murder even with the death sentence in place and imagine what would happen when it is no longer there. So, I don’t support the NBA at all. It should be an eye for an eye as the Bible says,” he told DAILY POST.

Also contributing, a journalist and public affairs commentator, Nze Ezeocha also disagreed with the NBA.

He, however, insisted that judgment on such cases should be clean and thorough so that the innocent would not fall victim.

He insisted that the death penalty serves as a deterrent to other intending murderers and should not be abolished for any reason.

“It serves as a deterrent to others who may want to commit murder in future. The only thing is that wrong, incompetent and corrupt judges should be avoided in such cases,” he said.

On the NBA’s argument that prison congestion is one of the reasons it is pushing for the abolition of death, Ezeocha called on the state governors to sign genuine death sentences to decongest the prisons.

“Death sentence, surely, will serve as deterrent to other intending criminals and it shouldn’t be abolished. It should be retained in our criminal justice system,” he said.

President of the Arewa Youth Consultative Forum, AYCF, Alhaji Yerima Shettima, also did not agree with the NBA’s position.

In fact, he wondered why anybody should even contemplate that in the first place.

“How can anybody think of that? As stubborn as Nigerians are, even when there is a death sentence, people undermine laws, break laws and get away with it; so how much more when you review the law and say it is not there again? He queried.

“It means that nothing scares anybody any more and it will be a free for all. It means that at the end of the day, people will commit all sorts of crimes with impunity and get away with them.

“This must not be encouraged; there must be a death sentence. In fact, the death sentence must be reinforced because we have people who are leaders but do not have conscience,” he further told DAILY POST.

Apart from the offences that attract death sentences, he suggested that corruption should also be included in the list of offences that attract death sentences in Nigeria.

“I suggest that on the issue of corruption, there should be a law that recommends death by hanging for anybody found wanting in corruption as it is done in China and other Asian countries,” he submitted.

But, those who are pushing for its abolition, like the NBA, are saying that if death sentence has not been able to deter people from committing grave crimes that attract such punishment after so many years of its existence in the country’s justice system, it then stands to reason that the time has come for an alternative justice system that should replace death sentence.

One of the proponents of this position is a lawyer and public affairs commentator, Ikechukwu Onodi.

He told DAILY POST: “I have personally had articles published since 1999, which sought for the abolition of death sentences in our criminal jurisprudence.

“So I’m in complete agreement with the leadership of the NBA on the need to abolish death sentences.

“Member countries of the UN had since 1966 on the platform of the Second Optional Protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), sought the abolition of death sentences in the statute books of the contracting states.

“Unfortunately, Nigeria has not acceded to that Protocol. Death sentence is an aberration. The argument of it serving as a deterrent to others is illogical as there are instances to show that criminality became heightened in Nigeria following the public execution of 1976.”

He also argued that since man cannot create life, it is only reasonable that man should not take that which he cannot create.

“Again, man cannot create a life. As such, man should also not terminate a life. To highlight the needlessness of death sentences, no death sentence has been executed in recent times as no governor has summoned the courage to sign any death warrant.

“In effect, inmates on death row are only being subjected to psychological torture,” he said.

He noted that society is the loser if the death sentence is sustained.

To buttress his point, he cited cases of people who were sentenced to death at one time in their lives but fate smiled on them and they were granted pardon. Such persons, he argued, had gone ahead to contribute meaningfully to the development of the country.

“The society is the loser in death sentences. This is because people have been known to become society icons, who by whiskers, got off the hook of death sentence. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is a living example.

“He was condemned by the late General Sani Abacha military junta for planning a coup. His death sentence was commuted to life jail on the intervention of the international communities.

“He was released and granted pardon by General Abdusalami Abubakar. He contested election in 1999 at the return of democracy in Nigeria, won and became the best President Nigeria has had since 1999,” he stated.

(source: dailypost.ng)

IRAN:

Civil rights activists call on Verisheh Moradi to end hunger strike

A group of civil rights activists has issued a statement in support of Kurdish political prisoner Verisheh Moradi, who is on the 16th day of an indefinite hunger strike, and called on her to end her hunger strike.

In the statement, the activists declared their intention to go on hunger strike on 26 October in solidarity with Moradi and asked her to end her strike afterwards.

Moradi, a member of the East Kurdistan Free Women Society (KJAR), began her strike against the death penalty in Iran on 10 October to coincide with World Day Against the Death Penalty. Since then, her health has deteriorated significantly and she is now in a critical condition.

The statement highlighted Moradi’s role as a “symbol of resilience” against the death penalty in Iran, which rights groups say is increasingly being used against political prisoners.

“We ask her to end her hunger strike, giving us and others the opportunity to stand beside her,” read the statement, adding that Moradi’s continued activism was necessary for the broader struggle for justice and freedom.

Moradi has lost 7 kg since beginning her indefinite hunger strike, and suffers from low blood pressure, migraines, and severe joint and back pain.

Full text of the statement:

Statement by a group of civil rights activists supporting Verisheh Moradi and requesting she ends her hunger strike to continue the civil and rightful struggle

Two weeks have passed since Verisheh Moradi began her hunger strike. For two weeks, she has raised her voice with courage and determination, protesting the cruel death sentences imposed on many civilians.

In these critical and significant moments, we, as part of a community that believes in justice, freedom, and human rights, stand in solidarity with Verisheh Moradi. She has become a symbol of resilience and civil resistance. Over the past two weeks, through her decision to go on hunger strike, she has raised her voice against oppression, inequality, and the growing number of unfair executions.

Her hunger strike is not only a testament to her unwavering resolve in the face of oppression but also a voice that echoes the truth and resilience to the world. We fully understand the difficult and challenging conditions she has endured, as well as the high-risk decision she has made to confront these injustices.

Nevertheless, as her companions on this journey, we are today asking her to end her hunger strike. Her struggle is evident not only in her current hunger strike but in all her efforts and actions to date. She is a figure our society needs to continue the civil struggle; she is a representative of all those who dream of a free and just society.

We have no intention of overlooking the importance and meaning of her protest; quite the contrary, we see her action as a significant step in the path of civil resistance. But, as Verisheh Moradi herself has always emphasized the role of society and the active participation of advocates, we now need her presence and strength on this journey more than ever. Civil resistance requires energy, resilience, and continuity, as this struggle is both long and challenging.

We ask her to end her hunger strike, giving us and others the opportunity to stand beside her and use our full strength to continue the fight for freedom and justice. Nothing should be more valuable than human life, and we need her to continue standing with us, not just now, but throughout this journey of resistance.

In this spirit, we, a group of activists aligned with all pro-freedom forces, have decided to embark on a hunger strike on Saturday, 26 October, as a tribute to her efforts and courageous resistance, and as a symbol of our solidarity and support. Although this action is symbolic and small in scale compared to larger protests, it serves as a meaningful gesture in support of her and the broader civil movements. It reflects our solidarity with Verisheh and all who are fighting for justice and freedom. Nonetheless, we ask her to end her hunger strike after this day, as civil and protest movements are arduous and lengthy, and we need our advocates to remain active to continue down this challenging path. Standing in full solidarity with Verisheh Moradi’s protest against the death penalty, we firmly believe that such inhumane sentences, which unjustly endanger human lives, can only be stopped through solidarity, collective protest, and individual civil actions. Each of us must be a voice for this protest and continue to strive for justice and defend human rights without wavering.

(source: Kurdistan Human Rights Network)

OCTOBER 26, 2024:

TEXAS:

Mum faces death penalty after 'intentionally' dropping baby daughter from 3rd-floor

A heartbroken community is in shock as a mother, Channel Yonko, aged 30, faces murder charges for deliberately dropping her 1-year-old daughter from a window, resulting in the child's death as she made her escape from the hotel.

An arrest warrant alleges she dropped Hannah from the 3rd-floor balcony of a hotel. Chilling CCTV footage appears to capture the young child falling from the balcony, hitting the pavement below.

Tragically, court documents reveal Hannah had also sustained 3 puncture wounds. Discovered on the pavement outside the hotel, the toddler was swiftly taken to a local hospital but was sadly declared deceased not long after arrival.

A swift response by local law enforcement led to the arrest of the mother, who was caught wandering the streets approximately half a mile from the ill-fated hotel, initially misleading officers by saying her daughter was simply sick. But police say she continued her erratic behaviour and collapsed into tears, later refusing to identify herself or cooperate once at the police station.

This chilling case took a more sinister turn when Channel's sister informed the police she had earlier seen Channel, stroller in hand near The Victorian hotel, assuming little Hannah was inside but not verifying the fact. In a haunting warning, she pleaded with Channel, "Don't return to the hotel," reports the Mirror.

During their investigation, police unearthed chilling details from the Beachfront Palms hotel staff, revealing that the group had occupied room 217. A garbage bag discovered at the hotel contained a key card to this room, a skinning knife, and various items including children's clothing, snacks, and nappies, officials disclosed.

Heartbreaking CCTV footage captured the moment little Hannah took her fatal fall, as well as a snapshot of Yonko pushing her living child in a stroller earlier.

Galveston Police Chief Doug Balli stated: "This is a horrible crime. All children deserve to feel safe when around loved ones, especially with their own mother. The Galveston Police Department is committed to bringing justice for Hannah and ensuring the safety of all children in our community."

(source: express.co.uk)

***************

Ken Paxton and Texas House members accuse each other of mischaracterizing Robert Roberson’s case

A week after death row inmate Robert Roberson was set to die, the extraordinary quest to save his life has morphed into a deepening political battle between a group of Texas House lawmakers and the state’s leading Republicans as they trade bitter accusations and push conflicting narratives around his guilt — or likely innocence.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday condemned the bipartisan Texas House committee that forced a delay of Roberson’s execution, saying it “stepped out of line.”

Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a graphic press release Wednesday, insisted on Roberson’s guilt and accused the committee of pursuing “11th-hour, 1-sided, extrajudicial stunts that attempt to obscure the facts and rewrite his past.” The group of lawmakers, in return, blasted Paxton for publishing a “misleading and in large part simply untrue” summation of Roberson’s case.

State Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, along with Reps. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, Rhetta Andrews Bowers, D-Rowlett, and Lacey Hull, R-Houston, issued a 16-page, point-by-point rebuttal on Thursday to Paxton’s release, including citations and exhibits shown at trial and since recovered during the appeals process.

The Office of the Attorney General attached the autopsy report of Roberson’s 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, whom he was convicted of killing, and a statement from the medical examiner who performed it. But Paxton otherwise referred broadly to the trial record and did not acknowledge any of the new evidence presented in Roberson’s appeals.

“There are no new facts in the OAG’s statement, only a collection of exaggerations, misrepresentations and full-on untruths completely divorced from fact and context,” Moody wrote on social media Thursday.

The political fight over Roberson’s execution came as a result of the unusual transfer in venue for debate over his case from the courtroom to the broader public discourse — a shift wrought when the courts shut down all of Roberson’s appeals and lawmakers, convinced of his likely innocence or at least of a failure by the courts, turned to their bully pulpit to intervene.

As part of a rare campaign to stop Roberson’s execution, the Texas Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence held two, daylong hearings featuring a stream of experts and advocates testifying live to his innocence.

“These people believe Robert isn’t guilty,” Moody, Leach, Bowers and Hull wrote in their rebuttal. “These people know Robert didn’t get a fair trial.”

The clash of narratives around Roberson’s guilt or innocence has since played out in the public sphere — the Texas Capitol, social media and dueling press releases — turning every observer into a quasi-juror, judge and potential executioner.

Paxton stepped in shortly after Roberson’s execution was halted to quash plans for Roberson to testify before the House criminal jurisprudence committee in person at the Capitol. His office said Roberson would only testify over video “in the interest of public safety,” to which Roberson’s attorney and the committee objected.

Doug Deason, a GOP megadonor and Abbott ally, called Paxton’s release “completely unhinged from reality,” while former Texas Republican Party Chair Matt Rinaldi described the response to the release from Roberson’s attorney as “gaslighting at its finest.”

Roberson was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for the death of his chronically ill daughter. He has maintained his innocence over two decades on death row while seeking unsuccessfully to use Texas’ 2013 junk science law to argue that the shaken baby syndrome diagnosis at the crux of his conviction is scientifically unsound.

The Texas Supreme Court stopped Roberson’s execution on Oct. 17 after a subpoena issued by the House panel touched off a separation of powers issue between the state’s legislative and executive branches. Roberson still faces the death penalty, but his execution has been delayed pending the resolution of that constitutional conflict.

The argument to carry on with Roberson’s death sentence as pushed by Paxton, the state’s top law enforcement officer, relied on a sometimes misleading and incomplete summation of his trial — itself, Roberson’s advocates say, tainted by a discredited shaken baby diagnosis, incomplete medical records, uncorroborated and prejudicial allegations of sexual abuse, bias against a man with undiagnosed autism, and non-credible testimony about Roberson’s history.

Roberson’s supporters point to reams of new scientific and medical evidence that suggest Nikki died from undiagnosed pneumonia, which suppressed her breathing and was worsened by medications that are no longer prescribed to children, leading to bleeding and swelling in her brain.

The lawmakers in Thursday’s rebuttal refuted Paxton’s claims that Nikki had extensive bruising when Roberson brought her to the hospital, and that she died not only from being violently shaken, but also from “blunt force head injuries” caused by beating.

The autopsy photos, they said, show “almost no outward injuries” — a fact the state acknowledged at trial when asking the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy to explain the “large discrepancy” between “what you see on the outside and what you see on the inside.” The lack of external injuries, in fact, is what led a doctor to diagnose shaken baby syndrome, the lawmakers wrote.

In response to Paxton’s claim that Roberson had a history of violence and domestic abuse, the lawmakers argued that the witnesses who gave that testimony at trial had serious credibility issues and provided no corroborating evidence.

They also condemned Paxton’s reference to another inmate’s claim that Roberson had admitted to molesting his daughter — a report so dubious that even the prosecution did not include it in its case.

“By including this information, the OAG has repeated a lie with, at best, a complete indifference to the truth,” the lawmakers wrote. “The ‘jailhouse snitch’ here wove a tale so outrageously contrary to the evidence that prosecutors didn’t use it at trial.”

And they highlighted the “mountain of evidence and changed science that’s accumulated since Robert’s trial — the same changed science that caused the Court of Criminal Appeals” to overturn another shaken baby conviction out of Dallas County this month.

Members of the committee drew ire from eight fellow House members, who filed a brief with the Supreme Court of Texas criticizing the panel’s use of a subpoena to delay Roberson’s execution. Those eight members also echoed Paxton’s claims portraying Roberson as a violent man who deserves to have his execution carried out.

Roberson’s attorneys issued their own 27-page rebuttal Thursday in response to Paxton’s release.

“We know that the laws our Legislature created to correct those problems haven’t worked as intended for Robert and people like him,” the lawmakers wrote.” That’s why we’re here and why we won’t quit.”

(source: Yahoo News)

**********

November election could determine the outcome of Robert Roberson's death penalty case

What’s becoming one of the most high-profile courts in Texas is one that some Texans have never heard of.

Judges Sharon Keller, Barbara Parker Hervey and Michelle Slaughter joined the 5-4 majority that dismissed Robert Roberson’s legal petition to avoid execution for the murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome of his daughter in 2002. All 3 also lost their bid for reelection

Democrat Holly Taylor is facing Republican David Schenck in the general election to become the court’s presiding judge

The 2 other races for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals are for Place 7—between Democrat Nancy Mulder and Republican Gina Parker—and for Place 8, between Democrat Chika Anyiam and Republican Lee Finley

“A third of the court that is different starting on Jan. 25, 2025,” said Elsa Alcala, a former judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is the only court in the state that deals with the death penalty. Judges Sharon Keller, Barbara Parker Hervey and Michelle Slaughter joined the 5-4 majority that dismissed Robert Roberson’s legal petition to avoid execution for the murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome of his daughter in 2002.

All 3 also lost their bid for reelection during the Republican primary election back in March.

Democrat Holly Taylor is facing Republican David Schenck in the general election to become the court’s presiding judge.

Candidates running for a seat on the court are not permitted to talk directly about the Roberson case. Schenck did not respond to our request for comment, but Taylor spoke to Texas Democrats Thursday about what’s at stake.

“I have spent much of my legal career working for the integrity of the criminal justice system,” she said.

After the court denied Roberson’s stay to his execution, state lawmakers stepped in and subpoenaed Roberson to testify. While he hasn’t appeared yet, the move was enough to halt the execution and set a legal precedent.

“We’re kind of in uncharted water here,” said lawyer David Coale.

Late Wednesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a statement condemning lawmakers for interrupting the process.

“I’ve never seen a case go back and forth like this with so many actors,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Legal experts not involved in the case say the next steps are uncertain, but the garnered public attention could play a role in whether Roberson is ultimately executed.

“To make sure that how you feel about how the law is being applied is reflected in the vote that you cast,” said Maher.

While Gov. Greg Abbott agreed the Texas Legislature shouldn’t have intervened, Coale thinks he may say more after the election.

“Before the election, I suspect he’s going to be very reluctant to exercise that power, given how close a number of races are, and how politically charged this issue is,” said Coale.

The 2 other races for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals are for Place 7—between Democrat Nancy Mulder and Republican Gina Parker—and for Place 8, between Democrat Chika Anyiam and Republican Lee Finley. None of the judges responded to our request for comment.

It will take just one new judge to tip the scales, which could halt Roberson’s execution.

(source: spectrumlocalnews.com)

****************

A Texas man's execution was stayed. Now Ken Paxton wants to silence him.----Robert Roberson was supposed to give testimony before a committee of the Texas Legislature.

On Oct. 21, Robert Roberson was scheduled to do what no death row inmate has ever done. He was supposed to give testimony before a committee of the Texas Legislature that is investigating his case.

This would have been a remarkable moment in death penalty history. It would have offered hope for Roberson himself. It also would have marked a moment when the humanity of someone convicted of a capital crime was recognized by treating them as a credible witness in a public proceeding.

That explains why officials in Texas, led by Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have stepped in to prevent Roberson from testifying. As Paxton said on Wednesday: “A few legislators have grossly interfered with the justice system by disregarding the separation of powers outlined in the State Constitution. They have created a Constitutional crisis on behalf of a man who beat his 2-year-old daughter to death.”

Abbott, Paxton and their allies are determined to see Roberson be executed and in doing so silence his voice. They should not be allowed to get away with their plan.

Allowing a death row inmate to testify before a legislative committee marks a sharp break from legal history.

They should follow the law and honor the subpoena as the Texas Supreme Ccourt did last week. Citizens of Texas, whatever their views about the death penalty, should demand that Roberson be allowed to tell his story to the state Legislature. Death row inmates, including Roberson, have sometimes given interviews to journalists. But it is something entirely different when one of them is asked to lend their voice to an official consideration of a pressing matter of public policy.

Even before this month’s events, Roberson’s case was already unprecedented in many ways. In 2002, Roberson was convicted and sentenced to death for killing his daughter, Nikki. The crucial evidence against him was provided by an expert who testified that Nikki had died from “shaken baby syndrome.”

If Roberson is executed he would be the 1st person in the United States put to death on the basis of a shaken baby syndrome diagnosis. But since Roberson was convicted, shaken baby syndrome has fallen out of favor among many in the medical community. Doubts have been raised about it by judges and legislators in several states.

Long before the Roberson case came to public prominence, similar doubts were raised in Texas. In 2013, the state passed what is colloquially called a “junk science” law. As The Associated Press says, the law “allows a person convicted of a crime to seek relief if the evidence used against them is no longer credible.” And “at the time, it was hailed by the Legislature as a uniquely future-proof solution to wrongful convictions based on faulty science.”

Texas, hardly a paradigm of criminal justice liberalism, became the 1st state in the nation to adopt such a law, which “clarified that judges could consider changes in the scientific value of already-available evidence as a basis for granting post-conviction relief even after all direct appeals are exhausted."

Nonetheless, courts have repeatedly refused to allow Roberson, who has claimed he is innocent, from taking advantage of that law through what his supporters say is “deliberate misinterpretation.” Roberson, who was scheduled to be executed on Oct. 17, was saved when a group of Texas legislators made ingenious use of an ordinary legislative power: the power to subpoena a witness to appear before legislative committees. It amounted to what I have called “a legislative reprieve.”

Having a death row inmate testify before a legislative committee would mark a sharp break from a long history in which such testimony would not have been regarded as credible. As Robert Popper, a former state prosecutor in New York, wrote, “For at least 300 years, between the 16th and 19th centuries, even the defendant in a criminal case was not permitted to testify in his own behalf.”

This same bar applied to people who had been convicted of a crime. The famous legal commentator William Blackstone put it this way: “All witnesses, of whatever religion or country, that have the use of their reason, are to be received and examined, except such as are infamous or such as are interested in the event of the cause.”

In this country, prisoners and people sentenced to death were among such “infamous” persons. Throughout the 19th century, American courts made that clear.

It is not an accident that prison guards refer to a person awaiting execution as a “dead man walking.”

In the 1871 case Ruffin v Commonwealth, a Virginia judge put it succinctly: “He has as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being the slave of the State. He is civiliter mortuus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man.”

The judge went on to explain: “The bill of rights is a declaration of general principles to govern a society of freemen, and not of convicted felons and men civilly dead. Such men … are the slaves of the State undergoing punishment for heinous crimes committed against the laws of the land.”

Courts no longer refer to prisoners or death row inmates as slaves of the state or as civilly dead. They can now give testimony in court. And in many capital cases, prisoners are often offered inducements to testify against co-defendants. But it is not an accident that prison guards refer to a person awaiting execution as a “dead man walking.”

In Roberson’s case, his testimony before the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee would help lawmakers investigate whether courts in the state are properly adhering to the “junk science” law. State Rep. Joe Moody, the committee’s chair, explained that the committee issued a subpoena to Roberson so he could “tell his story, what his life was like prior to this, what the investigation looked like through his lens. ... [T]he legislature can use that information to make the decisions that we need to make going forward in making policy.”

Whatever its legislative purpose, Roberson’s appearance before the committee may also bring even more public attention to his case and help keep him from being executed. Whether it does so or not, it is a reminder that death row inmates are still human beings, entitled to be treated with dignity, and given a voice in public proceedings.

That is precisely the kind of reminder that capital punishment’s most ardent supporters, like Abbott and Paxton, cannot abide.

Whatever the outcome of the effort to stop Roberson from telling his story, legislatures in other states should follow what the Texas legislators are trying to do and provide a place for death row inmates to testify when those legislatures consider bills about capital punishment. They and other Americans need to hear the voices of those we condemn to death, voices that are too often silenced until the moment when they are allowed the give their last words.

(source: Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College----msnbc.com)

SOUTH CAROLINA:

'He's not a monster'- the team trying to save Richard Moore from execution

Attorneys at Justice 360 fight for Richard Moore's life as he faces his third execution date, this time November 1.

“All of these men have retained a love of life,” says Vann. “They kept the hope that one day they would be released.”

Vann says the men’s optimistic eyes and satisfied smiles give her hope. She works for Justice 360, a non-profit founded more than 30 years ago to fight for people facing the death penalty.

Right now, she faces mounting deadlines as South Carolina resumes executions after a 13-year pause.

That pause was caused by the state’s inability to get drugs for lethal injection. The companies that sold them feared public backlash until last year when the state passed a shield law protecting their identities.

Executions resumed

Armed once again with a drug, the state announced plans in late August to put 6 inmates to death in a matter of months. It executed its first, Freddie Owens, on September 20.

“It’s certainly a challenging place to do the work,” says Vann. “But I think that means it’s where the work needs to be done.”

Now the clock ticks for Richard Moore.

Moore was convicted of murdering a Spartanburg convenience store clerk 25 years ago. He’s scheduled to die one week from today, November 1.

“I’ve represented Richard since 2014,” says Vann. “You can’t not develop a connection when you’re doing that kind of work for that long.”

Vann and her team have twice saved Moore from dates with death, including an execution by firing squad in 2022. Then, the method was new and the only alternative to the state’s century old electric chair. This time, Moore was able to choose lethal injection.

Still, Vann doesn’t believe he should die for his crime.

“It is not a case that is typical for seeking the death penalty,” she says. “He was unarmed when he went into the store.”

Moore’s case

Prosecutors said Moore intended to rob the store for drug money when he took clerk James Mahoney’s gun on September 16, 1999. They argued he then shot an innocent bystander, potentially the only witness, before stepping over Mahoney’s body to grab a bag of cash. The bystander survived the shooting.

But Vann insists Moore was forced to defend himself when he and Mahoney got into an argument over spare change left for customers on the counter. She says the clerk pulled out not one, but two guns and there was a struggle in which both men were shot as well as the bystander. Vann says Moore grabbed the cash as an afterthought.

But it’s not just the facts of the case that concern her. It’s also the way Moore was tried in court.

Vann says the death penalty was sought after a contentious solicitor race in which the candidates touted being tough on crime. She says the newly elected solicitor, Trey Gowdy, struck potential Black jurors who were qualified. That left Moore facing a jury with no African American peers who convicted him of murdering a white man, before a white judge and white attorneys.

Vann has filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. We reached out to Gowdy by email but did not hear back.

Moore’s family

“He’s not a monster,” says Moore’s son Lyndall who lives in Michigan. “He’s not someone who deserved the sentence he got.”

Lyndall, who was just a child when his dad was incarcerated, says he doesn’t want to lose his father. He’s 30-years-old now and says he looks a lot like his dad.

Lyndall says Moore has been involved in his life despite incarceration. He plans to visit him this weekend as he pleads with the U.S. Supreme Court and Gov. Henry McMaster to reconsider the case.

“And really just understand it and really look through it and not be content with just allowing it to go forward.”

Moore also has a daughter who lives in Spain as well as two grandchildren who are close with him. His life hinges now on the nation’s highest court or the governor granting clemency.

Vann had sought to have someone other than Gov. McMaster decide clemency. She and her team argued he couldn’t be fair because he told the media two years ago, he had no intention of commuting Moore’s sentence.

Last week, a federal judge denied the request as McMaster maintained he has not made up his mind.

“You have to study. You have to know all the facts and not just opinions,” says McMaster. “I really don’t decide until we get right to the end.”

The governor has long said executions must resume because they provide much needed closure for victims’ families.

Justice

Mahoney’s family hasn’t spoken much with the media. But they have commented on Justice 360’s Facebook page. In one post they said, “Justice is not subjecting victims to relive the trauma over and over in appeals.”

Vann says her fight for Moore’s life is not meant to mitigate their loss. Her mentor and the founder of Justice 360, John Blume, explains why they see justice differently.

“The truth is if this case happened today no prosecutor anywhere in the state would seek the death penalty,” says Blume.

Blume calls Moore’s case a relic from the past, a time when politicians boasted about the death penalty and Black men were routinely convicted by all-white juries.

He says mistakes were made in the case that could cost Moore his life. He also knows what Vann may soon face. Moore has asked her to be a witness if he is executed.

“Witnessing that, you’re never going to get over that,” says Blume, who’s seen his share of executions.

Vann tugs at a silver cross around her neck as she talks about the possibility. She says she’s never seen an execution before and is relying on her faith.

“Ultimately, I just believe that no one should be alone going through something like that.”

Vann believes everyone should have someone, on their side. It’s part of the mission of Justice 360.

(source: southcarolinapublicraio.org)

GEORGIA:

Re-membering the Executed

Today, we re-member Terry Michael Mincey who was executed by the State of Georgia on October 25, 2001.

In October 2001, Mr Mincey became the 1st person to be executed in Georgia by lethal injection.

(source: Cathy harmon-Christian, Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty)

FLORIDA:

Convicted cop killer is recommended death row again

A Bay County jury decided the fate of a convicted cop killer for the 2nd time Friday.

“We, the jury, find by a vote of 9 to 3 that Robert J. Bailey should be sentenced to death.”

Nearly 20 years after he was sentenced to death for the murder of Panama City Beach Police Sergeant Kevin Kight, 42-year-old Robert Bailey was sent back to death row by the recommendation of another Bay County jury. Kight’s family, friends, and attorneys said they are pleased with the outcome.

“We believe that this verdict reflects the community’s respect for the law enforcement men and women that sacrifice their lives each day. They put their lives on the line to keep our community safe,” State Attorney Larry Basford said.

Prosecutors said they worried the 20-year time gap would work against them in this case.

“As to the difficulties, just the age of the case worked against us quite a bit. Some of the witnesses were no longer alive and things like that,” Chief Prosecutor Mark Graham said.

Bailey would’ve spent the rest of his life behind bars without the possibility of parole if less than 8 jurors voted for the death penalty, but prosecutors said his crime calls for the ultimate punishment.

“The death penalty is appropriate in the most heinous cases. Consider the facts of this case. A law enforcement officer was killed while he was trying to enforce the law to protect all of us. If you do not have respect for the law enforcement officers, then who do you have respect for?,” Basford said.

Kight’s widow, Christina Kight-McVay, said she’s grateful the jury served Bailey justice.

“I am pleased and thankful to the jury for deciding to uphold the death penalty in this case. It was a difficult decision, one not made easily, and I thank them for finding a just and fair verdict in this case,” McVay said.

Bailey received the resentencing after a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling said death penalty cases had to be a unanimous jury verdict. After he was granted the resentencing, the law changed again in April of 2023, requiring at least an 8 to 4 vote for the death penalty. Bailey will be sentenced in November.

(source: WMBB news)

INDIANA----impending execution

Indiana death row inmate Jospeh Corcoran files to reopen appeal window in death penalty case----Corcoran’s legal team argued that his ongoing mental illness prevented him from signing the petition by the previous deadline.

Legal counsel for an Indiana man on death row have petitioned for the state’s supreme court justices to throw out a two-decade-old ruling that struck the option for post-conviction relief.

Joseph Corcoran was convicted of murdering four people in Fort Wayne in 1997 and was sentenced to death in 1999.

It wasn’t until earlier this summer, in June, that Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita filed to schedule an execution date — after the state obtained pentobarbital, a lethal drug increasingly being used around the country to carry out death warrants. Corcoran’s execution — scheduled for Dec. 18 — would be the 1st in Indiana since 2009.

In the Thursday filing, Corcoran’s Indiana public defender, Amy Karozos, maintained that her client “was and continues to be severely mentally ill.”

In the early 2000s, when the time was still ripe for Corcoran to initiate post-conviction review, he refused to sign the post-conviction petition, Karozos said.

Given recent, favorable exceptions made by state supreme court justices to allow tardy petitions — along with an increasing tendency nationwide to exempt those with mental illness from the death penalty — the lawyer argued for her client’s appeal window to be reopened.

“Corcoran has repeatedly refused to act in a competent manner which resulted in lost opportunities to save his life throughout this case and permit the State to assist in his suicide,” Karozos wrote in the motion, adding later that the state should have had to litigate a post-conviction case years ago “had Corcoran’s mental illness not severely interfered with his ability to sign his post-conviction petition in a timely manner.”

“Any prejudice the State of Indiana may suffer is outweighed by the ‘injustice’ suffered by Corcoran,” she continued.

Corcoran’s attorneys seek 2nd chance at petition

State attorneys originally offered Corcoran a life sentence if he would accept a plea or waive jury. He refused, prompting the state to file a request for the death penalty 2 days later, according to court records.

At sentencing, Corcoran stated that he wanted to waive all his appeals.

Indiana’s Supreme Court originally set a Sept. 9, 2003, deadline for Corcoran to sign and file his post-conviction petition, which could have removed him from death row.

Generally, post-conviction relief allows a criminal defendant to directly challenge the legality of a portion of their criminal trial, the judgment of their conviction, or the sentence they have received.

When that deadline day arrived, however, lawyers instead filed a motion asking the court to assess Corcoran’s competency based on his mental health history, a recent mental health exam, his department of correction records and observations made by his legal counsel.

Lawyers simultaneously submitted a post-conviction relief petition that lacked Corcoran’s signature.

Shortly after, the trial court struck the petition because it was not signed or verified by Corcoran by the Indiana Supreme Court’s deadline.

A post-conviction court held a hearing in October 2003 to determine whether Corcoran was incompetent to waive his appeals. Corcoran’s counsel presented 3 experts, including a board-certified forensic psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, and a neuropsychologist — all testified that Corcoran was incompetent to waive his appeals, Karozos said. The judge also questioned Corcoran during those proceedings.

The post-conviction court ultimately found Corcoran was competent to waive post-conviction based on his testimony. Even so, Karozos noted that the post-conviction court still acknowledged that Corcoran “is mentally ill.”

Another appeal followed in 2004, but a year later, the Supreme Court upheld the prior ruling that Corcoran was competent, and therefore, his incomplete petition for relief would not stand.

But in February 2005, Corcoran submitted to the Indiana Supreme Court a post-conviction petition with his signature. The high court justices dismissed the petition as untimely, however.

Corcoran’s lawyers are now leaning on an Indiana trial rule — Rule 60(B) — that would allow him to reinstate a petition for post-conviction relief following the dismissals.

That rule permits a trial court to relieve a defendant from a judgment for “any reason justifying relief from the operation of the judgment” that is not otherwise specifically mentioned in the rule.

To prevail, Corcoran and his legal team must demonstrate that:

he brought his claim within a reasonable time in light of the circumstances of the case

extraordinary or exceptional circumstances justify that relief; and

he has alleged a meritorious claim or defense.

Looking to other cases

Karozos argued in the newest filing that Corcoran is bringing his claim to the court within a reasonable time “in light of the circumstances.”

“The legal landscape in Indiana has changed since 2003 when Corcoran’s unsigned petition was struck, and his signed petition was dismissed,” the lawyer said.

She referenced, for example, a 2021 ruling by the Indiana Supreme Court that permitted a defendant facing execution to proceed with a post-conviction filing even though he refused to verify his petition by the deadline.

In that case, Isom v. State, public defenders submitted a petition for post-conviction relief on behalf of the defendant, Kevin Isom, without his signature. Isom, of Gary, was previously convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of his wife and her 2 children.

The post-conviction court, acknowledging the omission, issued an order giving Isom additional time to file the missing verification page. Isom still refused to sign the petition, concluding that his attorneys “were not up to the task of representing him,” according to court documents.

Isom’s refusal to sign meant he would forfeit his post-conviction challenge.

Still, after hearing oral argument, Indiana’s Supreme Court justices ordered the trial court to accept Isom’s petition anyway. The court eventually upheld Isom’s sentence, and he remains one of eight men on death row in Indiana.

“Corcoran should be treated the same as Isom given the change in how the Indiana Supreme Court has dealt with capital defendants who do not comply with the post-conviction rules in the time prescribed by the Court’s Order,” Karozos said, emphasizing that Corcoran has brought his motion “within a reasonable amount of time, given the 2021 opinion in Isom which changed the legal landscape.”

Corcoran’s lawyers additionally pointed to a move by the Marion County prosecutor in January 2024 to withdraw a death penalty request for a defendant, Elliahs Dorsey, who killed Indianapolis police officer Breann Leath.

“Equally as important is the fact that a regional consensus has emerged against executing the severely mentally ill has occurred in the past few years,” Karozos continued. “Every other contiguous death penalty state in this area of the Midwest has banned the death penalty for the seriously mentally ill.”

Corcoran’s lawyers repeatedly insisted he is “gravely mentally ill” and has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which they argued should further disqualify the inmate from capital punishment.

Larry Komp, lead federal attorney for Corcoran’s legal team, previously told the Indiana Capital Chronicle that a similar argument would be made in a separate clemency petition. A decision regarding the last-ditch plea will be left to Indiana’s governor.

(source: Indiana Capital Chronicle)

ARKANSAS----female faces death penalty

Amber Waterman booked into Arkansas jail for 1st time since 2022 arrest----Waterman is set to appear in Benton County court on Oct. 28 as prosecutors seek the death penalty.

Amber Waterman, the Missouri woman who kidnapped and murdered a pregnant Arkansas woman, has been booked into the Benton County Jail for the 1st time since her 2022 arrest.

Her booking information includes the 1 count of kidnapping and 2 counts of capital murder that she faces in her Arkansas case.

Waterman pleaded guilty to federal charges of kidnapping resulting in death and causing the death of an unborn child on July 30, 2024, and was sentenced to life in prison months later.

Benton County Prosecutor Josh Robinson told 5NEWS that the state is seeking the death penalty in the case, but that the case is on hold due to possible double jeopardy concerns.

Waterman is set to appear in Benton County court for the 1st time on Oct. 28.

The Crime

Ashley Bush, a pregnant mother of 3 living in Maysville, Arkansas, was reported missing on Oct. 31, 2022. It wasn't until Nov. 3 that the Watermans were arrested after being interviewed by detectives.

According to an indictment, Amber created a fake Facebook account under the name Lucy Barrows. As "Lucy," Amber told Bush that she could help her get a job and that she could drive her to an interview.

Once Bush was dropped off at a gas station in Maysville by family, Amber allegedly kidnapped Bush and drove her to her home in Pineville, Missouri.

On the same day, Amber called 911 and said she went into labor, and ultimately "delivered" a stillborn baby. The county medical examiner later told 5NEWS that it looked like the baby was "cut out" of the mother. Amber allegedly refused medical treatment after EMS arrived at the scene.

On Nov. 3, 2023, the Watermans were arrested. Investigators said Jamie wasn't aware of the crimes his wife had committed until Nov. 1 when Amber told him she had killed Bush, but then quickly changed her story and said “Lucy” had killed her.

After telling Jamie that Bush was killed, Amber led him to her body, which was wrapped in a blue tarp near their home. According to investigators, they burned the body in a fire pit on their property and then drove the body a short distance to hide it.

An autopsy showed that Bush died as a result of trauma to her torso, classifying the death as a homicide.

The Watermans were arrested on Nov. 3 and faced charges related to the deaths of Ashley Bush and her unborn baby girl.

For a full timeline of the case, from Bush's disappearance to Amber Waterman's guilty plea, click here, at: https://www.5newsonline.com/article/news/crime/timeline-ashley-bush-murder-kidnapping-amber-waterman/527-9c943146-93fd-4fb1-8a40-44711b285dbc

(source: 5newsonline.com)

IDAHO:

Defense takes aim at Idaho’s death penalty ahead of Bryan Kohberger capital murder trial

Bryan Kohberger’s defense beat back at prosecutors’ plan to give an Ada County jury the option to hand the University of Idaho homicide suspect a death sentence in the latest court filings of the closely watched case.

Kohberger’s attorneys this week filed more than a dozen briefs to support their ongoing effort to strike the death penalty as a possible sentence for the man suspected of killing 4 U of I students in November 2022. The filings came in response to objections earlier this month from state prosecutors who want capital punishment for Kohberger if he is convicted of murder.

The new defense briefs, each signed by Kootenai County public defender Jay Logsdon, aimed to pick away at prosecutors’ arguments about the appropriateness and their authority in Idaho to seek a death sentence for Kohberger. Logsdon countered in his briefs that many of the grounds for doing so are inconsistent, outdated or unconstitutional, based on U.S. and Idaho laws and legal precedents.

In 2015, when the Idaho Supreme Court ruled on contemporary standards of decency concerning the death penalty, 32 U.S. states had active capital punishment programs, Logsdon wrote in one challenge. That total has since dropped to 27 states, including Idaho, but with 6 of those states maintaining governor-imposed execution moratoriums, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

“The evolving standards of society, and the unusualness of the death penalty, have changed,” Logsdon argued. “This court should take these changes into account and strike the penalty in this matter.”

Kohberger’s murder trial was set to take place in Moscow, but his attorneys successfully argued the location should be changed over concerns of local juror bias. The Idaho Supreme Court moved the trial to Boise, where it is now overseen by Judge Steven Hippler of Idaho’s 4th Judicial District in Ada County.

Kohberger’s trial is scheduled for summer 2025.

Death penalty hearing Nov. 7

Kohberger is accused of killing the 4 U of I students at an off-campus home in Moscow almost 2 years ago. The case, including a nearly 7-week manhunt for a suspect that ended in eastern Pennsylvania with his arrest, drew global interest and continues to garner national attention ahead of his scheduled trial in Boise.

The victims in the early morning attack were Madison Mogen, 21, of Coeur d’Alene; Kaylee Goncalves, 21, of Rathdrum; Xana Kernodle, 20, of Post Falls; and Ethan Chapin, 20, of Mount Vernon, Washington. Each of the students was stabbed to death with a large knife, according to the local coroner.

Kohberger is charged with 4 counts of 1st-degree murder and 1 count of felony burglary. Prosecutors last year issued their intent to seek the death penalty, citing 5 aggravating factors, including that the killings were “especially heinous” and that the defendant would be a “continuing threat to society.”

Logsdon separately targeted each aggravator. He wrote that the heinousness standard was adopted by the state’s highest court, but Idaho law does not allow a defendant to be put to death on any grounds unless approved by the Legislature. In addition, Logsdon argued that someone’s future potential to commit a crime is not legally sufficient to sentence someone to death.

“… Idaho’s scheme fails utterly to define those who should be death eligible,” he wrote.

Earlier this month, based on a separate challenge, prosecutors withdrew 1 of their 5 initial aggravators, leaving 4 remaining. If the jurors convict Kohberger, they need only to establish 1 aggravating factor to give him the death penalty if it remains a possible sentence in the case.

Kohberger, who will turn 30 next month, has been in police custody for about 22 months following his December 2022 arrest on suspicion of the homicides. He was unanimously indicted in May 2023 on the 5 felony charges by a Latah County grand jury, and a judge entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf when he remained silent.

Kohberger is next scheduled to appear in court on Nov. 7 for oral arguments between the sides over whether he should be eligible for the death penalty.

(source: Idaho Statesman)

NEVADA:

For the 1st time in years, a Las Vegas jury has sentenced a man to death

This month, a jury sentenced a 54-year-old man to death for a 2012 murder — the 1st death penalty sentence a jury in Nevada has handed down in more than 5 years.

The jury found Robert Brown guilty of murdering his girlfriend, 29-year-old Nichole Nick, after breaking into her apartment, attacking her, shooting and injuring her mother and shooting toward a 3-year-old girl in the apartment. Brown and Nick were arguing just hours before, according to court transcripts.

It took about 2 hours for a jury to deliberate and sentence Brown to death on Oct. 9, said Lance Maningo, 1 of the defense attorneys representing Brown.

The case had received little media attention after Brown’s arrest in 2014. Attorneys said that in today’s age, when juries are less likely to deliver death sentences, it was surprising that Brown was sentenced to die.

“We were shocked, shocked and disappointed,” Maningo said.

Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said Brown’s violent criminal history helped distinguish this case.

“This is not a case where I would have thought that the death penalty would have been returned as compared to so many other cases,” Wolfson said when asked if he was surprised by the verdict. “There are some cases — the triple murders, the double murders of children — that you can see where a jury would come back death more easily than others … but it all depends on the makeup of the 12 people.”

Arguments for Brown’s punishment

During the penalty phase of the trial, when prosecutors argued for Brown to be sentenced to death, Chief Deputy District Attorney Jay Raman emphasized Brown’s criminal history and violence toward women. He served 9 years in prison for a 1998 carjacking conviction, in which he forced himself into his ex-wife’s car and slashed at her arms, neck and face with a box cutter. Raman also pointed to a fight Brown got into while he was in custody at the Clark County Detention Center, when Brown started punching someone who didn’t fight back, according to court transcripts

Raman argued that Brown attempted to disguise himself with a mask and gloves when he killed Nick, and he then fled Las Vegas and avoided arrest for 2 years.

“Sometimes, the hardest thing is the right thing,” Raman told the jury during his closing arguments. “Choosing life is the easy and safe choice here. With the knowledge you have now, have the strength to give him the right penalty. The death penalty.”

Meanwhile, defense attorneys argued that Brown had been treated for mental illness while incarcerated and had multiple suicide attempts, according to court transcripts. Maningo argued that Brown grew up witnessing his father abuse his mother, and that Brown was sexually abused during his childhood.

He pushed for Brown to be sentenced to life in prison, where he would be in a cell for 23 hours a day.

“Why would I be asking you to give Robert Brown life in prison?” Maningo said to the jury. “It’s simple. His life matters because all life has value. … We’re talking about the punishment, and nothing I say to you diminishes Nichole Nick. She was a beautiful young woman that didn’t deserve to die. But an eye for an eye is not the answer.”

Wolfson said that if Brown’s case was presented to him today, he would still seek the death penalty.

Scott Coffee, a defense attorney who represents murder defendants and who tracks capital punishment, said he would expect to see a capital punishment verdict in cases of multiple homicide victims, or if the crime were especially sadistic or planned out.

“Somebody is dead. All homicides are bad,” Coffee said. “But the system takes upon itself to identify those that are particularly egregious, that are such an outlier that someone has to lose their life. … What was so different about this case?”

‘Wasn’t willing to plead guilty’

Brown maintained his innocence and fired several court-appointed attorneys in the 10 years it took his case to reach trial, court records show. Defense attorneys argued that there was little forensic evidence tying Brown to the scene of the crime, although Nick’s mother, Esther Maestas, identified Brown as the man who shot her.

The jury convicted Brown of home invasion with a deadly weapon; burglary with a deadly weapon; murder with a deadly weapon; 2 counts of attempted murder with a deadly weapon; 8 counts of discharging a firearm within a structure; child abuse, neglect or endangerment with a deadly weapon; and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Brown asked the judge if he could stay in his cell at the jail during the penalty phase of the trial. District Judge Jacqueline Bluth questioned Brown about his decision but ultimately allowed the request, court records show.

Maningo said Brown didn’t want to be in the room because he was “broken” and distraught after the guilty verdict. That may have factored into the penalty deliberations.

“I think that the jury really was disturbed by the fact that he wasn’t present,” Maningo said.

Wolfson said that earlier in Brown’s case, he met with one of his defense attorneys who asked for the death penalty to be taken off the table, but Wolfson declined.

“His client wasn’t willing to plead guilty,” Wolfson said. “We don’t just take it off without exchanging something for it.”

Wolfson denied using the death penalty as a negotiating tool, but said that he is willing to stop pursuing capital punishment in some cases if the defense brings him mitigating evidence before trial.

In recent years, Wolfson has said he has been more selective and has filed for the death penalty in fewer cases. Clark County currently has more than 4o pending death penalty cases, he said.

Juries are also becoming less willing to sentence someone to death, he said.

“I’m fully aware that Clark County residents still favor the death penalty, but by a small margin,” Wolfson said.

‘The largest lever in the tool box’

The most recent person to be sentenced to death in Nevada was Tracy Petrocelli, who was sentenced to die for a 2nd time by a Reno jury in his renewed 2019 sentencing hearing. His death sentence was again overturned by the Nevada Supreme Court in 2021.

It’s been even longer since a Clark County jury has sentenced someone to die. In 2017, Thomas Randolph was sent to death row in the slaying of his wife and the hitman he hired to kill her. His conviction was overturned by the Nevada Supreme Court, and prosecutors withdrew the death penalty during his 2nd trial last year because of Randolph’s age, according to court records. He is now serving a life sentence.

The appeal process in death penalty cases can last years or decades. Nevada’s supply of lethal injection drugs expired in 2022, before officials could obtain a warrant for the intended execution of Zane Floyd. There are dozens of convicted killers on Nevada’s death row, and it is unclear if the state will ever be able to go forward with executing Brown.

Nevada has not executed anyone since 2006. The last prisoner to waive his appeals, Scott Dozier, died by suicide in prison before he was executed.

Coffee said there is a “randomness” to which defendants facing capital punishment will ultimately be sentenced to die. It depends on how successful the defense is at finding mitigating factors such as evidence of severe mental illness, the mindset of a jury, and who is willing to negotiate with prosecutors — especially defendants who maintain their innocence.

“If you want to talk about the largest lever in the tool box for the state, it’s capital punishment,” Coffee said. “What could be more frightening than telling a defendant, ‘I know you may have a defense, but if the jury doesn’t believe it, they will execute you’?”

(source: Las Vegas Review-Journal)

USA:

U.S. Presidential Election 2024: Death penalty absent from campaign, but not from minds----Kamala Harris, once openly opposed to the death penalty despite political costs, now avoids the topic as a candidate. Meanwhile, Donald Trump advocates tougher criminal policies, though presidential authority in this area is limited.

A few blocks from downtown Richmond, Virginia, the intersection of Spring Street and Belvidere Street now presents a completely different view. Where once stood a grim, old brick building, there is now a modern building with a glass facade reflecting the sun shining on Virginia’s capital. Trees along the wide Belvidere Street give the neighborhood a promenade-like feel, with the James River flowing nearby along the memorial for American war dead.

The lasting memory of October 1984

When he first came here in 1984, Michael Stone wasn’t out for a walk; he was on a mission. It was 40 years ago, almost to the day, but the memories are vivid, and he never fully recovered. Michael had just joined the Diocese of Richmond as a social worker. His superiors encouraged him to attend his first vigil, a solemn gathering outside the old brick building. Across the street, another group was gathered, but they were celebrating. “It’s a horrible memory,” said Michael, still moved four decades later. “It marked me forever. And although I hadn’t been particularly concerned about the death penalty, it became my priority.”

The now-demolished building was a penitentiary with a dark history, long marked by the horrors of segregation. It housed Virginia’s death row and its electric chair. That October night in 1984, the condemned man was Linwood Briley, an African-American involved in multiple crimes with his brothers. “This was Virginia's second execution since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the U.S. in 1976,” Stone recalled. Virginia has the highest death toll in the country, with over 1,300 executions, including over a hundred since 1976, surpassed only by Texas and Oklahoma in recent decades.

Virginia’s abolition in 2021

However, the machine ultimately halted in 2021, when Virginia became the 1st Southern state to abolish the death penalty. Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, led by Stone, spearheaded this effort. On March 24, 2021, then-Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, ended a practice that dated back centuries. The 1st execution in what would become the United States took place in Virginia in 1608, with a man accused of espionage for Spain, a rival colonial power. Now, capital punishment has been replaced by life imprisonment without parole—another harsh and hopeless sentence. Still, an important step was taken as the electric chair was disconnected.

Of the 50 states, 27 still retain the death penalty. About 20 people are executed annually in the United States, a steady decline since the late 20th century, which saw around a hundred executions per year, dropping to fifty by 2010. There was once hope that this trend would lead to complete abolition. In practice, however, only a handful of states still carry out executions, with some, like California in 2019, declaring moratoriums due to ethical concerns.

“This was the national abolition coalition’s strategy until recently,” explained Rob Poggenklass, director of Justice Forward Virginia, an NGO advocating for judicial reform in Virginia. “The goal was to push the U.S. Supreme Court to examine the issue, given the glaring injustice for those on death row in only a few states. The Constitution requires equal treatment for all citizens. However, with the current Supreme Court, shaped by former U.S. President Donald Trump’s appointees, that’s a dead end. This court will never address it. That path is blocked and for a long time.”

Donald Trump: Proponent of the death penalty

The Republican candidate is an unreserved advocate of capital punishment in the name of “law and order.” However, the president has limited authority in this area, as justice is primarily a state matter in the U.S. Of the 2,213 inmates on death row, only about 40 are under federal jurisdiction (in cases involving terrorism, military tribunals, etc.). Still, during his previous term, Trump lifted a 17-year moratorium and sped up executions, with 13 carried out in his last 6 months as president.

This year, in a campaign dominated by economic and immigration issues, the death penalty is not a national issue. But at rallies, Trump regularly repeats his desire to send drug traffickers and convicted immigrant murderers to the electric chair, drawing enthusiastic applause from his supporters.

Jasna, a lifelong Republican and daughter of Croatian immigrants, is volunteering at a conservative voter information center in Franconia, northern Virginia. Despite being Catholic, she is not disturbed by Trump’s statements. “Of course, life is sacred,” she said. “But there are cases where something has to be done. It’s the worst of the worst—pedophiles, terrorists…” Around her, other volunteers, also Catholic, nod in agreement.

Kamala Harris: A staunch abolitionist but silent in 2024

Kamala Harris is a committed abolitionist. In her time as a California prosecutor, she openly opposed the death penalty, even when it was unpopular. Running for San Francisco District Attorney in 2003, she pledged not to pursue capital punishment and upheld this stance, even after a San Francisco police officer’s murder provoked outrage. Despite criticism from her own party, she held firm, maintaining her position when she ran for California Attorney General in 2010.

However, the vice president has avoided discussing the issue in her current presidential campaign. This year, unlike in 2016 and 2020, the Democratic Party’s platform, adopted at the summer convention, does not mention abolition. “It would be political suicide,” Stone conceded, noting rising crime post-COVID, even though rates have recently shown a downward trend.

Majority support for the death penalty but declining

“There is indeed a drop in public support for the death penalty, but it’s not enough,” Poggenklas said. While just over 1/2 of Americans support capital punishment (down from 67% in 2000, according to Gallup), nearly 2/3 would favor replacing it with life without parole, as Virginia has done. “Political change is what’s needed.”

The 2019 Virginia elections, which gave Democrats majorities in both state chambers, paved the way for abolition. An unplanned factor also helped: an old photo of Governor Northam in blackface from his student years resurfaced in 2019. In response to the outcry, he committed to fighting discrimination, starting with the abolition of the death penalty, which disproportionately affected Black Americans.

Though the death penalty is not a central campaign issue, the November 5 election could impact it. Trump and Harris would pursue opposite policies within their limited presidential influence. President Joe Biden also has a role to play. “Especially if Donald Trump wins,” noted Stone. Biden could, before leaving office, commute the sentences of federal death row inmates. “I’m sure the Bishop of Delaware, Biden’s home state, or the Archbishop of Washington will quietly advocate for this cause. Discreetly, which is the most effective way.”

(source: international.la-croix.com)

IRAN----executions

Mohammadreza Haji Khani and Mehran Soltani Executed in Zanjan----Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law.

Mohammadreza Haji Khani and Mehran Soltani, two men on death row for murder, were executed in Zanjan Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, 2 men were executed in Zanjan Central Prison on 23rd October. Their identities have been established as 27-year-old Mohammadreza Haji Khani (photo) and 30-year-old Mehran Soltani who were sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Mohammadreza was from Zanjan and was arrested for a murder in a repair shop. Mehran Soltani was also from Zanjan and arrested for the murder of a relative 5 years ago.”

At the time of writing, their executions have not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

**************

Afghan Nationals Ayoub Sangari and Abdolgharib Maleki Executed in Qom

Ayoub Sangari and Abdolgharib Maleki, two Afghan nationals on death row for murder, were executed in Qom Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, 2 Afghan men were executed in Qom Central Prison on 22nd October. Their identities have been established as 26-year-old Abdolgharib Maleki and Ayoub Sangari who were sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Ayoub Sangari was arrested 4 years ago and Abdolgharib Maleki was arrested for a murder committed during a street fight.”

At the time of writing, their executions have not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

(source for all: iranhr.net)

OCTOBER 25, 2024:

TEXAS:

Robert Roberson’s defense team drops 27-page rebuttal after Texas AG releases autopsy report, statement

A day after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released the autopsy report for Nikki Curtis, the daughter Robert Roberson was convicted of killing and sentenced to death for, Roberson’s defense team has released a 27-page rebuttal to Paxton’s statements.

The rebuttal focuses on what the defense team calls 12 misrepresentations by Paxton in Roberson’s case.

“On October 23, 2024, the Office of the Attorney General issued a press release, bearing the seal of the State of Texas, doubling down on its grotesque misrepresentations of Robert Roberson’s innocence case endeavoring to discredit Mr. Roberson and those, including a bipartisan group of elected representatives, who properly view his case as a tremendous miscarriage of justice,” the rebuttal starts out saying.

A legal battle spared Robert Roberson’s life, for now. Here’s what happens next.

The 12 points the defense team calls misrepresentations are as follows. The language below comes directly from the defense team’s rebuttal:

Misrepresentation #1: The OAG has released to the public the 2002 autopsy report of Mr. Roberson’s 2-year-old child (Nikki Curtis), implying that it is definitive, ignoring all 2002 trial and a 2021 evidentiary hearing testimony identifying material flaws in the report.

Misrepresentation #2: The OAG falsely claims: “2-year-old Nikki Curtis was brought to the hospital close to death with extensive bruising to her chin, face, ears, eyes, shoulder, and mouth.” NO ONE testified that there were bruises all over Nikki’s body.

Misrepresentation #3: The OAG invokes the authority of “Emergency Room Nurse Andrea Sims” claiming she “saw Nikki before medical intervention, testified at trial that, in addition to the bruising, Nikki had a handprint on her face, and that the back of her skull was bruised and ‘mushy.’” (See document for more details)

Misrepresentation #4: The OAG falsely claims that “Nikki was abused by her father and died due to the trauma he inflicted” invoking imaginary “countless hours of testimony” that is entirely missing from the trial transcripts. Read the transcripts. The evidence, manufactured for trial from a handful of impaired and traumatized witnesses related to Robert’s estranged girlfriend Teddie Cox is all the State could adduce. There 8 p. 9 is no record of violent acts in Robert’s extensive social history records.

Misrepresentation #5: The OAG wrongly claims that “doctors” at trial testified that “Nikki died from substantial blunt force head injuries that clearly indicated the girl had been struck” and “precluded the possibility that the child died from being ‘shaken.’”

Misrepresentation #6: The OAG falsely claims “Dr. Jill Urban, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on the 2-year-old’s corpse, testified during the trial using photographic evidence that Nikki’s head had been repeatedly struck leaving clear impact wounds totally incompatible with merely being violently shaken.”

Misrepresentation #7: The OAG falsely claims “Roberson repeatedly changed his story during the investigation and trial about what happened to Nikki[.] " In truth, Mr. Roberson’s statements were remarkably consistent...

Misrepresentation #8: The OAG relies on a psychologist retained by defense counsel at trial for the punishment-phase to argue that Robert “confessed” to “shaking Nikki” (even as the State argues, incoherently, that this was not a “shaking baby” case after all).

Misrepresentation #9: The OAG asserts, absent evidence, that Robert “had over a dozen prior arrests[.]” The State should look back at the trial record as well as its own direct appeal brief, which identifies arrests for burglary (1), writing hot checks (2), and a probation violation (1)—all of which Robert pleaded guilty to and served his time without incident. Most importantly, Robert had absolutely no accusations, arrests, or criminal charges for any violence before he was falsely accused of hurting Nikki. And Robert has been a model inmate for the past 22 years since his arrest.

Misrepresentation #10: The OAG involves the punishment-phase testimony of Robert’s ex-wife, Della Gray, who spun a string of alarming tales about a coat hanger and fireplace shovel and a broken nose—none of which is supported by any contemporaneous medical, police, or court records.

Misrepresentation #11: The OAG’s most egregious lie is the statement suggesting that an unidentified “cellmate” claimed that he had sexually assaulted Nikki, providing a pornographic and COMPLETELY BASELESS report that amounts to no more than profoundly disturbing prosecutorial misconduct. This calumny was not put before the jury. There is only one possible reason that the prosecution would fail to introduce at trial the informant’s highly inflammatory claims—they did not believe their own snitch and realized that his allegations were false and motivated by his express requests for help from prosecutors in getting a reduction of his sentence—which can be found in the DA’s file.

Misrepresentation #12: The OAG incorrectly asserts: “Now, a coalition of activists and State legislators is interfering with the justice system in an unprecedented way in an attempt to stall or prevent Roberson’s execution. They have attempted to mislead the public by falsely claiming that Roberson was unfairly convicted through “junk science” concerning ‘shaken baby syndrome.’” The OAG has obviously ignored the concrete evidence contained in the massive pleadings Mr. Roberson has filed and developed since 2016—not suddenly “now”. Mr. Roberson has more than established his right to relief under Texas’s acclaimed “changed science” law.

On each of the points, the defense team cites sources, the trial, and post-conviction records.

“The information below demonstrates that the State of Texas persistently refuses to acknowledge the truth in this case. In multiple expert reports, testimony during the post-conviction hearing in 2021, and recent testimony before the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, highly specialized medical experts have explained exactly how Nikki died as a result of pneumonia, exacerbated by improper medications, and how the progression of her disease affected her body, along with medical intervention, to create the condition that she was in two days later when the autopsy was performed. They also explained the absence of evidence of “battery” or any other abuse and that the State’s crime theory is untethered to science—and not to even to the trial record. The lead detective, Brian Wharton, explained how Mr. Roberson’s case involved a rush to judgment based on flawed medical information and misperceptions based on Mr. Roberson’s autism,” the document reads.

Roberson was scheduled to be executed on Thursday, Oct. 17, but a group of Texas lawmakers issued a subpoena for Roberson to testify before them in a hearing about his case, sparking a legal debate and ultimately delaying Roberson’s execution.

The legal debate has centered around the Separation-of-Powers Clause in the Texas Constitution and whether the lawmakers have the authority to issue a subpoena to a death row inmate in the point in the case where it was, the eleventh hour.

Prior to Wednesday’s statement by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Gov. Greg Abbott submitted a letter to the Texas Supreme Court, who ultimately stayed Roberson’s execution following the lawmakers appeal, saying that the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence “stepped out of line” by subpoenaing Roberson.

Gov. Abbott says House Committee ‘stepped out of line’ with subpoena for death row inmate

Abbott argued the state constitution, at that point in the case, granted only the governor the authority to grant clemency or a 30-day reprieve in the capital case.

Abbott argued unless the tactic is rejected by the Texas Supreme Court, it can be repeated in any capital case, effectively rewriting the Texas Constitution to reassign a power given only to the governor.

“In all that time, even when it was clear that Roberson’s execution date was nearing and the Article 11.073 issue was manifest, the House Committee could not trouble itself with seeking Roberson’s testimony. Only at the eleventh hour, when the Constitution empowers the Governor to make the last move, did the House Committee decide to violate the Separation-of-Powers Clause,” Abbott said.

(source: click2houston.com)

****************

Judge denies DA's request to postpone key hearing in El Paso Walmart mass shooting case

A district court judge denied a request to postpone a key hearing in the El Paso Walmart mass shooting case over allegations of misconduct by the El Paso County District Attorney's Office.

Judge Sam Medrano of the 409th District Court denied District Attorney Bill Hicks’ request for a 30-day delay to an Oct. 31 hearing regarding defense attorneys’ motion alleging “outrageous misconduct" by prosecutors in the death penalty case.

Medrano ruled the Thursday, Oct. 31, hearing will not be postponed and the court will continue moving the state's death penalty case against the gunman, 26-year-old Patrick Crusius. The case has dragged on for more than 5 years.

The ruling came after an hour-long hearing Thursday, Oct. 24, at the Enrique Moreno County Courthouse in Downtown El Paso.

The gunman attended the hearing wearing an orange and white jailhouse jumpsuit with handcuffs around his wrist and chains around his waist and ankles. The gunman, who was escorted into the courtroom by his attorneys and law enforcement officers, was wearing a bulletproof vest.

The gunman did not speak during the hearing. He is facing one count of capital murder of multiple persons and 22 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Hicks is seeking the death penalty.

Heightened security was in place for the hearing at the Enrique Moreno County Courthouse in Downtown El Paso. Dozens of bailiffs, El Paso County sheriff's deputies and other law enforcement officers lined the walls of the courtroom. People attending had to clear two security checkpoints before entering the courtroom.

The hearing was livestreamed at elpasotimes.com.

Arguments over orders issued by Medrano without notifying state prosecutors

The hearing focused on claims by Hicks that Medrano illegally issued several orders without notifying prosecutors.

The orders were sealed by Medrano and the district attorney's office did not have access to them. Hicks learned of the orders after defense attorneys filed their motion claiming Hicks and his office were committing misconduct in the case.

Hicks requested that the hearing scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 31, be delayed by 30 days and that the orders be unsealed. The delay would give his team time to review the orders and prepare for the hearing, which will focus on several motions filed in recent weeks.

The allegations of misconduct include prosecutors mishandling evidence and illegally listening to private jailhouse conversations between the gunman and his attorneys, among several other claims of misconduct.

Hicks has repeatedly denied his office has done anything wrong in the case.

Medrano did rule in the district attorney's favor on one motion, ordering that 4 sealed orders be made public. He instructed his staff to place them into the public record.

The Medrano orders being unsealed involved allowing the gunman to get a pencil to write his attorneys, eyeglasses he needs, allowing the gunman to be taken for an eye evaluation and preserving jailhouse surveillance videos.

Hicks talked to reporters after the hearing saying he is happy the judge ruled to unseal the orders, so his office can know what precisely those orders entail.

“We don’t know what those orders say,” Hicks said after the hour-long hearing. “They are saying we violated orders we have never seen. We need to see what the orders say. I certainly don’t trust what the defense says.”

Defense attorney Felix Venezuela did not address the orders after the hearing but focused on the alleged misconduct by Hicks and his prosecutors.

“That is an exact example of a violation of the court's order, the gag order,” Venezuela said about Hicks talking to the news media after the hearing. “The court has instructed us not to speak to the media, not to talk about the case. And that is the first thing they (district attorney's office) do.”

Venezuela made the statement but took no questions from reporters.

Venezuela argued during the hearing that Hicks requesting the delay was unnecessary since the orders totaled 22 pages. He claimed Hicks was only trying to deflect from the allegations of misconduct.

"He is taking the playbook from the former (district attorney) administration's playbook and is now using that playbook of blaming the court," Venezuela said during the hearing.

Prosecutor John Davis said there could be hundreds of orders that the district attorney's office is unaware of, and the orders need to be unsealed for prosecutors to prepare for the Oct. 31 hearing.

What will happen at the Oct. 31 hearing?

Thursday's hearing comes a week before another contentious hearing is scheduled in the case.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys will argue over a handful of critical motions during the Oct. 31 hearing that have been filed over the past few weeks alleging prosecutorial misconduct.

Several witnesses are expected to testify during the Oct. 31 hearing. At least 10 subpoenas have issued for the hearing, including current and former district attorney's office staff, and El Paso County Sheriff's Office officials, court documents show.

The hearing is expected to last at least 2 days.

Gunman already sentenced to life in prison in federal court

The state's death penalty case is the last criminal proceeding left pending against the gunman.

The gunman pleaded guilty Feb. 9, 2023, in federal court to 90 federal charges in connection with the shooting. The U.S. Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the federal case against the gunman, elected not to seek the death penalty.

The gunman admitted in his guilty plea that he drove nearly 700 miles from Allen, Texas, to El Paso to commit the mass shooting. The shooting resulted in the deaths of 23 people and dozens more injured.

The mass shooting was racially-motived as the gunman admitted to law enforcement he was targeting Hispanics, who he claimed were invading the U.S., a federal prosecutor said during the gunman's federal sentencing hearing.

The gunman was sentenced July 7, 2023, to 90 consecutive life sentences. A federal judge ordered the prison sentences be served at ADX Florence supermax federal prison near Florence, Colorado. However, the gunman was transferred July 11, 2023, to state custody as the state's death penalty remained pending.

(source: elpasotimes.com)

************

Ken Paxton releases records to ‘correct falsehoods’ about Robert Roberson case

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Wednesday issued his 1st public remarks affirming the prosecution’s case against Robert Roberson III, the death row inmate whose execution was stayed last week after an unprecedented legal maneuver by a bipartisan group of lawmakers.

In the evening statement that was released on X, via email and his office’s website, Paxton said he released the autopsy report and a sworn affidavit of the medical examiner who performed Roberson’s daughter’s autopsy to correct “lies” about the case coming from state Reps. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, and Joe Moody, D-El Paso.

Roberson, an East Texas man, was convicted in 2003 for the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki. He has maintained his innocence since his trial.

The 57-year-old was scheduled to be executed on Oct. 17 by lethal injection in Huntsville, but a bipartisan group of lawmakers carried out a novel legal maneuver that resulted in the state Supreme Court staying the execution.

Roberson’s attorneys and lawmakers, including half of the Republican-controlled House, argue his case was based on shaken baby syndrome, a medical determination that abuse has caused serious or fatal head trauma.

Gretchen Sween, one of Roberson’s defense attorneys, said in an emailed statement: “Tonight, a profoundly disturbing thing happened: The chief law enforcement office of the State of Texas, the OAG, issued a stunningly misleading statement designed to quash a bipartisan group of lawmakers in their truth-seeking mission, which has riveted the world. Why the urgency to execute an innocent, autistic man, with a perfect disciplinary record during the 22 years he has been confined on Texas’s death row, largely without any lawyer willing to investigate his claim of innocence?”

Until Wednesday, Paxton had not publicly commented on the case. This past weekend, he filed a petition with the Texas Supreme Court asking for the order granting the subpoena to be reversed, which was later denied.

But in his news release, Paxton said: “The Office of the Attorney General released the original autopsy report and other evidence to correct falsehoods amplified by a coalition interfering with the capital punishment proceedings in which Robert Roberson was scheduled to be executed for the murder of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki.”

In the statement, Paxton said Nikki had multiple injuries when she was brought in to the emergency room that showed blunt force trauma rather than solely shaken baby syndrome, echoing Paxton’s statements in the petition from over the weekend. Paxton said in the statement that Roberson had a history of abuse to both Nikki and his ex-wife, and said that Nikki died due to being beaten by Roberson.

Paxton also alleged in his statement that evidence showed Roberson had sexually abused Nikki. Roberson was never charged with sexually abusing his daughter.

The Dallas Morning News is in the process of reviewing the 1,000-plus pages of court transcripts from Roberson’s original 2003 trial and his appeals.

Paxton also criticized the efforts of the House members to delay Roberson’s execution. Paxton said the House members attempted to mislead the public by “falsely claiming“ Roberson was unfairly convicted through “junk science” based on the shaken baby theory.

In a post on X, Moody said the House committee heard days of testimony from law, medical and psychology experts, as well as the lead investigator and a juror in the case.

“There are no new facts in the OAG’s statement, only a collection of exaggerations, misrepresentations and full-on untruths completely divorced from fact and context,” Moody said. “We intend to provide a response tomorrow that will completely undermine it. We will continue to act on truth in pursuit of justice and the rule of law.”

The diagnosis has come under broad scrutiny in the years since the conviction. Roberson’s attorneys and lawmakers have said the state’s 2013 “junk science” law should have been an avenue to vacate Roberson’s conviction.

Anderson County’s district attorney and the attorney general contend shaken baby syndrome was not central to securing the conviction. Since then, multiple courts have declined to intervene in subsequent appeals.

Roberson’s execution was stayed at the last minute after the Texas House Committee of Criminal Jurisprudence, of which Moody is the chair and Leach is a member, issued a subpoena the day before calling for Roberson to testify before the committee regarding his case.

(source: The Dallas Morning News)

*************

‘Deeply appalled,' Defense for Texas death row inmate responds to AG remarks

The case of Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson has reached new levels of scrutiny as blowback continues over recent statements from the Attorney General Ken Paxton. In the latest move by Roberson’s defense, his team released a rebuttal to claims from Paxton’s office that affirmed the prosecution’s case.

The case of Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson has reached new levels of scrutiny as responses continue over recent statements from the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In the latest move by Roberson’s defense, his team released an extensive rebuttal to claims from Paxton’s office that affirmed the prosecution’s case against Roberson.

Paxton commented for the 1st time since Roberson’s execution was put on hold. He said he wanted to “set the record straight about the murder case that landed Roberson on death row and the subpoena that put a halt to last week’s execution.”

Within hours, death row inmate Robert Roberson’s defense released a statement calling recent remarks from Paxton a “gross misrepresentation” of the case.

In an interview with NBC 5 on Thursday, attorney Gretchen Sween had strong words.

“The only word I can come with is deeply appalled,” said Sween.

Roberson was convicted in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki.

(source: nbcdfw.com)

************

Execution case highlights major policy split in Texas GOP

"Robert Roberson’s case spotlights Texas’ GOP divide on criminal justice" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

11 years ago, Texas lawmakers passed what would become known as the state’s “junk science” law, allowing courts to overturn convictions later found to have hinged on discredited forensic evidence.

It was the latest in a series of bipartisan reforms, starting around the mid-2000s, aimed at rethinking Texas’ uncompromising lock-‘em-up attitude that had made the state the face of mass incarceration in America. With the state prison system buckling, lawmakers fashioned a new bipartisan approach that rejected calls for more lockups and focused instead on treatment and diversion, winning national acclaim that was also later extended to the 1st-of-its-kind junk science law.

That statute is drawing renewed attention as a bipartisan group of House lawmakers embark on a last-ditch attempt to forestall the execution of Robert Roberson, who has turned to the law to dispute his 2003 conviction for killing his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki. Roberson’s lawyers have presented evidence they say invalidates the finding that his daughter died from shaken baby syndrome, a serious brain injury that critics say has been too broadly applied, including in cases where a head injury could be the result of an accident.

Roberson’s appeal has underscored the fact that Texas’ highest criminal court has never granted a new trial to anyone on death row under the junk science law. And as the statute has remained hamstrung for the last decade, so too has Texas’ broader pursuit of criminal justice reforms, according to critics who say Republican leaders have focused instead on reining in urban, progressive prosecutors and trying to keep defendants behind bars while awaiting trial.

Such efforts have upstaged the push for bipartisan criminal justice measures, which in recent years has largely been confined to the Texas House, with proposals on everything from loosening penalties for low-level drug cases to curbing the death penalty. Most of these bills have died in the Senate.

Roberson’s case embodies these clashing priorities on criminal justice, with the exoneration effort led by a broad ideological range of House Republicans, while Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and all but one Republican in the Senate chamber he oversees, has remained silent on the case.

The House intervention has met outright resistance from other GOP figures who, like Patrick, have driven the party’s recent focus on policies rooted in law and order and combating local officials. Among them is Attorney General Ken Paxton, who on Wednesday night blasted the House’s effort in a statement, attaching an autopsy report and other evidence he said would “correct falsehoods amplified by a coalition interfering with the capital punishment proceedings.”

Paxton’s statement accused lawmakers of using shaken baby syndrome as a straw man to deflect from evidence suggesting Roberson’s daughter died from blunt-force head injuries. The argument echoed what other leading voices on the party’s rightmost flank had been saying in recent days, including former Texas Republican Party Chair Matt Rinaldi and hardline activist Michael Quinn Sullivan, who this week slammed House members for what he characterized as an attempt to "protect a wife-beating child-killer."

State Rep. Joe Moody, the El Paso Democrat who has helped lead the exoneration effort, said Paxton’s statement contained no new facts, “only a collection of exaggerations, misrepresentations, and full-on untruths completely divorced from fact and context.” He vowed to issue a response Thursday that would “completely undermine” the statement.

Doug Deason, a Dallas businessman and GOP donor who has played a key role advocating for criminal justice reform on the right, said Paxton’s statement was “completely unhinged from reality.”

“Whoever wrote and released it should be evaluated for mental competence by the AG’s office,” Deason wrote on social media.

Also opposing the House’s intervention is Gov. Greg Abbott, who has included tougher bail laws among his list of “emergency items” — priorities that lawmakers may take up immediately — in each of the last 2 legislative sessions. Abbott, who so far has only commuted one death sentence since taking office in 2015, rebuked the House’s attempt to stop Roberson’s execution this week.

And yet, some criminal justice observers are optimistic that the effort to exonerate Roberson — which has drawn national attention and the support of lawmakers across the ideological spectrum — could inject new life into the movement.

“This has actually been a real boon for reenergizing the bipartisan criminal justice reform effort in Texas,” said Marc Levin, a leading policy voice in the conservative push for criminal justice reform in Texas.

Levin, who is now chief policy counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, noted that some of the House’s most conservative members have signed onto the exoneration effort, including state Rep. David Cook, who is trying to wrest control of the gavel from GOP Speaker Dade Phelan, and other of Phelan’s loudest detractors from the right. That prevents Phelan’s critics outside the chamber — many of whom have also condemned the House’s intervention — from “pigeonholing” the effort as merely something being pushed by the speaker, or framing it as a battle between moderate and hardline conservatives, Levin said.

“Clearly, it goes beyond the speaker’s race,” Levin said. “It demonstrates this is really organic and got support even on the most conservative end of the Republican Caucus in the House. So, this is something that is here to last, regardless of who's speaker.”

House and Senate tension

Still, any momentum generated by Roberson’s case would require buy-in from the Senate, the main source of Texas’ stalled movement on bipartisan criminal justice policy, according to advocates.

“You know, the Texas House has been pretty wonderful for the last decade,” said Elsa Alcala, a former Court of Criminal Appeals judge who was elected as a Republican but switched parties shortly after leaving the bench. “The problem is the Senate. The Senate is where criminal justice legislation goes to die.”

Case in point was the 2019 legislative session, Alcala said. After stepping down from the state’s criminal appeals court the year before, she became policy director for the Texas Defender Service, successfully lobbying for two bills that sailed through the House with bipartisan support.

The 1st was a bill that would have established a process to determine whether death penalty defendants are intellectually ineligible for prosecution. The move came nearly 20 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The second measure would have allowed a new trial for criminal defendants if both the prosecutor and the defense agreed to do so because it was in the interest of justice.

However, once those 2 bills were before the Senate, “everything died,” Alcala said.

“Patrick opposed a lot of the reform legislation, well, all of it and so there, you know, there was just no moving it,” she said. “We had all these wonderful bills pass the Texas House pretty decisively. And then when we got to the Texas Senate, the door was just slammed on our faces.”

Steven Aranyi, a spokesperson for Patrick, disputed Alcala’s portrayal of the Senate’s criminal justice approach. He noted that the chamber has worked closely on the issue with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that works to advance criminal justice reform through its Right on Crime initiative.

The 2019 bill to allow for new trials came over from the House late in the session, Aranyi said, and lacked enough support on the Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee to garner a hearing. As for the death penalty bill, Aranyi noted that the measure passed the Senate with unanimous support, but died after the 2 chambers were unable to reconcile changes to the bill in a conference committee.

“The House took an ‘it’s my way or the highway’ approach,” Aranyi said. “That’s on the House, not the Senate.”

Not every senator was hostile toward reform, Alcala said. Quite the opposite. “Some of the senators were really lovely to us … they seem to see the common sense of what we were trying to do.”

But in the end, Alcala said, it didn’t matter because the Senate rules allow Patrick, the chamber’s presiding officer, to prevent any bill from reaching the floor.

House mobilizes against death penalty

Amanda Marzullo is an attorney and advocate who has worked on clemency campaigns for death row inmates and helped craft several changes to the Texas legal system.

She said she’s seen a “growing nuance” toward the death penalty in recent years by the Legislature. In 2015, lawmakers passed a new law that for the 1st time gave defense attorneys official notice when one of their clients’ executions was set by prosecutors.

In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the use of the death penalty. Since then, 591 inmates have been put to death in Texas, the most in the nation. But the pace of executions has slowed considerably from the 1990s.

Death row appeals are costly and in 2005, Texas became the last death penalty state to offer prosecutors the option of sentencing capital murder defendants to life without parole.

About 10 years ago, Texas lawmakers began asking more pointed questions about how the death penalty is applied. The result of all these factors is a broad coalition of Republicans and Democrats who have supported clemency in specific cases since about 2016.

In that year, state Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, worked, as he did in Roberson’s case, to halt Jeffery Wood’s pending execution for the 1996 death of a gas station clerk. Wood was sentenced to death even though it was his accomplice who killed the clerk. That accomplice, Daniel Reneau, was executed in 2002 and Wood remains on death row. Since then, Leach and Moody have formed the House Criminal Justice Reform Caucus, and have been vocal in their support of other death row inmates, including Melissa Lucio and Rodney Reed.

For criminal justice advocates like Alcala, House lawmakers’ determination to bring the Roberson case before them and consider where past law changes have fallen short has been welcome.

“It was pretty surprising to see how much they had invested of themselves in the whole thing,” Alcala said.

That reception may make the silence from the Senate more noticeable from the public’s perspective but not surprising, some say.

“I think it's a bunch of things all at once,” Marzullo explained in an email. “The politics within the Republican Party are fraught right now, which would make any experienced politician reticent to speak out on (potentially) controversial topics.”

Also, she pointed to how funders have withdrawn from criminal legal reform in Texas, leaving members with less support from outside the Capitol.

The House, Marzullo said, is more insulated from these factors because so many members serve on the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee at some point in their tenure or are part of the chamber’s bipartisan caucus dedicated to these issues.

Also supporting the intervention in Roberson’s case are a number of lawmakers who do not serve on the Jurisprudence Committee or, for that matter, have any legal background. State Rep. Kronda Thimesch, a Lewisville Republican who runs a landscaping business and previously served as a school board trustee, said the case quickly struck a chord with her as she learned about the range of evidence never presented at Roberson’s trial — such as medical records outlining his daughter’s severe illness — and the use of testimony from a nurse who claimed to see signs of sexual abuse before admitting she was not certified to identify such cases.

“I think that really resonated with me, that with Robert, he was never given an opportunity to have a fair seat at the table of justice,” said Thimesch, who visited Roberson on death row last month with several House colleagues. “I don't see how anyone, in good conscience, could read and look at what's happening and not” think Roberson is innocent.

During her testimony before the House committee this week and in interviews, Alcala has been taking her former workplace, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, to task for what she described as a hyperfocus on legal technicalities to disqualify junk science appeals. Her critique echoed the findings of a recent study by the nonprofit Texas Defender Service, which also concluded that such appeals were routinely batted down on technicalities.

“The way that it's being treated by the Court of Criminal Appeals is absurd,” Alcala said. “They’re not even looking at the substance, you know that? That's insanity.”

In recent years, House lawmakers have tried to resolve some technicalities cited by the court. The House passed legislation in 2023 that would have expanded the junk science law by allowing the court to consider new scientific evidence not only when doing so could overturn a conviction, but also when it could yield a lesser sentence.

The bill was prompted by the court’s interpretation that the junk science law can be used only to reconsider someone’s guilt, not the degree of punishment. It passed the House with 144 votes in favor and one against, then was never referred to a Senate committee.

The outlook on criminal justice policy

Levin, the conservative criminal justice advocate, said he hopes Roberson avoids execution. But in the meantime, he admitted he is “kind of giddy about what it could portend going forward” — including for the array of measures that passed the House last session with bipartisan support but went nowhere in the Senate.

Those included bills that would have barred use of the death penalty for people with severe mental illness or conspirators who did not pull the trigger and did not intend for anyone to be killed.

The Senate also declined to take up proposals to lower the penalty for possessing less than an ounce of marijuana and expand the types of cases that can be referred to a drug court, as long as the prosecutor and judge consent. The upper chamber also rejected House bills to expand the sealing or expungement of criminal records, along with a so-called “second look” bill that would move up the parole eligibility date for people serving sentences for felonies committed before they turned 18.

When Rodney Ellis left the Senate chamber in 2016 after serving there for 26 years to run for the Harris County Commissioners Court, the Democrat left behind a storied criminal justice reform legacy. Among the highlights, he authored and helped pass legislation that overhauled the state’s indigent defense system, established an advisory panel to identify factors that contribute to wrongful convictions and helped create the Office of Capital Writs, which advocates on the behalf of indigent defendants sentenced to death. Ellis also penned the Michael Morton Act, which requires prosecutors to disclose evidence that would call into question a defendant’s guilt or affect a sentence.

In the 1990s, Texas created a meager fund to compensate criminal defendants who were wrongly imprisoned, if their conviction is thrown out and a judge, prosecutor or appellate court declares them to be “actually innocent.” Then in 2005, as part of these legislative reforms the compensation was increased. As of Oct. 1, more than $179 million has been paid out to exonerees, according to the comptroller’s office.

For Ellis, watching his former colleagues move to halt an execution last week was fascinating, he said.

“I’m proud of them,” Ellis said. “I do think we’re at a critical crossroads when you try to figure out what pursuit of justice means. This case does underscore the very real dangers of wrongful conditions in our legal system.”

While he hopes to see more Texas senators take a greater leadership role in criminal justice reform, he recalled how after the Michael Morton Act was passed in 2013, he could read a growing pressure in the chamber against criminal justice reform.

“I could sense it coming,” Ellis said.

Years after Ellis left, following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, that aversion to criminal justice reform in the Senate seemed to have “crescendoed,” he said.

Levin said that while the Legislature is poised for another clash next year over denying bail to people accused of violent crimes — “the issue that Patrick is most concerned about,” he said — there is reason to believe that with crime rates reverting to pre-pandemic levels and calls for police reform diminishing, Texas could be moving beyond the polarizing trends that have sapped the political will for bipartisan criminal justice work.

“Outside of [the bail issue], I think there's still a lot of opportunity on these other matters, especially concerning reentry and getting people back in the workforce who have a conviction,” Levin said. “I think we've got an opportunity, even in the Senate, to get some of that stuff across the finish line.”

(source: Jasper Scherer & Terri Langford, Texas Tribune)

SOUTH CAROLINA----impending execution

Murder victim, death row family members to speak out against death penalty

In a little more than a week, another inmate is set to be executed in South Carolina.

Richard Moore is set to be executed via lethal injection on November for his role in the 1999 killing of a convenience store clerk in Spartanburg County.

On Thursday, family members of murder victims and death row inmates, as well as an inmate that survived death row are set to speak out against the death penalty.

There will be a discussion at 6:00 pm at the McGregor Presbyterian Church in Columbia, followed by a screening of the "Prisoners by Choice" at 7:00 pm at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia.

Rev. Hillary Taylor is the Executive Director of the group South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

She said they are hoping to humanize the inmates, while also discussing a better solution to the root problem

"Murder is something we take very seriously; violence is something we take very seriously at South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. We believe that those who have committed great harm are also closest to helping us solve the problem of violence in our communities and that executing people who have done harm actually doesn't help communities it just makes them more violent," said Taylor.

(source: ABC News)

FLORIDA:

Honduran Man Found Guilty of Raping and Killing Woman in Florida Motel; Jury Votes Death Penalty

A Miami-Dade jury found a Honduran man guilty of raping and killing a woman in a Florida motel back in 2016.

Ronald Lopez Andrade could be facing the death penalty as 8 jury members voted in favor and 4 voted against capital punishment for his role in the death of 30-year-old Yaimi Guevara Machado.

Police reports show that Andrade walked up to the Chesapeake Motel in Hialeah in 2016, asking staff for prostitutes. Andrade, who was 26 at the time, had been living illegally in the U.S. for less than a year. She resided in a building behind the motel, per Local 10 News.

Andrade's arrest report indicates that hotel staff sold him alcohol and allowed him to remain on the premises despite him harassing a cleaning lady and a clerk.

Meanwhile, the victim had been locked out of her room and was waiting for someone when Andrade approached her. Machado didn't have a shirt on, and Andrade let her borrow his, authorities said. Andrade then made sexual advances, which Machado rejected.

The Honduran man quickly became violent, according to official reports cited by the outlet, and took the victim to a grassy area near the hotel. Lopez Andrade then raped and strangled her to death, per an NBC report.

Detectives said that Andrade left the scene when he noticed the victim was no longer moving and her face was covered in blood.

Police found Machado's naked body with her clothes nearby, and Andrade was arrested on a 2nd-degree murder charge.

The victim's family sued the hotel and received $12 million due to the staff's negligence in preventing Machado's death. The family said that she was very intelligent and wanted to be a nurse.

A judge will decide Andrade's sentence later this year.

(source: msn.com)

***************

Florida Supreme Court denies Kayle Bates' request to interview juror

As part of its regular release of opinions this morning, the Florida Supreme Court decided Bates v. State. The Court affirmed the circuit court's denial of his request to interview a juror from trial.

Kayle Bates was originally sentenced to death following trial in 1983. On direct appeal in 1985, the Florida Supreme Court remanded for a new penalty phase. After resentencing, Bates was again sentenced to death. The Court affirmed the sentence on direct appeal in 1987.

In 1989, when Bates was under an active death warrant, the circuit court ordered a new resentencing, finding that Bates’ counsel was ineffective. In his third resentencing, Bates was again sentenced to death following the jury’s recommendation for a sentence of death by a vote of 9-3. The Court affirmed his sentence on direct appeal in 1999.

In this case, Bates seeks to interview one of the jurors who sat on his 1983 trial. He claims that “the juror is the second cousin of a person who was married to the victim’s sister.” In a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Couriel, the Court determined his request is time-barred, stating that Bates “failed to carry his burden of showing good cause for the 40-year delay” in his request. Accordingly, the Court affirmed the circuit court’s denial of his motion.

The full opinion can be downloaded on the Court’s website here, at: https://supremecourt.flcourts.gov/

(source: fladeathpenalty.substack.com)

************

Clay County contractor convicted of killing client files motion asking for new trial----The motion filed by Corey Binderim's attorney has 16 reasons listed as to why the contractor convicted of killing Susan Mauldin, should be granted a new trial.

The Clay County contractor who was found guilty by a jury of 1st-degree murder on a client of his on Oct. 14, filed a motion on Wednesday, asking for a new trial.

First Coast News witnessed Corey Binderim stoic and emotionless when he learned of his conviction for killing 65-year-old Susan Mauldin, who paid him $12,000 for work on her Fleming Island home's bathroom.

According to police records, Binderim demolished the bathroom and didn't finish the job.

On Oct. 24, 2019, Mauldin was reported missing. Then on Jan. 29, 2020, her remains were found at Chesser Island Road Landfill in Folkston, Ga.

The Florida Times-Union reported that Mauldin intended to sue Binderim. Furthermore, a friend testified during the trial that Mauldin had planned to call police.

There were 7 votes in favor of the death penalty, and five for life imprisonment without the possibility for parole from the jury, as 1st-degree murder is punishable by the death penalty in Florida. The threshold to move a death sentencing forward is 8 votes.

“Life without the possibility of parole holds Corey Binderim fully accountable, for justice to be done,” said defense attorney Jim Hernandez.

The motion filed by Hernandez has 16 reasons listed as to why Binderim should be granted a new trial, which are below:

The verdict is contrary to law.

The verdict is contrary to the facts.

The court erred in not granting the defendant's motion for judgment of acquittal after the state rested.

The court erred in not granting the defendant's motion for judgment of acquittal after the defense rested.

The court erred in not granting the defendant's motion for arrest of judgment and judgment of acquittal.

The court erred by granting the state's motion for pre-trial ruling (admissibility of statements under forfeiture by wrongdoing hearsay exception).

The court erred by not granting the defense hearsay objections during Ms. Yates, Ms. Strickland, Ms. Fugate and Ms. Wright's testimony regarding out of court statements by Ms. Mauldin.

The court erred by not granting the defense hearsay objections to the admissibility of Ms. Mauldin's journal/papers and testimony of Mr. Fryer to the comments thereof.

The court erred by not granting the defense's motion in limine to prohibit the state from admitting historical data from life 360 and admitting said data and related testimony and state's exhibits over defense's renewed objection during Special Agent Corley's testimony.

The court erred by admitting over defense objection the maps created by Special Agent Corley.

The court erred by not granting the motion to prohibit other crimes or acts. The court also erred by not granting the defense's renewed objection during Leigh Ann Stansbury and Thomas Smith testimony.

The court erred by not granting defendant's motion to prohibit other crimes or acts. The court also erred by not granting the defense's renewed objection during Doug Houser and Mr. Fryer's testimony.

The court erred by not granting the defense's motion in limine to prohibit the state from admitting evidence of testosterone and anabolic steroids found in Corey Binderim's truck and renewed objection during the testimony of CSI Kern's testimony.

The court erred by not granting state's objection to expert testimony under Fl. Statute 90.702 and 90.704 and prohibiting the defense's DNA expert (Dr. Kalufut) from testifying to his activity proposition likelihood ratio.

The court erred by not granting defendant's motion to suppress testimony that K( Wall-E (Cadaver Dog) supposedly alerted at Mr. Binderim's storage unit. The court further erred by admitting the testimony of Mr. Long and Mr. Strickland and other witnesses who testified regarding the dog's alert over defense's renewed objection.

The court erred by not granting the defendant's motion for arrest of judgment and judgment of acquittal.

As it currently stands, the judge who presided over the trial will take up the motion in a court hearing on Oct. 29 at 9 a.m., the same day Binderim is set to be sentenced.

(source: firstcoastnews.com)

ALABAMA:

Alabama bill would make certain rape cases eligible for the death penalty

A bill pre-filed for the 2025 Alabama Legislative session would make certain Rape 1st degree and Sodomy 1st degree convictions eligible for the death penalty.

The bill, filed by Rep. Matt Simpson (R-Daphne) would provide that an adult over the age of 18 who is convicted of Rape 1st or Sodomy 1st when the victim is under 6 years of age, would face either death or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

HB 49 would also prescribe a mandatory life without parole or life if the victim is under 18 but over 6 years of age.

In Alabama’s history, 25 people have been executed for Rape convictions, the last being in December 1959.

4 of the executions for Rape were for crimes out of Mobile County.

(source: msn.com)

KENTUCKY:

Kentucky Supreme Court rules against allowing executions to resume — for now----No one has been executed in Kentucky since 2008 when Marco Allen Chapman was given a lethal injection for killing 2 Gallatin County children and injuring their mother and sister.

The Kentucky Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling Thursday denying a request by the state and Department of Corrections to resume executions, which have been on hold since a 2010 court order.

In 2010, a Franklin Circuit Court judge halted all executions in Kentucky amid concerns about the mental status of condemned inmates and the state's drug protocol used in lethal injections.

No one has been executed in Kentucky since 2008 when Marco Allen Chapman was given a lethal injection for killing two Gallatin County children and injuring their mother and sister.

In March, the Kentucky Department of Corrections revised its lethal injection regulations and moved to lift the Franklin Circuit Court's injunction, arguing the revisions resolved the issues. But in May, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd declined to rule, saying there were still constitutional questions about the new regulations.

An appeal by the state to the Supreme Court was unsuccessful because the justices can only rule on final orders, and the case before Shepherd is still pending.

"The Kentucky Supreme Court and Court of Appeals have appellate jurisdiction to review final judgments and orders," the justices ruled.

The high court noted that Judge Shepherd "acknowledged that the basis of the 2010 temporary injunction may not remain warranted, or proper," but he "chose to reserve a ruling on the Commonwealth's motion to dissolve the injunction."

And the state did not take any action to push Shepherd toward a definitive ruling, such as requesting another hearing to resolve whether the injunction should be lifted or request that the Supreme Court compel the judge to rule, according to the order.

The case has been sent back to Judge Shepherd for a ruling.

Attorney General Russell Coleman has called for the ban on the death penalty to be lifted in Kentucky and argued that the new regulations have brought the state into compliance with the 2010 ruling.

In a statement on Thursday, Coleman said the Supreme Court "sent us back to Franklin Circuit Court to continue our efforts to end the 15-year ban on the lawful imposition of the death penalty. On behalf of the victims’ families who have suffered through a decades-long wait for justice, that’s exactly what we intend to do.”

There are about 2 dozen inmates on the state's death row.

Attorney David Barron, who represents several death row inmates, said in a statement that the Supreme Court "rejected the Commonwealth’s latest attempt to rush to execute people before the Franklin Circuit Court can resolve a matter of utmost public importance - ensuring Kentucky’s procedures for carrying out executions are constitutional and valid.

"An execution is irreversible. There can be no remedy for a wrongful execution or for an execution carried out through unconstitutional or otherwise invalid execution procedures."

(source: WDRB news)

***************

Kentucky hasn’t executed anyone since 2008. Under new ruling, it won’t resume just yet

Executions won’t resume in Kentucky under a decision handed down Thursday by the state Supreme Court.

Instead, the legal fight over capital punishment appears headed back to Franklin Circuit Court in the capital city of Frankfort, where a temporary injunction blocking executions issued by a judge in 2010 might be modified or dropped in the months ahead.

Marco Allen Chapman was the last person executed by the state of Kentucky. Chapman was killed by lethal injection in 2008 for the murder of 2 children and the rape of their mother.

In March, expressing frustration with long delays as 25 prisoners accumulated on death row, Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman filed a motion in Franklin Circuit Court to lift its 2010 injunction. Coleman said the reasons for Franklin Circuit Chief Judge Phillip Shepherd’s injunction no longer are valid.

Most recently, he said, the Department of Corrections addressed concerns about the execution of intellectually disabled people with a new rule shielding inmates with an intellectual disability or an IQ scored at 75 or less. In May, Shepherd wrote that he would “reserve ruling” on Coleman’s request for now.

The protocols behind the death penalty that he originally criticized have been revised, Shepherd said. But at the same time, he said, “[t]here is no currently active death warrant at issue in this case.”

It has not yet been decided whether the revised regulations are constitutional, Shepherd said.

Coleman’s request for relief was appealed to the Supreme Court. But the high court ruled unanimously Thursday that it’s not in a position at this time to interfere.

The attorney general can ask Shepherd for a hearing in the case and request a definitive ruling on whether his 2010 injunction should be continued or dissolved.

If Shepherd refuses to make such a ruling, he can file a writ asking the Supreme Court to force the issue, Justice Kelly Thompson wrote for the court.

Expect the attorney general’s office to act, Coleman said Thursday in a prepared statement.

“The Kentucky Supreme Court sent us back to Franklin Circuit Court to continue our efforts to end the 15-year ban on the lawful imposition of the death penalty. On behalf of the victims’ families who have suffered through a decades-long wait for justice, that’s exactly what we intend to do,” Coleman said.

(source: kentucky.com)

**************

Kentucky Supreme Court dismisses case to resume executions

The Kentucky Supreme Court has dismissed a request from the Kentucky Department of Corrections to allow it to resume carrying out executions for death penalty convictions, according to an opinion released Thursday.

The unanimous ruling comes after the Department of Corrections tried to lift an injunction that has halted executions in the commonwealth since it filed revised rules for its lethal injection procedures in March 2010, according to court records.

The department moved to get the Franklin Circuit Court — the court that initially put it in place — to dissolve the injunction, but the court declined to make a ruling, according to the Supreme Court of Kentucky opinion. While the Franklin Circuit Court acknowledged that the parts of the death penalty procedures that originally prompted the injunction were no longer in effect, the court argued it is unproven whether the current injunction is relevant to any "present case or controversy."

The Department of Corrections took the matter to an appeals court, which directed it to the Supreme Court of Kentucky.

In the ruling, written by Chief Justice Laurance B. VanMeter, the court said the Department of Corrections tried to portray Franklin Circuit Court's decision to withhold a ruling as a "new" injunction or a "modification" of a preexisting one, when in reality the decision maintained the status quo.

There are currently 25 people on death row in Kentucky. Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman is a supporter of lifting the ban and has taken steps to challenge it during his term.

The injunction was originally enacted after attorneys for Ralph Baze, who killed 2 police officers, successfully argued before Franklin Circuit Court Judge Phillip Shepherd in 2010 that some of the Kentucky Department of Corrections lethal injection protocols were unconstitutional. Baze was sentenced to death in 1994 in Rowan County.

(source: Louisville Courier Journal)

KANSAS:

MONDAY: Historic Hearings Begin in Case Challenging the Death Penalty and Death Qualification in Kansas

CONTACT: Emily Berkowitz, ACLU, eberkowitz@aclu.org

WHAT: Hearings will begin on Monday, October 28, in a sweeping challenge to the constitutionality of the death penalty in Kansas, as well as the practice of death qualification. Death qualification excludes those who oppose the death penalty from juries, disproportionately excluding Black prospective jurors, women, and people of individual faiths who oppose capital punishment.

Throughout the week, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kansas, the Kansas Death Penalty Unit, Hogan Lovells, and Ali & Lockwood will present testimony from historians, legal experts, and researchers. These experts will highlight how death qualification, by systemically barring Black Kansans from fully participating in jury service, undermines the constitutional right to a fair and impartial jury.

This case marks a critical moment in the fight against not only the practice of death qualification, but also the legacy of racial bias in Kansas’ death penalty system.

WHO:

• Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project • Professor Carol Steiker, Harvard Law professor and expert on the history and application of the death penalty in the United States and Kansas

• Professor Shawn Alexander, University of Kansas professor and expert on the history of race relations in Kansas

Spokespeople available for onsite interviews post-hearing, including the legal team, state legislators, and faith leaders.

WHEN: Hearings are set to begin Monday, October 28, at 9 a.m. CT/10 a.m. ET. The court is scheduled to hear evidence all week through Friday, November 1. The court will hear one final day of expert testimony on January 9, 2025.

WHERE:

Wyandotte County Courthouse, Div. 13

710 N 7th St

Kansas City, KS 66101

(source: aclukansas.org)

USA:

As prosecutor, Kamala Harris navigated between ‘progressive,’ old-school----The Democratic presidential nominee launched innovative programs as a DA and refused to seek the death penalty. She was more conservative as attorney general.

Just 3 months after becoming the chief prosecutor of San Francisco in 2004, Kamala Harris faced a daunting decision: whether to seek the death penalty for a gang member who fatally shot police officer Isaac Espinoza with an assault-style rifle. She could take the standard, old-school prosecution route and pursue capital punishment for anyone who killed a cop. Or she could stand by her campaign promise never to seek the death penalty.

She chose the latter option, winning a life-without-parole sentence for the killing and earning the lasting enmity of law enforcement in California. The police officers’ union in San Francisco holds it against her to this day.

“We never endorsed her for any of the races” Harris has run since 2004, union president Tracy McCray said recently. “The place that Isaac holds for many of us, it’s opening up old wounds. We’re not changing our position as a union.”

The decision in the Espinoza case typified the line that many modern prosecutors must walk, and which Harris continued to face when she became California attorney general six years later: Keep doing things the way they’ve always been done, or blaze a new path informed by modern experience with race, incarceration and fairness.

Some of Harris’s supporters say she was a “progressive prosecutor” before the term was in vogue, launching programs designed to help first-time offenders and keep kids in school while dialing back drug possession cases. But she took other steps that baffled her liberal backers, particularly as attorney general, when she defended the death penalty, fought to uphold wrongful convictions despite prosecutorial misconduct, and defied a Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in California’s prisons.

Attorney General Kamala Harris looks over guns seized from individuals legally barred from possessing them following a news conference in Sacramento in 2011. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP) Harris has made her law enforcement experience key to her presidential campaign, telling audiences that she has prosecuted predators and fraudsters, so she is prepared to take on Donald Trump — a way of reminding voters of his felony convictions and history of alleged sexual assault and other wrongdoing, all of which he has denied.

Republicans have tried to paint Harris as soft on crime, while some left-wing Democrats pigeonhole her as not forward-thinking enough. Each critique has helped shape her political identity, in both her 2019 presidential campaign and her surprise rise this year as Trump’s Democratic opponent. But neither fully encapsulates her 14 years as an elected law enforcement official, according to people who have known her and observed her at work.

“I think the big picture is that she was moderate and pragmatic,” said David A. Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. “For her whole career, she tried to steer a course that was nonpartisan and nonideological. She rejected the dichotomy of ‘tough on crime’ versus ‘soft on crime.’”

We’ve collected Harris’s and Trump’s stances on the most important issues, including abortion, economic policy and immigration.

The Post broke down the eight races and three long shots that could determine whether Democrats lose control of the Senate. 10 competitive races will determine whether Republicans retain their narrow control of the House.

Harris started prosecuting cases just out of law school, which Sklansky said shaped her into “very much an institutionalist.” San Francisco reelected her district attorney in 2007 and California elected her attorney general in 2010 and 2014.

“I knew quite well that equal justice was an aspiration,” Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold.” “You can believe in the need for consequence and accountability, especially for serious criminals, and also oppose unjust incarceration. I believed it was essential to weave all these varied strands together.”

In response to written questions, the Harris campaign provided links and citations to various public accounts of Harris’s cases and legal career but did not make a spokesperson available for comment.

New approaches

After defeating incumbent Terence Hallinan in her 1st district attorney election, Harris — by then a line prosecutor for more than a decade — tried to restore an office in disarray. She eliminated a backlog of 73 pending murder cases by reaching plea deals or going to trial; boosted the felony conviction rate; and doubled the conviction rate for gun crimes, according to her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime.”

Harris launched initiatives that were unusual for prosecutors in the early 2000s, creating a hate crimes unit and an environmental crimes unit and persuading county judges to create specialized courts for drug users and domestic violence cases. In her book she writes of focusing on violent cases “at the top of the crime pyramid” and less on nonviolent offenses.

In November 2010, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris arrives at a campaign rally in Los Angeles during her race for California attorney general against L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) “At the time we faced vitriolic levels of criticism,” said Paul David Henderson, who was Harris’s chief of administration. He said the drug court, which distinguished between drug use and drug sales, focused on “more supervision and monitoring than a straight prosecution,” and is now considered a model by prosecutors and judges around the country.

Similarly, in 2005 Harris created the “Back on Track” program for defendants between the ages of 18 and 30 facing their 1st felony charges for low-level drug sales. The program combined guilty pleas with community service; education or job or parental training; and regular meetings with a case manager and a judge. It reduced recidivism to less than 10 %, compared with 53 % among similar California defendants, according to statistics her office released in 2009.

The program was adopted by the National District Attorneys Association and in many jurisdictions, including Prince George’s County, Maryland, by then-State’s Attorney Angela Alsobrooks (D). Harris and Alsobrooks, now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maryland. formed a long-lasting friendship as a result of that partnership.

Harris also attacked school truancy, sending letters to parents in the city school district that reminded them of the criminal consequences of allowing children to skip school. In some cases, prosecutors joined meetings on truancy between school administrators and parents. Henderson said no parents were actually sent to jail.

“She was much more tempered than what the school district wanted,” he recalled. “She sent letters to people that were in violation, and that was it. In hindsight, that’s great prosecution. She got kids in school.” Her office said in 2010 that truancy had dropped in San Francisco by 33 %.

But when Harris became attorney general, she spread the truancy program to county prosecutors throughout the state, and some used it to arrest parents. In 2019, Harris said she regretted how the program had been implemented statewide.

A police killing

The Espinoza case loomed over Harris’s tenure as district attorney. The officer and his partner were shot one night in April 2004, by a man they approached because they thought he was acting suspiciously. Espinoza was killed.

Within days, Harris announced she would not seek the death penalty. It was not clear if Harris acted based on her anti-death penalty policy, or after reviewing the facts of the case. Her political opponents pounced.

“When you’re district attorney, you take an oath to follow the law. She did not,” said Steve Cooley, who was the Los Angeles district attorney at the time of the killing and, six years later, lost to Harris in the California attorney general race.

Her campaign declined to clarify the reasoning for the decision, but pointed to public polling in 2004 that showed 70 % of San Francisco voters supported it. When jurors got the case they rejected a count of 1st-degree — or premeditated — murder, convicting the gunman of 2nd-degree murder, which is not a death penalty-eligible offense.

“First of all, she was right” about the Espinoza case, said George Gascón, who became San Francisco police chief in 2009 and later succeeded Harris as district attorney. “More importantly, San Francisco had a history of multiple DAs not seeking the death penalty … so her refusal to seek the death penalty was appropriate under the law.”

Cartels and foreclosures

Harris was elected attorney general with almost no law enforcement backing: No police union or group endorsed her. She adopted many of the traditional stances taken by her predecessors, sometimes breaking with her more liberal record as district attorney.

While she had refused to seek capital punishment in San Francisco, for example, Harris as attorney general successfully appealed a ruling that California’s death penalty was unconstitutional. She fought to uphold several convictions tossed out by lower courts and delayed action to reduce prison overcrowding. Harris opposed marijuana legalization and a statewide measure that would reduce a number of felonies to misdemeanors — both of which were approved by voters.

At the same time, Harris took steps to further her “smart on crime” agenda, including the anti-truancy program and Back on Track.

She is credited with eliminating a backlog in DNA testing of rape kits, requiring state police officers to wear body cameras long before that became the norm, and mandating implicit bias training for state criminal justice employees. And Harris, who often speaks about her motivation to become a prosecutor after learning that a close friend was molested by her stepfather, launched the successful prosecution of Backpage.com, a website accused of facilitating human trafficking. That effort led to federal convictions of four top Backpage officials and the shuttering of the website.

“She always had a particular interest in more aggressive prosecution of sexual predation,” said Sklansky, the Stanford law professor.

In 2014, Harris issued a report on transnational organized crime, detailing how foreign gangs not only smuggled in drugs and guns but also engaged in human trafficking and cybercrime impacting California. She recruited a bipartisan group of attorneys general from four other states to discuss cross-border crime with the attorneys general of Mexico and El Salvador. California authorities subsequently announced a huge methamphetamine bust in Contra Costa County connected to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, and the arrest of 17 people in Monterey County who had traveled to Mexico to obtain large amounts of methamphetamine.

Early in her term, Harris joined a team of state attorneys general negotiating a settlement with banks that helped create the mortgage foreclosure crisis in 2011. Nearly 700,000 California homes were at or near foreclosure, and the banks were offering the state $2 billion. Harris hired an outside consulting firm, which found that the average relief for homeowners would be just several thousand dollars.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris discusses her package of banking reform bills intended to protect homeowners in the foreclosure process during a hearing at the state capitol in Sacramento in April 2012. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP) She withdrew from the settlement against the wishes of the Obama administration. Soon came a new offer: $20 billion. She accepted.

“The way she handled the foreclosure crisis was amazing,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), who was serving in Congress at the time. “She said, ‘We’re not going to take any cheap money to stay out of your face.’”

Ellison lauded Harris for her balance as a top law enforcement officer. “She believes not just in putting people away but giving people a second chance.” But in some cases, Harris did not seek or facilitate second chances.

She successfully fought to reinstate the conviction of a Los Angeles County man who allegedly molested his stepdaughter, which was thrown out after a judge found prosecutors had withheld from defense lawyers the complainant’s medical records, which called some of her allegations into question. She tried to revive a case dismissed in Kern County after a prosecutor fabricated two lines of incriminating testimony from the defendant that would have increased the possible sentence to life in prison.

And her office spent 4 years investigating a secret jailhouse informant program in Orange County that quietly ended, after her term, with no sanctions for anyone involved. A subsequent federal investigation found the prosecutors “systematically violated defendants’ constitutional rights.”

“Kamala Harris’s term as attorney general was disastrous for the Orange County criminal justice system,” assistant public defender Scott Sanders, who discovered the county’s misuse of jail informants, told the Orange County Register in 2019. “Harris and the [current] A.G. have sent the message loud and clear that law enforcement answers to no one.”

The “snitch scandal” prompted a judge to toss the entire county prosecutor’s office off a mass-murder prosecution and ban the death penalty from the case. Harris argued unsuccessfully that although the district attorney conceded the killer’s rights had been violated, “prosecutorial misconduct, even egregious misconduct, cannot form the basis to recuse a district attorney.”

She made similar procedural arguments in the Kern County and Los Angeles cases. In Los Angeles, she was successful, and the man accused of molesting his stepdaughter remains in prison, serving a 70-year sentence.

In defending the death penalty in 2014, Harris said she had promised voters she would enforce the law, despite her personal opposition to it. But when California voters passed a ban on same-sex marriage in 2008, Harris refused to defend it, prompting Cooley, the former Los Angeles district attorney, to accuse her of “not doing her job.”

“Whatever your view is on gay marriages, once the voters pass an initiative, it is the obligation of the attorney general to defend it, even if you don’t agree with it,” Cooley said.

Harris also defied Supreme Court orders to reduce the overcrowding of California prisons, arguing that the justices lacked the authority to mandate the early release of low-risk prisoners. Years later she said she was “bound to advocate on behalf of” Gov. Jerry Brown (D) and felt mass early release would increase recidivism.

(source: washingtonpost.com)

**************

New Analysis: Death-Sentenced Prisoners “Volunteer” for Execution at 10 Times Civilian Suicide Rate

Mental Illness Conditions on Death Row Race

Derrick Dearman first told his mother that he wanted to die when he was 4 years old. On October 17, he was executed by the state of Alabama, becoming the 20th person executed in the United States this year and the 165th in the modern era to “volunteer” for death. A new analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center shows that despite falling rates of death sentences, executions, and public support for the death penalty, the number of death-sentenced prisoners waiving their appeals and choosing execution remains high—10 times higher than suicide rates among the general public. An estimated one in ten modern executions are the result of the prisoner’s choice. Given that the legal bar for “competence” to waive capital appeals is extremely low, scores of people have been executed on their own request despite evidence of severe mental illness and other serious constitutional concerns about their convictions and death sentences.

Mr. Dearman is a case in point. He struggled with severe depression and suicidal ideation since he was a small child and was diagnosed with numerous mental health conditions including bipolar disorder with psychotic features, PTSD, and neurocognitive disorder. On the day he killed 5 members of his girlfriend’s family, he had not slept for 6 days and was high on methamphetamines, hearing voices that told him people were “after” him. Earlier this year, he sent a handwritten letter to state officials requesting an execution date. The United States Supreme Court has held that it is unconstitutional to execute a person who cannot rationally comprehend their punishment and the reasons for it, adding that the practice “simply offends humanity.” However, without conducting a competency hearing, an Alabama court permitted Mr. Dearman to waive his appeals. He asked the state to be executed, and the state obliged.

In 2005, Cornell Law School Professor John Blume published a seminal study on volunteers titled “Killing the Willing: ‘Volunteers,’ Suicide, and Competency.” In an analysis of volunteers from 1977-2003, he found that 88% had struggled with mental illness and/or substance abuse. Volunteers did not split evenly along race or gender lines: 85% were white males, despite that group representing only 45% of those on death row. Black men represented 43% of death row but only 3% of volunteers.

DPI analyzed volunteers in the 20 years since the study and concluded that Professor Blume’s findings hold true today. Of the 165 people executed at their own request since 1977, 87% battled mental illness, substance abuse, or both. About 46% of people sentenced to death in the modern era have been white men—but they make up 84% of volunteers. The last 10 volunteers, going back to 2016, have all been white men. Meanwhile, 41% of modern death sentences have been imposed on Black men, but they represent only 5% of volunteers (8 total). The difference in volunteer rates for white and Black men, compared to their death sentence rates, is strongly statistically significant. Statistics for women are somewhat more consistent: about 2% of people sentenced to death have been women of any race, and 2% of volunteers have been women (only 3 total, all white).

These statistics match the demographics of suicide in the United States. Studies consistently show that over 90% of suicide victims suffered from mental illness and/or substance abuse. Serious mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and depression increase the risk of addiction to drugs and alcohol, and together the conditions compound to create further instability and vulnerability to suicidal ideation. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, white men accounted for 68.5% of suicides in 2022, despite being only 30% of the population, and had a suicide rate of 23.8 per 100,000—the highest of any individual race-gender group. Black men, despite facing higher social and economic adversity, had lower suicide rates. Researchers are “puzzled” by the racial disparities but have identified increasing social isolation, higher gun ownership rates, and a perceived “loss of status” as possible explanations for the suicide rate among white men in the general public. It is not clear which factors contribute to the overrepresentation of white male volunteers on death row.

Assisted suicide is legal in only a handful of states, and typically available only for terminally ill patients who must meet strict procedural requirements. Death-sentenced prisoners, though, may request execution dates even when they are physically healthy and openly suicidal. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who vehemently opposed the death penalty, wrote in 1979 that “the Court has permitted the State’s mechanism of execution to be triggered by an entirely arbitrary factor: the defendant’s decision to acquiesce in his own death.” He deemed this process “nothing less than state-administered suicide.”

Measurements of the “volunteer rate” on death row, compared to suicide rates on death row and amongst the general public, lend support to this critique. Professor Blume calculated that the volunteer rate on death row was approximately 150 per 100,000 people for the period 1977-2002.1 Using his method, we found that the volunteer rate through 2024 has seen only a modest decrease, to approximately 137 per 100,000. This rate is about ten times higher than the rate of civilian suicide, which stands at 14.2 per 100,000 people as of 2022. However, it matches the rate of suicide on death row—129.7 per 100,000—nearly perfectly. Research also shows that when executions increase, suicides on death row decrease—suggesting that some suicidal prisoners may volunteer for execution instead of attempting to take their own lives.

The data show “disturbing similarities between persons who commit suicide and those who volunteer for execution,” Professor Blume argued. “Volunteers resemble those who commit suicide in ways that are extremely unlikely to be attributable to chance.”

For Scott Dozier, the choice was clear: whether by execution or suicide, he wanted to die. “I just would rather be dead than do this,” he told The Marshall Project. Mr. Dozier had spent ten years on Nevada’s death row before he sent a letter to a Nevada judge on Halloween 2016, saying he was “of sound mind” and asking to be “put to death.” Like most other volunteers, he was a white man with a history of mental health conditions and substance abuse. But the state hadn’t executed anyone in a decade and could not find execution drugs. Officials proposed a new cocktail of fentanyl, Valium, and the paralytic drug cisatracurium, prompting lawsuits from advocacy groups as well as Mr. Dozier’s attorneys, who worried about its use on their other clients. Several pharmaceutical companies also accused Nevada of fraudulently obtaining their drugs for use in executions. Against his wishes, Mr. Dozier received several stays of execution while courts debated the new protocol. On January 5, 2019, he died by suicide.

Similarly, Aubrey Trail is seeking execution in Nebraska despite the state claiming not to have lethal injection drugs. “My message to whoever is listening is simple: ‘You gave me the death penalty so now use it,’” he wrote in a letter to a newspaper. Mr. Trail had attempted suicide in front of the jury at his trial by cutting his throat with a razor blade.

87% of volunteers suffered from mental illness, addiction, or both.

Several factors may contribute to the higher rate of suicide and volunteerism on death row, including harsh conditions, isolation, the psychological weight of a death sentence, and the fact that people sentenced to death are more likely to suffer from addiction and mental illness. Researchers use the term “Death Row Syndrome” to describe the hopelessness and situational depression experienced by people facing execution. In many states, the history of the death penalty is a history of volunteers: in 4 states, the only prisoners executed have been volunteers, and volunteers were the 1st to be executed in 15 states and by the federal government.2 The 1st man executed in the modern era of the death penalty, after the Supreme Court authorized new death penalty statutes in 1976, was volunteer Gary Gilmore. He had tried to kill himself at least twice while awaiting execution, and was shot to death by firing squad just two months after his death sentence.

The “volunteering” phenomenon also creates serious ethical issues for defense attorneys, who have professional and ethical obligations to fight to save their client’s life. Defense attorneys note that nearly all death-sentenced prisoners at some point express hopelessness about their appeals and consider volunteering for execution. However, most change their minds, in part due to the advice and encouragement of their attorneys. In this study, DPI has defined a volunteer as a prisoner who takes affirmative steps to hasten their execution, including waiving appeals, asking for an execution date, or instructing their attorneys not to file end-stage litigation.

One of the largest concerns about volunteering is that it allows executions to occur despite lingering constitutional questions about the volunteer’s conviction and death sentence. Because the courts only require a minimal finding of legal “competence” to waive appeals in a capital case, many volunteers have gone to their deaths with unresolved constitutional claims such as intellectual disability, severe mental illness, powerful mitigation evidence that a jury has never heard, and even innocence. Some of these claims could have resulted in the prisoner’s ineligibility for the death penalty, but the law permits the volunteer’s desire for execution to take precedence. “Society’s independent stake in enforcement of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment cannot be overridden by a defendant’s purported waiver,” wrote Justice Marshall in dissent in Lehnard v. Wolff (1979). But the court asks only whether a person has a rational and factual understanding of the consequences of waiving his appeals.

Stephen Vrabel was found incompetent to stand trial and treated in mental hospitals for 5 years before he was sentenced to death. He suffered from schizophrenia and believed his attorneys were spies working against him. Yet a court found him competent to waive his appeals, and he was executed on July 14, 2004. That same year, courts approved execution for volunteer David Hocker, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had cut off his testicles on death row. On September 24 this year, just a few weeks before Mr. Dearman was executed, Travis Mullis was put to death after volunteering in Texas. He had been found competent to waive his appeals after a lifetime of suicide attempts and severe mental illness, including bipolar disorder. In his final statement, he explained that he “took the legal steps to expedite to include assisted suicide.”

While there is evidence of a growing national consensus against executing people with serious mental illness, there have been few successful legal or legislative reforms to protect them. In recent years, Ohio and Kentucky passed bills prohibiting the execution of people who suffered from a serious mental illness at the time of their crimes, regardless of whether a court deems them “competent” for execution. Similar bills have been introduced in a dozen other states but none have passed.

If the execution of Joseph Corcoran proceeds on December 18, 2024 will have the highest number of volunteers executed in 6 years. Sentenced to death in Indiana for the murders of 4 people, including his brother, Mr. Corcoran has a long history of serious mental illness. He has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, with symptoms of hallucinations and delusions, and multiple experts have testified that he is incompetent. He believes that the prison guards are torturing him with an ultrasound machine. However, the Indiana Supreme Court held that his “past evidence of mental illness” is not enough to block his execution.

For more information, see DPI’s Execution Volunteers list (at: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/executions-overview/execution-volunteers) or search for volunteers in DPI’s Execution Database (at: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/database/executions?volunteer=Yes).

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)

LIBERIA:

Human Rights Platform campaigns against death penalty ---- Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform of Liberia launches project to abolish death penalty in the country.

The Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform of Liberia, with funding from the British Embassy, has officially launched a project to abolish the death penalty in the country.

Speaking during the official launch in Monrovia on Wednesday, October 23, 2024, British Ambassador to Liberia Neil Bradley reaffirmed his government’s commitment to the universal abolition of the death penalty.

Ambassador Bradley noted that Liberia is a signatory to the second optional protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that requires states to impose a moratorium on execution and amend laws to eliminate the death penalty.

“We have a long-standing policy to oppose the death penalty in all circumstances as a matter of principle”, he added.

He said the British Government welcomes the fact that the global trend towards abolishing capital punishment continues in all parts of the world.

According to him, 3/4 of states’ abolitionists are either in law or practice.

However, he warned against complacency in the collective efforts to abolish the death penalty.

“Last year, recorded global executions soared to their highest number in almost a decade”, the British Envoy disclosed.

He believes that the death penalty undermines human dignity, as it neither makes communities safer nor serves as a deterrence to crime. Instead, he says it exacerbates cycles of violence and is often used for repression.

Ambassador Bradley recalls that in 2005, Liberia acceded to the second optional protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming to abolish the death penalty.

He explains that under this protocol, Liberia was required to impose a moratorium on executions and amend its laws to eliminate the death penalty.

“Through consultation and engagement with stakeholders, the project aims to increase public support for the abolition of the death penalty and identify a pathway for Liberia’s ratification and domestication of the protocol.”

He says the long-term real-world difference will be no further prisoners sentenced to the death penalty and greater public support for non-violent punishment of crimes.

Ambassador Bradley detests that responding to a crime, no matter how heinous, by committing another crime should never be a solution, and any miscarriage of justice leading to the imposition of the death penalty is irreversible and irreparable.

For his part, the chairman of the board of directors of the platform, Reverend Francis Kollie, reveals that there is growing consensus for universal abolition of death penalty and torture, noting that this is the right time for Liberia to join the rest of the world for the abolishment of these two cruel anti-human rights acts.

Reverend Kollie discloses that 12 persons, who are currently detained at various prisons across the country, are on death roll.

He wants the Liberian government and CSOs to use collective approach to eradicate inhumane treatment and return victims who were allegedly tortured in the past.

“Torture and death penalty should be totally unacceptable under the laws of Liberia, and our country’s judicial system should frown at these inhumane practices just like any other civilized countries around the world”, he underscores.

Reverend Kollie notes that past efforts to combat torture and the death penalty sent an indication that Liberia is strengthening human rights and justice for all Liberians and other nationals from diverse backgrounds to promote dignity, accountability, and a country free of torture.

However, he explains that globally, human rights are considered key cornerstones for a peaceful world, ensuring timely redress and change and the inclusion of different human rights groups in strengthening human rights advocacy and solidarity.

He says the significance of the human rights campaign to promote a fair and inclusive society cannot be overemphasized in ensuring that the right to life is upheld.

The ceremony, held at a local hotel in Monrovia, was graced by representatives of the Ministry of Justice, the Independent National Commission on Human Rights, the French Embassy, the European Union, ECOWAS, and civil society organizations, among many others.

(source: thenewdawnliberia.com)

CHINA:

Woman who trafficked 17 children sentenced to death

Yu Huaying, a woman who abducted and trafficked 17 children for financial gains between 1993 and 2003, was sentenced to death by a court in Guizhou province on Friday after a retrial.

"Considering the circumstance of her offense was extremely serious, bringing great damage to the victims and their families, we impose the death penalty on her," said the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court.

It also stripped Yu of her political rights for life and ordered that all her personal assets be confiscated.

According to the court, the 17 victims, who came from 12 families, were abducted by Yu, Gong Xianliang and Wang Jiawen in Guizhou, Chongqing and Yunnan province and then sold in Hebei province.

Gong died during the course of the case, and Wang, Yu's husband, pleaded guilty to the crime while standing trial in Yunnan in September. Yu's case has aroused widespread public attention since 2022 when police in Guiyang received a complaint from Yang Niuhua, who was snatched by Yu in Guizhou and taken to Hebei province in 1995.

Yang went to Guiyang police in 2022 to provide clues about her abduction, and Yu was soon captured in Chongqing. In September 2023, Yu was sentenced to death by the court for abducting and trafficking 11 children.

She appealed to a higher court, and the Guizhou High People's Court asked the Guiyang court to retry the case because it determined that the original ruling omitted some criminal facts.

During the retrial, which opened on Oct 11, the omitted facts referred to six other children who were abducted and trafficked by Yu.

(source: chinadaily.com)

IRAN----URGENT ACTION

URGENT ACTION----YOUTH ARRESTED AT 17 AT RISK OF IMMINENT EXECUTION

Mohammad Reza Azizi, 21, is at risk of imminent execution in relation to a crime that took place when he was just 17 years old, in violation of international law prohibiting the use of the death penalty against children. His trial was grossly unfair; the court relied on his “confessions” obtained during interrogations without a lawyer present to convict him. Iranian authorities have previously scheduled his execution at least twice, including on 21 October 2024. While his execution was halted following public outcries, he remains under sentence of death and at risk of execution.

TAKE ACTION: WRITE AN APPEAL IN YOUR OWN WORDS OR USE THIS MODEL LETTER

Head of judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei

c/o Embassy of Iran to the European Union

Avenue Franklin Roosevelt No. 15

1050 Bruxelles, Belgium

Dear Mr Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei,

Mohammad Reza Azizi, aged 21, is at risk of imminent execution in Adel Abad prison in Shiraz, Fars province, following his conviction related to a crime that took place when he was just 17 years old. His execution was scheduled on two previous occasions including on 21 October 2024. Most recently, his execution was halted following public outcries, but he remains at risk of execution.

Mohammad Reza Azizi was arrested in September 2020, and interrogated without a lawyer present. On 15 August 2021, Branch 1 of Criminal Court One of Fars province convicted then still 17-year-old Mohammad Reza Azizi of murder and sentenced him to death under the principle of qesas (retribution-in-kind). The court relied on his “confessions” made during interrogations to issue its verdict, according to legal documents reviewed by Amnesty International. Amnesty International is concerned that his “confessions” were extracted under coercive circumstances. The organization has long documented the pattern of Iranian security and intelligence bodies holding individuals incommunicado during the investigative phase, questioning them without their lawyers present, and subjecting them to torture or other ill-treatment to force them to self-incriminate. The court also disregarded key evidence, including witness testimony from the defence. Branch 26 of the Supreme Court upheld Mohammad Reza Azizi’s conviction and death sentence in November 2021. In their rulings, reviewed by Amnesty International, both courts acknowledged that Mohammad Reza Azizi was under 18 at the time of the crime, but accepted the finding of the Legal Medicine Organization of Iran, which is a state forensic institute under the supervision of the judiciary, that he had attained “mental growth and maturity” at the time of the crime. The Supreme Court rejected at least one request for judicial review. Another was submitted before his execution was scheduled for 21 October and remains pending.

Iran continues to sentence to death and execute people who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime for which they were convicted, in violation of their obligations under international law. I urge you to immediately halt the scheduled execution of Mohammad Reza Azizi, quash both his conviction and death sentence, and grant him a fair retrial in full compliance with international law and the principles of juvenile justice, excluding “confessions” and without resorting to the death penalty. I call on you to immediately establish an official moratorium on all executions and completely abolish the use of the death penalty against persons who were under the age of 18 at the time of the alleged crime, in line with Iran’s obligations under international law, pending full abolition of the death penalty.

Yours sincerely,

First UA: 93/24 Index: MDE 13/8673/2024 Iran Date: 24 October 2024

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Iranian authorities arrested Mohammad Reza Azizi on 18 September 2020 and denied him access to a lawyer during interrogations. According to legal documents, he “confessed” to acting in self-defence during an altercation where he sustained injuries and another individual died. Medical documents reviewed by Amnesty International show that Mohammad Reza Azizi required hospital care on the date after the incident.

According to legal documents reviewed by Amnesty International, the Legal Medicine Organization of Iran (LMOI) concluded that Mohammad Reza Azizi had attained “mental growth and maturity” at the time of the crime without providing an explanation of how it reached this conclusion beyond noting he was able to provide his first and last name. Amnesty International understands that Mohammad Reza Azizi’s lawyers raised concerns that conclusions were made without “a detailed investigation”.

Amnesty International has repeatedly urged the Iranian authorities, including judges and doctors from the Legal Medicine Organization of Iran, to halt “maturity assessment” processes that inherently violate children’s human rights and risk subjecting them to the death penalty, and instead adopt a position that treats all individuals under 18 as less mature and culpable than adults, in accordance with international juvenile justice principles. While Article 91 of the Islamic Penal Code grants judges discretion to replace the death penalty with an alternative sentence if they find that there are doubts about the individual’s full “maturity” at the time of the crime, in practice, there are no policies and guidelines in place on the types of evidence and the standards of proof needed to rebut the presumption of maturity. Amnesty International has repeatedly called on the Iranian authorities, including parliamentarians, to amend Article 91 to completely abolish the use of the death penalty for all child offenders, without any exception or judicial discretion.

Iran’s criminal justice system also facilitates the violation of the right to life, perpetuates a cycle of violence and seeks to place the responsibility for state-sanctioned killings of human beings on those who have lost their next of kin to murder. Under Iran’s laws, qesas (retribution-in-kind) is a system of equivalent retaliation which involves subjecting those convicted of murder to the same fate as that suffered by the victim of murder - that is death. The law grants this power to the family of the murder victim who may demand and carry out the killing of the defendant or grant pardon in exchange for “blood money” (diyah). In death penalty cases involving persons convicted of crimes taking place when they were children and based on qesas, the Iranians authorities frequently mislead the public and the international community by claiming that the final decision on carrying out or halting the execution is out of their hands and that all they can do is to mediate and encourage the family of the victim to grant pardon in exchange for “blood money” (diyah). Amnesty International emphasizes that these claims are dishonest and reflect a fundamental lack of respect for children’s rights by the Iranian authorities. Iranian courts sentence individuals to death for crimes that took place when they were children, in flagrant violation of international law, and Iranian courts subsequently reject repeated requests to commute these death sentences.

In the aftermath of the “Woman Life Freedom” of September to December 2022 uprising, Iranian authorities have intensified their use of the death penalty to instil fear among the population and tighten their grip on power. In 2023, authorities carried out at least 853 executions. Amnesty International recorded the executions of five individuals in 2023 who were children at the time of the crime: Adel Damani, Ali Najafi, Abdolsamad Shahuzehi, Hamidreza Azari and Mahmoud Rigi. In 2024, Amnesty International has recorded the execution of at least one individual who was a child at the time of the alleged crime - Mehdi Jahanpour -in September 2024.

The absolute prohibition on the use of the death penalty against persons who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime for which they have been convicted is provided in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, both of which Iran has ratified. It is also recognized as a peremptory norm of customary international law, which means it is accepted and recognized by the international community of states as a norm which is binding on all states and from which no derogation is permitted. Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception, regardless of the nature or the circumstances of the crime; guilt, innocence or other characteristics of the individual; or the method used by the state to carry out the execution.

PREFERRED LANGUAGE TO ADDRESS TARGET: Persian and English.

You can also write in your own language.

PLEASE TAKE ACTION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE UNTIL: 31 December 2024.

(source: Amnesty International)

********************

Death Sentences of 4 Sunni Prisoners Finalized, Case Referred for Execution

The death sentences of 4 Sunni prisoners—Eido Shahbakhsh, Abdolghani Shahbakhsh, Abdolrahim Ghanbarzehi Gorgij (Rahim Mirbaloch), and Soleiman Shahbakhsh—have been confirmed by Branch 32 of the Supreme Court and referred to Branch 1 of the Tehran Security Prosecutor’s Office for execution. They are currently held in Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj.

On February 4, 2024, Judge Mohammadreza Amuzad Khalili of Branch 28 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced these men to death, accusing them of armed rebellion through membership in opposition groups and armed uprising against the regime. Their death sentences were later upheld by the Supreme Court following their appeal.

HRANA’s investigation into their case reveals significant rights violations during their imprisonment. The prisoners faced extreme pressure from security agencies, including denial of legal representation, prolonged solitary confinement, physical and psychological torture, and deprivation of basic rights such as family visits and phone calls.

Since 2012, following the initial arrests of Eido and Abdolghani Shahbakhsh, court hearings have been irregular. Despite initial acquittals by the Zahedan Revolutionary Court, objections by security agencies led to the re-arrest of the defendants in 2016 and continued prosecution.

A source close to Abdolrahim Ghanbarzehi’s family told HRANA that he was subjected to severe physical and psychological pressure during solitary confinement and was coerced into making confessions while in the IRGC’s Salman Detention Center in Zahedan, in violation of Article 38 of Iran’s Constitution and international anti-torture conventions.

A key issue in this case has been the frequent transfer of case files between courts in Zahedan and Tehran, causing delays and uncertainty for the defendants. Despite multiple requests for regular hearings and proper defense, initial acquittals were overturned due to pressure from security agencies, leading to their eventual death sentences.

With the Supreme Court now confirming their death sentences, the case has entered a critical phase, with the execution possibly imminent. The families of the prisoners maintain their innocence and argue that the judicial process has been fraught with serious human rights violations.

(source: en-hrana.org)

**********************

Zenobia Women's Gathering demands end to death penalty for Iranian women----The Zenobia Women's Gathering announced its support for the global campaign to abolish death sentences against women in Iran through a statement.

The Zenobia Women's Gathering in the NE Syria region issued a written statement today, calling for the abolition of the death penalty against women in Iran. The statement reads:

"We, the Zenobia Women's Gathering, express our deep concern over the tragic conditions of women in Iranian prisons, especially in Evin Prison.

We stand in full solidarity with Warisha Moradi, who has begun an indefinite hunger strike on 'World Day Against the Death Penalty' to protest the ongoing execution of women fighters, activists, and politicians in Iran.

We strongly reject all forms of violence and injustice, whether stemming from war or internal oppression. We vehemently condemn the brutal human rights violations in Iran, especially those directed at women, including execution, torture, and deliberate arrests of those advocating for freedom and social change.

We highlight the direct link between the regional policies of the Iranian government and the internal violations faced by women, where people are used as tools in unnecessary wars, and society is stripped of its basic rights under the pretext of 'national interest.'

We call on the international community to take immediate and effective action to halt human rights abuses in Iran and to abolish the death penalty for all women convicted on political charges or for violating laws that are repressive and restrict personal freedom.

We affirm our support for all fighters for freedom and justice in Iran and call on all individuals and organizations to show solidarity with the global campaign to abolish death sentences against women in Iran.

'Women, Life, Freedom.'"

(source: hawarnews.com)

****************

At Least 5 Men Including 2 Afghan Executed in Karaj

At least 5 men including 2 Afghan nationals were executed for drug-related, murder and rape charges in Ghezelhesar Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, at least 5 men including 2 Afghan nationals were executed in Ghezelhesar Prison in Karaj on 23rd October. 2 of the men who were sentenced to death for drug-related charges have been identified as Mohammad Koushaki and Babakhani Jafari from Nourabad in Lorestan.

The 3rd man who was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder, has been identified as Arman Naserzadeh.

The 2 Afghan men who were on death row for murder and rape charges in separate cases, have not been identified at the time of writing.

At the time of writing, none of their executions have been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

****************

4 Men Including 2 Afghans Transferred for Execution in Shiraz and Qom

4 men including 2 Afghan nationals have been transferred to the pre-execution solitary confinement cells of Shiraz and Qom Central Prisons. They are all on death row for murder charges.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, 2 unidentified men were transferred to solitary confinement on 21st October in preparation for their executions in Shiraz (Adel Abad) Central Prison.

Furthermore, 2 Afghan nationals were transferred to the pre-execution solitary confinement cells of Qom Central Prison on 22 October.

All 4 men appear to have been sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

(source for all: iranhr.net)

OCTOBER 24, 2024:

TEXAS:

Texas attorney general's statement rejects supporters of death row inmate's appeal

The Texas attorney general is refuting claims by critics who say a death row inmate was unjustifiably convicted in the death of his toddler child.

In the Wednesday night statement posted online from his office, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he released the original autopsy report and other records about the case of Robert Roberson to rebut the "lies" from state Reps. Jeff Leach and Joe Moody.

Paxton is a Republican, while Leach is also a Republican and Moody is a Democrat.

Roberson was convicted for the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis. He has maintained his innocence since his trial. Prosecutors argued at the trial that the child's death was caused by head trauma from being violently shaken. Roberson's attorneys, however, maintain that the bruising on the girl's body was likely due to pneumonia, not child abuse.

It was eventually revealed that the child had pneumonia at the time of her death, and now state legislators and activists are claiming the accusation that she died from being shaken is “junk science.”

Roberson was scheduled for lethal injection last Thursday, but the procedure was postponed in the minutes leading up to the execution after the Texas House issued a subpoena for Roberson to testify in court.

Critics of Roberson's conviction say Texas Senate Bill 344, which states that convictions can be challenged if they were reached due to incomplete science, was not properly applied in Roberson’s case.

Paxton called the defense's “eleventh-hour, one-sided, extrajudicial stunts that attempt to obscure the facts and rewrite his past.”

In the statement that was also released on X, Paxton's office provided the original autopsy report and a 2016 letter from the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy. Both documents say the child died from blunt force head injuries.

Paxton said Roberson had a history of sexually and physically abusing Curtis and her mother. She was sent to the hospital in 2002 with a handprint on her face and bruises on her shoulder, face, ears and the back of her head, he said.

The Dallas Morning News, however, cited one of Roberson's attorneys in rejecting Paxton's claims. "Tonight, a profoundly disturbing thing happened: The chief law enforcement office of the State of Texas, the OAG, issued a stunningly misleading statement designed to quash a bipartisan group of lawmakers in their truth-seeking mission, which has riveted the world," said Gretchen Sween in the Morning News' report.

Roberson’s legal team is fighting with Paxton about whether Roberson will be able to testify in person or virtually. House committee members argue that Roberson’s autism and the decades he spent in solitary confinement would make online communication difficult for Roberson. But Paxton says it is dangerous to let Roberson in the state capitol building.

“A few legislators have grossly interfered with the justice system by disregarding the separation of powers outlined in the State Constitution,” Paxton’s office said. “They have created a Constitutional crisis on behalf of a man who beat his 2-year-old daughter to death.”

(source: npr.org)

************

Robert Roberson death penalty case in Texas has turned into a horrific circus

Robert Roberson’s death sentence has become a circus, with gruesome acts playing simultaneously in three distinctly American rings. In the center are Texas politicians battling one another for power to end or preserve Roberson’s life. In a side ring, celebrities weigh in on whether the condemned man might be telling the truth about his young daughter’s death, and in another, medical experts debate the credibility of shaken baby syndrome and the meaning of the autism spectrum.

It has the feeling of an 18th century public hanging, complete with gawking crowds. And yes, news outlets offering commentary. We’re all players in the most horrific show on Earth. All because of the death penalty.

That’s no knock on the members, Republican and Democrat, of the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee who effectively halted Roberson’s scheduled Oct. 17 execution with a last-minute subpoena for him to testify about his case. It was an odd yet creative and heroic move, blocking the killing at least temporarily, and forcing debate over the Texas laws and procedures that led to Roberson’s 2003 conviction and death sentence for supposedly murdering his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis. At trial, prosecutors presented medical testimony that the girl’s injuries could only be the result of “shaken baby syndrome,” in which a young child is injured or dies from blunt force trauma induced by abuse.

Roberson would be the 1st person to be executed based on the diagnosis just as it is falling into disrepute.

In advance of Monday’s hearing, Roberson’s life became the subject of a horrendous political tug-of-war. Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton denied the lawmakers’ attempt to bring Roberson to the state Capitol. Gov. Greg Abbott told the Texas Supreme Court that the subpoena violated his executive purview. The court stayed the execution to resolve the elected officials’ territorial dispute.

In Texas’ unusual judicial system, the Supreme Court handles only civil matters. A 2nd, co-equal high court — the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals — had previously denied Roberson’s request to postpone his execution, putting the two courts at odds. Each court has nine judges who run for office in partisan elections in which they align with political parties. All are Republican.

Complicating and politicizing matters further is that three of the Court of Criminal Appeals judges who rejected Roberson’s requests for a stay are lame ducks, having been defeated for reelection in the primary earlier this year after a campaign against them by Paxton’s political machine. The attorney general was unhappy that they had blocked him, 2 years earlier, from prosecuting several highly questionable voter fraud cases.

Voters are currently electing judges who could scrap the execution, or reschedule it.

Roberson’s position is nearly unimaginable. With his execution just hours away, he was called to Austin to argue for his life, not in court with experienced attorneys addressing judges or jurors on his behalf, but by himself, in front of politicians who would closely scrutinize his presentation.

Paxton blocked Roberson’s appearance at the hearing.

Roberson is autistic, which may make it difficult for him to understand the reactions and emotions of others. And vice versa. Even if he is not ultimately put to death, his punishment has been cruel and unusual as those words are commonly understood, if not as interpreted by courts that parse the meaning of the 8th Amendment. If he’s innocent, of course, the more than two decades he has spent in prison and the last year of entanglement in state political and ideological disputes is worse than cruel. It is a deep stain on the administration of justice.

Phil McGraw, also known as television’s Dr. Phil, testified on Roberson’s behalf in his absence. So did John Grisham, attorney, former member of the Mississippi House of Representatives and author of numerous legal thrillers that have been turned into popular films, including “The Pelican Brief,” “The Firm” and “The Rainmaker.” They argued that Roberson did not receive a fair trial and deserves a new one.

Involvement of celebrities adds to the circus-like atmosphere, yet McGraw and Grisham are, like the Texas lawmakers, heroes for sticking their necks out in pursuit of justice that they have good reason to believe was denied by the system.

McGraw noted that he does not oppose the death penalty.

“The death penalty hangs in the balance here because if we get this wrong in a case like this, I think the death penalty could come under real attack,” he said.

Yet the death penalty deserves to come under attack. Perhaps it’s ironic that imminent execution was the only thing that mobilized so many to come to Roberson’s defense. But that’s no credit to the death penalty. It’s instead a criticism of a legal system that concerns itself more with punishment and finality than with truth and fairness.

Nearly every developed and democratic nation has abolished the death penalty, except for Japan, Singapore, Taiwan — and the United States.

Even here, a majority of states have either abolished it or, as in the case of California, simply stopped executing people while leaving the punishment on the books.

Killing people, whether guilty or innocent, is an abuse of state power that should not be tolerated in a free and democratic society. Ending this circus means more than allowing Roberson to live for another few months. It means putting an end to the death penalty and recommitting ourselves to justice, mercy and truth.

(source: Editorial, Los Angeles Times)

**************

Lawmakers Examine Robert Roberson’s Claims of Innocence----Abbott condemns the bipartisan committee

Gov. Greg Abbott is taking a position in the case of death row inmate Robert Roberson. On Monday, Abbott criticized a bipartisan group of Texas legislators for an unprecedented tactic they employed last week – issuing a subpoena to compel Roberson’s appearance before the House of Representatives’ Jurisprudence Committee.

The subpoena caused the Texas Supreme Court to cancel Roberson’s execution on Oct. 17, 4 hours after it was supposed to occur. James Sullivan, Abbott’s attorney, filed a brief on Oct. 21 arguing the subpoena undermines the governor’s clemency powers. “Unless the Court rejects that tactic, it can be repeated in every capital case, effectively rewriting the Constitution to reassign a power given only to the Governor,” Sullivan wrote.

Roberson was expected to appear before the committee on Monday but didn’t after Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that transporting him from Huntsville to the Capitol would present security issues. The hearing went on anyway, with co-Chair Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, saying that prison officials had offered to make Roberson available through an online video conference but that the committee had rejected the proposal.

“That’d be perfectly reasonable for most inmate witnesses,” Moody explained. “But Robert is a person with autism who has significant communication challenges, which was a core issue that impacted him at every stage of our justice system. He’s also spent most of the last 2 decades alone, locked away from the modern technology we now take for granted. Video conference is poorly suited for Robert.” Moody said the Jurisprudence Committee is negotiating with the attorney general to bring Roberson before the committee in person.

“If [other evidence] had been told to us, I would have had a different opinion and I would have found him not guilty.”– Terre Compton, one of the jurors at Robert Roberson’s trial

After comments from other committee members, the hearing got underway, with eight witnesses testifying deep into the evening that Roberson is innocent of murdering his 2-year-old daughter Nikki 20 years ago in Palestine, Texas. Phillip McGraw, the TV personality known as Dr. Phil, said he has read the transcript from the murder trial and counted 47 references to shaken baby syndrome, the dubious medical hypothesis that prosecutors used to convict Roberson, before he stopped keeping count. “I am 100% convinced that we are facing a miscarriage of justice here,” McGraw said. “I do not believe that Mr. Roberson has had due process in this case.”

The novelist John Grisham followed, praising the committee for its actions last week. “You literally saved an innocent man’s life,” he said. “You took a bold stand against injustice at the precise moment when the courts and the leaders of the state seemed hellbent on executing Robert.”

Terre Compton, one of the jurors at Roberson’s trial, also spoke. “Everything that was presented to us was all about shaken baby syndrome,” Compton said. “That was what our decision was based on. Nothing else was presented for us to consider. If [other evidence] had been told to us, I would have had a different opinion and I would have found him not guilty.”

(source: austinchronicle.com)

*************

Trial for man accused of killing Panola County deputy begins

Almost 5 years after the death of a Panola County deputy, a man is now on trial for his murder.

Gregory Newson is charged with capital murder in the shooting death of William “Chris” Dickerson.

The trial is taking place in a Gregg County courtroom with a visiting judge. Newson’s lawyer requested a change of venue, saying his client would not get a fair trial in Panola County.

Two prosecutors from the attorney general’s office are prosecuting the case, serving as district attorney pro tem.

The state is seeking the death penalty.

Prosecutors say Dickerson pulled over Newson for a broken taillight in the early hours of Dec. 31, 2019. They say Newson preemptively “executed” Dickerson, before they had made contact.

The state says Newson had drugs and a large amount of cash in his vehicle. He was captured several hours later after a police chase that briefly led into Louisiana.

Retired Panola County Sheriff Kevin Lake was the state’s first witness. Prosecutor Natalie Tise asked Lake what he remembered about notifying Dickersons family of his death.

“It’s been 1,758 days,” Lake said, holding back tears. “You don’t forget something like that.”

A man who lived next to the alleged murder testified. He said he was alerted to the incident by his son. When he rushed outside, he said he found Dickerson dead, laying on the street face down. The man used Dickerson’s radio to call in “officer down.”

Dashcam video was soon shown from Dickerson’s vehicle. As Dickerson is approaching the vehicle, the driver gets out with a weapon and shoots him several times. The neighbor is seen several minutes later, telling dispatch Dickerson has no pulse.

After lunch, the jury heard from Robert Delconte, a former Henderson Police Officer. Delconte was off-duty and lived near the site of the incident. He heard scanner traffic, leading him to get his gear and get into his truck.

Delconte said he received a vehicle description over the scanner and began to stage along U.S. 79.

The jury viewed dash cam footage from Delconte’s vehicle. It shows Delconte relaying the license plate to dispatch, then receiving confirmation.

Delconte is seen following the vehicle for several minutes. The car is seen turning around multiple times. After a turn, several shots at fired at Delconte.

A photo of Delconte’s truck was shown, depicting a bullet hole in the driver’s side window and door. Delconte was not hit.

The jury also heard from a Shreveport Police officer who engaged in the chase with Newson. He said Newson’s vehicle failed to stop at a red light after they had already activated sirens.

A chase that exceeded 90 miles an hour ensued. It ended when Newson’s vehicle flipped out of the roadway and he was arrested after a brief foot pursuit.

(source: KLTV news)

************

Ken Paxton releases records to ‘correct falsehoods’ about Robert Roberson case----Texas AG says Roberson had history of abuse, was not convicted on ‘shaken baby’ theory.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Wednesday issued his first public remarks affirming the prosecution’s case against Robert Roberson III, the death row inmate whose execution was stayed last week after an unprecedented legal maneuver by a bipartisan group of lawmakers.

In the evening statement that was released on X, via email and his office’s website, Paxton said he released the autopsy report and a sworn affidavit of the medical examiner who performed Roberson’s daughter’s autopsy to correct “lies” about the case coming from state Reps. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, and Joe Moody, D-El Paso.

Roberson, an East Texas man, was convicted in 2003 for the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki. He has maintained his innocence since his trial.

The 57-year-old was scheduled to be executed on Oct. 17 by lethal injection in Huntsville, but a bipartisan group of lawmakers carried out a novel legal maneuver that resulted in the state Supreme Court staying the execution.

Roberson’s attorneys and lawmakers, including half of the Republican-controlled House, argue his case was based on shaken baby syndrome, a medical determination that abuse has caused serious or fatal head trauma.

Gretchen Sween, one of Roberson’s defense attorneys, said in an emailed statement: “Tonight, a profoundly disturbing thing happened: The chief law enforcement office of the State of Texas, the OAG, issued a stunningly misleading statement designed to quash a bipartisan group of lawmakers in their truth-seeking mission, which has riveted the world. Why the urgency to execute an innocent, autistic man, with a perfect disciplinary record during the 22 years he has been confined on Texas’s death row, largely without any lawyer willing to investigate his claim of innocence?”

Until Wednesday, Paxton had not publicly commented on the case. This past weekend, he filed a petition with the Texas Supreme Court asking for the order granting the subpoena to be reversed, which was later denied.

But in his news release, Paxton said: “The Office of the Attorney General released the original autopsy report and other evidence to correct falsehoods amplified by a coalition interfering with the capital punishment proceedings in which Robert Roberson was scheduled to be executed for the murder of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki.”

In the statement, Paxton said Nikki had multiple injuries when she was brought in to the emergency room that showed blunt force trauma rather than solely shaken baby syndrome, echoing Paxton’s statements in the petition from over the weekend. Paxton said in the statement that Roberson had a history of abuse to both Nikki and his ex-wife, and said that Nikki died due to being beaten by Roberson.

Paxton also alleged in his statement that evidence showed Roberson had sexually abused Nikki. Roberson was never charged with sexually abusing his daughter.

The Dallas Morning News is in the process of reviewing the 1,000-plus pages of court transcripts from Roberson’s original 2003 trial and his appeals.

Paxton also criticized the efforts of the House members to delay Roberson’s execution. Paxton said the House members attempted to mislead the public by “falsely claiming“ Roberson was unfairly convicted through “junk science” based on the shaken baby theory.

In a post on X, Moody said the House committee heard days of testimony from law, medical and psychology experts, as well as the lead investigator and a juror in the case.

“There are no new facts in the OAG’s statement, only a collection of exaggerations, misrepresentations and full-on untruths completely divorced from fact and context,” Moody said. “We intend to provide a response tomorrow that will completely undermine it. We will continue to act on truth in pursuit of justice and the rule of law.”

The diagnosis has come under broad scrutiny in the years since the conviction. Roberson’s attorneys and lawmakers have said the state’s 2013 “junk science” law should have been an avenue to vacate Roberson’s conviction.

Anderson County’s district attorney and the attorney general contend shaken baby syndrome was not central to securing the conviction. Since then, multiple courts have declined to intervene in subsequent appeals.

Roberson’s execution was stayed at the last minute after the Texas House Committee of Criminal Jurisprudence, of which Moody is the chair and Leach is a member, issued a subpoena the day before calling for Roberson to testify before the committee regarding his case.

(source: Dallas Morning News)

***************

Robert Roberson hearing raises profound questions about guilt----Based on what we know, Texas cannot execute this man.

Had Robert Roberson III been executed by the state of Texas last Thursday night as scheduled, it would have been a shameful failure of our criminal justice system.

Out of appeals, Roberson would have been put to death even as his conviction on outdated “shaken baby syndrome” science in the death of his 2-year-old daughter was shrouded in tremendous doubt.

Instead, a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers, some of whom actually support the death penalty, boldly prevented that from happening. Their last-minute legal maneuver to issue a subpoena requiring Roberson to testify before the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence hearing Monday morning effectively stayed the execution, at least for now.

The unprecedented move, led by Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, and Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, to effectively go around the state’s judicial branch does raise valid questions about a potential violation of the state’s constitutionally enshrined separation of powers among the legislative, judicial and executive branches.

Those concerns may well be headed for a full airing in court, as the Texas Supreme Court noted while agreeing to uphold the House subpoena.

But if ever there was a case to test the limits of those separations, it’s this one. The fact is, it should have never come to all of this.

The House committee hearing has brought into full public view, on live-streamed video, a distressing set of facts surrounding Roberson’s case and the way the criminal justice system has dug into his conviction. The committee is studying whether the state’s “junk science” law, that provides a pathway for new trials for those convicted on the basis of discredited science, has worked as intended in Roberson’s case.

In 2003, an Anderson County jury convicted Roberson in the death of his daughter largely on a doctor’s diagnosis that she had suffered from “shaken baby syndrome.” Back then, doctors believed the syndrome was the only explanation for three different types of internal head injuries in small children, absent a serious accident. But today, doctors realize that these same symptoms can be caused by other things, as well.

Roberson’s attorneys contend that the jury never heard evidence of some of those causes, and that the district attorney rushed to convict. Even Roberson’s defense attorney said at trial that this was a textbook “shaken baby” case, though his client maintained his innocence and rejected plea bargain deals.

Roberson’s attorneys today have brought to light the fact that the child, Nikki, had been chronically ill most of her life, and most especially in the week before her death. They say doctors who have reviewed her records, as well as slides of her lung tissue, have concluded that Nikki likely died from undiagnosed pneumonia, made worse by drugs prescribed to her by doctors in the days before her death. Other blunt force injuries to the child’s head noted by the medical examiner could be explained by the sick child’s fall off a bed as well as efforts made by her doctors in the hospital to save her life, her attorneys contend.

Terre Compton, one of the jurors who convicted Roberson, told the House committee Monday that had she known all of that, she would not have voted to convict Roberson. She also repeatedly testified that prosecutors at the time made it clear that this was solely a “shaken baby” case. So insistent were they, she recalled, that in driving home their case they violently shook, in front of jurors, either a stuffed bear or doll to demonstrate how Roberson killed his daughter.

Compton’s testimony is significant because the district attorney today, as well as the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, has said that Roberson is not eligible for a new trial because his conviction was not solely based on the “shaken baby” diagnosis but also evidence that Nikki sustained other injuries. But evidence of other signs of abuse has now been seriously called into question and may be explained by other things. Compton told the committee she now thinks Roberson is innocent.

Of course, Compton is one of only many involved in the case who now have serious doubts. They include the former lead detective, who says the state got it all wrong; more than 80 bipartisan lawmakers who have petitioned the criminal appeals court to reconsider the case; Phil McGraw and author John Grisham, both of whom told the committee that they fully investigated the case and believe Roberson did not get a fair trial; even U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who took the unusual step last week of publicly saying that Roberson has made a “serious showing of actual innocence.”

Can all those people be wrong? Or did the state get it wrong? Did the criminal appeals court, which ruled just 5-4 earlier this month to uphold the execution, consider the full facts? We note that the appeals court, on its own power and authority, could reconsider and grant Roberson a new trial based on the state’s junk science law. Just one vote would need to change. We urge it to do so.

We also note that Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell, who was not in office at the time of Roberson’s conviction, could also reconsider the case in light of Compton’s testimony and other details revealed at the House committee hearing. We urge her to do so, as well.

And finally we urge our governor, a lawyer himself, to look carefully at the facts in this case and to ask himself, given all we know now, given all of the doubt that has been raised, whether our state can in good conscience put this man to death.

This editorial board is not a trier of fact, but in light of so much overwhelming evidence and the extraordinary acts of a group of bipartisan legislators in recent days, Roberson deserves a new day in court.

(source: Dallas Morning News Editorial Board)

***************

Facts matter in Robert Roberson's death penalty case. Why isn't AG being honest?

Terre Compton got up early Monday for the 3-hour drive from Palestine to Austin — taking a day away from her 86-year-old husband in frail health and the 4 grandchildren they’re raising as 2nd-time parents — because she understood time was running out for a man facing execution.

More than anything, the truth mattered.

“I just couldn't think about killing a man, and that's how I looked at it,” said Compton, now 69, who served as a juror in the 2003 trial that put Robert Roberson on death row in a supposed shaken baby case. It wasn’t until years later that she learned Roberson’s 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, had chronic health problems, an acute case of double pneumonia and doctor-prescribed medications in her system that are no longer allowed for children that young.

“My decision 21 years ago was getting ready to come to realization” when Roberson’s execution date was set, Compton told the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee on Monday. “And I really, in my eyes, was killing a man that I knew was innocent, and I was going to have to live with that.”

How could anyone live with that?

Yet at a time when getting it right is paramount — when, as Plano GOP state Rep. Jeff Leach put it Monday, Roberson “was within 20 minutes and 20 steps of being executed by the state of Texas just days ago” — the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton is muddying the waters with demonstrably false statements about the case.

The truth matters. Why won’t the AG’s office get the facts right?

Paxton’s office didn’t respond to my questions Tuesday. But in a Travis County civil court hearing last week, Texas Assistant Attorney General Ed Marshall claimed that “there was a history of abuse from this particular inmate against this child.”

Not so, Compton told lawmakers at Monday’s hearing. “I would like to know where they're getting their information,” she said, noting no evidence of prior abuse was introduced at the trial. Nor does anything like that appear in his record.

And now that there is robust debate around shaken baby syndrome, and at least 32 people in 18 states have been exonerated after wrongful convictions in such cases, the AG’s office is arguing Roberson’s trial was never a shaken baby case.

In a brief filed with the Texas Supreme Court, the AG’s office falsely stated that Roberson was convicted “of beating his 2-year-old daughter to death."

In last week’s Travis County court hearing, Marshall from the AG’s office said: “Shaken baby syndrome just doesn't play a role in this case. So whether or not it's been discredited in the community of pediatric specialists, it's just not the central feature of this case.”

Which is absurd. Phillip McGraw, who spent years running a litigation consulting firm before becoming TV’s Dr. Phil, reviewed the records in Roberson’s case in depth.

“I stopped counting it (at) 47 times it was mentioned in the trial transcript: Shaken baby syndrome, shaken baby case, shaken baby syndrome, shaken baby case, triad of symptoms,” McGraw told lawmakers Monday.

Compton was emphatic that was the story with jurors as well.

“Me being at the trial and in the jury area and the jury room, that is all that this case was based on, was shaken baby syndrome,” Compton told lawmakers. She even remembered prosecutors using a doll or a teddy bear to demonstrate how they believed Nikki had been grabbed by the arms and shaken.

Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, asked her: “Who would know better? You or somebody in the Office of the Attorney General right now?”

Compton replied, “Me, because I was on the jury.”

Harrison asked, "How does it make you feel, seeing these statements by the government right now, as somebody who lived through every day of the trial?”

Compton replied with steely candor, “It has pissed me off very much.”

I suspect a good number of Texans following this case feel the same way.

It is hard, as humans, to admit when we’re wrong. It’s even harder for institutions to do so. And hardest of all when acknowledging the error means facing the fact a likely innocent man would have been killed if not for the House committee using its subpoena powers to delay last week’s scheduled execution.

But there is still time for the state of Texas — the AG’s office, Gov. Greg Abbott and the courts — to do the right thing.

Be honest about how this case got here.

Recognize that jurors didn’t have all the facts about Nikki’s fragile life and tragic death.

Acknowledge that experts’ understanding of shaken baby syndrome has evolved.

And give Roberson a new trial where jurors can sort all of this out.

The stakes are too great for Texas to get this wrong.

(source: Bridget Grumet, Austin American-Statesman)

FLORIDA:

TREASURE COAST DEATH ROW----6 inmates on Florida’s death row have connections to the Treasure Coast

There are 277 people on death row in Florida.

6 men on death row were convicted of crimes on the Treasure Coast.

These are their stories, compiled from court records and TCPalm archives and organized by the county in which the murders were committed:

Indian River County

Rodney Lowe

Age: 54

Offense date: July 3, 1990

Sentence date: May 1, 1991

Details of crime: Lowe, then 21, fatally shot store clerk Donna Burnell in an attempted robbery of Nu Pack Market on County Road 512. Burnell was found with gunshot wounds in her head and heart, her 3-year-old nephew kneeling beside her crying.

Donna Burnell

In 2012, Lowe was sentenced to death for a 2nd time after a jury unanimously voted to recommend he be executed during a resentencing proceeding.

The latest: Since his 2012 resentencing, Lowe has been pursing post-conviction appeals and has hearings scheduled in November 2024 before Chief Circuit Judge Charles Schwab, court records show.

William Reaves

Age: 75

Offense date: Sept. 23, 1986

Sentence date: March 6, 1992

Details of crime: Reaves killed Indian River County Deputy Richard Raczkoski outside a convenience store. Reaves was waiting for a cab when a gun fell from his shorts. A struggle with the deputy ensued and Reaves shot him 4 times in the back with the weapon.

Richard Raczkoski

The latest: The Florida Supreme Court in 2018 denied his post-conviction appeal seeking a new sentencing proceeding.

St. Lucie County

Billy Kearse

Age: 51

Offense date: Jan. 18, 1991

Sentence date: Nov. 8, 1991

Details of crime: Kearse shot Fort Pierce police Sgt. Danny Parrish 13 times with the officer's own gun after getting pulled over for driving the wrong way down a 1-way street. A jury voted unanimously in recommending the death penalty.

Danny Parrish

The latest: The Florida Supreme Court in 2018 upheld a trial judge’s ruling that denied his post-conviction appeal.

Martin County

Matthew Marshall

Age: 60

Offense date: Nov. 1, 1988

Sentence date: Dec. 12, 1989

Details of crime: Marshall, then a Martin Correctional Institution inmate, beat inmate Jeffrey Henry to death. A fight broke out between the 2 men when Henry refused to pay Marshall winnings from a prison football game pool. Henry was found with his hands bound in his cell, killed by blows to the back of the head. Marshall claimed he acted in self-defense.

The latest: In May 2017, the Florida Supreme Court denied Marshall’s post-conviction appeal challenging the constitutionality of his death sentence.

Lenard J. Philmore

Age: 47

Offense date: Nov. 14, 1997

Sentence date: July 21, 2000

Co-defendant: Anthony Spann

Details of crime: Spann and Philmore kidnapped Kazue Perron, 44, outside her West Palm Beach home and drove away in her Lexus. They took Perron to an isolated area in Martin County, where Philmore shot her in the head and threw her body into a canal. The men then robbed a bank in Indiantown and were eventually captured in a Martin County orange grove.

The latest: The U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 denied a review of his post-conviction appeal challenging his death sentence.

Anthony Spann

Age: 50

Offense date: Nov. 14, 1997

Sentence date: June 23, 2000

Co-defendant: Lenard Philmore

Details of crime: Spann and Philmore kidnapped Kazue Perron, 44, outside her West Palm Beach home and drove away in her Lexus. They took Perron to an isolated area in Martin County, where Philmore shot her in the head and threw her body into a canal. The men then robbed a bank in Indiantown and were eventually captured in a Martin County orange grove.

The latest: A federal district judge in 2013 denied a post-conviction appeal.

Who from the Treasure Coast has been executed?

April 12, 2012

David Alan Gore, 58, of Vero Beach, who admitted killing 6 women, spent 28 years on death row until his execution by lethal injection for the 1983 murder of Lynn Elliott, 17, of Vero Beach. She and a friend were hitchhiking when they were abducted by Gore and his cousin Fred Waterfield, who is serving life in prison. Dubbed the “killing cousins,” Gore and Waterfield targeted at least a dozen women for kidnap and rape beginning in 1976. Most of the victims were sexually assaulted, some were tortured and others were dismembered and buried in hidden graves in citrus groves west of Vero Beach.

John Earl Bush, 38, of Fort Pierce, was executed by Florida's electric chair after spending 14 years on death row for the 1982 1st-degree murder of Frances Julia Slater, 18, of Stuart. He, along with Alphonso Cave, J.B. "Pig" Parker and Terry Wayne "Bo Gator" Johnson, abducted Slater while robbing a Stuart convenience store and drove her 13 miles to a rural area where she was stabbed, shot and left for dead.

Frances Julia Slater

Cave and Parker were also sentenced to death. After decades of appeals, Parker in 2023 was resentenced to life in prison. Cave, who spent 40 years on death row, was 64 when he died on Aug. 3, 2023. Johnson received a life term but he was released in 2008. Johnson, 67, in April was ordered back to prison for 38 months for a drug possession conviction related to a 2022 arrest, court records show.

May 10, 1984

James Adams, 47, of St. Lucie County, spent 10 years on death row until he was executed in Florida’s electric chair for the Nov. 12, 1973 murder of Edgar Brown, a millionaire Fort Pierce rancher and former St. Lucie County Sheriff's Department chief deputy. Brown died after being bludgeoned with a fireplace poker during a robbery in his Indrio Road home.

Oct. 25, 1948

Lacy Stewart, 17, of White City was housed on death row for a year before he was executed by Florida's electric chair for the Oct. 28, 1946 murder of Erich Emil Spiller, 65, a beer parlor operator from White City who Stewart confessed he fatally shot as the man counted receipts.

Stewart was 1 of at least 8 executed inmates in Florida younger than 18.

May 12, 1939

Johnny Smith, 30, of Vero Beach was put to death by Florida's electric chair after spending 2 years on death row for the 1936 murder of Sam Jones, according to a 1939 Press Journal newspaper article.

Then-Indian River County Sheriff William Frick pulled the switch that electrocuted Smith; until 1941, the job of pulling the switch fell to the sheriff in the county where the crime had been committed.

(source: tcpalm.com)

OHIO:

Ohio Innocence Project to host death penalty roundtable

The Ohio Innocence Project will be hosting a community roundtable on Zoom on Nov. 1 to discuss the death penalty.

According to a press release from the organization, there will be 2 sessions on Nov. 1, the roundtable discussions will start at 9:45 a.m. and end at 1:15 p.m. on Zoom. The sessions will be free and open to the public.

The 1st program session will feature a presentation from a public defender who handles death penalty cases. She will discuss how she helped a Cincinnati man gain freedom after 16 years on death row for the murder and rape of a child. The man was wrongfully convicted due to several factors including an inadequate defense attorney.

The man who was wrongfully convicted will also speak during the session.

The 2nd session will feature the co-author of The Politics of Innocence, he will present his research which focuses on how wrongful conviction impacts the decision-making of legislators.

For more information or to register contact Dr. Steven Hurwitz at tuoip-u@tiffin.edu. The deadline to register is Oct. 24 at 10 p.m. You must include your name and email address to register.

(source: WTVG news)

NEBRASKA:

Prosecutors seeking death penalty for man accused of killing 2 in Bloomfield; Defense asking for it to be quashed

The state will be seeking the death penalty against the man accused of killing 2 in a Bloomfield bowling alley a recent court filing, while the defense is asking to quash it.

In a Tuesday court filing, prosecutors gave notice that they intend to provide evidence of aggravating circumstances against Alias Reed, 26, in his alleged murders of William Reffett and Curtis Strom earlier in the year. The arguments for aggravating circumstances would come only if Reed would be found guilty of 2 counts of 1st-degree murder.

The prosecutors said that they plan to use the state statute’s definition that “at the time the murder was committed, the offender also committed another murder.”

According to state law, state prosecutors must prove the existence of aggravating circumstances to a jury to proceed with the death penalty against a defendant.

Reed is charged with 2 counts of 1st-degree murder and 2 counts of using a firearm to commit a felony, He is accused of the shooting deaths of Strom, 77, and Reffett, 49 on Feb. 20.

On Wednesday, Reed’s lawyer filed a motion to quash the death penalty, declaring sections of it unconstitutional.

In the filing, the defense argues 7 points against the death penalty, with the 1st being that individual county attorneys can determine to impose the death penalty with “no statutory standard in place for the determination of which defendants the state will seek to impose a sentence of death,” thus violating the 8th and 14th Amendments.

The defense also argues that a 3-judge panel meant to “weigh” aggravating circumstances violates the 6th Amendment alongside the other 2 previously mentioned. The 3rd ground laid out is that the state law disallowing mitigating evidence to be provided also violates the same amendments. Another argument for violating the same 3 amendments is that the state law on the death penalty also doesn’t allow the jury to determine life or death. The law is also prejudiced against defendants because the 3-judge panel doesn’t need to be unanimous if a jury finds aggravating circumstances, but the same panel must be unanimous if defendants waive their right to a jury trial, the defense argues.

In its 6th argument, the defense says that a state law regarding lethal injection violates the state constitution in allowing the executive branch to make decisions that the Nebraska Legislature is responsible for. The motion to quash ends with the defense stating that this case “violates the evolving standard of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

The defense asked that the death penalty be quashed and that the Nebraska death penalty be declared unconstitutionally in part or in whole.

The court will hold a hearing on the motion to quash on Nov. 26. Reed is also scheduled for an arraignment on Oct. 29, but the defense has also asked to move that on Nov. 26.

The case was bound over from county court to district court on Oct. 11 after court proceedings resumed in September after the court found Reed’s mental competency had been restored. He had been found to not be mentally competent to stand trial in early April. The court ruled a few weeks earlier that he would undergo a mental competency evaluation.

On the morning of Feb. 20, court documents state Reed went to Curt’s Lanes and Dining bowling alley in Bloomfield with the “intentions of killing ‘Will and Curt.’” He allegedly shot both and then made his way to his girlfriend’s parents’ house.

Reed’s girlfriend, Kaylyne Sweazy, 28, went with Reed to dispose of the shotgun on a gravel road outside Center, documents state. Authorities later found the gun after Sweazy told investigators the exact location.

Sweazy has also been charged in the case, charged with tampering with physical evidence and accessory to a felony. She pleaded not guilty to both charges. In late September, her defense lawyer told the court he may request a change of venue. Her case is currently being heard in Knox County.

(source: KCAU news)

IDAHO----impending execution

Idaho Supreme Court denies execution stay for Thomas Creech

The Idaho Supreme court has denied an emergency motion for stay in the execution of Thomas Creech.

Creech’s attorneys filed the order last week, looking to halt his execution next month until his appeal is “fully developed and finalized.”

The state supreme court denied the request earlier Wednesday, writing in part that his appeal will be heard before his execution date.

Attorneys for Creech have already filed an appeal of Wednesday’s decision.

Creech is on death row following the murder of a fellow inmate back in the 80s.

Right now his execution date is set for November 13th.

(source: KMVT news)

***********

Forensic Pathologist Who Worked OJ Simpson Case to Testify as Bryan Kohberger Tries to Strike Death Penalty

A Florida forensic pathologist who worked for OJ Simpson’s defense in 1994 will be testifying at a hearing next month to determine whether an Idaho judge will strike the death penalty for Bryan Kohberger, who is accused of stabbing four University of Idaho students to death in 2022.

Dr. Barbara C. Wolf is the medical examiner for Florida’s 5th and 24th Districts, serving Hernando, Lake, Marion. Seminole, and Sumter Counties. Her name surfaced in motions filed earlier this month asking that she be allowed to testify remotely for the November 7 hearing.

Prosecutors objected to Wolf’s testimony at all, saying that her testimony would not “help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue” on the matter of whether to allow the state to seek the death penalty. The state did not object to her remote testimony, however, once the judge decided to allow her to testify.

It’s not clear how Wolf’s testimony will pertain to the defense’s attempts to strike the death penalty. It’s also not clear what role she played in the OJ Simpson case, only that she “joined the highly regarded team of experts” working the case, according to her biography on the Districts 5 and 24 Medical Examiner web page.

According to the Associated Press, she was on a panel of experts that included Connecticut state criminologist Henry Lee and New York State Police forensic pathologist Michael Baden to review mountains of evidence collected at the scene of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman’s murders. Wolf was the director of anatomic pathology at Albany Medical College, where the testing took place.

The Florida web page says she was involved in the 1991 exhumation of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who was shot to death in Mississippi in 1963, and also worked with forensic scientists in Croatia and Bosnia to identify remains found in mass graves uncovered there.

She also chairs the National Association of Medical Examiners Inspection and Accreditation Committee and the Florida Medical Examiners Commission.

Kohberger is charged with killing Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves at their off-campus rental home on November 13, 2022, as CrimeOnline reported. He was arrested more than a month later at his parents home in Pennsylvania. He has pleaded not guilty.

(source: crimeonline.com)

******************

Idaho death row prisoner seeks clemency review, with support of cold-case victim’s family

Attorneys for Idaho death row prisoner Thomas Creech, who is under a death warrant and awaits his scheduled execution next month, asked Tuesday for a new hearing so the state’s parole board can reconsider dropping his sentence to life in prison.

His application for the hearing is supported by the family of one of Creech’s purported victims, a case that earlier this year helped prosecutors prevent the convicted murderer from receiving a reduced sentence. Creech’s attorneys said in a court filing that assertions made by the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office about their client’s involvement in a 50-year-old cold case — the killing of a man named Daniel A. Walker in Southern California — amounted to “false evidence.”

In recent months, Creech’s attorneys with the Federal Defender Services of Idaho said they’ve been able to determine that local police in California investigated their client at the time of Walker’s death and ultimately ruled out Creech as a suspect. Now, Creech seeks a “fair opportunity to fully challenge the allegations” at another hearing in front of the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole, his attorneys said in a statement Tuesday.

Walker’s younger brother, Doug Walker, submitted a signed letter of support that accompanied Creech’s application filed with the parole board.

“We are concerned that we were manipulated into participating in a hearing where the stakes were as high as they can get, namely the death penalty, and that this resulted in false statements being made that corrupted the Commission’s decision-making process,” Doug Walker wrote.

Under Idaho Administrative Rules, prisoners may ask for such a review only once a year — with the exception of capital cases, Creech’s attorneys noted in his application. The state’s parole board reviewed his case in January.

The parole board will consider Creech’s application in closed session at its general meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 29, Christine Starr, the board’s executive director, said Tuesday in an email to the Idaho Statesman.

“If the commission grants Mr. Creech another hearing, it will be on the merits of the recently filed petition,” she said.

At a new hearing, Creech also aims to argue that a 2nd execution attempt would be cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of his constitutional rights, his attorneys wrote. An Ada County judge last month dismissed the same legal argument, which is now on appeal to the Idaho Supreme Court.

The request for a new clemency hearing is the latest maneuver from Creech’s legal team to hamper an unprecedented 2nd execution attempt in Idaho of the same prisoner after state officials failed to fulfill Creech’s death sentence earlier this year. Creech also has other active appeals before the state’s federal court system, with stays of execution filed there and the state’s highest court as of Tuesday evening.

One of those federal lawsuits names the parole board and elected Ada County Prosecutor Jan Bennetts as defendants. A federal judge was recently removed from overseeing the case because of her longstanding friendship with Bennetts.

Creech, 74, is the state’s longest-serving death row prisoner after almost 50 years of incarceration. He remains sentenced to death for the May 1981 beating death of fellow maximum security prisoner David Jensen. Creech also was sentenced to death for the November 1974 murders of 2 men in Valley County, but later resentenced to life in prison after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not make the death penalty mandatory for 1st-degree murder convictions.

Victim’s brother still seeks justice a half-century later

The state’s parole board held an all-day clemency hearing for Creech in January. At that hearing, the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office opposed a reduced sentence for Creech, saying he was responsible for no fewer than 11 murders across the western U.S. Creech has been convicted of 5 murders, including the 3 in Idaho, which has led state officials to label him a serial killer.

Prosecutors said one of the other killings was Walker’s in October 1974. They alleged to the parole board that Creech “got away with this murder” and several others, without offering any specific evidence concerning Walker. Clemency hearing rules do not permit objections or arguments between the 2 sides.

Creech has never been charged in the case, and he and his attorneys have repeatedly denied his involvement in Walker’s death. Creech did so directly to the Statesman in a June phone interview from the prison.

In a news release immediately after the hearing, Bennetts’ office also characterized the Walker cold case as “solved” and identified Creech as the culprit “after law enforcement’s thorough investigation.”

“The problem is that none of that is true,” Doug Walker wrote in his support letter. “The cold case wasn’t solved. There was no ‘thorough investigation.’ ”

Bennetts, who is up for reelection in a couple of weeks, and her office did not respond to a Statesman request for comment Tuesday. Bennetts’ office previously deferred comment about the Walker case to the Sheriff’s Department and District Attorney’s Office in San Bernardino County, which together investigated his death.

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office told the Statesman she would look into the matter. The DA’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

In January, with one member recusing himself, the parole board voted 3-3 on Creech’s request for a reduced sentence, a tie that upheld his death sentence. At the time, Idaho Gov. Brad Little, who has the final say on clemency decisions in the state, said in a statement that part of his job is to follow the law and ensure criminal sentences are carried out as ordered.

“Thomas Creech is a convicted serial killer responsible for acts of extreme violence,” Little said. “As governor, I have zero intention of taking any action that would halt or delay Creech’s execution. His lawful and just sentence must be carried out as ordered by the court. Justice has been delayed long enough.”

Creech was served with a death warrant the next day, which scheduled his execution for late February.

But at Creech’s planned execution, the prison’s execution team was unable to find a suitable vein for a lethal injection IV at 8 different points of his body, and prison leadership called it off after almost an hour. It was the 1st time in Idaho history that the state failed to execute a prisoner, with Bennetts and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador each on hand as state witnesses.

With Labrador’s help, Idaho approved a firing squad as a backup execution method last year, but the state has yet to renovate the prison’s existing execution chamber to accommodate that option. Prison officials last week told the Statesman the construction project will cost nearly $1 million to complete.

With Creech’s latest death warrant active — his 13th since his 1st death sentence in 1976 — his attorneys are seeking to stave off a repeat attempt on his life by lethal injection on Nov. 13. They’re now using prosecutors’ uncorroborated statements about Creech’s involvement in Walker’s death to request reconsideration.

”Independently and extraordinarily, the family and friends of Mr. Walker are also requesting a clemency hearing to allow them to resolve lingering questions and doubts they have about whether Mr. Creech is really responsible for Daniel’s murder,” Creech’s attorneys wrote.

Walker’s brother, who published a book about the unsolved case, previously told the Statesman that he believed Creech likely killed his brother. But he said Tuesday that he continues to pursue justice and wants to ensure there’s enough time to know precisely who is responsible.

“It’s not a case of questioning Thomas Creech’s guilt in Dan’s case,” Doug Walker said in a text message. “Guilt or innocence is determined in a court of law. In a way, Dan has never had his day in court. We are asking for more time to do further investigation in the interest of justice and on behalf of my brother Dan.”

(source: Kevin Fixler, Idaho Statesman)

USA:

It’s Time to Kill the Death Penalty----The U.S. should join over 100 other countries and ban the death penalty.

In Old Testament times, the death penalty was used as the punishment for murder (Genesis 9:6). But death was also the punishment for a number of other offenses, such as eating leavened bread during the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Exodus 12:15), being a stubborn child (Deuteronomy 21:21), picking up sticks on the Sabbath day (Numbers 15: 32-36), insulting your parents (Exodus 21:17), going to the Tabernacle if you are not a priest (Numbers 1:51), and ignoring the verdict of a judge or priest (Deuteronomy 17:12). Today the death penalty is still used in 27 states in America, including the state I live in—Ohio.

In 2007 the American Bar Association released the results of a three-year study of the death penalty.[1] Although the American Bar Association takes no position for or against the death penalty, they issued a moratorium on the death penalty because “the process is deeply flawed.” As a researcher of aggression and violence for over 25 years, I also believe the death penalty is “deeply flawed.” There are at least eight serious problems with the death penalty.

1. The Death Penalty Models the Behavior it Seeks to Prevent

The death penalty is used to deter killers, but it models the very behavior it seeks to prevent. It teaches the lesson that it is acceptable to kill, as long as the state is the one doing the killing. This is somewhat paradoxical. As my friend Jed said, “We don't like people who kill other people, so to show everyone how much we don't like people who kill people, we are going to kill people who kill other people. It seems like capital punishment pretty much goes against everything it claims to be for.” The death penalty answers violence with violence. As American novelist Wendell Berry said, “Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in ‘justice’ or in affirmation of ‘rights’ or in defense of ‘peace’ do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.”

2. You Might Kill the Wrong Person!

William Blackstone, the English jurist, judge, and Tory politician of the 18th century, said, “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” The death penalty is irreversible, so it is critical that it be used on the actual killer. Over 165 people have been exonerated and freed from death row, such as on the basis of DNA evidence.[2] It is estimated that 4.1% of death row inmates are innocent.[3] As of 2018, there are about 3,000 people on death row in America today.[4] Thus, about 120 of them, we could estimate, are innocent. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976,[5] 1,470 individuals have been executed in the U.S. (as of 2019).[6] It is difficult to know for sure how many innocent people have been executed, but it appears at least 15 have.[6] In Japan, a man who had spent over 50 years on death row was exonerated because a court found the evidence used against him had been planted,[7] In a unanimous opinion, the Missouri Court of Appeals ruled Sandra Hemme, age 64, was wrongly convicted of murder and she should be freed.[8] Hemme spent 43 years in prison, which is the longest sentence any woman wrongly convicted in the U.S. has ever served.

3. The Death Penalty Does Not Reduce Murder Rates

The available evidence indicates that the death penalty does not reduce murder rates. FBI Unified Crime reports show that states with the death penalty have homicide rates 48-101% higher than states without the death penalty.[9] Similarly, an international study of criminal violence analyzed data from 110 nations over a period of 74 years and found that the death penalty does not deter criminals.[10] One reason why the death penalty might not deter criminals is that most murders are committed in a fit of rage, after an intense argument, when people rarely consider the consequences of their actions.[11] Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said: “I have inquired for most of my adult life about studies that might show that the death penalty is a deterrent. And I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point.”[12] As one scholar notes, “No one who kills, by permanent or temporary insanity, through jealousy, drug addiction, robbery, alcoholism, retardation, brain damage, chemical imbalance, rape, revenge, a feeling of no way out or rage, thinks of the death penalty at the time of the murder.”[13]

4. The Death Penalty Targets The Poor

Of the 22,000 murders that occur each year in the U.S., about 1% result in death sentences.[14] Which 1% depends largely on the effectiveness of the attorney, which often depends on how much money the accused has. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.”[15] Ginsburg also criticized the "meager" amount of money spent to defend poor people. OJ Simpson's lawyer—who received $5 million for defending him—said, "In the U.S., you're better off, if you're in the system, being guilty and rich than being innocent and poor.”[16] There are no billionaires or millionaires on death row.

5. The Death Penalty Targets People of Color

The American Bar Association three-year study concluded: “Every state studied appears to have significant racial disparities in imposing the death penalty, particularly associated with the race of the victim, but little has been done to rectify the problem.” Other statistical evidence is consistent with this conclusion.[17] Blacks make up 12% of the U.S. population, but they make up 48% of those on death row (55% of those on death row are people of color). The odds of receiving death penalty increase by 38% when the accused is Black. Although 50% murders involve white victims, 80% of death penalty cases involve white victims. In addition, black people are sometimes excluded from juries.[18] About 95% of elected prosecutors are white.[19] In 2021, Viginia's Governor granted posthumous pardons to seven Black men ("Martinsville Seven") who were executed for the alleged rape of a white woman in 1951 in Martinsville, Virginia.[20] The men were tried without adequate due process.

6. The Death Penalty May Constitute “Cruel and Unusual Punishment.”

The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” According to the U.S. Supreme Court [21], punishment is cruel and unusual if it is too severe for the crime, arbitrary, is rejected throughout society, and is not more effective than a less severe penalty. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that has executed minors under 18-years-old. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for minors offended "evolving standards of decency" and therefore constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”[22]

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “The capital punishment system is discriminatory and arbitrary and inherently violates the Constitutional ban against cruel and unusual punishment. The ACLU opposes the death penalty in all circumstances, and looks forward to the day when the United States joins the majority of nations in abolishing it.”[23] There are five methods currently used to execute people—lethal injection, electrocution, gas chamber, firing squad, hanging, and for the first time ever in Alabama — nitrogen gas. In 2020 the American Veterinary Medical Association deemed it "unacceptable" as a euthanization method for all mammals except pigs, since it could be "distressing."[24] With lethal injection drugs becoming more difficult to obtain, several states are using alternatives (e.g., electrocution, firing squad).[25] The ACLU argues that there are significant problems with each method. Consider just a few examples of several botched cases.

A prisoner generally dies within seven minutes of receiving a lethal injection. Drugs for lethal injections in the United States were obtained from Europe, where the death penalty is illegal. However legal pressures and concerns from manufacturers in Europe have made traditional execution drugs unavailable. Thus, states have been trying experimental drug cocktails for lethal injections. There have been a number of "botched executions" involving lethal injections. In an Arizona case, for example, Joseph Rudolph Wood received 2 new drugs (midazolam + hydromorphone), and it took him nearly 2 hours to die.[26] Sometimes the victim being electrocuted bursts into flames. In 1983, for example, the electrocution of John Evans in Alabama was described in a sworn testimony by his attorney: “At 8:30 p.m. the 1st jolt of 1900 volts of electricity passed through Mr. Evans' body. It lasted thirty seconds. Sparks and flames erupted…from the electrode tied to Mr. Evans' left leg. His body slammed against the straps holding him in the electric chair and his fist clenched permanently. The electrode apparently burst from the strap holding it in place. A large puff of grayish smoke and sparks poured out from under the hood that covered Mr. Evans' face. An overpowering stench of burnt flesh and clothing began pervading the witness room. Two doctors examined Mr. Evans and declared that he was not dead.” "The electrode on the left leg was re-fastened…Mr. Evans was administered a second…jolt of electricity. The stench of burning flesh was nauseating. More smoke emanated from his leg and head. Again, the doctors examined Mr. Evans. [They] reported that his heart was still beating, and that he was still alive. At that time, I asked the prison commissioner, who was communicating on an open telephone line to Governor George Wallace, to grant clemency on the grounds that Mr. Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The request…was denied.” "At 8:40 p.m., a third charge of electricity…was passed through Mr. Evans' body. At 8:44, the doctors pronounced him dead. The execution of John Evans took fourteen minutes." Afterwards, officials were embarrassed by what one observer called the "Barbaric ritual." The prison spokesman remarked, "This was supposed to be a very clean manner of administering death."[27]

Autopsy results show that people who are put to death by lethal injection have lungs that weigh about twice the normal amount. because they are filled with blood, plasma, and other fluids. Froth and foam was also found in the lungs of some inmates. The inmates experienced severe form of a condition called pulmonary edema, which can induce the feeling of suffocation or drowning. The inmates did not experience a quick and painless death. Rather, as they gasped for air they experienced "A death of organ failure, of a dramatic nature that I recognized would be associated with suffering," said Dr. Joel Zivot.[28]

7. The Death Penalty Costs More Than Life in Prison

Some people may be surprised to learn that the death penalty is far more expensive to implement than life in prison without the possibility of parole. As a conservative estimate, it costs $137 million per year for death penalty vs. — about 12 times more.[29] And the gap is increasing over time as the amount of time between sentencing and execution increases. Many death penalty cases involve a long, drawn out, complex, and expensive judicial process that takes many years. Even if the death penalty deterred murders (it does not), research shows that for punishment to be effective it must be administered immediately after the offense.

A sentence of life in prison without parole is in actually a sentence of death in prison.[30] Nobody sentenced to life in prison without parole in the US has ever been released on parole.[30] There are only 2 ways that someone convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole can be released from prison (or a death sentence): (1) a pardon or commutation from the governor, or (2) by having a court overturn their conviction.

8. The Death Penalty Negatively Impacts Jurors, Justices, Governors, Executioners, and the Families of Victims

Any discussion of the death penalty should also consider the potential psychological impact of executing another human being on the jurors, justices, governors, executioners, and families involved.[31] One writer concluded, "Jurors are unrecognized victims of the death penalty."[32] The Capital Jury Project interviewed 1,198 jurors from 353 capital trials in 14 states and found that 81% of female jurors and 18% of male jurors regretted their decisions, and 63% of female jurors and 38% of male jurors sought counseling after the trial.[33] As the former superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary said, "After each execution, I had staff members who decided they did not want to be asked to serve in that capacity again. Others quietly sought employment elsewhere. A few told me they were having trouble sleeping, and I worried they would develop post-traumatic stress disorder if they had to go through it another time."[34]

Often a death row inmate requests a last-minute stay of execution, which is either granted or denied by the nine U.S. Justices of the Supreme Court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that making such decisions was the "hardest part of the job I do."[36] Justice Lewis F. Powell said he had "come to think that capital punishment should be abolished, because it serves no useful purpose."[35] Justice Paul Stevens concluded, "Arbitrariness in the imposition of the death penalty is exactly the type of thing the Constitution prohibits."[36] Justice Sandra Day O'Connor also added her voice to the "growing chorus of skepticism about the administration of capital punishment in the United States.”[36]

The last hope a death row inmate has for a stay of execution is a grant of clemency (for life in prison) by the state's Governor. California Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown had to make this decision about 59 inmates, and granted clemency to 23 of them. He said, "the longer I live, the larger loom those fifty-nine decisions about justice and mercy that I had to make as governor. They didn’t make me feel godlike then: far from it; I felt just the opposite. It was an awesome, ultimate power over the lives of others that no person or government should have, or crave. And looking back over their names and files now, despite the horrible crimes and the catalog of human weaknesses they comprise, I realize that each decision took something out of me that nothing—not family or work or hope for the future—has ever been able to replace."[35] Illinois Governor George Ryan granted clemency to all 167 inmates he decided on because he regarded the criminal justice system as “fraught with error and [which] has innumerable opportunities for innocent people to be executed."[32] Governor Pat Quinn, also from Illinois, said: "As a state, we cannot tolerate the executions of innocent people because such actions strike at the very legitimacy of a government. Since 1977, Illinois has seen 20 people exonerated from death row. ... To say that this is unacceptable does not even begin to express the profound regret and shame we, as a society, must bear for these failures of justice."

Corrections officers actually carry out the executions, and 31% of them suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In comparison, 20% of Iraq War veterans suffer PTSD. Lewis E. Lawes, who supervised 303 executions in New York, wrote, “I shall ask for the abolition of the Penalty of Death, until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me.”[36]

Donald Cabana, who served as a corrections officer in Missouri, Florida, and Mississippi, said you "do not have the right to ask me, or any prison official, to bloody my hands with an innocent person’s blood. Not in the name of justice, not in the name of fairness."[33] Ron McAndrews, a corrections officer from Florida and Texas, said: "[T]hose of us who have lived through an execution know just what the death penalty does to those who must perform it. In my tenure as warden, I helped perform three electrocutions in Florida and oversaw five lethal injections in Texas. In both places, I saw staff traumatized by the duties they were asked to perform. Officers who had never even met the condemned fought tears, cowering in corners so as not to be seen. Some of my colleagues turned to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain of knowing that a man had died by their hands. I myself was haunted by the men I was asked to execute in the name of the State of Florida. I would wake up in the middle of the night to find them lurking at the foot of my bed. One of them had been cooked to death in a botched electrocution. I stood just 4 feet away watching flames rise out of his head, hearing the electrician ask me, ‘Is that enough? Should I continue?’ It wasn’t until I left my post as warden that I finally sought counseling for the trauma I had been through."[36]

Craig Baxley, Jim Harvey, and Jon Ozmint, who performed different roles related to the task of carrying out executions in South Carolina for the Department of Corrections, describe the trauma they experienced by carrying out these role.[35] For example, after he executed his first prisoner, "Baxley felt like a different person. Nightmares replaced his previously sound sleep. Painful knots invaded his stomach. Anytime he became nervous, his hands started to drip with sweat like they did in the death chamber." He couldn't stop thinking about suicide.

Some family members of murder victims feel that a death sentence will provide closure. But death penalty court proceedings can drag out for years, which prolongs their pain. By contrast, a life sentence is swift and certain, allowing families to move on.[29] One study found higher levels of physical and psychological health, and more satisfaction with the criminal justice system, for families when the sentence was life not death.[37]

Summary

In summary, there are many good reasons to abolish the death penalty, in the remaining states in the U.S. and around the world. Unfortunately, some states continue to execute inmates even when there is widespread calls for clemency, as in the cases of Missouri executing Brian Dorsey [38] and Marcellus Williams [39], even though corrections officials argued that both of these capital sentences should be commuted. Murder is a terrible crime that is never justified and should always be punished. However, I believe that the punishment should be life in prison without the possibility of parole, rather than the death penalty. Life in prison without the possibility of parole keeps the public safe from killers while eliminating the risk of an irreversible mistake. Less than half of Americans (47%) believe the death penalty is fairly applied.[40]

Closing Quote

“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.” — Albert Camus, French philosopher (won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at age 44)

References

[1] American Bar Association (2007). ABA study: State death penalty systems deeply flawed. Retrieved from http://apps.americanbar.org/abanet/media/release/news_release.cfm?relea…

[2] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row

[3] Gross, S. R., O’Brien, B., Hu, C., & Kennedy, E. H. (2014). Rate of false conviction of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death. PNAS, 111(20), 7230-7235. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1306417111

[4] Death row inmates by state. Death Penalty Information Center. Retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row-inmates-state-and-size-death-…

[5] Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 96 S. Ct. 2909, 49 L. Ed.2d 859 (1976)

[6] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executed-possibly-innocent

[7] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y9x6zrkrro

[8] https://www.kcur.org/news/2024-10-22/missouri-court-vacates-sandra-hemm…

[9] Fessenden, F. (2000, September 22). Deadly statistics: A survey of crime and punishment. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/22/us/deadly-statistics-a-survey-of-crim…

[10] Archer, D., & Gartner, R. (1987). Violence and crime in cross-national perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

[11] FBI Uniform Crime Reports (2018). Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office.

[12] Reuters, 1/21/00

[13] West, B. (1993, November/December). The death penalty: n National Disgrace.” The Nonviolent Activist, p. 13

[14] Leno, M. (2003, January 28). The ultimate price: Is the death penalty in California's best interest? SFGate. Retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/The-Ultimate-Price-Is-t…

[15] CBS News (2001, April 10). Justice backs death penalty freeze. Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/justice-backs-death-penalty-freeze/

[16] Kover, G. (2012, October 14). Debate: Abolish death penalty, amend three strikes? Pressdemocrat.com Retrieved from http://www.petaluma360.com/article/20121014/ARTICLES/121019748/1309/www…

[17] https://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment/race-and-death-penalty

[18] National Public Radio (23 May 2016). Supreme court orders new trial for black death row inmate convicted by all-white jury. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/23/479166026/supreme-cou…

[19] https://wholeads.us/justice/

[20] Frankin, J. (2021, August 31). These 7 Black men were executed for an alleged rape. Now, they have been pardoned. National Public Radio. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1032859243/virginia-history-pardons-exec…

[21] Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972)

[22] Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005)

[23] ACLU: Death penalty. Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/capital-punishment

[24] https://www.avma.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/Guidelines-on-Euthanas…

[25] Wamsley, L. (2021, May 19). With lethal injections harder to come by, some states are turning to firing squads. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/get-psyched/201401/it-s-time-ki… https://www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166139433/idaho-is-the-latest-state-to-…

[26] Eckholm, E. (2014, July 23). Arizona takes nearly 2 hours to execute inmate. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/arizona-takes-nearly-2-hours-to-ex…

[27] Friendly, F. W., & Elliot, M. J. H. (1984). The Constitution: That delicate balance. New York: Random House.

[28] Caldwell, N. (2020, September 21). Gasping for air: Autopsies reveal troubling effects of lethal injection. National Public Radio, Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/793177589/gasping-for-air-autopsies-reve…

[29] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty#financialfacts

[30] https://deathpenalty.org/facts/5-myths-death-penalty/

[31] https://www.npr.org/2022/11/17/1137380268/the-hidden-toll-of-working-on…

[32] Slick, J. (2011, October 14). The weight of 'playing God': In capital punishment cases, jurors are punished. The Oregonian. Retrieved from http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/10/the_weight_of_playi…

[33] Capital Jury Project. Retrieved from http://www.albany.edu/scj/13189.php

[34] Thompson, S. F. (2016, September 15). What I learned from executing two men. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/what-i-learned-from-ex…

[35] Eisner, C. (2021, November 5). They executed people for the state of South Carolina. For some, it nearly destroyed them. The State. Retrieved from https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article254201328.html#storyli…

[36] Mitchell, P. (2013, October 25). The weight of capital punishment on jurors, justices, governors, and executioners. Verdict. Retireved from https://verdict.justia.com/2013/10/25/weight-capital-punishment-jurors-…

[37] Armour, M. P., & Umbreit, M. S. (2012). Assessing the impact of the ultimate penal sanction on homicide survivors: A two state comparison. Marquette Law Review, 96(1), 1-131. Retrieved from [38] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/09/missouri-executes-death…

[39] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/us/marcellus-williams-execution-miss…

[40] Gallup (2023, November 6). Gallup poll — New 47% low say death penalty is fairly applied in US. https://news.gallup.com/poll/513806/new-low-say-death-penalty-fairly-ap…

(source: Brad J. Bushman Ph.D., psychologytoday.com)

**************

The Limitations of DNA Evidence in Innocence Cases

Innocence

Death-sentenced prisoners with credible evidence of innocence have gained significant attention this month with the execution of Marcellus Williams in Missouri, the near-execution of Robert Roberson in Texas, and the U.S. Supreme Court arguments in Glossip v. Oklahoma. There is a common misconception that DNA evidence is widely available in all cases and central to exonerations, but the reality is that DNA exonerations in death penalty cases are relatively rare. DPI has identified 34 cases across 15 US states in the modern death penalty era of people who have been exonerated from death row with DNA evidence—with the 1st case being Kirk Bloodsworth in 1993 (he was convicted in 1985). These numbers represent just 17% of the 200 death row exonerations.

The average time spent on death row by people exonerated thanks to DNA is 18.6 years, for a total across the 24 cases of 631 years spent in prison for crimes they did not commit. Few of these exonerees have been adequately compensated.

The Innocence Project reports  375 DNA exonerations in criminal cases between 1989 and 2020. Before 2000, only a handful of states allowed post-conviction DNA testing. That changed in 2004 with the passage of the Justice for All Act. In her 2020 article, Chi-Hsin Engelhart argues that post-conviction DNA testing is a procedural due process right that should be constitutionally protected. She notes this protection is especially important in the context of death row to explore the potential of wrongful execution, concluding that a denial of access and testing could lead to a violation of the Eighth Amendment. Ms. Engelhart argues that courts should shift their emphasis from finality to accuracy in the legal system, and that allowing for DNA testing in post-conviction proceedings would advance this goal.

During a recent discussion moderated by DPI Executive Director Robin Maher at the French Ambassador’s Residence in Washington, D.C., Vanessa Potkin, Director of Special Litigation at the Innocence Project, noted that DNA evidence is available in less than 10% of crimes. The case of Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, who was executed on September 24, 2024, illustrates that even when DNA evidence can be obtained from the crime scene, forensic materials may degrade or become contaminated, rendering them unusable for proving a defendant’s innocence.

Robert DuBoise was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Florida in 1983 based on faulty forensics, including the since-debunked practice of bite mark matching. DNA testing ultimately exonerated him in 2020 and in February 2024, Mr. DuBoise received $14 million compensation for his wrongful conviction.

As scientific and technological progress continues, many prisoners may benefit from these advancements. However, many legal procedural barriers continue to block prisoners from accessing DNA evidence that has the potential to exonerate them.

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)

LIBERIA:

British Embassy, CSO-HRAP Seek End to Death Penalty

The British Embassy near Monrovia, and the Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform (CSO-HRAP) of Liberia, have officially launched a human rights campaign aimed at increasing public awareness and support for the abolition of the death penalty in Liberia.

The campaign, titled the “Abolition of the Death Penalty Project,” seeks to galvanize public backing for the elimination of capital punishment and establish a clear pathway for the ratification and domestication of protocols.

This would ensure the removal of all prisoners from ‘death row’ and facilitate the successful passage of laws through both houses of the legislature. The overarching goal is to prevent future death sentences and to encourage public acceptance of non-violent alternatives for punishing crimes.

Development partners, Civil Society actors and governmental authorities attended the official launching program from the following institutions: Embassies of Great Britain, France, and Ireland; as representatives of the European Union, ECOWAS, and the Ministry of Justice.

Other entities that attended and participated in the official launching program include the Liberia National Bar Association, National Human Rights Commission, Law Reform Commission, Accountability Lab, Prison Fellowship-Liberia, United Nations Human Rights Commission, among others.

Speaking at the official launch of the abolition of the death penalty project on Wednesday, October 23, British Ambassador to Liberia, Neil Bradley, elaborated that the United Kingdom is proudly supporting the work of the Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform of Liberia through its abolition of the death penalty project.

He stated that the launch of the human rights project is timely because on October 10, 2024, marked the International Community observation of the 22nd World Day Against the Death Penalty.

According to him, the United Kingdom is committed to the universal abolition of the death penalty and the UK has a longstanding policy to oppose the death penalty in all circumstances, as a matter of principle.

Ambassador Bradley pointed out that the UK welcomes the fact because the global trend towards the abolition of capital punishment continues in all parts of the world.

“Today, around 3/4 of states are abolitionist, either in law or in practice. However, we should not be complacent in our collective efforts to abolish the death penalty. Last year, recorded global executions soared to the highest number in almost a decade and it has undermined human dignity,” the British Ambassador intoned.

He believes that the ideology of the Death Penalty exacerbates cycles of violence, and it is often used as a tool of repression.

He recalled that in 2005 that Liberia acceded to the Second Optional Protocol to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)-aiming at the abolition of the death penalty.

“Under the Protocol, Liberia was required to impose a moratorium on executions and amend its laws to eliminate the death penalty. Through Consultation and engagement with stakeholders, the project aims to increase public support for the abolition of the death penalty and identify a pathway for Liberia’s ratification and domestication of the Protocol”, Ambassador Bradley asserted.

He stressed that the longer-term real-world difference will be no further prisoners sentenced to the death penalty and greater public support for non-violent punishment of crimes.

“Responding to a crime, no matter how heinous, by committing another crime should never be the solution. And any miscarriage of justice leading to the imposition of the death penalty is irreversible and irreparable. Justice can be done, while maintaining the right to life,” he added.

Also speaking at the official launching of the abolition of the death penalty project, Rev. Francis Kollie, Chairman and Chief Advocate of the Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform of Liberia, emphasized that the human rights campaign against capital punishment is a step toward a more just and humane society, which aims at fostering dialogue, raise awareness, and engage stakeholders across the borders of Liberia; from policymakers to grassroot communities to ensure the ending of death penalty, a inhumane practice.

According to him, the execution of the death penalty and torture are not consistent with the right to life and the right to live free from cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment.

He mentioned that there is a growing consensus for universal abolition of the death penalty and torture, as such, it is so timely that Liberia is joining her counterparts across the world for the abolishment of torture and the death penalty, 2 cruel anti-human rights practices meted against an accused individual.

“We need a collective approach from the government of Liberia and the CSO actors to eradicate inhumane treatment, extradition and return of victims who were allegedly tortured in the past. Torture and the death penalty should be totally unacceptable under the laws of Liberia, and other country’s judicial system should frown at these inhumane practices -just like any other “civilized countries” around the world, the Chief Advocate pointed out.

Rev. Kollie accentuated that our collective effort to combat torture and the death penalty send an indication that Liberia is strengthening human rights and justice for all Liberians and other nationals from diverse backgrounds to promote dignity, accountability, and a country free from capital punishment.

He appeals to the Boakai-Koung administration to pardon 12 convicts who are jailed across Liberia from facing the death penalty because the right to life must be respected.

“Let us make this the beginning of a new era of justice, a process that honors life and upholds the dignity of every individual. The British Embassy near Monrovia for its interest in supporting the CSO Platform and other Civil Society organizations working with lawmakers and judiciary authorities to ensure compliance with International Human Rights Instruments including the 2nd Optional Protocol of the ICCPR, which squally highlight the abolishment of death penalty,” Rev. Kollie emphasized.

He recalled that the Plenary of the Liberian Senate in July of 2022, with a unanimous vote of 17, passed a portion of the Penal Code of Liberia to abolish death penalty and other capital offenses, following a recommendation from the Senate’ Committee on Judiciary.

For his part, the Technical Program Lead of the CSO Advocacy Platform of Liberia, Davestus T. James, promised to increase public support by embarking on awareness and outreach in Montserrado County and other parts of Liberia to properly inform the general populace about the significant to abolish death penalty in Liberia because, it is totally inhumane.

He said they are prepared to constructively engage the 55th Legislature for the passage of the abolishment of the death penalty legislative instrument presently at that august body, which is responsible to pass laws.

Mr. James stated that 112 states have abolished the death penalty and expressed optimism that Liberia will adhere to the much-publicized International Protocol that supports the right to life.

Meanwhile, a popular call has been proffered by the CSO Platform, development partners and others who attended the human rights-friendly project- for the 55th Liberian Legislature to timely pass the abolition of death penalty and other capital offenses legislative instruments still at the Capitol Building into law.

(source: liberianobserver.com)

UGANDA:

The death penalty can not make Uganda a safer place to live in

(see: https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/oped/commentary/the-death-penalty-can-not-make-uganda-a-safer-place-to-live-in-4801174)

PAKISTAN:

SC urged to decide Noor murder case without delay

The Supreme Court of Pakistan has been urged by the father of Noor Mukadam — a 27-year-old woman murdered by Zahir Jaffer in 2021 — to take up the murder case pending for more than 1 1/2 years in the top court.

Shaukat Mukadam, a former diplomat, addressed a press conference on Wednesday to mark the birth anniversary of his slain daughter and demanded swift justice from the top court.

Mr Mukadam said the family of Zahir Jaffer had approached him for reconciliation but he rejected their offer.

He said it was crucial to bring such a “beast” — a reference to Zahir Jaffer who decapitated his daughter — to justice so that no girl in the country could be subjected to such cruelty.

He said no matter how powerful anyone was they could not be allowed to kill someone’s daughter.

Shaukat Mukadam says case pending in top court for 1 1/2 years

The case has been pending in the top court for the past 1 1/2 years, he said, adding that it was an important case and the lives of many girls were connected to its outcome, he said.

The CJP should hear the case on a priority basis so that Jaffer could be punished and no one would be able to dare to do such an act again, he added.

On the occasion, social workers Tahira Abdullah and Reema Tariq said that birthdays were about happiness, but Noor’s birthday was an excruciating day for her parents.

“It is an open and shut case and all evidence is available against the accused, but due to unknown reasons, it has been pending for 1 1/2 years.”

Noor, 27, was found murdered at a residence in Islamabad’s upscale Sector F-7/4 on July 20. A first information report (FIR) was registered later the same day against Jaffer, who was arrested from the site of the murder.

According to the FIR registered by her father, he discovered that his “daughter has been brutally murdered with a sharp-edged weapon and beheaded”.

Subsequently, a district and sessions judge sentenced Zahir Jaffer to death in February 2022 along with 25 years of rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs200,000. His household staff Iftikhar and Jameel — both co-accused in the case — were sentenced to 10 years in jail, while all other suspects, including Jaffer’s parents and TherapyWorks employees, were acquitted.

In March 2023, the Islamabad High Court upheld the death sentence and also converted his 25-year jail term into another death penalty.

In April 2023, an appeal in the Supreme Court was filed against the IHC decision to uphold the death sentence.

(source: dawn.com)

VIETNAM:

Vietnam tycoon's death row appeal to begin in November

The appeal trial of a Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death for fraud totalling $27 billion will begin in November, state media said Wednesday.

Property developer Truong My Lan was found guilty in April of swindling cash from the Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) -- which prosecutors said she controlled -- and sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history.

Tens of thousands of people who had invested their savings in the bank lost money, shocking the nation and prompting rare protests from the victims.

"The High People's Court in Ho Chi Minh City has issued the decision to open an appeal trial for Truong My Lan and accomplices in the 1st Van Thinh Phat case on November 4," Tuoi Tre newspaper said, referring to the major real estate developer of which Lan was chair.

A total of 48 defendants are appealing, including Lan, and the trial is scheduled to end on November 25, the newspaper added, citing the court.

The announcement comes days after Lan was convicted of money laundering and jailed for life in a separate case.

During her 1st trial, Lan was found guilty of embezzling $12.5 billion, but prosecutors said the total damages caused by the scam amounted to $27 billion.

The court ordered Lan to pay almost the entire damages sum in compensation.

85 others were also sentenced on charges ranging from bribery and abuse of power to appropriation and violations of banking law.

They were arrested as part of a national corruption crackdown that has swept up numerous officials and members of Vietnam's business elite.

Between 2012 and 2022, Lan used nearly 1,300 fake loan applications to withdraw money from SCB, in which she owned a 90-% stake, the court found.

Her driver transported the equivalent of more than $4.4 billion in cash from SCB's headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City to her nearby home and Van Thinh Phat's head office, state media reported, citing the police investigation.

(source: tuoitrenews.vn)

SAUDI ARABIA----executions

Saudi Arabia Executes 7 Over Drug Trafficking

Saudi Arabia executed 7 individuals on Wednesday, including 5 for drug trafficking, according to the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

The executions bring the total number carried out this year in the Gulf kingdom to 236, based on an AFP tally using official statements.

Yahya Lutfullah, Ali Azib, Ahmed Ali, and Salem Nahari were executed in the southern province of Asir for “smuggling hashish” into the country, the interior ministry stated in a report published by SPA.

The report identified all 4 as Yemeni nationals.

Also on Wednesday, the same source reported the execution of a Pakistani man for drug trafficking, raising the number of people executed in the kingdom for that offence this year to 71.

Saudi Arabia has emerged as a major market for captagon, an addictive amphetamine drug being smuggled from war-torn Syria and Lebanon.

Saudi authorities launched a high-profile anti-drug campaign last year, leading to numerous raids and arrests.

Executions for drug trafficking have surged since a moratorium on the death penalty for such offences was lifted 2 years ago.

The interior ministry also announced the execution of two Saudi nationals for murder on Wednesday.

In 2023, Saudi Arabia ranked 3rd globally for the number of executions, following China and Iran, according to Amnesty International, which began recording annual figures in 1990.

Riyadh’s use of capital punishment has been widely criticised, with human rights organisations arguing that it is excessive and inconsistent with the kingdom’s efforts to present a more modern image internationally.

Saudi authorities have previously defended the death penalty as necessary for “maintaining public order”, emphasising that sentences are only carried out once “defendants have exhausted all levels of litigation”.

(source: newscentral.africa)

MALAYSIA:

Filipino man charged with taxi driver's murder in Keningau

A 43-year-old Filipino man was charged at the Keningau Sessions Court on Thursday (Oct 24) with the murder of a 58-year-old taxi driver last month.

No plea was recorded from the accused, Abdul Razak Amri, who has no valid identification.

The court has set Nov 26 this year for the next mention of his case, pending the completion of the chemist and post-mortem reports.

Abdul Razak, who was charged under Section 302 of the Penal Code, faces the death penalty if convicted. He was denied bail.

He had allegedly killed the taxi driver on Sept 19 following a heated argument between the two men in Kampung Lingkudau, Keningau, at 9.40pm.

The case was heard before Sessions Court Judge Ahmad Fairuz Mohd Puzi at 10am, with Assistant Superintendent Ramona Albert Rayang prosecuting.

The accused remains unrepresented.

(source: thestar.com.my)

**********

Trial for massacre: Extradition only if death penalty abolished

With an arrest warrant out for ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh's interim government should amend the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) Act to ensure a fair and impartial judicial process, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.

Before moving ahead with trials, the interim government should adopt a moratorium on the death penalty and take steps to abolish capital punishment in line with international human rights law, the New York-based rights organisation said in a letter to the law, justice and parliamentary affairs ministry on Monday.

Unless the Bangladesh government issues a moratorium on the death penalty and makes amendments to ensure a fair trial, the foreign governments sheltering deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her senior cabinet members should not extradite them to face trial.

India and other relevant governments should support Bangladesh's justice process by adhering to extradition agreements once the government makes amendments to ensure that the accused will be safe and will face a fair trial by international standards, HRW said.

"Without clear commitments to international standards, the interim government risks undermining the justice process," said Julia Bleckner, senior Asia researcher at HRW.

The tribunal, which was established under Hasina's government in 2010 to address crimes against humanity committed during the 1971 Liberation War, has previously been fraught with violations of fair trial standards.

This included failure of evidence gathering, lack of independence of judges including collusion with prosecutors, witness tampering, denying proper rights to defence, forcibly disappearing relatives of the accused and the use of the death penalty, it said.

The interim government has issued important amendments to the ICT Act, the law establishing the tribunal, including provisions for transparency by allowing the presence of international observers and for broadcasting trial proceedings.

Amendments also included important requirements for victim and witness protection.

Nevertheless, additional amendments are necessary to ensure that trials are fair and carried out following international standards and the rights enshrined in the Bangladesh Constitution.

The government should repeal Article 47(A) of the constitution to allow the accused protection of their constitutional rights, including the right to enforce their fundamental rights under Article 44 of the constitution, it added.

Furthermore, the interim government should urgently create an adequately resourced witness and victim protection unit within the court administration.

At a minimum, such a unit should be able to protect witnesses, victims, and their family members before, during and after court appearances, particularly for individuals who testify against serving security forces personnel.

Such a unit should also have the expertise to determine when in-country or, in extreme cases, out-of-country relocation is appropriate and to make suitable arrangements.

Witnesses should know what rights they have and the protections that are available to them, both inside and outside the courtroom.

Any prosecution should be rooted in fair trial standards, the HRW said.

These include the presumption of innocence, the right to equal access to justice and the right to trial before an independent, impartial and competent court.

They also include the right to present witnesses in one's own defence, the right of defendants to see and be able to challenge the evidence and witnesses used against them and the right to humane detention conditions.

Among the amendments issued by the interim government is a proposal to ban a political organisation found to have committed, aided, or abetted crimes against humanity.

While the role of political parties in grave abuses in Bangladesh should be addressed, a broad ban on an entire political party undermines other human rights obligations, including the right to free association, and sets a dangerous precedent that could allow the court to be politically weaponised, the HRW said.

This section should be amended to apply to individuals convicted of grave human rights abuses, instead of the political party with which they may be affiliated, unless the party itself is held responsible in law for such crimes after a fair hearing.

The authority to ban a party should be limited to courts, not ministers or other members of the executive branch.

"Sheikh Hasina and others with command responsibility should be investigated, tried, and, if found responsible, held accountable for the widespread abuses committed during the protests in July and August. Ensuring fair trials will only strengthen the accountability process and is the only way to deliver genuine justice to victims and their families," Bleckner said.

(source: thedailystar.net)

IRAN----executions

Execution of 6 people in Karaj and Gorgan prisons.

According to the Iranian Human Rights Society, at dawn on Wednesday October 23, 2024, 6 prisoners were executed in Ghezel Hesar and Gorgan prisons.

With the execution of 4 prisoners earlier today in Karaj Central Prison, the number of executed prisoners on October 23, 2024, has reached at least 10.

According to the Iranian Human Rights Society, at dawn on Wednesday October 23, 2024, 6 prisoners executed in Ghezel Hesar and Gorgan prisons.

5 of the executed prisoners in Ghezel Hesar prison are: Salam Babakhan Jafari, Mohammad Koushki, Arman Naserzadeh, and 2 Afghan nationals whose identities remain unknown.

Salam Babakhan Jafari and Mohammad Koushki had been previously arrested and sentenced to death on drug-related charges. Arman Naserzadeh had been arrested 10 years ago and finally executed. The 2 Afghan nationals, whose identities are not known, were executed.

Execution of 1 prisoner in Gorgan prison

At dawn on Wednesday, October 23, 2024, a prisoner named Armin Aghchali executed in Gorgan Central Prison. He arrested in 2020 on drug-related charges and sentenced to death.

Execution of 10 prisoners on October 23, 2024, Including the 4 prisoners executed earlier today in Karaj Central Prison, the number of prisoners executed on October 23, 2024, has reached at least 10.

Execution of 4 prisoners in Karaj Central Prison

At dawn on Wednesday October 23, 2024, 4 prisoners executed in Karaj Central Prison. These individuals accused of “corruption on earth” due to producing and distributing alcohol. The Judiciary-affiliated Mizan news agency has not revealed the identities of these 4 prisoners.

Execution of 2 prisoners in Qorveh and Shiraz prisons

2 prisoners executed in Qorveh and Shiraz prisons. 1 prisoner named Salman Aghaei executed in Shiraz Prison. He had been arrested 3 years ago on drug-related charges and sentenced to death. Salman Aghaei, 33 years old, was a father of 1 child and a school caretaker before his arrest.

Execution of one prisoner in Qorveh prison

A prisoner named Mehdi Cheraghi executed in Qorveh Prison. He arrested 7 years ago and sentenced to death. Mehdi Cheraghi was 34 years old at the time of execution.

Execution of 3 prisoners in Qom

3 prisoners executed in Qom Prison. At dawn on Saturday, September 7, 2024, a prisoner named Milad Badinloo executed. He arrested and sentenced to death.

At dawn on Thursday, October 10, 2024, 2 more prisoners executed in Qom Prison. 1 of the prisoners identified as Shahin Dehghani, while the 2nd was an Afghan national whose identity remains unknown.

Execution of 5 prisoners in Isfahan, Malayer, and Jiroft prisons

5 prisoners executed in Isfahan, Malayer, and Jiroft prisons. At dawn on Monday, October 21, 2024, 2 prisoners executed in Jiroft Prison. 1 of the executed prisoners Hamid Chatarsimabeh (Sabaki), who arrested on charges of killing a police agent. He and Mahmoud Bamri arrested in 2018 on charges of murdering a police agent and sentenced to death.

Although the family of one of these prisoners had obtained the consent of the victim’s family by paying diya (blood money), judicial authorities still proceeded with their execution. Hamid Bamri already executed on Thursday, October 17, 2024.

Hamid Chatarsimabeh (Sabaki), 40 years old, was the son of Abbas, married with 3 children, and a resident of Goldasht, a village in Jazmourian.

The other executed prisoner named Mohammad Farhadzadeh, who had been and sentenced to death.

Execution of 2 prisoners in Isfahan Prison

At dawn on Thursday, October 17, 2024, 2 prisoners executed in Dastgerd Prison, Isfahan. The names of these prisoners are Mohammadreza Mahjoor and Mohammad Ashoori.

Mohammad Ashoori arrested 6 years ago on murder charges and sentenced to death. Mohammad Ashoori was 32 years old and from Maranjan village in Noorabad Mamasani.

The executions of these prisoners not reported in domestic media or judiciary-affiliated websites.

Execution of 1 prisoner in Malayer Prison

At dawn on Sunday, October 20, a prisoner named Mohammad Saberi executed in Malayer Prison. He arrested 2 years ago on drug-related charges and sentenced to death.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Violation of the death penalty in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as an important international document, guarantees the fundamental rights of all human beings, regardless of race, color, gender, language, religion, political opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or any other status.

Article 3 of this declaration clearly states: “Everyone has the right to life.” This right cannot be deprived except by the judgment of a competent court for committing a crime recognized by law.

The death penalty, as the highest form of punishment, directly contradicts this article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because:

Right to Life: The right to life is considered a fundamental and inalienable right. The death penalty takes away this right.

Irreversibility: Once the death penalty carried out, it is impossible to rectify judicial errors.

Torture and Inhumane Treatment: Some methods of carrying out the death penalty considered torture and inhumane treatment, which is itself a violation of the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

(source: en.iranhrs.org)

Prisoner executed for murder-related charges in Qorveh

Mehdi Cheraghi, a prisoner from Qorveh in Kurdistan Province, was executed for murder-related charges in Qorveh Prison on 22 October.

Cheraghi, who had been on death row for around 7 years, was transferred to solitary confinement on 21 October ahead of his execution.

He was initially arrested on charges of “premeditated murder” and sentenced to death after his trial.

In recent weeks, the authorities transferred Cheraghi from Sanandaj Central Prison to Qorveh Prison in preparation for his execution.

(source: kurdistanhumanrights.org)

*************

Khamenei’s Desperation: Escalating Executions Amid Overthrow Crisis – 9 Prisoners Executed on October 23, 2024

The Iranian regime, the godfather of executions, terrorism, and warmongering, must be expelled from the international community and its leaders brought to justice.

Facing an overthrow crisis and in fear of public outrage, Khamenei has brutally and frantically intensified prisoner executions.

Today, Wednesday, October 23, 2024, Khamenei’s executioners put to death 4 prisoners in Karaj Central Prison and 4 prisoners, including 25-year-old Mohammad Koushki, 65-year-old Babakhan Jafari, and 33-year-old Arman Naserzadeh in Qezelhessar Prison of Karaj, along with 1 prisoner named Armin Aghcheli in Gorgan. On Tuesday, October 22, Mehdi Cheraghi, 34, was hanged in Ghorveh Prison, and Salman Aghaei was hanged in Shiraz.

The number of executed prisoners in the Iranian month of Mehr 1403 (September 22 to October 21, 2024) has reached 150, which is 85% higher than last Mehr’s executions (81 executions in Mehr 1402) – the final year of the ’88 executioner Raisi’s presidency – and represents the highest figure in recent years. The names of 147 execution victims were previously announced. Hassan Khodabandehloo and another prisoner were executed in Qom on October 16. Thus, Khamenei continues to break his records of cruelty and crime!

Negotiation and appeasement toward the godfather of execution, terrorism, and warmongering only encourage the regime to trample human rights values further and endanger global peace. These very elements form the founding philosophy of the United Nations. The clerical regime must be expelled from the international community, and its leaders must face justice for four decades of crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. This is the demand of the Iranian people and a requirement for peace and stability in the region and the world.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)

(soruce: ncr-iran.org)

*************

2 Prisoners Executed in Zanjan Prison

At dawn yesterday, October 23, the death sentences of 2 prisoners, previously convicted of murder in separate cases, were carried out in Zanjan Prison.

Their identities have been reported as “Mohammadreza Hajikhani, 27, and Mehran Soltani, 30, both from Zanjan.”

According to the report, Mr. Hajikhani was arrested 3 years ago, and Mr. Soltani 5 years ago, on murder charges. They were later sentenced to death by the judiciary.

At the time of this report, the executions of these 2 prisoners have not been officially announced by prison authorities or relevant institutions.

According to HRANA’s latest annual report, between October 10, 2023, and October 8, 2024, at least 811 individuals were executed in Iran, marking a 23.06% increase compared to the same period last year. 4 of these executions were carried out publicly, with many of the accused reportedly being denied fair trials.

(source: en-hrana.org)

**********

Women Are Leading the Resistance Against Executions in Iran----Their prominence in the ongoing struggle for human rights has been met with fierce crackdowns by the state.

Amid Iran’s heightened, unconscionable mass scale of executions and a growing abolitionist campaign of resistance led from within the country’s prisons, Iran’s Supreme Court overturned the death sentence for Sharifieh Mohammadi, a feminist labor activist. Mohammadi was alleged to have ties to labor organizations that were accused of baghy, or seeking armed rebellion against the state. Despite the fact that the suspected organizations had denied her membership, undermining the charge of baghy, this summer she was sentenced to death. On October 13, her defense lawyer confirmed that her death sentence had been overturned and that she is up for a retrial.

Thousands of people, including many human rights activists and drug offenders, have been executed in Iran since 1979. As of October 18, Iran has killed 570 people on death row in 2024, and the number continues to rise. On October 6, Iran executed Akhtar Ghorbanlu, a child bride. Mohammadreza Azizi, who was 17 at the time of his alleged offense, is scheduled for execution in October. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has demanded a moratorium on the death penalty in Iran.

Iran’s executions not only constitute outrageous human rights violations but also function as a form of collective punishment, systematically targeting generations of Iranians who have transgressed authoritarianism by fighting for social change. The repression is so lethal that it is now common knowledge among diverse marginalized communities within Iran, as well as abolitionists around the world, that Iran weaponizes the death penalty to suppress speech. This growing awareness presents an opening for the international community to demand that Iran abolish the death penalty, and that countries throughout the world cease all forms of dehumanization, whether manifested in the United States’ own grim record of executions or the US foreign policy of aiding the genocide of Palestinians.

Within Iran, these frightful conditions are galvanizing activists who consider themselves part of the global feminist movement to end repression. Fifteen years ago, the One Million Signatures campaign pressured Iranian legislators to repeal laws that violated the human rights of women. More recently, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement sparked the largest mass protests in the country in recent years following the police killing of Jina Mahsa Amini, whose death while in custody for “improper clothing” underscored the continued systemic violations of women’s human rights in Iran.

The prominence of Iranian women and girls in the ongoing struggle for human rights has been met with fierce crackdowns by the state, which routinely threatens and targets women’s human rights defenders with arrest, torture, sham trials, incarceration, and death sentences.

This should not come as a surprise. Iran is notorious for its gender segregation and its persecution of ethnic and sexual minorities and political dissidents. The egregiousness of its two-tiered legal system is made clear by its explicit gender-based discrimination—and the method by which this government criminalizes dissent as rebellion or “corruption on earth,” crimes that are punishable by death. In this context, the struggle for girls’ and women’s human rights in Iran, led by Iranian women, is inseparable from the global movement to abolish the death penalty.

The current “No to Executions” campaign, led by political prisoners, exemplifies this connection perfectly. Last month, Reza Rasaei, a Kurdish activist, became the 10th person judicially executed in connection with the Women, Life, Freedom movement; the official pretense for his killing was a murder charge based on false confessions obtained by torture.

In response, women in Evin Prison—one of Iran’s most notorious prisons, where 70 political prisoners are currently held—gathered in the prison courtyard to demand an end to weaponizing capital charges against other human rights activists who have been subjected to torture, including Nasim Gholami Simiari, Pakshan Azizi, and Vrisheh Moradi.

Like Rasaei, these incarcerated women have been wrongly subjected to the risk of the death penalty. Simiari, for example, was accused of the capital offense of rebellion for participating in the Women, Life, Freedom protests. Azizi, a journalist, social worker, and activist, has been subjected to such severe torture that she can no longer walk. Moradi, who has been held in solitary confinement, publicly humiliated, and denied counsel, announced in an open letter that she would not attend her second court hearing in October to protest the death sentences, and she has since begun a hunger strike.

Recently, prison guards violently attacked these women and their fellow political prisoners for speaking out against executions, and subsequently denied them access to medical care and visitation rights.

The charges levied against these human rights defenders are a farce, obscuring the obvious truth—which is that Iran wields its judicial power to kill those who dare to raise their voices against their oppression.

Despite the extreme violence and deprivation that characterize their confinement, these advocates continue to protest against systemic human rights violations. Vida Rabbani, human rights defender and a member of the Tehran Journalists Association, notes the strange dichotomy that Iranian women face: “In exceptional conditions that constantly transform into norms and rules, in the confrontation of bodies, when facing an authoritative officer, we are reduced to mere life, to nothing. Our rights are easily suspended, we become targets of violence, and again, this rightless body is crammed back into the shell of a citizen because court appearances are reserved for citizens.”

As a report on the situation in Evin states, “The pressures exerted by the government and the issuance of harsh sentences by the Islamic Republic and the judiciary are merely retaliation against the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and its ideals, aimed at intimidating women activists and preventing the continuation of their just struggle.” Criminalization and state-sanctioned killing of those who speak out against oppression is not unique to Iran. And there is enormous value in international solidarity that embraces, without double standards, the interconnectedness of our struggles for freedom and human rights, whether through intersectional feminist alliances, an anti-genocide framework, or an abolitionist lens. Indeed, dozens of human rights groups have come together to call for a moratorium on Iran’s death penalty and an independent investigation into state violence against women political prisoners.

Evin Prison is one of 17 in Iran that are participating in the “No Death Penalty Tuesdays” campaign, which began as a hunger strike among political prisoners in Ghezel Hesar Prison and has grown into a global campaign. Meanwhile, Zanaan, the collective of 22 independent Iranian women’s rights organizations, has issued a joint message of abolitionist solidarity. And alongside dozens of human rights organizations, we at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide have signed this urgent statement.

(source: Bahar Mirhosseni is a criminal defense/human rights lawyer, a former public defender, and co-instructor of the UCLA Law School Bail Practicum. She is a member of the Bring Eyvin Hernandez Home coalition----thenation.com)

****************

Protest by Families of Death Row Inmates in the 39th Week of the “No to Executions Tuesdays” Campaign

On Tuesday, October 22, 2024, families of death row inmates gathered in front of the mullahs’ Parliament in Tehran to protest during the 39th week of the “No to Executions Tuesdays” campaign. Chanting “Stop the executions,” they voiced their opposition to the death sentences and the imminent execution of their children.

It is noteworthy that similar protests were held in Tehran and Karaj in October and November 2023, but security forces violently suppressed them.

This protest marks another step in expanding the “No to Executions” campaign beyond the prison walls.

On October 22, 2024, the 39th week of the “No to Executions Tuesdays” continued in 23 prisons nationwide. Inmates in Ahvaz‘s Sheiban Prison issued a statement announcing their participation in the campaign.

The statement of the 39th Week of the campaign highlighted the alarming rise in executions, with more than 140 individuals, including 5 women, hanged from September 22 until October 21.

The campaign condemned these systematic executions and called on political activists, civil and human rights organizations, and conscientious people worldwide to stand against this oppression.

This week, members of the campaign went on hunger strike in 23 prisons, including the women’s wards of Evin and Lakan prisons, as well as female political prisoners in the Central Prison of Tabriz and other jails.

(source: wncri.org)

OCTOBER 23, 2024:

TEXAS:

John Grisham, Jim McCloskey put a spotlight on wrongful convictions amid controversial Texas case

The case of Robert Roberson is putting a new spotlight on the death penalty.

Roberson was convicted of killing his daughter in 2002, based on a disputed diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome. He maintains his innocence. Roberson, who was set to be executed last week until the Texas Supreme Court temporarily halted it, would have been the first person put to death for a shaken baby syndrome conviction.

New York Times bestselling author John Grisham testified about the case on Monday in Texas. Now, he's calling for an end to the death penalty in the U.S.

"He (Roberson) was convicted of shaking her to death in Texas using some outdated, old science that was used and popular 20 to 30 years ago," Grisham said of Roberson's case.

Grisham, along with Jim McCloskey, who founded a nonprofit organization called Centurion Ministries to help free innocent people, recently released a book called "Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions." The book focuses on 23 defendants caught in a web for something they say they didn't do.

One of the cases featured in the book is that of Clarence Brandley. He was a janitor supervisor at Conroe High School, which is about 50 miles north of Houston, McCloskey said.

In 1980, Brandley, a Black man, discovered the body of a White 16-year-old girl who was visiting as part of a volleyball team in the loft above the school's auditorium. She had been raped and strangled.

"Don't ask me why, but the police said because he found the body, and the fact that he's African American … he's the only suspect," McCloskey said.

A Texas ranger was called in to consult on the case 3 days after the crime occurred, McCloskey said. Soon after, McCloskey said, Brandley was arrested for capital murder. He was sentenced to death, but his conviction was later overturned after spending nearly 10 years in prison. In 2018, Brandley died of pneumonia.

"There have been 3,600 exonerations in the U.S. since 1989. In my understanding, there has not been one public inquiry about any single conviction," McCloskey said.

His organization, Centurion Ministries, is responsible for 70 exonerations.

Grisham blames wrongful convictions on law enforcement having tunnel vision.

"They're under enormous pressure to solve the crime, to clear the case, to get the conviction, and that bleeds over to the prosecution … Once they zero in on a suspect, they ignore all contrary evidence," he said.

(source: CBS News)

***********

What’s next in the complex case of Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson

A week ago, Robert Roberson was running out of time.

On Wednesday, however, the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a an extraordinary subpoena seeking Roberson’s testimony, a maneuver that ultimately caused the execution to be halted.

With his execution looming last Thursday, the 57-year-old Texas death row inmate watched as his attorneys’ legal arguments were rejected in the courts and his pleas for clemency disregarded, as the state parole board declined to recommend he receive a lesser sentence or a reprieve.

That subpoena also prompted a court battle that will unfold in coming weeks. Committee members have expressed hope the subpoena will be honored, but Roberson did not appear at Monday’s hearing. The Texas Attorney General’s Office has tried to limit the inmate to testifying virtually, a non-starter for the committee and Roberson’s attorneys, who want him to appear in person – even if it means lawmakers travel to Roberson to hear his testimony.

The case remains fluid, and if the last week has been any indicator, it could continue to evolve dramatically. Here’s what could happen next:

The execution

Roberson was sentenced to death for the 2002 murder of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, based on a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

But he says he is innocent. Roberson’s attorneys and advocates say the diagnosis is discredited – and in Roberson’s case, they say, there are a myriad of other possible explanations for Nikki’s death.

Child abuse pediatricians fiercely defend the validity of shaken baby syndrome, which today is considered a subset of abusive head trauma.

Texas lawmakers hear testimony supporting death row inmate Robert Roberson – but despite subpoena, he does not appear

The most important consequence of the committee’s subpoena is that it has, for now, effectively reset the clock on his execution.

The ensuing court battle over the subpoena culminated with a temporary injunction late last Wednesday by the state Supreme Court, preventing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice from putting Roberson to death.<

By midnight Thursday, Roberson’s death warrant dictating the date of the execution had expired, and a spokesperson for the department confirmed a judge would need to order a new date. Texas law requires a judge set an execution date at least 90 days in advance, meaning the earliest Roberson could again face execution would be early next year.

The state has appeared to acknowledge this in court records. The office of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, in a letter submitted to the state Supreme Court, said the committee’s subpoena “had the effect, both legally and factually, of granting (at least) a 90-day reprieve.”

The court battle

In the meantime, the bipartisan legislative committee remains locked in litigation with the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton, which is representing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Both are part of the executive branch under Abbott.

The criminal jurisprudence committee did not intend to “create a constitutional crisis” by issuing its subpoena, Rep. Joe Moody, the committee chair, said Monday. But the attorney general contends the committee has put the state on “the brink” of one while arguing for the Texas Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling halting the execution – and to throw out the committee’s initial petition to stop the execution so Roberson could testify.

The temporary stay aside, the committee’s initial petition and the attorney general’s request to revisit it both remain under consideration, the Texas Supreme Court said in an order Sunday.

That order also laid out a several deadlines for the parties to file briefs before the court, beginning next Monday, October 28, and ending November 8.

The committee asked the Texas Supreme Court to halt the execution after the attorney general’s office sought to overturn a temporary restraining order granted by a lower court. In its initial petition, the committee argued Roberson’s testimony was key to its examination of a state law, Article 11.073 – more commonly referred to as the state’s “junk science” law.

The statute was intended to provide a path for post-conviction appeals when new, relevant science emerges that was unavailable at the time of a defendant’s trial. Roberson’s supporters feel he should benefit from this law, pointing to a widening dispute over the legitimacy of shaken baby syndrome.

The courts, however, have so far rejected claims stemming from Article 11.073 – a fact that has become a focus for the legislative committee. Its members have said they are considering whether his case illustrates a need for changes to the law. No capital defendant has ever benefited from it, the committee said Monday.

The attorney general’s office opposed the committee’s request and has argued the Texas Supreme Court – which has ultimate authority over civil matters in the state – did not have jurisdiction to intervene in matters related to Roberson’s case because it stems from a crime.

His testimony

More immediately, the committee has signaled it will continue to seek Roberson’s testimony, and that it will insist on hearing it in person – even if the lawmakers are forced to travel to Livingston, Texas, where Roberson resides on death row.

Over the weekend, the attorney general informed the committee the state criminal justice department would make the inmate available to testify over Zoom. But Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sween, objected, noting her client has autism, another factor she and others believe contributed to his wrongful conviction.

Her client has “overwhelming challenges” communicating and interpreting social cues, Sween said Monday. Roberson appearing in person would allow lawmakers to see the “palpable impairments” that might have influenced his trial.

Additionally, communicating via Zoom would be daunting for the inmate, who had never used the software before a court hearing last week. When Sween asked him about the experience, she said he told her, “I saw a bunch of heads, but I couldn’t hear much.”

In his concluding remarks at Monday’s hearing, Chair Moody said the committee was working through the logistics of Roberson’s testimony, “perhaps by the committee going to Robert instead of him coming to us, which is something we’re fleshing out right now.”

“Our expectation is still that we are going to hear from Robert,” Moody said, “and that’s going to be the next step for this committee.”

(source: CNN)

**********

Say their names: Texas death row families speak out

“Beto is my only child,” said Lydia Garza from McAllen in far south Texas. She was 1 of 12 family members of people on death row speaking, and the pain in her voice was palpable. Her son, Humberto Garza, was sent to death row under Texas’ Law Of Parties. This repressive law convicts people who have not killed anyone.

Every fall since 2000, Texas abolitionists, death row families and their allies have gathered to march, rally and demonstrate their opposition to state-sanctioned murder.

On the 25th anniversary this year, the often-overlooked impact of capital punishment on families was highlighted, and they were the only speakers at this year’s rally organized by a coalition of groups on Oct. 19.

Before the rally a spirited march took everyone to a nearby overpass of a busy freeway where a banner drop was held. Traffic honked approval, and three large banners and dozens of signs were well-received.

Speaking and chanting on bull horns as they went through the historic Third Ward African American neighborhood, words echoed off the homes and buildings with chants like “Death penalty? Shut it down!” and “Texas says death row! We say hell no!”

The rally at Our Park, adjacent to the S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, was led off by the mother of Erica Sheppard, who was sent to death row in 1993 at age 19, and said she was angry and tired.

< Madelyn Johnson has raised Sheppard’s 3 children and numerous grandchildren and said, “I am ready for Erica to come home.” Johnson talked about the expense, both financial and emotional, of visiting her daughter.

She drives over 3 hours to visit her daughter, paying for overpriced food and drinks from the vending machines. She regularly puts in money in her daughter’s commissary account for essentials like toothpaste, deodorant and extra food, plus she buys minutes so Erica can regularly call home.

‘One injustice after another’

A poem for death row victims, written by the activist Catholic nun Sister Helen Prejean, was read by Delia Perez-Meyer before she spoke about her brother Louis Perez. He died on death row last May after he had a heart attack and was left on the concrete floor of his cell for 2 days before he received any treatment. The Innocence Project had investigated his case and was about to announce his innocence when he died.

Yancy Balderas’s husband Juan Balderas was wrongfully convicted by a district attorney who lied and “lost” whole cases of files that would have proven his innocence. Tears fell as she described how Juan spent almost 9 years in solitary confinement at the county jail before he was even taken to trial.

Yancy stated, “It’s been one injustice after another, and we were not prepared for that. I will be forever grateful to activists, because they took us under their wings, and we learned how to fight for his life.”

Yancy Balderas’ mother brought her famous home-made Salvadoran chicken sandwiches and gave them to everyone participating at the rally.

Juan Balderas’ mother also spoke through tears. Speaking in Spanish, Vicky Reyes told of the pain her family has endured for so many years and thanked everyone fighting for her son and to end the death penalty.

Terri Been’s large family and their friends arrived with banners and signs proclaiming Jeff Wood’s innocence. Her brother Jeff was also convicted under the Law Of Parties. Years ago Wood’s young nieces and nephews formed Kids Against the Death Penalty and have creatively fought for Wood for decades.

Now that they are adults, they are still dedicated activists. They marched with their snare drum and loud bull horns.

Brandley case highlighted in new book

One of the most well-known cases of Texas’ injustice is that of the late Clarence Brandley, the victim of a racist frame-up who served 10 years on death row before his family, attorneys and activists finally freed him in 1990. Brandley then became an activist himself, working with local activists and organizations as well as Witness To Innocence. In 1995 he went to Philadelphia to help stop the execution of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

His brother, the Rev. Ozell Brandley, spoke emotionally about the injustice of his brother’s case. He held up a newly released book written by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey called “Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.” One of the 10 stories in the book is about his brother Clarence. The book looks closely at what leads to wrongful convictions and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony and corruption in the court system that can make these unjust convictions so hard to reverse.

The final speaker of the day was too shy to talk so a friend read his statement about his mother, Pam Perillo Tise. Joseph Tise was just a baby when his mom was sentenced to die, and a woman offered to raise him.

He took her last name when she legally adopted him. Pam spent 20 years on death row and after she got a commutation did another 20 years before she was finally paroled. During those 40 years she kept in touch with her son, and he wrote and visited thanks to the woman who adopted him.

His moving words explained that he would rather have had his mother raise him, but he loved her all the same, and today he said, “She can hold me and visit me and love me and my own children.”

At the end of the day, families and supporters left inspired, supported and ready to continue the fight. Now it is for justice for Robert Roberson who just received a 30-day stay of execution.

Texas has legally lynched 591 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Now Texas already has 3 executions and counting set for 2025, and everyone claimed they were up for the fight!

(source: Gloria Rubac; The writer is a founding member of the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement----Workers World)

SOUTH CAROLINA:

SC governor can decide whether to grant death row inmate clemency, judge decides----Attorneys plan to appeal decision ahead of Richard Moore’s Nov. 1 execution date

Gov. Henry McMaster can decide whether to grant clemency in the state’s upcoming execution, a federal judge decided.

Ahead of Richard Moore’s execution, scheduled for Nov. 1, his attorneys argued that McMaster could not make a fair decision on whether to commute Moore’s sentence to life in prison — a last resort for condemned prisoners who have exhausted all their appeals.

Moore’s attorneys plan to appeal federal Judge Mary Geiger Lewis’ ruling, Lindsey Vann, director of nonprofit legal group Justice360, told the Daily Gazette on Tuesday.

Attorneys are also waiting on a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court as to whether Moore’s sentence was legal. In a court response filed Tuesday, the S.C. Attorney General’s Office argued it was.

After Moore was convicted of killing gas station clerk James Mahoney in 2001, McMaster successfully fought Moore’s appeals as the state’s twice-elected attorney general. He was the state’s chief prosecutor from January 2003 to 2011.

Ahead of Moore’s scheduled execution in 2022, which was halted amid a now-concluded lawsuit, McMaster said he would not grant him clemency, suggesting he had already made up his mind, Moore’s attorneys argued.

The attorneys instead asked Lewis to hand the clemency decision over to the state’s parole board. While the parole board handles sentencing challenges on most cases, state law says only the governor can commute a death sentence to life in prison.

But McMaster has no legal obligation to issue an unbiased decision, Lewis wrote in a Monday order.

A governor’s previous service as attorney general does not preclude them from granting clemency, Lewis wrote.

She pointed to a 2001 case in which the North Carolina Supreme Court also decided that the governor at the time could decide on clemency despite a previous job as the state’s lead attorney.

“The Court thus concludes Governor McMaster’s prior service as attorney general fails to affect the constitutionality of the state’s clemency procedures as applied to Moore,” Lewis wrote.

As to his comment that he had “no intention” of granting Moore clemency, he has had plenty of time to change his mind in the 2 years since, Lewis wrote.

Because Moore’s legal team had not yet filed a clemency petition when McMaster told reporters he had “no intention” of granting clemency, the governor was relying on his own knowledge of the case, she continued.

“It makes logical sense, then, Governor McMaster had ‘no intention to commute (Moore’s) sentence’ as of April 20, 2022,” Lewis wrote, quoting what he said to reporters at the time.

Even if the law did require McMaster to make an impartial decision in the matter, Lewis wrote that she was confident he “will give full, thoughtful, and careful consideration to any clemency petition filed by Moore, giving both comprehensive and individualized attention to the unique circumstances of his case,” the order reads.

McMaster said he would do as much in a signed statement submitted to the court Thursday.

“In such matters, it is and has been my intention and commitment to take care to understand the issues presented, including those from my review and consideration of applications, petitions, and requests for clemency presented to me by or on behalf of a condemned inmate in advance of an execution date,” McMaster’s statement read.

Pending U.S. Supreme Court decision

Moore’s attorneys are awaiting a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court as to whether it was constitutional for prosecutors to remove the only two qualified Black candidates from the jury pool during his 2001 trail. The jury that convicted and sentenced Moore, who is Black, was composed of 11 white people and one Hispanic man, the filing reads.

The solicitor’s office did not remove white jurors with similar backgrounds, and Moore’s original attorneys did not fight the move hard enough during the trial, his current attorneys argued in their petition appealing a decision by the state Supreme Court.

In response, Attorney General Alan Wilson’s office said the state’s high court should have the final say on the question. Beyond that, prosecutors removed the two Black jury candidates for legitimate reasons that had nothing to do with their race, according to state prosecutors.

“There is no pretext; there is no discrimination; and there is no cause for yet another review of the same information that has been a matter of record for years,” the filing reads.

Moore’s attorneys also argued that his sentence was too extreme because he did not enter the gas station armed. That does not rise to the level of the “worst of the worst” crimes for which the death penalty is usually reserved, they wrote in the petition.

The Attorney General’s Office pointed to the fact that every appeals court that has heard Moore’s case, including the state Supreme Court, has upheld his sentence.

“In other words, every court to delve deeply into the evidence has disagreed with Moore’s claim, that he again repeats to this Court, that his is not truly a capital case,” the Tuesday filing reads.

Moore decided Friday he would die by lethal injection.

He is the 2nd of 6 inmates to be scheduled for execution after the state’s high court decided firing squad and electrocution were both constitutional methods of death.

(source: South Carolina Daily Gazette)

**************

Federal Court Dismisses Claims of Bias and Rules South Carolina Governor Has Sole Authority in Richard Moore’s Clemency Case

On October 21, 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Mary Geiger Lewis ruled that South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster has the sole power to grant clemency to Richard Moore. In response to allegations of bias presented by Mr. Moore’s counsel, Judge Lewis said that “[t]he Court is confident… Governor McMaster will give full, thoughtful, and careful consideration to any clemency petition filed by Moore, giving both comprehensive and individualized attention to the unique circumstances of his case.” This decision comes ahead of Mr. Moore’s scheduled November 1, 2024. State law now forces prisoners to choose their method of execution or be executed with the default method of electrocution; Mr. Moore selected lethal injection as his execution method.

Mr. Moore’s lawyers had asked the court to stay his execution and designate clemency power to the state parole board, which is responsible for granting clemency in non-capital cases, or another neutral party, such as the lieutenant governor. Mr. Moore’s petition alleged that Gov. McMaster could not reasonably act as a neutral party in this case given his previous role as attorney general, as well as statements made in 2022 indicating he had “no intention” of granting clemency to Mr. Moore ahead of a possible execution date. “For Moore to receive clemency, McMaster would have to renounce years of his own work and that of his former colleagues in the Office of the Attorney General,” Mr. Moore’s petition said. 

Judge Lewis found that Gov. McMaster’s previous position as attorney general did not preclude him from making a clemency decision in this case, nor did his earlier statement. “Governor McMaster’s statement was made nearly 2 1/2 years ago. At the time, Moore had yet to file a petition proposing any grace-oriented grounds for clemency, and the only basis upon which Governor McMaster could evaluate Moore’s sentence was through his knowledge of Moore’s exhaustive legal proceedings, which had thus far been unfavorable to Moore and served only to reaffirm his sentence,” Judge Lewis wrote.

Mr. Moore, a Black man, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1999 killing of a store clerk. He had entered the store unarmed, intending to rob it. After being threatened by the clerk who had weapons, Mr. Moore defended himself, resulting in the death of the clerk James Mahoney. Lawyers for Mr. Moore highlight that he is the only South Carolina death row prisoner to have been sentenced by a jury with no Black jurors, and if executed, he would be the 1st put to death in the state’s modern death penalty era who was unarmed initially and subsequently defended himself when threatened.

Earlier this year, South Carolina resumed executions after 13 years, a pause the state attributes to its difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs. On September 20, 2024, the state executed Freddie “Khalil” Owens, despite a codefendant’s last-minute admission that he was not present at the crime scene. Gov. McMaster did not grant Mr. Owens clemency, nor has any South Carolina governor done so during the modern death penalty era. If executed, Mr. Moore would be the 2nd person executed by the state this year. The state’s next tentatively scheduled execution is that of Marion Bowman on November 29, 2024. 3 other death row prisoners who have exhausted their appeals are expected to receive execution dates 5-weeks apart.

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)

GEORGIA:

Cobb County family wants to see man on death row for decades pay for murdering 8-year-old

The family of a Cobb County 8-year-old is speaking out for the first time almost 50 years after their loved one was killed in May 1976.

Virgil Delano Presnell, Jr. is on death row for attacking 2 little girls as they walked home.

Prosecutors say Presnell murdered 8-year-old Lori Smith and raped her 10-year-old friend.

"He was convicted in 1976 and got the death penalty," Lisa Hare explained. "We did another trial in 1999, and he was issued the death penalty again. There has never been any doubt about his guilt."

However, Smith's family says legal delays and death penalty attorneys have left family and friends waiting for justice for decades.

"It's something that we will never be able to get rid of and, you know, even at the age of 12, I thought I would be able to see him executed and that is my goal in life is to actually watch the execution. I do not want to see him die in jail of old age," Hare affirmed.

In 2022, attorneys for Presnell argued that scheduling the execution violated an agreement that put some executions on hold during the pandemic, which helped them temporarily move the case to Fulton County.

"The soonest it will probably go back to Cobb County is at least a year, possibly a year and a half, and then it goes back to Cobb County," Hare said in frustration. "That's when we start all over again and until it gets out of Fulton County, there's nothing we can do."

The almost 50-year-old case has consumed the family. Some relatives even showed up for Presnell's execution in Jackson back in 2022. But, it never happened.

Sarah Hare didn't have the opportunity to meet her aunt.

"I am almost 30, and this has been a case that's loomed over my life the whole time," Sarah said. "It's devastating to walk away without any progress. It feels like we've made no steps forward."

Lisa says her younger sister was the kind of person who'd never met a stranger. She says Lori was full of life and was a very brave little girl.

The family believes if they are lucky, the execution might happen in 2026.

(source: fox5atlanta.com)

COLORADO:

‘No person is beyond redemption’: One politician’s journey to end the death penalty in Colorado

“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved).” Eph 2:4-5

Faith has been the foundation upon which I have built my entire life. My parents raised my 2 brothers and me in a Catholic home, which meant that certain values, like a spirit of service and compassion for our neighbors, were instilled in us from a young age.

I grew up serving as an altar boy during various Masses at St. Leander Church in Pueblo and spent summers volunteering at church festivals and bingo. Later in life, when I learned to play the piano, I felt called to share that gift by joining church choirs to play prayerful and beautiful liturgical music–a practice I still maintain to this day. When I started my own family, I knew I wanted to pass the same values and traditions on to my own boys, Jeremiah and Xan. As a father, it has always been important to me that I foster within them their own sense of faith, love of God and commitment to living with integrity, compassion and justice. I did not want these to be simply abstract principles but rather living testaments in their own lives.

My Catholic faith taught me the importance of service to others, which led me to join the United States Marine Corps. I was deployed to Iraq in 2003, where I served as a mortuary affairs specialist. After completing my military service, I became a paramedic. In both of these roles, I witnessed the fragility and resilience of life. As a paramedic responding to calls, my job was to offer medical assistance, as well as compassion, dignity, respect, hope and comfort to my patients in their moments of need. When witnessing these incredibly difficult situations, I leaned heavily on God and his divine plan for every individual. I am certain that I would not have been able to fulfill the obligations of either of these jobs were it not for my deep faith.

I was blessed to have the opportunity to run for public office and served as a city councilor, a member of the Colorado House of Representatives, a State Senator and ultimately the Senate President of Colorado. During my tenure on Council and in the legislature, we faced several difficult political battles, but one of the most intense was the effort to repeal the death penalty. It was an emotionally charged and complicated topic for everyone involved, including me. My family history, particularly our own experiences with violence and loss, made the debate over the death penalty deeply personal.

In 1988, my cousin was working at a hotel in Pueblo when he was brutally murdered. In addition to the devastating loss of someone we loved, my family had to grapple with the fact that the murderer was a serial killer and my cousin’s killing had been random. As we reckoned with the death of our loved one, my family leaned heavily on God and prayer to guide us. The intense and, at times, overwhelming feelings of grief didn’t overshadow the teachings of our faith: that every life is worthy and forgiveness is possible. We knew that more violence would not lessen our loss and that healing our own wounds would require mercy and forgiveness.

I carried this loss, as well as my experiences in Iraq and as a paramedic, with me in elected office. When the debate around the death penalty began, I truly understood the pain and reasoning I heard from colleagues, advocates and community members who wanted to keep capital punishment in Colorado. They had seen tragedy firsthand, and I would never diminish their pain and lived experience. Often, I prayed for and with them.

The debate around the potential repeal of the death penalty illuminated some other factors that I had to consider as well: the people who remained on death row were all unequivocally guilty of truly heinous crimes. Prosecutors voiced concerns that abolishing the death penalty could harm their ability to extract confessions and secure convictions. Coloradans were divided nearly equally on either side of the issue. The consequences of this deeply personal and politically fraught debate could not have been more serious.

While I have the utmost respect for those who advocated for the death penalty and sometimes found myself resonating with their perspective, I could not turn my back on my faith and all it had taught me. I knew I was bestowed with the divine responsibility to choose mercy over retribution and to take action that honors our belief that no person is beyond redemption. Voting to keep the death penalty in Colorado would have been incompatible with the most sacred tenets of my Catholic faith.

I decided the best way forward was to bring people together as gently and compassionately as possible. After countless difficult conversations, we moved people one by one until we had secured the votes we needed to finally abolish the death penalty in Colorado.

The journey to repeal the death penalty in Colorado was long and arduous. I had to confront my own fears and doubts, engage in difficult conversations and ultimately find the strength to stand firm in my convictions, even when they were politically unpopular. None of this would have been possible without my faith to anchor me. It reminded me that lawmakers’ work is about much more than just changing the law: it is about affirming the sacred value of every individual, no matter the severity of the circumstances.

Life is filled with moments that test your commitment to your faith. My Catholic upbringing never failed to give me the strength I needed to overcome even the most severe challenges. Ultimately, I know that truly living these values requires me to be courageous in protecting them. The effort to repeal the death penalty and the painfully complicated debate surrounding it was one of those tests.

Thanks to the tireless work and unwavering courage of countless people, Colorado’s death penalty was abolished in 2020.

There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty, and my personal reason happened to be my faith, which showed me that every person, even those who have committed heinous acts, has a life that is sacred. In this debate and so many others, I am immensely grateful to have been guided by a faith that commands me always to choose mercy and forgiveness over retribution.

(source: Guest Contributor; Leroy M. Garcia is a 6th generation southern Coloradan, currently working as a Chief of Staff for Rural Business Cooperative Services at the United States Department of Agriculture. Before President Biden appointed him to this position, Garcia was the Democratic State Senator for Colorado Senate District 3 (Pueblo County) and was elected in 2019 to serve as the 1st Latino Senate President in Colorado’s history----denvercathoic.org)

NEVADA:

Accused killer takes the stand in death penalty trial in Circus Circus killings

A 37-year-old man facing the death penalty in connection with a 2018 double homicide at Circus Circus took the stand in his own trial on Tuesday.

Julius Trotter is accused of killing and robbing Sang Nghia and Khuong Nguyen, two Vietnamese tour leaders who were staying at Circus Circus in June 2018. Prosecutors have alleged that Trotter broke into their hotel room during a “door push,” in which someone attempts to find hotel rooms with doors left open in order to steal belongings.

He is standing trial on 2 counts of murder with a deadly weapon, burglary with a deadly weapon and robbery with a deadly weapon.

Trotter maintained Tuesday that he did not kill the 2 tourists. Although he was later found with several items belonging to Nghia and Nguyen, Trotter testified that his friend gave him the stolen items.

“I told them the same exact story I’m telling you guys right now,” Trotter testified, recalling his interview with detectives after his arrest.

Nguyen worked for the tour company that Nghia operated with her husband. The 2 of them had arrived in the U.S. days earlier, as part of a tour group traveling from Ho Chi Minh City to Los Angeles, with a side trip to Las Vegas. They were both stabbed multiple times in the early hours of July 1, 2018, in a room that had a broken lock, prosecutors have said.

Trotter was staying in the nearby Circus Circus Manor with the mother of his child, Itaska Dean. He was captured on surveillance footage around 4 a.m. taking an elevator in the tower where Nguyen and Nghia were staying.

He was then seen on video returning to his room about 45 minutes later, with his shirt turned inside out, and he and Dean quickly checked out, Chief Deputy District Attorney Michelle Fleck argued during opening statements last week.

Trotter testified Tuesday that he was staying at Circus Circus for sports betting, and that he was going to the hotel tower that night to have sex with a sex worker.

He said that after having sex with the woman and turning his shirt inside out to obscure a stain, he met up with a friend at Circus Circus who would occasionally sell him stolen items to resell. Trotter testified that his friend gave him a backpack, purse and watch that police later determined belonged to the victims.

Trotter also said his friend gave him a pair of size 11½ sneakers that police found in his belongings after his arrest.

Prosecutors have argued that the shoes had Trotter’s DNA inside of them, along with Nguyen and Nghia’s blood on them. Fleck also argued during opening statements that the shoes matched the description of the sneakers Trotter was seen wearing in surveillance footage the morning of the killings.

Trotter testified that he had the size 11½ shoes because he resells sneakers, and that he has an identical pair of shoes in a size 13 that were not collected by police.

‘Just didn’t go like that’

Cross examination from prosecutors turned tense on Tuesday, as Trotter and Chief Deputy District Attorney Michelle Fleck spoke over each other. Fleck questioned why Trotter didn’t tell police about the size 13 shoes after his arrest.

“It’s not my job to do the police’s job,” Trotter said.

Outside the presence of the jury, defense attorney Lisa Rasmussen asked the judge if she could use a shoe measuring device to show the jury what Trotter’s shoe size is. District Judge Michele Leavitt denied the request, but allowed Trotter to testify to the jury that his shoe size is 13.

Fleck also questioned why Trotter left Circus Circus with Dean shortly after returning to his hotel room, even though he had paid for another night. Trotter said he had always planned on going to a different casino that day for more sports betting.

“I understand how you’re trying to make it seem but the situation just didn’t go like that,” Trotter testified.

The trial is set to resume Wednesday with more testimony.

(source: Las Vegas Review-Journal)

USA:

Last Rites----Executions prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains that they are “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” So why do powerful American Catholics still support the practice?

On September 24 at 6:01 PM—still business hours for many Americans—Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, 55, having been led in chains to a room and strapped to a table, was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate that, at lower levels, induces sleep, treats seizures, and calms anxious patients before surgery. It is also used to euthanize pets. Williams was accompanied by his imam, while his son and attorneys watched from an adjoining room. He was declared dead 9 minutes later.

The execution took place at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, the state where Williams, a Black man, had been incarcerated for 21 years for the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle, a former journalist who was stabbed to death in her home. He had always maintained his innocence, and his trial had been obviously deficient. A racist jury selection process that reduced the number of Black jurors from seven to one (the prosecutor Keith Larner said that one prospective juror and Williams “looked like they were brothers”), unreliable and incentivized witnesses, nonexistent forensic evidence: Williams had, to all appearances, been railroaded, first into a cell and now into the death chamber.

Public outcry mounted as the execution date drew near. It had been stayed twice before, in 2015 and 2017, and many hoped that a 3rd reprieve was forthcoming. Gayle’s family had publicly advocated for Williams’s sentence to be commuted to life in prison: “the family defines closure as Marcellus being allowed to live,” their petition read. But successive courts struck down their appeals, repeatedly ruling that the defense had not produced any new evidence supporting Williams’s claim to innocence. In one instance, the Missouri Supreme Court made a point of arguing that it was not bound by a prosecutor’s confession of error, because the determination of error was the Court’s responsibility.

In August Williams and the St. Louis County prosecutors reached an agreement to enter a so-called Alford plea, which would grant that the state had enough evidence to charge him with murder in exchange for commuting his sentence to life in prison. The plea was opposed by the state attorney general, however, and blocked by the Missouri Supreme Court. When the appeals finally reached the United States Supreme Court, it decided along political lines to decline to hear the case, effectively denying another stay. After the execution, Governor Mike Parson, directly contradicting the Gayle family’s account, claimed that they had been “revictimized” by Williams’s repeated attempts to prove his innocence. “We hope this gives finality to a case that has languished for decades,” he said, as if the value of such finality were self-evident. The sentiment was so representative of official consensus that the director of the Missouri Department of Corrections issued an identical statement.

*

The Court’s failure to intervene and spare Williams’s life was appalling by any measure. A bitter irony is the fact that 6 of the 9 justices are practicing Catholics. (A seventh, Neil Gorsuch, was raised Catholic, though he now attends Episcopalian services; in a brief dissenting statement, 1 of the 6 Catholics on the bench, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined her liberal colleagues Elena Kagan, who is Jewish, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Protestant, to say that she would have stayed the execution.) The Church as a political entity in the US has for the past half-century been tightly associated with the notion of the “sanctity of life,” which guides its hard-line stance against abortion. A growing number of American Catholics have, since at least the 1990s, been pushing to apply this principle more broadly, advocating with increasing visibility for the abolition of the death penalty as well.

It has been a difficult fight, both within the Church and beyond it. Early Christians commonly condemned capital punishment, but as the Church’s proximity to worldly power grew, it came to make allowances for this most extreme sentence. For much of its history, its authorities and theologians believed, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, that “if any individual becomes a danger to society and if his sin is contagious to others, it is laudable and beneficial to put him to death on behalf of the common good.” The 1566 Roman Catechism—the first Church-wide set of Catholic doctrine, itself a response to the Reformation—invested the “civil authorities” with the “power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent.” Later changes narrowed the scope of its applicability, down to the 1992 Catechism, which limited its use to cases “of extreme gravity.” In every instance, however, the Church deferred to the state as the deciding actor, even during the Spanish Inquisition, when the condemned were simply handed over to civil magistrates, or, as the phrase went at the time, “relaxed to the secular arm.”

Progress toward abolition began in earnest in the 20th century, with the arrival of the broad movement known as Catholic social teaching—a series of post–Industrial Revolution doctrinal innovations intended to defend the dignity of the poor and the working class against capitalist rapacity and state repression. What followed was a venerable history of American Catholic dissidents who denounced the death penalty, among them Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, the Berrigan brothers and the Plowshares Movement, and, most notably, Sister Helen Prejean, perhaps the foremost American campaigner in the fight against capital punishment. In her classic 1993 book about her time as a spiritual adviser to 2 death row inmates, Dead Man Walking, she describes her activism in explicitly religious terms: “Kings and Popes and military generals and heads of state have killed, claiming God’s authority and God’s blessing. I do not believe in such a God.” The Catholic Mobilizing Network, meanwhile, advocates tirelessly for the abolition of the death penalty and the transformation of the US justice system “from punitive to restorative,” on the basis of the “Gospel value that every human is created in the image and likeness of God.”

Informal condemnations have since emerged from the Vatican, such as Pope (now Saint) John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which pointed to the increasing rejection of capital punishment both within the Church and in civil society as evidence of civilization’s progress toward universal recognition of intrinsic human dignity. Citing this encyclical, the 1997 Catechism’s language on capital punishment was further clarified to limit its use to cases that were “very rare, if not practically non-existent.” On a 1999 visit to the United States he told 100,000 people gathered for mass in St. Louis that it was time to “end the death penalty.” Finally, in 2018 Pope Francis officially amended the Catechism to declare the death penalty “inadmissible” in the modern world and call on Christians everywhere to work toward its eradication. Following on John Paul II’s language of progress, the Catechism now reads: “Today…there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state,” which renders the death penalty strictly forbidden.

Francis’s amendment represents a seismic shift not only on the discrete issue of executions but also on the Church’s attitude toward the authority of governments to uphold the common good. In effect, he closed a loophole that the Catechism had previously left open—the possibility that lawful authority may take a life. In the process he did more than firmly limit the powers of the state. He also suggested that the faithful ought to actively resist the state on the issue of the death penalty to remain in good standing with the Church, which now officially teaches that capital punishment is in every instance a violation of human dignity, an abdication of our obligation to the least of us, and an act of tyrannical hubris. By sanctioning the taking of a life, we prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world and with God—it is as violent and unjustified an act as any crime that could tempt us to employ it.

*

A significant number of Catholic politicians in the US have failed to follow Pope Francis’s lead. The refusal of 5 Catholic justices to intervene even in a case as patently unjust as Williams’s was especially outrageous, but it was hardly unique. 6 of the 21 states in which the death penalty is practiced are presided over by Catholic governors, including Greg Abbott, who described the frequency of executions in his state as “Texas justice.”

To be sure, some inroads have been made in the fight against capital punishment, even among the powerful. In 2020 Ohio’s Catholic Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who has cast doubts on the death penalty’s deterrent effect and issued more than forty reprieves during his tenure, instituted an “unofficial moratorium” on the practice—although initially he cited only the lack of an alternative method for lethal injections, the only legal technique in the state. (Following Alabama’s execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith by nitrogen hypoxia—in other words, by gassing—Ohio Republicans have begun pushing to legalize this novel method.) Nancy Pelosi, also a Catholic, decried the hypocrisy of church officials who punish politicians for their pro-choice voting records—as she herself was, when the archbishop of her home diocese denied her communion—but not for their support of state executions. Joe Biden, for his part, began his administration as the only sitting president to ever oppose the death penalty without exception. In July 2021 Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on capital punishment at federal prisons after Donald Trump oversaw 13 executions in the final months of his presidency, ending a 17-year hiatus.

But Biden’s own time in office is nonetheless ending with what the political scientist Austin Sarat has called the “worst execution spree in 3 decades”: Williams’s killing was 1 of 5 sentences carried out across 5 states in a single week. Garland, meanwhile, is allowing the Justice Department to seek the death penalty in 2 cases involving racially motivated mass murders, and the Democratic Party has quietly dropped the abolition of the death penalty from its platform.

It’s a grim reminder, however sotto voce, of the party’s recent record on the issue: after the 1988 presidential debates, when Michael Dukakis’s answer to a grotesque question about whether he would seek the death penalty for his wife’s hypothetical rapist and murderer was deemed insufficiently passionate, the Democrats lurched rightward. In the 1992 campaign Governor Bill Clinton interrupted a visit to New Hampshire to return to Arkansas to personally oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a Black man who had been so severely brain damaged that he saved the dessert from his last meal “for later.” (Once president, Clinton signed into law the 1994 Crime Bill, which expanded federal statues so that the death penalty could be imposed as punishment for 60 different crimes, including some—espionage, treason, and certain drug offenses—that don’t involve murder.)

Prior to the official amendment of the Catechism, some Catholic governors and prosecutors made liberal use of the Church’s exception for ostensibly extreme cases, as former Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts explained in 2015: “The Catholic Church does not preclude the use of the death penalty under certain circumstances: That guilt is determined and the crime is heinous. Also, protecting society.” Since 2018, however, Catholic officials who are now in outright violation of the Catechism have largely been silent on the matter of how they reconcile their religious convictions with their political work. (Ricketts, for his part, said that the death penalty would remain the law of the land in his state, though he “respect[s] the pope’s perspective.”)

Some Catholics have attempted to relieve politicians of this burden by attacking the Pope’s total condemnation of the death penalty as another example of his dictatorial and revisionist tendencies. In 2018 the formerly urbane right-wing Catholic magazine First Things—now a hotbed of anti-Francis reaction—issued an open letter signed by several dozen priests and theologians, mostly American, requesting that the college of cardinals undo Francis’s amendment on the grounds that it was contrary to Scripture, in particular Genesis 9:6, which reads: “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind.”

It’s a strange argument for Catholics to make. For one thing, the Genesis passage stands in some tension with the Gospel’s teachings on sin and casting stones. For another, Roman Catholicism typically emphasizes allegorical, rational, and, above all, ecclesial interpretations of the Bible; direct appeals to the literal inerrancy of Biblical texts are rather a hallmark of Protestant theology in general and Reformation polemics against the Roman Magisterium in particular. Then there is the obvious inconsistency between approving of, or indeed advocating for, slaying a human being in the case of capital punishment on the one hand and insisting that abortion constitutes such a slaying—precisely in order to condemn it—on the other.

The First Things letter also gives the lie to the notion that Catholics swear obedience to the Pope over and above temporal political allegiances. The authors take some license from canon law, which grants the faithful the right to engage in protest when they feel the clergy is leading them astray. But this protest is made in such evident bad faith that it is difficult to read it as a genuine act of conscience. It ignores not only the letter and spirit of decades of papal precedents but also the lessons to be drawn from no less an example than that of Jesus and the Apostles, all of whom were imprisoned and killed by the governing authority. (Even the Emperor Constantine, though hardly against capital punishment in general, banned crucifixion out of deference to his newfound savior.) Considering the literalist, legalistic approach these authors take, it’s hard to see their letter as much more than a screed against a pontiff who so grates against their political preferences (which, in turn, have utterly saturated their religious commitments) that they can only think of him as yet another liberal.

*

To these American conservatives, the amendment to the Catechism and the advocates who pushed for it epitomize the Church’s failure to maintain its historical identity and stand athwart soft-hearted cultural degeneracy. But those activists—and their teachings—are more rooted in the legacy of Catholic thinking than the signatories of the First Things letter would like to believe, and their gradual rise in influence stems not from external pressures but rather from trends within Catholicism itself, which were finally absorbed and synthesized by the Church in the Second Vatican Council.

From the late 19th century—especially with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, generally regarded as the starting point for Catholic social teaching—the Church was increasingly in favor of strengthening craft guilds, labor unions, and mutual aid networks. The aim was to develop a social order beyond both capitalist acquisitiveness and what many in the Vatican saw as the dangerous statism of mainstream socialism. And though the Vatican fell to Mussolini with appalling ease, while condemning but doing little to combat the Nazi regime, antifascist resistance flourished in religious and lay communities both in Europe during World War II and under later, US-supported autocracies in Latin America and around the world.

By the middle of the century, a consonant revolution in the Church’s theology was unfolding. New generations of writers, artists, scholars, and theologians—particularly in France, Germany, and Switzerland—challenged the reigning school of Neo-Scholasticism, which pitted the resources of medieval Christian thought, especially that of St. Thomas Aquinas, against modern philosophy from Descartes onward. Hoping to catalyze a more capacious and dynamic intellectual movement within the Church, people like Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar developed what came to be called ressourcement theology (“a return to the sources,” at first pejoratively referred to as the nouvelle theologie). The ressourcement thinkers believed that the Church ought to be more responsive both to history as it unfolded and to the needs of the laity; they drew on a wider range of early Church sources to wrest Catholic thinking from the ecclesial abstractions of Neo-Scholasticism.

Conservatives like the Thomist theologian Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (a friend of the antisemitic Action Française movement and a supporter of the Vichy collaborationist regime) attacked the ressourcement movement and for a time hounded it out of respectable theological discourse on the charge of “modernism”—a formal heresy that involved replacing “traditional” interpretative and political models with modern innovations, especially historical biblical criticism and liberal democracy. But following the death of Pope Pius XII—widely understood as an enemy of ressourcement for his 1950 encyclical Humani generis, in which, under the influence of Garrigou-Lagrange, he warned against the “relativism” of “new opinions” in theology—the movement gained new favor under John XIII in time for it to exert, from 1962 to 1965, a profound influence on the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council. Among other things, its imprint can be seen in the Council’s decision to recover the older tradition of the vernacular Mass, which in the following decades gradually supplanted (though never eradicated) the Latin Tridentine rite—a 16th-century innovation that, like the original Catechism, was supposed to have bolstered the Church against the ravages of the Reformation.

It was under this banner of ecclesial and theological renewal that the Vatican started condemning the death penalty outright, beginning with Pope Paul VI, who in 1969 abolished capital punishment within Vatican City itself, where it had been on the books since the 1929 Lateran Pact with Mussolini, as punishment for the assassination of a Pope.

Since 1965, however, American Catholicism has returned in some corners to a kind of Neo-Scholastic thinking and, more to the point, to a medieval reverence for “civil” authority. During these last decades a number of powerful right-wing Catholic movements and organizations have flourished in mainstream American society, all of them with intensely traditionalist preferences and long histories of friendship with the powerful and the reactionary. Though not all of them homegrown, these groups—from Opus Dei to the Legionaries of Christ to the Napa Institute—have gained traction here by making strategic alliances on the issue of abortion, notably with the evangelical voter bloc spearheaded by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and benefited from a more general rightward turn in both the clergy and the laity (not to say the country). Where in the past priests had been caricatured as liberal idealists ministering and rabble-rousing on behalf of the poor and the beleaguered—think Father Barry in On the Waterfront—now more than 80 % of young American clerics self-identify as conservative or very conservative.

On the issue of the death penalty, the American church hierarchy has been moved to act, frequently imploring state governors to grant stays, sometimes successfully, as when the Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops called on Abbott to halt the execution of Rodney Reed in 2019. Since 1974, 2 years before Gregg v. Georgia, the 1976 Supreme Court ruling reaffirming the death penalty’s Constitutional validity, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has consistently argued against its use, even undertaking in 2005 the Catholic Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty, which they reaffirmed in 2015.

But anyone looking for the kind of tenacious united front one sees on abortion will be disappointed. Indeed, American bishops’ consistent opposition to the death penalty has often been undermined by the rhetoric and actions of powerful American Catholic congregants and their academic adjuncts. Theological debate provides some cover: hard-liners like Edward Feser, a Catholic philosopher whose brand of analytic scholasticism harkens back to pre-ressourcement abstraction, defend capital punishment largely on the grounds of the continuity of church teaching. To theologians like Feser, the precedent of Catholicism’s earlier endorsement of the death penalty effectively ends the discussion. Revoking the endorsement in favor of a more coherent position would entail abandoning the sacred tradition altogether. Feser’s arguments, though refuted by more capable theologians like David Bentley Hart and Paul J. Griffiths, are nevertheless mirrored in the actions of Catholic politicians and officials like Ricketts, the former attorney general William Barr (who promulgated Trump’s execution spree), Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and others.

The present situation can appear, in some respects, even more radical than the historical deference to civil authority. In seeming fulfillment of another call by Pope Leo XIII, who in 1895 encouraged American Catholics to seek out the favor of civil institutions, many among the faithful have abandoned ethnic and to an extent religious difference—one is now likelier to hear about Notre Dame football than the Virgin Mary—and become to all appearances devotees of American civil religion, as well. As if the kingdom of heaven were a gated community, the hard-won assimilation of Catholics into the white Christian mainstream seems, for some believers, to have imbued the administrative state with the glow of divine right, transforming secular authority into a worldly tool for heavenly purposes, and, indeed, blurring the distinction between the 2.

This coziness with power is also at the root of the apparent hypocrisy between the dominant American Catholic positions on abortion and the death penalty. For decades now, the Church has been notoriously uncompromising on abortion, advocating total bans the world over and, in certain circumstances, prescribing instant excommunication for Latin Catholics who undergo the procedure. However immovable this conviction may seem to be now, it is a departure from centuries of more nuanced theology in the Church, which while it has always condemned abortion had long countenanced debate over what was meant by the word, up to and including discussions over whether it was sinful to terminate a pregnancy before “quickening” or the point at which a fetus is “ensouled” and becomes human.

The Catholic position has since crystallized into the steadfast belief that abortion amounts to taking an innocent life; that is, to murder. Ambiguities have thus been neutralized and forgotten, and it is only as an aside—or, more often, a mournful ex post facto reflection on the tragedy of unintended consequences—that conservatives discuss the reality of pregnancies wanted and unwanted, as when, during the vice-presidential debate, J.D. Vance agreed that Amber Thurman, who died while traveling 600 miles from Georgia to North Carolina in order to obtain reproductive care outlawed in her home state, should still be alive today.

If American Catholics were to consider some of the lessons of Vatican II, they might find that applying a dictum indiscriminately to any situation, whatever the real-world implications, is less an act of moral clarity than an attempt to seize power and assume its righteousness. If the same Catholics who rallied in their hundreds of thousands for 40 years to criminalize abortion were to ask not whether a life is being taken but rather whether abortion might be better prevented by social measures; or whether the manifold physical, psychological, and social complications that can occur during a pregnancy are properly adjudicated by politicians and prosecutors; or whether it is at all possible for women, accused of slaying an innocent, to receive a fair hearing before being thrown into the maw of the state, the same state that executes, and executes not for justice but simply for a sense of finality, then they would have to ask themselves whether it is truly life that they sanctify.

*

4 years prior to his amendment to the Catechism, in an address to the International Association of Penal Law, Pope Francis remarked that “there are many well-known arguments against the death penalty.” That Catholics continue to defend the practice is troubling; that in order to do so they must return not only to arguments but to whole modes of thought that the Church has rightly left behind suggests that their attachment is to a political system and the power it offers, rather than to a living communion that bends toward ever greater reflection of divine love. But the gravest condemnation must be reserved for the likes of the Supreme Court justices who allowed Marcellus Williams, and many like him, to be killed by the state, who lacked the courage to endorse the murder as some kind of justice and simply passed over the matter in silence, like the elders of the city in Deuteronomy, washing their hands in the stream, saying, “Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it.”

The main insight that motivated Pope Francis’s change to the Catechism is that it should reflect the essential inviolability of human life, even when that life cannot be said to be innocent. The case of Marcellus Williams is particularly egregious because to all appearances he was innocent of the crime for which he had been sentenced, but this is, in a sense, beside the point. What makes the Gospels radical texts, and the Church a potential site of social transformation (to the extent that it reflects the Gospels), is that they introduce into our consciousness a plane of human experience that not only stands apart from law and the organization of political life but also necessarily disrupts the ordinary run of things, interjecting at the most inopportune moments, such as when I or someone I love has been harmed, or when I am flooded with righteous anger, to ask whether my conduct is worthy of my intrinsic dignity, of which even I cannot divest myself. When we hold it above a human life, the “common good” becomes just another idol, and “preventive justice” just another sacrifice offered for its propitiation. No amount of argumentative subtlety will heal the desecration of both victim and perpetrator when a human being, no matter what they have done, is rendered defenseless and killed. And no depth of silence can conceal those responsible, should they ever be held to account.

(source: Jack Hanson, New York Review of Books)

IRAN:

Families of Drug Death Row Prisoners Protest Outside Iran Parliament on 39th “No DeathPenalty Tuesdays”

On the 39th week of “No Death Penalty Tuesdays” hunger strikes behind bars, families of drug death row prisoners staged a protest with chants of “Don’t Execute” outside parliament in Tehran this morning. In the shadow of the war, the Islamic Republic has executed at least 119 people in October.

While condemning the wave of executions in Iran, Iran Human Rights calls on the international community to support the abolitionist movement in Iran and try to stop the executions in Iran.

IHRNGO Director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said: "Civil protests against the death penalty in a country where 5 to 6 people are executed every day is unprecedented and should be widely supported. Despite the possibility of violent repression by the forces of the Islamic Republic, people have come to the streets to say no to the death penalty. The international community should hear the voice of the Iranian people and break its silence regarding the wave of executions in Iran.”

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, families of drug death row prisoners and abolitionist activists protested outisde the Islamic Consultative Assembly (parliament) building in Tehran on 22nd October demanding an end to executions.

Videos obtained by IHRNGO show around 100 people marching on parliament while chanting “don’t execute.” The protest comes after the recent surge in executions.

(source: iranhr.net)

***********

‘No to Executions’ Campaign Reaches 39 Weeks with Participation from 23 Prisons

On October 22, the “No to Executions Tuesdays” campaign marked its 39th week, with prisoners from 23 facilities across Iran, including Ahvaz’s Sheiban Prison, joining in defiance of the Iranian regime’s escalating use of executions. This growing movement, which began in February, continues to draw attention to the regime’s oppressive tactics and widespread use of capital punishment to suppress dissent.

In a statement released this week, political prisoners from Sheiban Prison announced their participation, underscoring the regime’s recent surge in executions. “We are witnessing a rapid increase in executions, with over 140 hangings in just the past month of Mehr,” they declared. They further highlighted that four Arab political prisoners had been moved to solitary confinement in Sheiban, facing imminent execution. “Their lives are in danger,” the statement warned.

The prisoners’ statement, which represents voices from across Iran’s prisons, condemned these “systematic executions” and called on all “political, civil, trade, and human rights organizations, as well as all conscious minds inside and outside Iran,” to join forces against this oppression. It emphasized, “Standing against the issuance and execution of death sentences must be a part of our social demand, achievable only through resistance, solidarity, and collective will.”

Despite the brutal conditions, the statement affirmed, “We can stop this killing machine and uproot such inhumane practices in our homeland.”

The Ahvaz prisoners’ solidarity adds to a list of 22 other facilities already involved, including the notorious Evin Prison, Gohardasht, and Urmia. Each Tuesday, prisoners go on hunger strikes, signaling their resistance against the death penalty. This act of defiance reflects a collective determination, where they declared: “Our struggle continues, and our resistance is our greatest weapon.”

On October 21, 2024, the Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) issued a statement detailing a sharp rise in executions by the Iranian regime. In the Iranian month of Mehr (September 22 to October 21), 147 confirmed executions took place, a record high surpassing even the grim numbers seen during the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi, who is infamous for his role in the 1988 mass executions. The actual number of executions is likely higher, with more updates expected in future reports.

Since July, coinciding with Pezeshkian’s time in office, at least 342 people have been executed, including 13 women. On Monday, October 21, 2024, 2 prisoners, Mohammad Farhadzadeh and Hamid Chatrsimaab, were executed in Jiroft Prison. A day earlier, on Sunday, October 20, 5 more prisoners were hanged, including Mohammad Saberi in Malayer and another in Tabriz. On October 19, 3 prisoners were executed, followed by 18 on October 16, 12 on October 13, and 8 more on October 17, including Mohammad Reza Mahjour, who was hanged in Isfahan Prison. The regime’s increasing reliance on capital punishment signals its growing fear of uprisings and potential overthrow.

The campaign has maintained its momentum even as executions climb, sending a powerful message of unity and resilience against state-sanctioned violence. As the prisoners have expressed, “Despite the regime’s utmost brutality, our demand for justice remains unwavering.”

With international attention growing, the campaign’s call to halt the death penalty has garnered support beyond Iran’s borders, reflecting the courageous stance of those who, despite facing the ultimate threat, remain steadfast in their pursuit of freedom and justice.

(source: ncr-iran.org)

OCTOBER 22, 2024:

TEXAS:

Robert Roberson's testimony is delayed after dramatic death row reprieve

In a stunning chain of events, a man scheduled for execution was granted an 11th-hour reprieve by the top court in Texas. But he is not yet out of the woods.

Robert Roberson, 57, was due to be the 1st American ever put to death over murder charges related to what is known as "shaken baby syndrome".

Set to die by lethal injection 17 October, he was spared - for now - by Texas lawmakers and the state Supreme Court.

What happens next could lead either to a re-scheduled execution or an ultra-rare act of clemency in the state that leads the way for capital punishment in the US.

Roberson - who was convicted in the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis - was hoping to be shown leniency, though he lost multiple appeals in state courts.

On Wednesday, the state's parole board rejected Roberson's bid for clemency, recommending against commuting his sentence to life in prison and against delaying his execution.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has the power to halt an execution regardless of the board's recommendation, also declined to do so. In nearly a decade as the state's chief executive, Abbott has commuted a sentence only once.

But the same day, in response to calls to spare Roberson's life, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Texas House of Representatives issued a subpoena for him to testify before their panel next week.

The purpose of the panel is to address questions about Roberson's case, including new scientific developments that have called key details surrounding his conviction into question, according to CBS, the BBC's US news partner.

Some 90 minutes before Roberson’s scheduled execution last week, the House criminal jurisprudence committee secured a temporary restraining order against the state, forcing it to hit pause on the procedure.

Although a divided Texas Court of Criminal Appeals struck down the order, the lawmakers appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, which swiftly halted the execution so Roberson could sit before the House panel Monday.

But he did not appear in person at the state capitol in Austin as expected, after the state's attorney general refused to allow it for security reasons.

The legislature also refused to have Roberson appear virtually because he has autism and he is not familiar with modern technology after spending 20-plus years in prison.

Instead of hearing from the convict on Monday, the five Republicans and four Democrats on the committee heard from experts, including Phil McGraw, the television host known as Dr Phil. Mr McGraw spoke about how the state's junk science law, which lets inmates challenge convictions based on later discredited science, might have affected his case.

He said Roberson did not have due process or a "fair trial".

"There's no such thing as shaken baby syndrome," Mr McGraw said, noting there would be "very clear signs" of abuse "that were not present in this case".

Roberson has long maintained his innocence and his attorneys say his daughter was suffering from multiple health issues before her death, including side effects from prescribed medications inappropriate for a toddler and acute pneumonia that had progressed to sepsis.

Advocates have also said that manifestation of Roberson's autism, which went undiagnosed until 2018, were used against him during the criminal inquiry.

Brian Wharton, the lead detective on the case, is among those supporting a plea for clemency, writing in a letter that he "will be forever haunted by my participation in [Roberson's] arrest and prosecution. He is an innocent man”.

But prosecutors maintain Roberson is guilty of murder and that there is evidence Nikki Curtis was shaken and had suffered abuse at the hands of her father.

"Everything that he continues to complain of has been litigated in state and federal court, and every court has rejected his arguments," they wrote earlier this month.

According to data compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), Texas has executed 591 people since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

That is more than 1/3 of the 1,602 executions carried out across the country.

During that same time period, the state has granted clemency on only 3 occasions, DPIC figures indicate.

(source: BBC News)

***********

Republicans express alarm that Texas execution nearly went ahead----Lawmakers unhappy with handling of Robert Roberson case as doubts grow over science used to secure conviction

Republican lawmakers in Texas expressed alarm on Monday at the apparent willingness of state officials to execute a potentially innocent man on the basis of junk science, as the political fallout of the 11th-hour reprieve of Robert Roberson continued to roil the state.

Several Republican members of the state’s House committee on criminal jurisprudence lined up to air their discontent with the handling of the case of Roberson, 57, who was convicted of killing his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002 by violently shaking her.

Roberson was accused of “shaken baby syndrome”, a diagnosis that in recent years has been called into question as a reliable forensic tool.

Representative Jeff Leach told a hearing of the committee on Monday that he had come to be convinced that Roberson was “fully innocent”. And yet the prisoner, he said, had come “within 20 minutes and 20 steps of being executed by the state of Texas”.

Monday’s hearing of the committee not only amounted to one of the most dramatic outpourings of unease by Republican state politicians in a death penalty state about the flaws of the capital system, but it also temporarily spared Roberson’s life.

It was the committee’s issuing of a subpoena for the death row inmate to appear before it last Thursday night that persuaded the state’s supreme court temporarily to stay the execution, even as Roberson was sitting waiting to be escorted into the death chamber.

Roberson had been scheduled to answer the subpoena and appear before the committee at Monday’s hearing. But such is the level of political conflict now engulfing the Roberson case that Republicans have become pitted against Republicans.

Texas’s attorney general Ken Paxton refused to let the prisoner testify in person. In return, fellow Republican lawmakers refused to have the prisoner give testimony over conference call.

“There are dramatic ways that we could enforce that subpoena,” the chair of the committee, Joe Moody, told the hearing. “But we didn’t issue the subpoena to create a constitutional crisis, and we aren’t interested in escalating a division between branches of government.”

Committee members went on to vent their dissatisfaction at the way the state and state courts had handled the Roberson affair.

“When a man’s life literally hangs in the balance, and we are contemplating the government exercising the ultimate and most awesome power of taking a life, then we cannot get this wrong,” said the Republican representative Brian Harrison.

He added: “I want the state of Texas to lead the nation in just about everything, but executing potentially innocent people is not one of them.”

Had Thursday’s execution have gone ahead, Roberson would have been the 1st person in the US to have been put to death on the basis of the contested allegation of shaken baby syndrome. The diagnosis came to prominence as a medical and later forensic hypothesis in the early 1970s.

The idea quickly gained traction that violent shaking of an infant could cause severe illness and even death even where there was no sign of external head injury. The syndrome, or abusive head trauma as it is also known, is still considered a viable diagnosis by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But doubts about its reliability as a forensic tool have grown, especially where no other corroborating evidence is present. Since 1993 there have been 32 exonerations in 17 states following SBS convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

At Monday’s hearing Phillip McGraw, the clinical psychologist better known as the TV personality Dr Phil, told the committee that having studied the trial records and Nikki’s medical history he had come to the firm conviction that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the case.

He pointed out that scientific advances had shown that an infant could die from other causes other than violent shaking – in Nikki’s case she had been acutely and chronically ill at the time of her death including with severe pneumonia.

McGraw said that Roberson “had not had due process – this man has not had a fair trial. If we start executing people in Texas absent due process and fair trial, we are going down a really dangerous road.”

(source: The Guardian)

*************

Texas House Postpones Testimony of Death Row Inmate in Shaken Baby Case----Robert Roberson, whose execution was postponed last week, had been subpoenaed to appear before a committee of the State House, but there was no agreement on whether he could testify in person.

Robert Roberson, the Texas death row inmate whose execution in a strongly disputed shaken baby murder case was postponed last week, had been scheduled to testify on Monday before a committee of the State House, but his appearance was canceled in a dispute over whether he would be allowed to testify in person.

A subpoena for his testimony, issued in a novel last-minute legal maneuver, halted his execution just before it was set to be carried out Thursday evening. The Texas Supreme Court ruled that by issuing the subpoena, a bipartisan group of Texas House members had raised legal questions about the separation of powers that needed to be resolved.

But there was a wave of last-minute scrambling as the hearing was set to begin, with Gov. Greg Abbott filing a brief with the Texas Supreme Court arguing that the Legislature, with its subpoena, had improperly intruded into what ought to be the governor’s authority to postpone executions.

“The power to grant clemency in a capital case,” Mr. Abbott’s office wrote in its brief, “is vested in the governor alone.”

And after the office of the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, declared over the weekend that, “in the interest of public safety,” Mr. Roberson would be made available only by video conference from prison, Mr. Roberson’s lawyers objected.

They have argued that his autism, which was diagnosed after the murder conviction, would make any attempt to judge his credibility by video conference “profoundly limited.” And they said that having him appear remotely without his lawyers by his side would deprive Mr. Roberson of access to counsel during the questioning.

One of his lawyers, Gretchen Sween, said that officials from the state prison systems with whom she had spoken last week had appeared open to allowing Mr. Roberson to travel to Austin to testify. “The last I heard was that it was no problem,” she said. “They were helping him get street clothes” so that he would not have to appear in his prison uniform, she added.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled on Sunday that as long as Mr. Roberson was able to give testimony in response to the subpoena, it would not involve itself in the dispute over how he would testify.

When it became clear that no agreement would be reached, Representative Joe Moody, an El Paso Democrat who helped engineer the subpoena, announced that the appearance was off — for now.

“I’m very disappointed to say I don’t believe that will happen today,” Mr. Moody said of Mr. Roberson’s testimony at the start of the hearing.

“Our committee simply cannot agree to video conference,” Mr. Moody said, explaining that Mr. Roberson’s disability would hinder his testimony. He did not rule out that Mr. Roberson could testify in some other way and said that House members were still discussing with the attorney general’s office how to make that happen.

“We cannot get this wrong,” said one of the Republican committee members, Brian Harrison. “I want the state of Texas to lead the nation in just about everything. But executing potentially innocent people is not one of them.”

The committee instead began hearing testimony from a celebrity guest: Phil McGraw, the television host known as Dr. Phil, who has supported Mr. Roberson and interviewed him in prison.

“I am 100 % convinced that we are facing a miscarriage of justice here,” Mr. McGraw said, at times displaying details of the case on a computer with a logo of his television show visible on its back.

Later, the committee heard from another famous supporter, the novelist John Grisham, who appeared by video. “Let’s have a fair trial,” he said. “That’s all we’re asking for.”

Mr. Roberson’s case has attracted attention from a broad range of people — including a majority of the Republican-controlled Texas House and the detective who helped convict Mr. Roberson — who have raised questions about the conviction, which relied in part on a finding of shaken baby syndrome.

His lawyers have argued that the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, in 2002 was explained by pneumonia and the effect of medications that could affect her breathing. And they have said that Mr. Roberson’s autism, undiagnosed at the time, figured in his conviction as well, because investigators took his absence of apparent emotion as his daughter was dying as evidence of his guilt.

The state has stood by the conviction, saying the girl’s death was caused not just by shaking but also by blunt-force injuries. They have argued that any doubts raised about the reliability of shaken baby syndrome diagnoses in the two decades since Mr. Roberson was convicted do not change the evidence in his case.

Mr. Roberson has had his appeals denied by the state’s top criminal court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, and his request for clemency was rejected by the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles. Governor Abbott, who has the power to grant a temporary 30-day reprieve to stop executions, did not step in as the execution loomed on Thursday.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a statement agreeing with the court’s decision on legal grounds, said that she nevertheless believed that there were significant questions about the application of evidence about shaken baby syndrome in Mr. Roberson’s case. She said the execution should be halted by Mr. Abbott to prevent a “miscarriage of justice from occurring.”

Instead, it was members of the Texas House, outraged at what they said was the injustice of his case, who took the unusual step of calling Mr. Roberson to testify, and thus forestalling the execution.

But the maneuver does not reopen Mr. Roberson’s case. The Texas Supreme Court said that it had intervened only in response to questions about the respective powers of the legislative and the executive branches of Texas government in the context of a subpoena and a pending execution.

What We Know About the CaseThe execution of Robert Roberson, an autistic Texas man convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter, was halted at the last minute.

The courts were not, for now at least, reconsidering the conviction, any new evidence or expert testimony in Mr. Roberson’s case.

Still, it was the specifics of his case that Mr. Roberson had been expected to discuss during his testimony. The lawmakers who intervened, led by Representative Moody and Representative Jeff Leach, a Dallas-area Republican, have said that they needed to hear from Mr. Roberson in order to consider the adequacy of state laws.

Texas was among the first states to pass a so-called junk science law, which allows for convictions to be reconsidered on the basis of changes to scientific understanding of evidence.

Mr. Roberson’s lawyers, and the House members, have said that the law should be applied to Mr. Roberson’s case because the medical symptoms that had been used to diagnose shaken baby syndrome in his dead daughter were no longer considered sufficient to support such a diagnosis.

The Court of Criminal Appeals applied the junk science law to a different shaken baby case this month, requiring a new trial in that case. But in Mr. Roberson’s case, the court concluded that the law did not apply, in part because the record did not show that his conviction was based on evidence that his daughter had died from shaking alone.

Mr. Abbott’s office, in its brief, said that those issues with the law — “the supposed point of hearing his legislative testimony” — had already been considered and rejected by the court, and there had been ample time for the committee to seek his testimony earlier, if that was what it had actually wanted.

“Only at the 11th hour, when the Constitution empowers the governor to make the last move, did the House committee decide to violate the separation-of-powers clause,” his office wrote.

Mr. Roberson’s execution is on hold while legal issues around his testimony are considered by the Texas Supreme Court. The court has asked for briefs to be filed by the end of the 1st week in November.

Once there are no more legal obstacles, a court can order a new execution date to be set for no sooner than 91 days later.

As negotiations over Mr. Roberson’s testimony continued, members of his family were awaiting the outcome. Some attended the hearing in the Capitol on Monday.

Thomas Roberson, 44, the inmate’s younger brother, had traveled from East Texas to attend the hearing in Austin. “He needs a fair trial,” he said before adding: “It’s in God’s hands.”

A sister-in-law and a nephew also packed into the hearing room along with dozens of members of the news media, lawyers and a line of public spectators.

(source: New York Times)

***************

Gov. Greg Abbott’s office condemns Texas House lawmakers that intervened in Robert Roberson’s execution----The Texas governor had not publicly shared his thoughts on the actions of a bipartisan group of lawmakers that stopped the scheduled execution of Robert Roberson.

Gov. Greg Abbott's office condemned the actions of a bipartisan group of Texas legislators Monday, effectively breaking his silence in the pending execution of Robert Roberson.

In an amicus brief filed by James P. Sullivan, the governor's general counsel, the governor's office said lawmakers “stepped out of line” when they intervened to save Roberson’s life.

The brief argued the power to grant clemency in a capital case, including a 30-day reprieve, lies with the governor alone.

"Unless the Court rejects that tactic, it can be repeated in every capital case, effectively rewriting the Constitution to reassign a power given only to the Governor," Sullivan argued.

The brief accounts for Abbott's first public comments on the matter. The governor, who had the ability to grant Roberson a 30-day reprieve was silent last week as the unprecedented legal battle unfolded.

The Texas Supreme Court halted the execution of Roberson last week after members of the Texas House committee subpoenaed Roberson to testify in an attempt to save his life.

Roberson was convicted in 2003 in the death of his chronically ill 2-year-old daughter Nikki. Had he been executed last week, he would have been the 1st person to be executed based in a case related to shaken baby syndrome, a diagnosis that many experts and lawmakers say is no longer supported by scientific evidence.

Gov. Greg Abbott speaks about the recent 88th Legislative Session to an audience at the Texas Public Policy Foundation offices in Austin, on June 2, 2023. Abbott recounted policy victories in regards to fentanyl and the border crisis, as well as limiting gender-affirming care and banning DEI practices in higher education. Abbott ended the event by promising to call a special session for school choice, after the current special session for property tax resolves.

Roberson has maintained his innocence for more than 20 years on death row.

Abbott campaigned in South Texas Monday afternoon. He was not made available for questions from reporters, including The Texas Tribune. Meanwhile, the legislative panel that subpoenaed Roberson heard testimony from other witnesses after it was announced Roberson would not testify as scheduled.

(source: The Texas Tribune)

*************

Texas lawmakers hear testimony supporting death row inmate Robert Roberson – but despite subpoena, he does not appear

Death row inmate Robert Roberson did not appear Monday to testify before the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence – in person or otherwise – despite a subpoena lawmakers issued last week that halted his execution for a crime he and his attorneys say did not occur.

After a weekend of uncertainty, committee Chair Rep. Joe Moody said he did not believe Roberson would testify at Monday’s hearing, which will feature the inmate’s case and the shaken baby syndrome diagnosis his murder conviction was built upon.

While the Texas attorney general’s office has sought to limit Roberson to testifying virtually, Moody did not feel that would be appropriate given Roberson’s autism, he said. The committee and Roberson’s attorneys had expected he would appear in person at the Capitol in Austin.

This does not mean Roberson will not eventually testify, Moody added, saying the committee remains in talks with the attorney general’s office.

“I expect a quick resolution to these discussions, which are ongoing, even at this moment,” Moody said.

Roberson was scheduled to be executed last Thursday for the 2002 killing of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis – who allegedly died from shaken baby syndrome. But the execution was halted after the Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a subpoena for Roberson to testify about his case, an unprecedented gambit that led to a partial stay of execution from the Texas Supreme Court.

Lawmakers intended to hear from Roberson in person as they considered the lawfulness of his case, and whether it necessitates changes to a “junk science” law those in his corner feel should benefit Roberson. Over the weekend, however, members of the committee, the inmate’s attorneys and the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton clashed over the logistics of his testimony.

In the meantime, the committee was proceeding with the hearing, which included testimony from a slate of other witnesses, including TV host Dr. Phil McGraw, who has interviewed Roberson, and the author and Innocence Project board member John Grisham.

Committee members had continued to signal Monday morning they expected the inmate to appear before them in the flesh.

“I fully expect him to testify today, and if not, we’re going to make reasonable accommodations to ensure that his testimony is heard before this committee sooner rather than later,” Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican, told CNN’s Erica Hill.

“The question now is whether he’ll show up today, whether he’ll show up at another date here at the Texas Capitol, or, if necessary, whether our committee will take a field trip … to interview him in a public hearing there at the prison.”

At the same time, the attorney general and the committee were filing dueling motions with the Texas Supreme Court over its decision to temporarily halt the execution. GOP Gov. Greg Abbott submitted a letter brief in support of the attorney general’s filings, arguing the committee’s subpoena had violated the state constitution’s separation-of-powers clause, effectively usurping clemency power that is reserved for his office.

The brief notes Roberson was convicted more than 2 decades ago, and that if the Legislature wanted to seek his testimony, it had ample time do so. “Only at the eleventh hour, when the Constitution empowers the Governor to make the last move, did the House Committee decide to violate the Separation-of-Powers Clause,” the brief says.

In an order Sunday, the court said it was still considering arguments from both sides and set several deadlines for filing over the next several weeks.

Texas law requires a judge to set a new execution date at least 90 days in the future, and Roberson’s attorney previously told CNN the earliest a new execution could be set would be next year.

The testimony

McGraw interviewed Roberson earlier this month on TV and indicated he has extensively gone over the trial transcript and medical record involved in the case.

He testified the case against Roberson was tried as a shaken baby case and the term was brought up 47 times during the 2003 trial, despite evidence Roberson’s daughter was very ill at the time of her death.

“I am 100% convinced that we’re facing a miscarriage of justice here,” McGraw testified. “I think if people really drill down on the facts of this case and thought … you can be executed against a standard of reasonable doubt, I think it would be horrifying. I don’t think he’s had due process, I don’t think he’s had a fair trial, and I think he should.”

Grisham, a bestselling author who wrote an op-ed on Roberson’s case, commended the committee’s actions last week, saying members “literally saved an innocent man’s life.”

“You took a bold stance against injustice at the precise moment when the courts and the leaders of the state seemed hell bent on executing Robert. If not for you, Robert would be in his grave today. Your actions were creative to say the least, fascinating, unique, courageous, bipartisan and heroic.”

During his testimony, Grisham advocated for a retrial.

“Let’s have a fair trial, that’s all we’re asking for,” he said.

Terre Compton, one of 12 jurors in Roberson’s trial, said the jury’s decision was based on what was presented to them about shaken baby syndrome, and nothing else.

She testified if other evidence or explanations had been presented, she would have found Roberson not guilty, and she now believes he did not kill his daughter.

“I could not live with myself thinking that I had a hand in putting an innocent man to death,” Compton said.

In an interview with CNN after her testimony, Compton said learning about Roberson’s potential innocence has weighed on her so much that it would move her to tears.

“I don’t think it really hit me so hard until they set his death date,” Compton said. “We as jurors took what they told us to be the truth. … I feel like we were taken very much advantage of. I think they lied to us in a lot of ways.”

The case

For Roberson, the committee’s subpoena last week was a godsend, coming just as the other doors to save his life slammed shut: His team had lost several appeals in the Texas courts, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles had declined to recommend clemency and the US Supreme Court had also declined to intervene.

Roberson was convicted of capital murder in a case that relied on allegations his daughter died of shaken baby syndrome – a misdiagnosis, his attorneys claim, and one they say has since been discredited. Child abuse pediatricians and medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics remain firm on the legitimacy of the diagnosis.

But Roberson, his attorneys and advocates point to a variety of other possible causes for Nikki’s death, citing their own medical experts: She had double pneumonia that had progressed to sepsis, they say, and she had been prescribed two medications now seen as inappropriate for children that would have further hindered her ability to breathe. Additionally, the night before Roberson brought her to a Palestine, Texas, emergency room, she had fallen off a bed, and was particularly vulnerable given her illness, Roberson’s attorneys say. They point to all these factors as explanations for her condition.

Roberson brought Nikki to the hospital on the morning of January 31, 2002. He told investigators he had woken in the night to find she’d fallen off the bed, with some blood on her lips and a bruise under her chin, according to the criminal complaint. He kept her up for two hours to make sure she was OK, he said, but when he woke that morning, she was unresponsive.

Doctors treating Nikki presumed abuse based on her symptoms and common thinking at the time of her death without exploring her recent medical history, the inmate’s attorneys claim. And they say his behavior in the emergency room – viewed as uncaring by doctors, nurses and the police, who believed it a sign of his guilt – was a manifestation of autism spectrum disorder, which went undiagnosed until 2018.

Indeed, police never explored explanations for Nikki’s death other than shaken baby syndrome, according to Brian Wharton, the former lead detective of the Palestine police. The guidance of medical experts paired with Roberson’s demeanor led authorities to focus on Roberson as a suspect “to the exclusion of any other possibilities,” he has told CNN.

The diagnosis

Roberson’s attorneys do not dispute babies can and do die from being shaken. But they contend more benign explanations, including illness, can mimic the symptoms of shaken baby syndrome, and those alternative explanations should be ruled out before a medical expert testifies with certainty the cause of death was abuse.

Shaken baby syndrome is accepted as a valid diagnosis by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by child abuse pediatricians who spoke with CNN. Today, it is more commonly referred to as a type of “abusive head trauma,” a broader term doctors began to use around 2009 to reflect it can be caused by actions other than shaking, like an impact to a child’s head.

Abusive head trauma generally occurs when a frustrated parent or caregiver violently shakes a child and/or causes a blunt impact injury, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others say. It is the leading cause of child abuse deaths in children younger than 5, the CDC says.

Criminal defense lawyers also have oversimplified how doctors diagnose abusive head trauma, child abuse pediatricians say, noting many factors are considered to determine it.

Still, courts across the country have been reconsidering the role shaken baby syndrome plays in convictions that rely upon it: Since 1992, courts in at least 17 states and the US Army have exonerated 32 people convicted in shaken baby syndrome cases, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Those who question the diagnosis point to research they say undermines its reliability. But within the context of the law, they are also concerned the diagnosis appears to encompass multiple elements of a crime, including the suspect, their state of mind and how the crime was committed.

“It’s the entire case, and that is Mr. Roberson’s case,” Keith Findley, professor emeritus with the University of Wisconsin Law School, testified before the Texas Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence last week. “When you have a prosecution, a conviction that rests entirely upon medical, scientific opinion, and it turns out that medical science is, at best, deeply disputed, you have a recipe for real problems.”

Child abuse pediatricians, however, fiercely defend the diagnosis.

“I don’t know what to say about the legal controversy,” Dr. Antoinette Laskey, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, told CNN. “This is real, it affects children, it affects families.”

The 2013 law

Last Wednesday, the criminal jurisprudence committee held another hearing about Roberson’s case, and whether he should have benefited from a Texas law commonly referred to as the “junk science writ.” The law, formally known as Article 11.073, dates to 2013 and was meant to open a path for someone to challenge their conviction if there is new scientific evidence that was unavailable at the time of their trial.

Roberson’s advocates feel he should have benefited from this law. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued a stay of execution in Roberson’s case in 2016, sending a claim under Article 11.073 (among others) back to the trial court. The lower court ultimately ruled against Roberson, finding he had not shown there was new scientific evidence relevant to his case, and the appeals court later accepted these findings.

“I believe that section 11.073 simply did not work as it should have in the Robert Roberson case,” Findley testified last Wednesday – a sentiment echoed by members of the House committee, who signaled last week’s hearing was as much about Roberson as it was about finding a way to fix a law they felt had failed to operate as intended.

“Every member of this committee has been surprised by how it has been applied in this particular case,” Moody, the committee chair, said of Article 11.073. “Quite frankly, we’ve reviewed this case in detail, fully expected that this law would provide relief, and that has not happened.”

“When the Legislature passes a law and finds out that it’s not working the way that it was intended to, it is incumbent upon us to step in and make that law right.”

(source: CNN)

*************

Texas juror who voted to convict Robert Roberson: 'I would have found him not guilty'----Governor Greg Abbott finally weighs in, telling the state's Supreme Court that the Texas Constitution gives only him the power to grant clemency.

After a dramatic flurry of weekend court filings, the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee on Monday opted to delay hearing testimony from death row inmate Robert Roberson, scuttling a controversial plan that drew national attention and avoiding what might have been a developing constitutional crisis in state government.

But the committee did hear from one member of the jury that convicted Roberson, who told the panel that if she had known of new evidence that calls into question the foundational premise of the trial — that the condemned man had killed his daughter by shaking her to death — she would have voted to set him free at trial.

"Everything that was presented to us was all about shaken baby syndrome. That is what our decision was based on," former juror Terre Compton testified Monday. "Nothing else was ever presented to us to consider. If it had been ... I would have found him not guilty."

The change in plans came after Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday morning broke weeks of silence on one of the most controversial death penalty cases in recent history, telling the Texas Supreme Court that the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee had overstepped its authority and encroached on powers that are rightfully his.

Abbott's court filing takes issue with the last-minute stay of execution the Texas Supreme Court ordered Thursday to allow Roberson time to appear before the House committee, which voted unanimously Wednesday to subpoena the death row inmate as part of its investigation into the "junk science" law. Lawmakers say they believe Roberson was convicted with a faulty diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome in the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, more than 2 decades ago.

In lieu of in-person or remote testimony from Roberson, an inmate with autism who has been locked away in solitary confinement since being condemned in 2003, the House committee heard hours of testimony from expert witnesses, including television personality Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, and best-selling author and attorney John Grisham.

McGraw, a mental health professional who studied Roberson's case, told lawmakers that studies debunking shaken baby syndrome as junk science and his death row meeting with Roberson have left him convinced that Texas was on the verge of executing an innocent man.

Television personality Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, told members of the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee on Monday that he believes Robert Roberson is innocent. "I believe that in the United States of America, if we are going to deprive someone of their liberty, that comes at a very high standard," McGraw said. "If we are going to deprive someone of their life, that comes at a very high standard, a very high standard of proof, a very high standard of evidence."

He said that standard has not been met in Roberson's case.

How Texas' separation of powers comes into play

The change in plans also comes after Attorney General Ken Paxton's office asked the Texas Supreme Court to throw out the House panel's subpoena entirely, reversing its Thursday order. The court declined to rule on the motion over the weekend and instead asked the House and the attorney general to file merit briefs next week.

Committee Chairman Joe Moody, D-El Paso, said that the House panel could have taken a "heavy-handed approach" to enforcing its subpoena, but that it decided against it. Moody held open the possibility that the committee would hear directly from Roberson at an unspecified later date.

"We didn't issue the subpoena to create a constitutional crisis, and we aren't interested in escalating a division between branches of government," Moody said. "In fact, we have the greatest respect for every other facet of our government, and we want to make and we want all of them to come together in our purpose here, which is making sure that Robert is heard."

Moody's Republican colleagues also nodded to concerns about separation of powers that the executive branch raised but maintained that the subpoena was a necessary measure.

Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, said the committee issued the subpoena and convened Monday not only to understand how the justice system "failed Mr. Roberson," but also "to make sure that it never happens again."

Leach also said he has gone from having "questions and concerns" about the man's conviction to "believing he is 'fully innocent.’”

The debate over 'junk science'

At issue in the hearing is whether lawmakers need to overhaul a decade-old law meant to provide recourse for people convicted based on flawed science.

The 2013 law has been cited in at least 75 appeals of criminal convictions, about a third of which were from prisoners on death row, but none has been affirmatively reviewed and remanded, emphasized Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, who serves on the committee.

Nikki's diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome has been questioned in light of evidence that she was given inappropriate doses of cough medicine and that she had pneumonia and sepsis, which might have led to her death. Prosecutors and the state have maintained that Roberson abused the child and that she died of blunt force trauma, though a detective who played a key role in the original trial now says he is certain that Roberson didn't kill his daughter.

Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, who has butted heads with Leach in intraparty disputes, backed his committee colleagues, Leach and Darby, saying the law's poor record made the House's effort to understand Roberson's conviction even more important.

"If you care about ... the proper functioning of our constitutional system or separation of powers, you should be the loudest supporters and the biggest proponents of what this committee is doing here today," Harrison said.

He added, "I want the state of Texas to lead the nation just about everything, but executing potentially innocent people is not one."

Abbott: Texas House committee 'stepped out of line'

In his court brief, the lawyer for Abbott's office argues that only the governor has the power to grant clemency, including a 30-day reprieve, and that the court's Thursday order would thwart the separation of powers enshrined in the state Constitution.

"Unless the Court rejects that tactic, it can be repeated in every capital case, effectively rewriting the Constitution to reassign a power given only to the Governor," wrote James P. Sullivan, Abbott's general counsel.

The letter states that the House panel essentially preempted a constitutional prerogative of the governor.

"In this case, however, actions by a single committee of a single chamber of the Legislature have had the effect, both legally and factually, of granting (at least) a 90-day reprieve," Sullivan wrote. Texas law requires at least 90 days' notice of a new execution date.

Over the weekend, the court declined to reverse its ruling after Paxton, representing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, requested that it nullify the subpoena.

Paxton's office argued that the Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort for civil matters, does not have jurisdiction over the subpoena matter as it interferes with a criminal matter. Leach and Moody countered that the state had already admitted that the subpoena was valid in a lower court hearing Thursday.

Roberson, 57, of Palestine, Texas, about 180 miles northeast of Austin, came within minutes of being put to death Thursday night before the Texas Supreme Court affirmed a Travis County judge's ruling that the summons from the House committee was valid, effectively staying his execution until a new date can be set.

The order does not address Roberson's underlying criminal conviction. State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, said the hearing and the effort to help Robert Roberson are evidence "that Republicans and Democrats can work together, and that death penalty supporters and death penalty opponents can work together, that the three branches of government — the legislative, the executive and the judicial branches — can work together."

Roberson supporters descend on Capitol

The scene at the Capitol about an hour before the scheduled noon hearing was chaotic, with media and some of Roberson's family queued up outside the 100-seat hearing room hoping to get a spot.

Outside the Capitol, Bob Smilie and May Heftke carried a banner protesting any use of the death penalty in this case.

"I want justice. I want the right thing to be done," Smilie told the Statesman. "I want fairness. Robert Roberson is an innocent man."

For Leach, the hearing and the effort to help Roberson are evidence "that Republicans and Democrats can work together, and that death penalty supporters and death penalty opponents can work together, that the three branches of government — the legislative, the executive and the judicial branches — can work together," he said from the dais.

Roberson's sister-in-law Jennifer Martin, who drove nearly four hours to attend the hearing, said she was optimistic that Roberson could find a pathway to freedom.

"We're just appreciative of the House of Representatives for standing up for what's right when no one else was," she told the Statesman. "We're just excited. Hopefully this will be a step into an acquittal or, at the very least, a new trial for him."

(source: Austin American-Statesman)

*****************

Testimony at Texas Legislature Does Not Include Robert Roberson But Witnesses Confirm Serious Concerns about the Possible Execution of an Innocent Man

Innocence Texas

The Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence heard testimony on Monday October 21, 2024 from novelist John Grisham, talk show host “Dr. Phil” McGraw, but not its expected star witness, Robert Roberson, whose subpoenaed testimony resulted in a dramatic last-minute stay of execution on October 17th from the Texas Supreme Court. Legislators said they could not reach an agreement with the Office of the Texas Attorney General to facilitate Mr. Roberson’s in-person testimony, and Committee Chair Joe Moody indicated that legislators did not believe Mr. Roberson’s testimony via video link would be appropriate given the communications challenges related to his autism spectrum disorder. Mr. Roberson’s lawyer Gretchen Sween sent a letter to the House Committee explaining why Mr. Roberson’s appearance by video would not be effective and cited “material misrepresentations about record facts” by the Office of the Attorney General. Chair Moody noted that negotiations were continuing with his expectation that a “quick resolution” would allow Mr. Roberson to testify.

At the hearing, legislators heard from a number of witnesses who recounted the facts of the case and the conclusions of many experts that no crime caused the death of Mr. Roberson’s young daughter, Nikki. Dr. Phil testified for more than two hours, noting his prior work as a clinical psychologist and describing his support for the death penalty in general before expressing his absolute belief in Mr. Roberson’s innocence.

Novelist John Grisham testified by video. Mr. Grisham noted his experience as a former criminal trial lawyer and a current board member at the New York-based Innocence Project. He described Mr. Roberson’s trial as “grossly unfair” and testified that the “junk science was terrible. We know it’s bad science.”

Both Mr. Grisham and Dr. Phil noted the prejudicial effect of having the jury hear about allegations of sexual abuse – allegations made by just one hospital staff member and never proven. Mr. Grisham said he believes Mr. Roberson should receive a new trial, “with as many lawyers as the prosecution, and as many experts as the prosecution” so he will have a fair proceeding. Mr. Grisham also described why “junk science is a huge factor” that causes wrongful convictions, and noted the many exonerations that have occurred after forensic science was revealed to be unreliable.

Terry Compton, one of the jurors at Mr. Roberson’s trial, testified that the “only thing” jurors were told by prosecutors was that Nikki’s death was caused by “shaken baby syndrome”(SBS) – in contrast to recent statements from a Texas Attorney General pleading stating that “SBS just doesn’t play a role in this case.” Ms. Compton expressed being “very pissed off” at how officials now describe what happened at the trial; she added that she would have never voted to convict Mr. Roberson if any other explanation for Nikki’s death had been provided. Former Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Elsa Alcala, who has been critical of how Texas’ “junk science” law has been used, also testified at Monday’s hearing and offered suggestions about ways that the law could be changed.

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)

*****************

Attorneys for Tarrant County man on death row take case to U.S. Supreme Court

Attorneys for a Tarrant County man on death row have filed a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court asking for a new punishment hearing after allegations that prosecutors lied during his trial.

Paul David Storey, 40, has been on death row since 2008. He was 1 of 2 men convicted of capital murder after killing mini golf course manager Jonas Cherry during a robbery 2 years prior. The other man, Mark Porter, pleaded guilty and got life in prison.

During Storey's trial, then-prosecutor Christy Jack told the jury Cherry's family wanted the death penalty for Storey, but his family denied ever wanting Storey to die for the crime, KERA previously reported.

Storey's initial execution date was set for April 2017 but the court granted a stay of execution to investigate whether the prosecution violated due process, according to the petition.

Attorney Keith Hampton started representing Storey around the time he was supposed to be executed.

"Now, at that point, the state was seeking to have him executed," Hampton said. "Everything's different now. The state is not seeking to have him executed which is why he doesn't have an execution date."

The petition filed this month is not the 1st time Storey's attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case.

The court denied the petition in 2022 but Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote at the time the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals "got it wrong.”

"Its illogical rule conflicts with this Court’s precedent, and it rewards prosecutors who successfully conceal their Brady and Napue violations by creating a procedure wherein prosecutors can run out the clock and escape any responsibility for all but the most extreme violations," she wrote, referencing due process cases.

Later that year, the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, which had prosecuted Storey, filed for the Supreme Court to reconsider his petition citing "substantive claims" from Storey.

Storey's petition to avoid the death penalty comes the same month the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence delayed the execution of Robert Roberson, who is on death row for capital murder over a "shaken baby syndrome" case experts say is not supported by scientific evidence.

Roberson was set to be executed Thursday, but in an unprecedented legal move, state lawmakers called on Roberson to testify in front of the committee Monday in order to delay that execution.

However, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton blocked Roberson’s in-person appearance, and his lawyers declined to have him speak remotely.

(source: KERA news)

**************

Dr. Phil testifies of ‘miscarriage of justice' in ‘shaken baby' case hearing Monday----House Committee 'has stepped out of line' in 'shaken baby' case, governor's office says

The attorney representing the Texas governor's office filed an amicus brief Monday saying the petition filed by the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence last week regarding the case of death row inmate Robert Roberson should be tossed out. Roberson was convicted of murdering his 2-year-old daughter in 2003 based on evidence of shaken baby syndrome – a diagnosis many experts are now calling into question.

Roberson’s appeals to the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals, the Texas Supreme Court, and the United States Supreme Court failed. After the state parole board denied his bid for clemency last week, he was set to be executed Thursday night when, minutes before the execution, lawmakers successfully subpoenaed him to appear at the State Capitol on Monday and testify before the House Committee.

On Monday afternoon, NBC 5 confirmed that Roberson would not be testifying Monday, in person or virtually.

State Rep. Joe Moody (D-El Paso) opened a hearing on Monday afternoon and said he was disappointed to share that Roberson's testimony would not happen on Monday and took a couple of minutes to explain why, saying there was a valid subpoena in place but that they didn't want to create a constitutional crisis or escalate a division between the branches of state government. Moody said they were working with the attorney general's office to find a way to have Roberson appear in person instead of via video conferencing.

"Robert is a person with autism who has significant communication challenges, which was a core issue that impacted him at every stage of our justice system," Moody said. "He's also spent most of the last 2 decades alone, locked away from the modern technology we now take for granted. Video conference is poorly suited for Robert, specifically to provide his testimony, and would only further the harm he's already suffered."

Why Robert Roberson is not testifying in Texas Monday

Texas State Rep. Joe Moody (D-El Paso) explains why death row inmate Robert Roberson would not be testifying before the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence on Monday afternoon. Moody's reference to the constitutional crisis was at least partially based on the amicus brief from the governor's office. James Sullivan, the governor's general counsel, sent a three-page letter Monday to Blake Hawthorne, the Supreme Court of Texas clerk, on behalf of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, saying the committee's actions were "out of line."

Sullivan wrote that the subpoena granted a 90-day reprieve in the administration of the death penalty and that clemency in a capital case or granting a 30-day reprieve is a power "vested in the governor alone."

The governor's office worried that unless the court rejected the tactic used by the committee to get a temporary restraining order to delay the execution, it could be repeated, essentially rewriting the state's Constitution and reassigning a power only given to the governor.

Sullivan wrote that if the committee wanted testimony from Roberson, it could have requested that testimony at any point before last week, saying Roberson had been convicted more than two decades ago, his last appeal was more than a year ago, and his execution was set months ago.

"In all that time, even when it was clear that Roberson's execution date was nearing and the Article 11.073 issue was manifest, the House Committee could not trouble itself with seeking Roberson's testimony," Sullivan wrote. "Only at the eleventh hour, when the Constitution empowers the governor to make the last move, did the House Committee decide to violate the Separation-of-Powers Clause."

Sullivan called for the petition to be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, saying only the governor, not any branch of state government, the House Committee, a district court in Travis County, a court of appeals, or the Supreme Court of Texas, has the power to issue a reprieve.

A bipartisan group of 84 Texas lawmakers urged the governor to intervene in September, calling for the execution to be halted. Since taking office in 2015, Abbott has granted clemency in only one death row case when he commuted Thomas Whitaker's death sentence to life in prison in 2018.

WHAT IS AN AMICUS BRIEF?

An amicus brief, or amicus curiae, is an unsolicited statement about a case from a party not involved in the case. The brief is not legally binding but could influence a court's decision. It's up to the court's discretion whether the brief will be considered.

(source: nbcdfw.com)

SOUTH CAROLINA----impending execution

Federal judge denies SC death row inmate’s request for parole board to review clemency

A federal judge has denied South Carolina death row inmate Richard Moore’s request to have the state’s parole board review his clemency application instead of the governor.

Moore was convicted and sentenced to death for various crimes stemming from a deadly store robbery in Spartanburg County that happened in September 1999.

Moore filed the action for preliminary relief and for the court to declare it unconstitutional for Governor Henry McMaster to consider his forthcoming clemency petition.

He is scheduled to be executed on Nov. 1, and chose to die by lethal injection.

(source: WHNS news)

TENNESSEE:

A Death Row Pastor’s View of Executions

From 2010 to 2015 I was incarcerated at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, the site of death row for the men’s prison system. Though I wasn’t housed on death row, as the editor of the Maximum Times prison newspaper and, for a time, the chaplain’s clerk, I was on occasion able to visit. It was there that I was fortunate enough to meet author, prison volunteer and death row pastor Joseph B. Ingle.

Ingle, a reverend with the United Church of Christ, began ministering to the condemned in 1975. Prison volunteers don’t normally have access to all areas of a facility—certainly not death row—but Ingle could just walk in like staff. His experience, and something about his unassuming demeanor, makes governors and legislators seek him out.

Ingle’s gentleness was always in stark contrast to the harshness of the cold steel and concrete. He was a humble student of prison culture, and to speak with him you’d never guess he’s been twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He spends little time talking about himself. Compliment him and he’ll likely blush and change the subject. He prefers to focus his energies on the condemned and their families, and anyone who will help change the culture of killing in United States prisons.

Ingle’s book Too Close to the Flame: With the Condemned inside the Southern Killing Machine, published in May, chronicles the 45 years he’s spent ministering to people on death row. Not just at Riverbend, but across the South. He became friends with many of the condemned, and thus prayed with many friends in their final moments before they were killed by the state.

“If you don’t know a person, it’s easier to kill [them], so staying away from the flame keeps you safe,” Ingle told Filter when asked about the title. “Proximity brings compassion and humanity. We have empathy when we really see someone, up close and personal.”

As they waited for the execution to begin, they could hear the witnesses in the room next door laughing.

So many years so close to the flame took their toll. One of the only sources of comfort he found, as he endured multiple sclerosis and his wife Becca was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, was laying with her listening to her heartbeat. To hear the sound of life still inside the person he loved soothed him and gave him hope.

Today, they live in an organic farming community where they grow around 200 blueberry bushes. But Ingle’s life’s work is with the people condemned to death. He wants people to understand that people don’t end up on death row because of any single decision. Many people he’s known who were executed were not the perpetrators of the violence for which they were condemned to death. All were poor. The vast majority of people tried in death penalty cases—around 90 percent—cannot afford a lawyer.

Ingle’s work led him to found the Southern Center for Human Rights to fight systemic “extermination, or obliteration through lengthy sentences.” The organization’s services include providing legal representation to people condemned to death in Georgia and Alabama.

Ingle thinks it absurd that mass incarceration or capital punishment prevent further violence. It’s self-evident that they are a cause, not a solution.

In 2007 Ingle sat vigil with Phillip Workman before his killing by lethal injection. As they waited for the execution to begin, they could hear the witnesses in the room next door laughing.

Instead of requesting a last meal for himself, Workman requested that the Tennessee Department of Correction give a vegetarian pizza to anyone in the area who was homeless. TDOC denied the request, prompting hundreds of pizzas to be donated to shelters around Nashville and across the US. In 2019, Workman’s friend Don Johnson made the same last-meal request before his own execution. TDOC denied that request, too.

“It’s interesting that the South is the most religious region of the country,” he told Filter, “while at the same time is [its] largest killing field and imprisoning machine.”

Tennessee had not been following its own lethal injection protocols since revising them in 2018.

Governor Bill Lee (R) of Tennessee, who campaigned on Christian values and in 2019 said that as a man of faith, his death penalty decisions weigh heavily on him, would not come pray with Ingle and the condemned.

Lee, who took office in 2008, initially denied requests for stays of execution, including Johnson’s. But in 2022 he ordered a moratorium on all executions in Tennessee amid an investigation into improper lethal injection practices.

Ingle was present at the execution of Charles Brooks in 1982, the 1st in the US carried out by lethal injection. He has seen over the years that many of these deaths are not painless.

Tennessee’s investigation revealed that the drugs used in lethal injections were not tested for contaminants, and the state had not been following its own protocols since revising them in 2018. Between 2018 and 2022 the state executed 7 people, 2 by lethal injection and 5 by the electric chair.

In May, Lee signed legislation that contradicts the Supreme Court in authorizing the death penalty for a conviction other than homicide. It took effect in July.

In October, TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada revealed that the department would be ready to unveil its new lethal injection process by the end of 2024 or early 2025.

--

Tony has served almost 3 decades of a life with parole sentence in Tennessee. Before prison he lived as a closeted gay man; his Southern Baptist parents and an older brother have since died. While incarcerated he has worked as a tutor, clerk and newspaper editor. He’s also begun book clubs and writing workshops, and prisoner-led elder care programs. He writes about captivity in the hope of contributing to the prison reform movement. You can reach him by USPS.

Tony Vick #276187

South Central Correctional Facility

PO Box 279

Clifton, TN 38425-0279

(source: filtermag.org)

IDAHO----impending execution

Idaho serial killer trying several legal avenues to stop impending execution

Idaho's longest-serving death row inmate is trying several paths to stop his execution, scheduled for mid-November.

The state has issued a death warrant for Thomas Eugene Creech. He's scheduled to die on November 13.

Creech is the only Idaho inmate to survive an execution attempt. Prison officials tried for an hour last February to establish an IV through which to insert lethal injection drugs.

That's one of the reasons Creech says his life should be spared, arguing that trying a 2nd time to execute him constitutes legal double jeopardy.

Creech was convicted of 2 murders in Idaho in 1974 and sentenced to death. That sentence was later reduced to life in prison.

While in prison, he murdered a fellow inmate named David Jensen. It's that murder for which Creech is now sentenced to die. He's also a suspect in several murders for which he has not been charged.

Creech is pursuing 2 paths to stop the execution, 1 through the federal court system and the other through the Idaho Supreme Court.

He filed a writ of habeus corpus in federal court last week. In it, his attorneys argue that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to carry out his death sentence after his botched execution.

They describe the anguish of the botched execution and say Creech has suffered psychological effects in the months since.

Since that happened, Idaho has announced a change to its lethal injection procedures.

In the court filing, Creech's attorneys say the state has issued 13 death warrants for their client, dating back to 1976.

Attorneys also argue about double jeopardy, saying the law prohibits "multiple punishments for the same offense."

While the federal court considers that request, Creech has filed a petition with the Idaho Supreme Court, appealing a judge's recent decision to halt the execution.

Attorneys also filed a request for an emergency stay of the execution so that his appeal could be fully developed and finalized.

The state responded to those motions, saying the court does not have the authority to issue a stay of execution.

The state says Creech's arguments ignore the "40-plus-year history since murdering David [Jensen] in 1981 and the unnecessary delays therefrom."

The attorney for the state says "unnecessary delay substantially injures the public's trust in the criminal justice system."

The Idaho Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in the case on November 4th.

(source: KXLY news)

INDIA:

Take Proactive Steps To Release Deserving Undertrial Prisoners Under S.479 BNSS : Supreme Court To States/UTs

The Supreme Court on Tuesday (October 22) expressed concern over the inadequate implementation of Section 479 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023, which the maximum period for which undertrial prisoners can be detained.

“A cursory examination of the reports from few of the states and the union territories would indicate that the process of identification of the undertrial who are entitled to benefit under section 479 of BNSS is somewhat deficient”, the Court observed.

Section 479 of BNSS mandates the release of prisoners who have served half the maximum sentence for the alleged crime (except those offence which carry the punishment of life sentence or death penalty). Additionally, first-time offenders, who have never been convicted, are eligible for release after serving one-third of their maximum sentence

“In order to make the process of identification of the deserving undertrials efficient, the Undertrial Review Committee present in each district must play a proactive role by co-ordinating with the Jail Superintendents...The District Legal Services Authority and the State Legal Services Authority should mobilize their panel advocates and para legal volunteers so that the release information of the under trials can be updated. This is necessary as a particular under trial may cross the threshold bar of one third or 50% of the sentence the very next day after the information is collected or thereafter. Therefore this has to be an ongoing process, and steps must be taken to ensure the release of deserving under trials under section 479 BNSS in a proactive way.”

A bench of Justice Hrishikesh Roy and Justice SVN Bhatti was dealing with a writ petition concerning overcrowding in the prisons across India. The Court on August 23, 2024 had held that the beneficial provision of Section 479 of BNSS would apply retrospectively to the undertrials across the country, i.e., to all undertrials in cases registered before July 1, 2024.

The Court had directed jail superintendents nationwide to process applications for the release of eligible undertrials under Section 479, in order to alleviate the issue of prison overcrowding. Further, it had sought reports within two months from each state and union territory detailing the number of undertrials eligible for release, the applications filed for their release, and the number of actual releases.

Today, the Court noted that only 19 states/UTs out of 36 have filed reports. It further observed that the identification process for eligible undertrials under section 479 was lacking in several states and union territories. For example, the report filed by State of Andhra Pradesh indicated that the state had no undertrial prisoners eligible for release under Section 479. The Court noted that if this information is correct, no further comment is required. However, if this is inaccurate, necessary steps must be taken to identify eligible undertrials properly.

Reports from various states and union territories indicated that some eligible undertrials had been identified, and applications for their release were being processed. However, the Court noted release orders were not yet obtained. The Court added that the reports did not indicate why some undertrials, despite being eligible under Section 479, had not yet been released.

The Court directed all states and union territories to submit their respective responses by November 8, 2024, in compliance with the order dated August 23, 2024. It called for the Undertrial Review Committees in each district to play a more proactive role, working with jail superintendents to ensure eligible undertrials are identified and released promptly.

Further, the Court directed all District Legal Services Authorities and State Legal Services Authorities to mobilize their panel advocates and paralegal volunteers to update the release information of undertrials continually.

The Court also highlighted the toll of incarceration, quoting the words of author Oscar Wilde while he was incarcerated –

“I know not whether loss be right or whether laws be wrong all that we know who be in jail is that the jail wall is strong. And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.”

“An under trial who deserves release under the provisions of section 479 BNSS deserves consideration under the beneficial legislation enacted from 1-7-2024 as the agony of the person who is incarcerated can only be felt by the one within before 4 corners of the jail”, the Court observed.

As per the Court's directions, reports from the states and union territories must also include reasons why a particular undertrial, despite falling under the permissible category, has not yet been granted the benefit of release.

Additionally, the suggestions provided by the amicus curiae regarding steps to reduce overcrowding in prisons have to be circulated to all standing counsel of the states and union territories.

The Court kept the case on November 19, 2024.

Case no. – Writ Petition (Civil) No. 406/2013

Case Title – In Re-Inhuman Conditions In 1382 Prisons

(source: livelaw.in)

SRI LANKA:

Court sentences man to death in 24-year-old homicide case

Following a prolonged legal battle, the Galle High Court has delivered a death sentence in a homicide case dating back over 2 decades.

The accused, a 50-year-old resident of Imaduwa, was convicted for the deliberate killing of a man by electrocution on 6 February 2000, using an unauthorised electricity connection in the Koratuhenagoda area.

The court found that the defendant had intentionally set up the illegal connection, leading to the death of the victim, an action which was part of a premeditated plan.

The incident, which occurred within the jurisdiction of the Imaduwa police division, has been the subject of a lengthy judicial process, marked by extensive investigation and deliberation over the years.

The verdict was delivered on 16 October, with the High Court handing down the death penalty, bringing closure to a case that had remained unresolved for nearly 24 years.

This decision reflects the seriousness with which the court viewed the crime, particularly in light of the unlawful use of electricity as a method of murder.

The death penalty, although still legally permitted, is a subject of ongoing debate in Sri Lanka, with human rights advocates calling for its abolition.

Nevertheless, the court’s ruling reaffirms that severe punishment remains an option for cases deemed particularly heinous.

(source: lankanewsweb.net)

*************

MAN SENTENCED TO DEATH FOR MURDER REPORTED 24 YEARS AGO

A man was sentenced to death in Sri Lanka on October 16, 2024 over the murder of a person in Imaduwa in February 2000.

The Police said the man was sentenced by the Galle High Court on October 16, after a long trial.

The man is accused of having illegally tapped into the electricity supply and having carefully planned to cause the victim to be electrocuted, resulting in his death.

The suspect sentenced to death is a 50-year-old resident of Imaduwa.

(source: handsoffcain.info)

MALAYSIA:

Drug case dropped, duo escape death penalty

A man who was putting up at a friend’s house here before he was set to board a ferry to Indonesia but ended up in prison for 5 years for alleged drug trafficking can finally return home now.

Indonesian Zamri Dalit, 51, and his friend, Malaysian Mohd Shah Baba, 49, cried and hugged each other yesterday when the High Court here acquitted them without calling for their defence.

Arrested on July 23, 2019 – a day before Zamri’s planned return home – both men had faced the death penalty if convicted.

Judicial commissioner D. Suria Kumar, in his judgment, said the prosecution had failed to prove that the accused were exclusively in custody and control of the drugs found in the room of a house in Jalan Junir here at 11.35am.

He ruled that there could be the possibility of access by a third party to the said room, and the prosecution had also failed to explain who else had keys to the house.

Zamri and Mohd Shah were charged under Section 39B (1)(a) and 39B (2) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 after they were caught with 1.53kg of methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (MDMA).

Deputy public prosecutor Nur Sulehan Abd Rahman prosecuted the case.

Lawyers Haresh Mahadevan and Ramzani Idris acted for Mohd Shah, while Zamri’s counsels were Selvi Sandrasegaran and Ho Zhi Qian.

(source: thestar.com.my)

ISRAEL:

7 Israeli Citizens Accused of Spying for Iran, Could Face Death Penalty if Convicted

7 Israeli citizens were arrested last month and accused of performing about 600 spy missions for Iran over a two-year period, prosecutors announced on Monday.

The suspects are accused of spying on Israel’s security figures and military bases, the Times of Israel reported. At least 3 of the Israel Defense Forces facilities were targeted by Iran and Hezbollah via missile or drone strikes earlier this month.

“This is one of the most severe cases we’ve ever investigated,” Israeli police chief superintendent Yaron Binyamin said. “There is a real possibility that the main charge will be aiding the enemy in wartime, for which the penalty is death or life imprisonment.”

Miki Zohar, who serves as Israel’s minister of culture and sports, called for the death penalty on anyone convicted of treason during war.

“The phenomenon of traitors to the country harming Israel’s security for the sake of money while we are fighting for our future in an existential war demands the harshest measures, including a law allowing for the death penalty for aiding the enemy in wartime,” Zohar said following news of the alleged Iranian spies. “This is the only way we can create a clear deterrent that will prevent further similar cases.”

Treason is considered grounds for capital punishment in Israel, and has only been imposed twice in the Jewish state’s 76-year history. Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was one of the two people executed by Israel’s judicial system.

All 7 alleged spies, who were arrested on September 19, are residents of Haifa after emigrating from Azerbaijan. The group includes one soldier who left the Israeli military and two minors between 16 and 17. The five adults were identified as Azis Nisanov, Alexander Sadykov, Vyacheslav Gushchin, Yevgeny Yoffe, and Yigal Nissan; the minors’ names were not released.

The Iranian agents scouted IDF locations and gathered intelligence on the components of Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system, according to Israeli authorities. They also provided their handlers with information about where Iranian missiles landed following Tehran’s April attack on Israel, so that Iran could land more precise strikes in the future.

A senior official in the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, concluded the spies’ actions “caused damage to the security of Israel” during its war with Hamas and fighting with other terrorist proxies backed by Iran.

Additionally, the spies collected intelligence on a top figure in Israel’s security establishment with potential plans to assassinate the unnamed official. They received hundreds of thousands of dollars, some in cash and the rest in cryptocurrency, in exchange for their covert efforts, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said they intend to file an indictment against the 7 suspects on Friday and request that they be held in detention during the legal proceedings.

Israel has foiled several alleged Iranian plots, including one involving a Jewish man accused of pursuing an assassination attempt against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and possibly two other high-ranking officials. Israeli authorities indicted the man last month on suspicion of working for Iran. He was arrested in August.

(source: nationalreview.com)

***************

Death penalty for spying? A look at how Israel deals with traitors----The uncovering of a serious espionage case linked to Iran has sparked debates over the appropriate punishment for spies, with some lawmakers urging the consideration of capital punishment

The expected indictment against the Israelis at the center of the serious espionage case for Iran that was revealed on Monday could be severe according to the police, mainly due to the long period during which the seven suspects allegedly operated on behalf of Tehran, reaching 2 years.

The indictment is set to be filed on Friday, though charges against the suspects have already been determined. In the past, the most serious espionage charges were brought against Israeli atomic technician Mordechai Vanunu, who leaked information and photos from the nuclear reactor in Dimona. He was charged with severe espionage charges and even treason, convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Israel's Penal Code divides espionage charges into 5 different crimes, each with distinct characteristics, severity and penalties. The serious crimes of espionage and passing information to the enemy can lead to prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life imprisonment.

For instance, former Israeli minister Gonen Segev was charged with espionage for Iran and convicted of espionage, but not treason, resulting in an 11-year prison sentence. Amir Makhoul, who spied for Hezbollah, was similarly sentenced to 9 years in prison in 2011. Journalist Anat Kamm was convicted of espionage and unauthorized disclosure of classified information, receiving a 3 1/2-year prison sentence

The significant differences in sentencing stem from the law's clear distinction between someone who spied and gathered security information and someone who did so without passing the information to the enemy.

In Kamm's case, she provided the information to Haaretz journalist Uri Blau. The treason offense, which could be linked to this case as it was for Vanunu, comprises seven serious charges, with the most severe ones carrying the possibility of the death penalty. However, these offenses are not expected to be included in the current indictment.

Meanwhile, lawmakers have started calling for harsh punitive measures against the suspects, including the death penalty. "The phenomenon of traitors who harm Israel's security for monetary gain, while we're fighting for our future, requires the use of the harshest measures, including a death penalty law," Culture and Sports Miki Zohar wrote on his X account (formerly Twitter). "This is the only way we can create a clear deterrent to prevent similar cases."

Interior Minister Moshe Arbel instructed the advisory committee to consider revoking the citizenship of the Israelis suspected of espionage for Iran. "The State of Israel, as a nation that values life, will act alongside stricter enforcement against breaches of trust, to expel and denounce those who act against it," he said. "This is how we should act, and God willing, this is how we will proceed."

(source: ynetnews.com)

SAUDI ARABIA----executions

2 Saudis executed for planning suicide attack, joining terrorist group----The acts of terror by the duo resulted in the deaths of several security personnel

2 Saudis were executed on Monday for committing acts of terrorism in the country, the Ministry of Interior announced on Monday.

The 2 citizens, Khalid bin Muhammad bin Talal Al-Shahrani and Omar bin Dhafar bin Ali Al-Shahrani, committed multiple acts of terrorism, including joining a terrorist entity, collaborating with its members, financing terrorism, and participating in terrorist acts that resulted in the deaths of several security personnel.

The duo used weapons and suicide belts to target security facilities, backed by a terrorist ideology that 'justified shedding blood and violating the sanctity of property and honour, aiming to disrupt the security and stability of society'.

The 2 individuals were sentenced to death after being referred to the Public Prosecution, where charges were brought against them for these acts. This ruling became final after being appealed and upheld by the Supreme Court.

The death sentence was carried out on Monday in Riyadh.

(source: Khaleej Times)

IRAN----executions

10 Prisoners Executed in Different Prisons Across Iran----The death sentences of 10 prisoners were carried out in the prisons of Qom, Jiroft, Isfahan, and Malayer.

2 Prisoners Executed in Jiroft: According to the Iran Human Rights Organization, two prisoners were executed early on Monday, October 21, 2024, in Jiroft Prison. They have been identified as Mohammad Farhadzadeh and Hamid Chatr Simabeh (Sabaki), both around 40 years old. Farhadzadeh had been imprisoned for seven years on murder charges, while Chatr Simabeh had been detained for the same period on charges of “waging war against God” for his involvement in a confrontation and the murder of a police officer.

5 Executions in Qom Over 40 Days: In the past 40 days, 5 prisoners convicted of murder were executed in Qom Prison. 1 of these, Milad Badinlou, was executed on September 7, 2024. 2 others, executed on October 10, 2024, were identified as Shahin Dehghani and Abdulqadir (last name unknown), an Afghan national. Additionally, on October 16, 2024, Hassan Khodabandelou and another Afghan national were also executed.

2 Prisoners Executed in Isfahan: On Wednesday, October 16, 2024, Mohammad Ashoori, 32 years old, was executed in Isfahan Prison after spending 6 years in detention on murder charges. Another execution took place on Thursday, October 17, in the same prison, where Mohammad Reza Mahjour was also put to death for murder.

Prisoner Executed in Malayer: On Sunday, October 20, 2024, Mohammad Saberi was executed in Malayer Prison. He had been incarcerated for 2 years on drug-related charges and was sentenced to death.

As of this report, prison officials and relevant authorities have not publicly confirmed the executions.

According to the Department of Statistics and Publication of Human Rights Activists in Iran, in 2023, at least 767 citizens, including 21 women and 2 juvenile offenders, were executed. Of these, the executions of 7 individuals were carried out in public. Additionally, during this period, 172 others were sentenced to death, with 5 of them sentenced to public execution. It is worth noting that during the same period, the initial death sentences of 49 other individuals were also upheld by the Supreme Court.

(source: en-hrana.org)

**********

Verisheh Moradi enters 12th day of indefinite hunger strike in Evin Prison

Kurdish political prisoner Verisheh Moradi has entered the 12th day of her indefinite hunger strike protesting the use of death sentences in Iran.

A member of the East Kurdistan Free Women Society (KJAR), Moradi is currently being held in Tehran’s Evin Prison, facing charges of “armed insurrection” (baghi).

Moradi, who began her hunger strike on 10 October to coincide with World Day against the Death Penalty, is suffering from low blood pressure, joint pain and insomnia, the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) has learned.

Despite the recommendations of the medical staff at Evin Prison, she has so far refused to accept an IV.

Moradi, who has been held in pretrial detention since August 2023, has also stopped receiving physiotherapy treatment for joint and back pain, which she began a few months before the strike.

In a letter published by Radio Zamaneh, Moradi explained her reasons for going on hunger strike: “Do not let the transnational wars overshadow the internal repression. My hunger strike is part of that effort. We will not at any cost allow the voices of the internal fighters who have bravely stood up to be drowned out by the noise of wars and futile adventures”, she wrote.

The political prisoner remains committed to the hunger strike, writing: “I will continue my indefinite hunger strike until the protests and the clear, explicit stance of the ‘No to Executions’ campaigns around the world, launched by groups, organisations, and international bodies to stop the executions, bear fruit.”

Moradi’s case was reviewed in two court sessions at the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Tehran, in June and October this year, with the hearings presided over by Judge Abolghassem Salavati.

She had previously refused to attend an earlier hearing on 4 August in protest against the death sentences handed to fellow Kurdish political prisoners, Pakshan Azizi and Sharifeh Mohammadi, leading to the postponement of the session.

On the same day, Moradi had her letter and defence statement published on the Bidarzani website, announcing her refusal to attend the court session as a form of protest against the death sentences handed down to Azizi and Mohammadi.

In part of her letter published by Bidarzani website, Moradi wrote: “The unjust execution sentences of activists Sharifeh Mohammadi and Pakhshan Azizi within less than a month is the Islamic Republic’s admission of its political ineffectiveness and helplessness. The new government’s pretence of strength, fear-mongering and expansion of repression on the brink of the Women, Life and Freedom revolution is nothing but a vain illusion. In this context, I have been accused of ‘armed insurrection’ because I am a woman, a Kurd and I want to live in freedom. Now, after a year of temporary detention, I am waiting for the second court session in Branch 15 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Salavati, on 4 August. Although I know that not attending the court could be interpreted as a refusal to defend myself, I will not go to court in protest against the death sentences handed down to my comrades Sharifeh Mohammadi and Pakhshan Azizi, and I do not recognise a court that does not issue fair judgments.”

Continuing her letter, she wrote: “On 1 August 2023, I was arrested by the forces of the Ministry of Intelligence at the Sanandaj-Kamyaran checkpoint. Shooting, breaking car windows, torture and physical assault at the moment of arrest, psychological warfare, interrogation in solitary confinement (white torture) away from cameras to prevent recording of their misconduct and unethical assaults, and humiliation in front of the camera to break my will – these were part of the pressures I endured during the 13 days I spent in the Ministry of Intelligence in Sanandaj. They called me savage and said I had lost my femininity! Why do you not cry? When was the last time you cried? When did you last smell a flower? Then they transferred me to Ward 209 of Evin House of Detention, where I spent four and a half months under intense pressure during interrogations that included torture, contradictory and deceptive fabricated scenarios, threats of character assassination and forced confessions. Severe headaches and constant bleeding (from the nose), worsening neck and back pain were the gifts of my days in solitary confinement.”

The first hearing, originally scheduled for 13 May, was cancelled for undisclosed reasons, and on 14 May Judge Salavati ordered Moradi’s transfer to solitary confinement in Ward 209 for further interrogation.

Pakhshan Azizi and Moradi went on a hunger strike for 2 days in protest at the transfer.

Moradi, a member of the East Kurdistan Free Women Society (KJAR) from Sanandaj, Kurdistan Province, was arrested by the Ministry of Intelligence on 1 August 2023 at the entrance to Sanandaj upon her return from Kermanshah, Kermanshah Province, where she had been involved in political and organisational activities.

She spent the first 13 days of her detention in the detention centre of this security institution in Sanandaj, and afterwards was transferred to Ward 209 of Evin Prison in Tehran.

During this period, she was subjected to pressure and threats to make forced confessions, and on 26 December 2023, after 5 months of solitary confinement, she was transferred to the women’s ward of Evin Prison.

(source: kurdistanhumanrights.org)

**************

Execution Rates Soar: 147 Executions in recent Iranian Month of Mehr, Surpassing Previous Years----Alarming Surge in Executions: 342 Put to Death Under Pezeshkian’s Administration, Including 13 Women

In a troubling development, the Iranian regime, led by Ali Khamenei, has intensified its use of capital punishment as it faces mounting fears of uprising and potential overthrow. The Iranian month of Mehr (September 22 to October 21) has seen a staggering 147 confirmed executions, marking a new high in recent years – even surpassing the rates during the presidency of Raisi, notorious for his role in the 1988 mass executions. It’s worth noting that the actual number is likely higher, with updates expected in future reports.

Since July, coinciding with Pezeshkian’s tenure, the grim tally has reached at least 342 executions, including 13 women.

Today, Monday, October 21, 2024, executioners hanged 2 prisoners named Mohammad Farhadzadeh and Hamid Chatrsimaab in Jiroft Prison.

On Sunday, October 20, 2024, 5 prisoners, including Mohammad Saberi in Malayer and another prisoner in Tabriz, were executed. The names of 3 others were mentioned in the previous statement.

On October 19, 3 prisoners were executed, on October 16, 18 prisoners, and on October 13, 12 prisoners were executed, whose names have been previously announced. On October 17, 8 people were executed, with 7 names previously announced. The 8th person is Mohammad Reza Mahjour, who was hanged in Isfahan prison.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)

*********************

In Fear of Uprising And Overthrow, Khamenei Sets A New Record of Executions And Crimes----18 executions on October 16; 337 executions, including 13 women, during the tenure of Pezeshkian

On Sunday, October 20, Ali Khamenei’s henchmen hanged a female prisoner named Nastaran Firoozi along with 2 other prisoners named Hassan Yousefi and Siamak Molaei in Tabriz, and a prisoner named Bahman Sheikh Hosseini, aged 32, in Birjand.

On October 19, Behzad Ghaffari and Javad Ebrahimi were executed in Tabriz prison, and Reza Abbasi was hanged in Rasht prison. On Wednesday, October 16, 18 prisoners were subjected to a brutal mass execution. Among those executed were Yousef Shirvani and Jafar Sami in Zanjan, Mohammad Ashoori in Isfahan, Ramin Mohammadvand in Dezful, Rahmat Rahim Pour and Rashid Ataei in Torbat-e Jam, a prisoner named Nemat in Urmia, Reza Karimi Zarasvand in Farrokhshahr of Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, and another prisoner in Qezelhessar prison. The names of nine other executed individuals were previously announced.

On Thursday, October 17, in addition to the execution of six prisoners whose names were announced on October 18, Mahmoud Bamari was executed in Kahnuj. On October 13, twelve prisoners were executed, with the names of ten of them having been previously announced. 2 other prisoners named Ali Najari and Ali Asghar Kujvari were also executed in Tabriz on that same day.

On October 17, Noor Ali Koohkan died in Zabol prison due to a lack of medical care.

Thus, the number of prisoners executed since August and during the tenure of Massoud Pezeshkian has reached at least 337, including 13 women, which is significantly higher than in previous comparable periods.

The Iranian regime, surrounded by internal and external crises and struggling in the quagmire of a war it was the primary instigator of, has resorted to increased executions out of fear of uprising and overthrow. The Iranian Resistance calls on the United Nations, relevant organizations, the European Union, and its member states to take urgent action to save the lives of prisoners on death row. Inaction in the face of this wave of executions is seen by the mullahs’ regime as a green light to continue its crimes.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)

(source for both: ncr-iran.org)

**************

5 Executed in Qom; Mohsen Zand at Imminent Risk of Execution

5 men including 2 Afghan nationals were executed for murder charges in Qom Central Prison. Mohsen Zand is scheduled to be executed in the coming days if the victim’s family do not change their mind.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Qom Central Prison on 7 October. His identity has been established as Milad Badinlu who was arrested for murder in a street fight and sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) by the Criminal Court.

Furthermore, 2 men were executed at the prison on 10 October. Their identities have been established as Shahin Dehghani and Afghan national Abdolghader (surname unknown) who were both on death row for murder.

On 16 October, 2 other men were executed at the prison. 1 of the men has been identified as Mohsen Khodabandehlu. The 2nd man who was an Afghan national has not been identified at the time of writing. They were also sentenced to qisas for murder.

A 6th man named Mohsen Zand was transferred to pre-execution cells and is scheduled to be hanged if the victim’s family do not change their mind.

At the time of writing, their executions have not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the second highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

***************

Mehdi Cheraghi at Imminent Risk of Execution in Ghorveh Prison----"Last night, many community elders and people went outside the home of the victim’s family, if they don’t change their mind, he’ll be executed within hours.”

Mehdi Cheraghi, a man on death row for murder, has been transferred to the pre-execution solitary confinement cells in Ghorveh Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was transferred to solitary confinement in preparation for his execution in Ghorveh Prison. His identity has been established as Mehdi Cheraghi from Ghorveh who was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) by the Criminal Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Mehdi Cheraghi was arrested for murder a few years ago. Last night, many community elders and people went outside the home of the victim’s family, if they don’t change their mind, he’ll be executed within hours.”

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

****************

Mohammad Farhadzadeh and Hamid Chatrsimabeh Executed in Jiroft

Mohammad Farhadzadeh and Hamid Chatrsimabeh were executed for murder and moharebeh charges in Jiroft Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, two men were executed in Jiroft Prison in Kerman province on 21 October. Mohammad Farhadzadeh (left photo) was arrested seven years ago and sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

The second man’s identity has been established as 40-year-old Hamid Chatrsimabeh (Sabaki) from Goldasht who was sentenced to qisas by the Criminal Court and “moharebeh (enmity against god) through clashing and killing a NAJA officer” by the Revolutionary Court.

Per informed IHRNGO sources, the victim’s family had agreed to forgo execution in the qisas case, the moharebeh sentence was carried out.

At the time of writing, their executions have not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

**************

Mohammad Saberi Executed in Malayer

Mohammad Saber, a man on death row for drug-related offences, was executed in Malayer Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Malayer Prison 20 October. His identity has been established as Mohammad Saberi. He was arrested around two years ago and sentenced to death for drug-related charges by the Revolutionary Court.

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

**************

Woman and 5 Men Executed in Tabriz

Behzad Ghafari, Javad Ebrahimi, Mohammad Amin Nourafkan, Hassan Yousefi, Siamak Mulaii and a woman only identified as Ms Firouzi were executed for drug-related and murder charges in Tabriz Central Prison on Saturday and Sunday.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, 2 men were executed in Tabriz Central Prison on 19th October. Their identities have been established as Behzad Ghaffari, around 40 years old and 35-year-old Javad Ebrahimi who were sentenced to death for drug-related charges by the Revolutionary Court in a joint case.

Furthermore, 3 men and a woman were executed at the prison on 20th October. The woman has only been identified as Ms Firouzi who was alleged to have murdered her husband. 2 of the men were also sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder. Their identities have been established as Hassan Yousefi and 45-year-old Siamak Mulaii (left photo) who were co-defendants in the case.

The 4th man executed has been identified as 38-year-old Mohammad Amin Nourafkan who was on death row for drug-related offences.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Behzad Ghaffari and Javad Ebrahimi were both Tabriz natives arrested for drug charges 3 years ago.”

“Hassan Yousefi and Siamak Mulaii were also co-defendants arrested for murder 4 years ago. Mohammad Amin Nourafkan was a father arrested for drug offences 2 years ago.”

At the time of writing, none of their executions have been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

*************

Reza Abbasi Executed in Rasht

Reza Abbasi, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Rasht Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Rasht (Lakan) Central Prison on 19 October. His identity has been established as 29-year-old Reza Abbasi from Rasht. He was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Reza Abbasi was arrested for murder during a group fight 4 years ago and sentenced to qisas.”

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

***********

Mohammadreza Mahjour Executed in Isfahan

Mohammadreza Mahjour, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Isfahan Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Isfahan (Dastgerd) Central Prison on 17 October. His identity has been established as Mohammadreza Mahjour who was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Revolutionary Court.

IHRNGO previously reported the execution of Abbas Karimi and Mohammad Ali Najafi, which brings the number of executions at the prison to 3 that day.

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

(source for all: iranhr.net)

OCTOBER 21, 2024:

TEXAS:

Anti-death penalty activists protest in Texas against capital punishment----Advocates said they are fighting for innocent people like Robert Roberson, who is currently on death row

Anti-death penalty advocates held a rally over the weekend in Texas calling for capital punishment to be abolished, as several high-profile death row cases in Texas and other states have sparked debate over whether the death penalty should remain.

Former death row inmates spoke at the 25th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty on Saturday, according to Fox 26. The march held each fall features state abolitionists, former death row inmates and allies opposing capital punishment who all gather together to demand an end to the state-sanctioned death of inmates on death row.

Many of the advocates said they are fighting for innocent people like Robert Roberson, who is currently on death row over his conviction in which prosecutors say he killed his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, by shaking her to death, known as shaken baby syndrome. But his lawyers say Nikki actually died from other health issues such as pneumonia and that new evidence proves his innocence. His lawyers also said doctors had failed to rule out these other medical explanations for the child's symptoms.

Roberson was scheduled to be put to death on Thursday before the state Supreme Court issued a stay to delay his execution shortly before it was set to take place. He would have been the first person in the U.S. to be executed based on shaken baby syndrome.

The delay was issued Thursday night after a bipartisan group of state lawmakers subpoenaed Roberson to testify Monday about his case. The ruling came after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals earlier Thursday night denied a motion for a stay of execution, reversing a judge's temporary injunction that was handed down earlier that day.

More than 80 Texas state lawmakers, as well as the detective who helped the prosecution, medical experts, parental rights groups, human rights groups, bestselling novelist John Grisham and other advocates have called for the state to grant Roberson clemency over the belief that he is innocent. A group of state lawmakers also visited Roberson in prison to encourage him.

At the rally in Texas, former death row inmate Pamala Tise said she was locked up for a total of 40 years.

Tise was sentenced to death at the age of 24 following her conviction on 2 counts of capital murder, Fox 26 reported. Her initial conviction was overturned in 1983, but she was again sentenced to death after a retrial. The following year, she was placed back on death row and remained there until 2000.

"I was not innocent of my crime. When I did my crime, I was on a lot of drugs and when I came off the drugs a week later and realized what we had done, I turned myself into the police," Tise said, according to Fox 26.

But in 2000, her conviction was overturned because of a conflict of interests. She was taken off death row following a plea bargain that reduced her capital murder charges to two counts of aggravated robbery.

"So I went in at 24 and came out at 64," said Tise, who now campaigns against the death penalty.

"Having someone be executed, to me, would be the easy way out. Spending the rest of your life in prison is a living hell," Tise added.

Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement organizer Gloria Rubac said "Harris County has more people on death row than any state."

The activists said they hope a court will hear the new evidence in Roberson's case when he testifies on Monday.

(source: Fox News)

*************

How does Texas’ ‘junk science’ law apply to the Robert Roberson death row case?----The 2013 law allows people to challenge their convictions based on new scientific evidence that was not available at the time of the trial.

On Monday, Robert Roberson is set to testify before a committee of the Texas Legislature — the 1st time a person on death row has had such an opportunity.

Roberson was set to be executed Thursday, but the evening before the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee voted 7-0 to subpoena him to appear before the panel. They want him to discuss how the state’s “junk science” law allowing people to challenge convictions with new science was applied in his case.

Roberson, 57, was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for reportedly shaking his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, to death. He has maintained his innocence in his two decades on death row, and doubt has been cast on his conviction due to the “shaken baby syndrome” theory partially used to convict him being later disputed.

“Although our focus is Robert Roberson, we’re here because his case has shined a light on our new science writ law,” Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, said at the hearing Wednesday. “Every member of this committee has been surprised by how it has been applied in this particular case.”

The law, passed in 2013, allows people to challenge their convictions based on new scientific evidence that was not available at the time of the trial. Roberson’s original execution date in 2016 was stayed to allow him to receive a hearing under the “junk science” law. That hearing was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and took place in 2022, the Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell testified Wednesday.

Experts for the state maintained blunt force trauma as the cause of Nikki’s death, Mitchell recalled, and experts for Roberson testified Nikki died from complications related to severe pneumonia. The Anderson County district court determined Roberson did not meet the criteria for relief with the evidence presented, a decision the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld.

Roberson is not the only person on death row whose request for relief has been denied under the “junk science” law, according to a report by the Texas Defender Service.

The report, which was presented at Wednesday’s hearing, did not find a single instance of the appeals court using this law to grant relief to a person facing the death penalty. The criminal appeals court also grants relief predominately in DNA cases, the report said, giving less consideration to other types of false forensic evidence.

Roberson will be among several witnesses to testify at Monday’s committee hearing, Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, told conservative radio host Mark Davis on Friday.

(source: Dallas Morning News)

************

Texas' junk science law is getting another look over Robert Roberson's case

When Robert Roberson's execution was abruptly halted in Texas, it was due to a subpoena ordering him to testify over a legal backstop that both Republicans and Democrats say should had saved him long ago: Texas’ junk science law.

The 2013 law allows a person convicted of a crime to seek relief if the evidence used against them is no longer credible. At the time, it was hailed by the Legislature as a uniquely future-proof solution to wrongful convictions based on faulty science. But Roberson's supporters say his case points to faults in the judicial system where the law has been weakened by deliberate misinterpretation from the state's highest criminal court.

On Monday, Roberson is scheduled to testify to members of a state House committee, 4 days after he had been scheduled to die by lethal injection.

“He’s seen how the prosecution has really stood in the way of bringing new science forward,” Democratic state Rep. John Bucy told The Associated Press. “I think his first hand account will be helpful for that.”

Roberson, 57, was convicted of murder the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in Palestine, Texas. Prosecutors alleged that he violently shook his daughter back and forth, causing fatal head trauma. A bipartisan group of lawmakers, medical experts and the former lead prosecutor on the case have thrown their support behind Roberson, stating that his conviction is based on flawed science.

In his clemency petition to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, several medical professionals wrote that Roberson's conviction is based on outdated scientific evidence and that Curtis likely died from complications with severe pneumonia.

Shaken baby syndrome — now referred to as abusive head trauma — was a popular misdiagnosis at the time that has largely been debunked, according to Roberson's attorneys.

Courts have rejected numerous attempts by his attorneys to hear new evidence in the case, and Texas' parole board voted to not recommend Roberson clemency, a necessary step for Abbott to stay the execution. The governor has not commented on Roberson's case.

No one facing execution has had their sentence overturned since the junk science law was enacted in 2013, according to a report by civil rights group Texas Defender Service.

In the last 10 years, 74 applications have been filed and ruled on under the junk science law. 1/3 of applications were submitted by people facing the death penalty. All of them were unsuccessful.

Of the applications that led to relief, nearly three-quarters were for convictions related to DNA evidence despite making up less than half of all applications.

Legal experts suggest the reason for this is the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals misinterpreting the law and assessing applicants based on their innocence rather than the evidence.

“In practice, the CCA is applying a much higher standard than what the legislators wrote,” said Burke Butler, executive director for Texas Defender Service. “It (proving innocence) is a virtually impossible bar for anyone to meet,” she said, adding that DNA claims are likely more successful because the court can point to another perpetrator.

A House committee is set to discuss how the junk science law has failed to work as intended. In their subpoena to block the court's execution warrant, lawmakers argued that Roberson's testimony is vital to understanding its ineffectiveness.

Prosecutors have stated that the evidence in Roberson's case has not changed significantly since his conviction. The Anderson County District Attorney Office did not respond to phone calls and voice messages Friday from The Associated Press.

Texas' junk science law was the first of its kind in 2013 and a model for other states across the country, according to legal experts. California, Connecticut, Michigan, Nevada and Wyoming have similar “junk science” statutes, but it has not been studied how successful they are at overturning death penalty convictions.

There are many instances when prosecutors rely on inconsistent or faulty evidence during trial, and junk science laws can be a necessary tool to combat wrongful convictions, according to University of Oklahoma law professor Jim Hilbert.

“The Roberson case is a classic case that the Texas law was meant to address,” Hilbert, who has written about discredited science used in criminal trials, said.

“It has had a positive impact, but in such a limited way. There is so much more it can do.”

(source: newsday.com)

VIRGINIA:

Former death row inmate turned jailhouse lawyer dies at 67

It was a blood clot in his lung, not the electric chair, that ultimately killed Joseph M. Giarratano, who spent years on Virginia's death row and became a well-regarded legal scholar and advocate for prisoners' rights.

Giarratano died on Oct. 6 at his home in Charlottesville. He was 67.

Joe Giarratano became a household name in Virginia after being found guilty of murder and rape. Speculation around the integrity of his conviction, which was pinned to his own hazy confession, fueled activism for his release.

Joe Giarratano was Mecklenburg Correctional Center's "jailhouse lawyer." He was granted parole in 2017 by the Virginia Parole Board, which was then under the tenure of Adrienne Bennett.

Giarratano was convicted of the Feb. 4, 1979, rape and capital murder of Michelle Kline and the murder of her mother, Toni Kline, in Norfolk. Giarratano was living with the family.

After several confessions, he later said he had no recollection of what happened in their apartment, having blacked out under the influence of drugs and alcohol. He said he woke, discovered the bodies, assumed he was guilty and fled.

That month, Giarratano entered a bus station in Florida, his home state, where he approached an off-duty police officer and stated that he might have killed his 2 friends.

Giarratano was given the death sentence after a 4-hour bench trial — which is when a judge, rather than a jury, determines a person’s guilt. That same year, Giarratano was scheduled to die in the electric chair.

Questions about his guilt morphed into years of advocacy for Giarratano's innocence. His cause was picked up by celebrities and pro bono lawyers who dug up evidence that had not been presented at trial.

At one point, Amnesty International purchased a billboard on the Downtown Expressway. The billboard read: “Is Joe Giarratano Innocent? Will we kill him without knowing?"

While imprisoned at Mecklenburg Correctional Center, Giarratano orchestrated a last-minute intervention that saved the life of Earl Washington, an intellectually disabled man who had been coerced into a false confession for a murder in Culpeper in 1982.

Washington was days away from execution and had no attorney. In a video interview in 2021, Giarratano recalled asking Washington why he was on death row. Washington, who could not read or write, replied that he didn’t know.

(source: Richmond Times-Dispatch)

INDIANA:

The only death row inmate in America who is begging to die is finally given execution date

A quadruple murderer who has repeatedly asked to be killed is finally set to be executed after 25 years on death row.

Joseph Corcoran, 49, murdered his brother James and 3 other men in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in July of 1997, and was sentenced to death after a trial in 1999.

The then 22-year-old had been living in a home with his brother, his sister Kelly and her fiancé Robert Turner at the time of the murders.

He claimed he heard his brother, brother-in-law, Timothy Bricker and Doug Stillwell talking about him while he was upstairs.

Enraged, he armed himself with a Ruger Mini-14 assault rifle and stormed downstairs, opening fire on the unsuspecting group, killing them within 6 seconds.

Last month the Indiana Supreme Court issued a notice that he would be killed by lethal injection on December 18.

While his attorneys are continuing to fight on his behalf, arguing he is too mentally ill to execute, Corcoran has previously said he wants to die.

In 2006 he wrote to a Fort Wayne newspaper and said: 'I believe the death penalty is a just punishment for murder. I'm guilty of murder, therefore I should be executed.'

He continued: 'Why give such a person life in prison? If they kill someone, they've won the lottery; they get free room and board for the rest of their life.

'Therefore, it is my opinion that the death penalty is a just punishment for murder'. he added.

Corcoran also attempted to have his right to appeal the death sentence waived at the time of his conviction.

Addressing the court, he said: 'Do I have the right to waive my appeal? I wish to waive my appeals.'

He was found to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia after being imprisoned for the murders.

In a July court filing in the Indiana Supreme Court, it was revealed that Corcoran has daily delusions that prison guards are torturing him with an ultrasound machine.

It also said that he has conversations with individuals who are not there, and that he suffers from an involuntary speech order.

He also believes that his thoughts are broadcast throughout the prison, and that he says embarrassing things that make people act hostile towards him in his sleep.

Citing the opinions of medical professionals, his lawyers have tried to argue that his mental health problems are what have prompted his wish to die.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Robert Kaplan previously testified at a post-conviction hearing that he was not competent to waive his appeals.

Kaplan noted that: 'One of the reasons that he wants to die is because he doesn't want to continue to suffer with this speech disorder that he doesn't really have.

'Another reason he wants to die is because he doesn't want to continue to be a victim of the guards' ultrasound machine. And that is a highly bizarre belief.'

At the time of the murders, Corcoran told his niece to stay in her room, loaded his assault rifle with 28 high velocity rounds and made his way downstairs.

Within 6 seconds he had shot his brother 3 times, Bricker twice and put 4 bullets into Turner.

The men all died instantly. Stillwell bolted from the couch and into the kitchen where Corcoran gave chase, before he shot him 4 times.

Following the quadruple murder, he lay down his rifle and appeared at a neighbor's house where he asked them to call the police.

A search of his room and secure attic turned up over 30 firearms, munitions, explosives, guerilla tactic military guides and a copy of The Turner Diaries.

The Turner Diaries is a notorious book written by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce concerning a race war within the US.

The book has been described as being the 'bible of the racist right' by the FBI and has been inspiration for attacks such as the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

Corcoran would later explain that he had been under stress due to his sister's upcoming marriage, which meant he had to move out of the home.

He told officers that his real intention was to intimidate the group, saying: 'It just didn't happen that way.'

He asserted an insanity defense based upon his self diagnosis as having either a paranoid or schizotypal personality disorder.

Court ordered psychiatrists who evaluated him later concluded that he was competent to stand trial.

Earlier in 1992 he had been acquitted of killing his parents at their home in Steuben County. Jack and Kathryn Corcoran had died from shotgun blasts.

The Steuben County trial heard testimony that he had a preoccupation with guns and murder, and allegedly offered people money to murder his parents.

According to a local newspaper article at the time seen by WANE, police believed he killed his parents with a 12-gauge and then got on the bus to school.

Prosecutors in the case argued that he killed his parents after they sold a car he thought would go to him, burned his music tapes and made him go to church.

The investigation into their deaths remains ongoing but is at a standstill.

Officials with the Steuben County Sheriff's Department told the outlet that the acquittal left it open, but there were no active leads.

Following the death of her brother James, Corcoran's sister Kelly told reporters: 'I knew right then and there that he killed my parents.'

She continued; 'I've cried so many tears. I'm dry, everything's gone. He's ruined my life.'

Despite his lawyers arguing that by executing Corcoran the state would be violating his 8th amendment, they are pushing forward with it.

The order read: 'It is ordered that execution of the death sentence imposed on Joseph E. Corcoran be carried out on Dec. 18, 2024 before the hour of sunrise.'

Federal appeals from Corcoran came to an end in 2016. He is currently being held at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.

His lead attorney Larry Komp told the Indiana Capital Chronicle that they would be seeking a last minute plea with a clemency petition.

The execution of Corcoran will be the first in the state since 2009, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The last was death penalty carried out was on Matthew Eric Wrinkles, who was killed for the triple murder of his wife, her brother and sister-in-law.

The decade plus pause has been attributed to the unavailability of lethal injection drugs.

Earlier this year the Department of Corrections revealed that they had managed to acquired the sedative Pentobarbital after 'years of effort'.

His execution will be the 1st in the state since 2009, according to the Death Penalty Information Center

The use of the drug has never previously been used in Indiana, but Governor Eric Holcomb said he was 'comfortable' with the option.

Since the state announced that they had managed to procure the drug, despite a shortage, they have remained tight lipped over how they got their hands on it.

The Department of Corrections has consistently denied requests for information.

Holcomb said: 'We've done our due diligence, and we've tracked this particular drug, and feel comfortable that not only it's the right drug, but also that the protocol is in place, and we're prepared to carry out our duties.

'We've been working on this for seven years, and I would say — through no fault of anyone — it's been harder to get for various reasons.

'When such evil is on display, I personally believe in this. I respect others that don't. The will of the people will be carried out, and it's the law of our land.'

The state currently has eight people on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Some states have been looking for new ways to execute inmates after drugs used in lethal injections became increasingly difficult to find. Alabama was the first state to use nitrogen gas in an execution earlier this year.

(source: dailymail.co.uk)

USA:

Defending Capital Punishment: A Response to Dennis Uhlman

Is Uhlman’s position that all executions for murder violate pro-life principles, or only executions for which there is some residual doubt of guilt, however small? In any system run by fallible human beings, however well-intended, mistakes are possible. Is the mere possibility of error enough to reject the death penalty in its entirety? Or is his position that wrongful executions are so common in the United States that the pro-life advocate should reject capital punishment as applied in this country at this time?

In his recent essay in Public Discourse, Dennis Uhlman makes a variety of arguments against the death penalty. Some of these are indictments of the American criminal justice system as a whole: e.g., there is too much plea bargaining, poor defendants cannot afford the best defense attorneys, public defenders are “overworked and under-resourced,” we rely too much on eyewitness testimony, and the system takes too little account of the effect of childhood trauma on future criminality. But Uhlman does little (in some cases nothing at all) to connect these general critiques to the use of the death penalty in the twenty-seven American states, and the federal government, that retain capital punishment.

Should Eyewitness Testimony Be Excluded from Capital Trials?

Consider eyewitness testimony. Uhlman writes that “our justice system relies on a faulty system of plea bargains and eyewitness testimony to sentence men and women to death.” Later he explains that “eyewitness accounts . . . can be corrupted by the motives and personal animosities of the individual witness.” But of course. That is precisely why eyewitnesses face cross-examination. Perhaps the witness had faulty eyesight. Perhaps the light was bad. Perhaps the witness had corrupt motives. It is the jury’s responsibility to assess the reliability of eyewitness accounts. Surely, if one person sees another person kill a third person, that evidence must be allowed in court. Would Uhlman ban eyewitness testimony from all murder trials?

Can Public Defenders Provide an Adequate Defense?

Or consider the charge that public defenders are “overworked and under-resourced.” This is a familiar refrain; but note that Uhlman provides no evidence that in capital cases—a tiny subset of all violent crime cases—public defenders lack the experience, time, and resources (such as relevant experts) to provide an adequate defense. In By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, Edward Feser and I present considerable evidence that, in general, public defenders in capital cases are well-qualified and well-resourced. Moreover, if a defendant believes he received an inadequate defense, he may raise this on appeal in both state and federal courts. Sometimes defendants succeed in these appeals and receive a new trial or a new sentencing hearing.

Does Childhood Trauma Make the Death Penalty Unjust?

It is not clear what Uhlman’s larger point is regarding the connection between early childhood trauma and future violent behavior. He denies that his views lead to “an overly therapeutic view of restorative justice.” Here, “overly” carries a lot of weight, and one would like to know just how “therapeutic” his understanding is of what justice demands in the most serious murder cases. Apparently, childhood trauma would not rule out such a severe punishment as life behind bars: “These arguments against capital punishment are not arguments against life in prison. Justice is a vital part of our system and the families of victims deserve to see that our culture takes crime seriously.” So, perhaps what Uhlman means is that evidence of prior trauma should be admitted in a capital murder case as a mitigating factor when the jury considers whether to recommend a sentence of death.

But, as he must know, this is happening already. For nearly half a century the Supreme Court has held that in a sentencing hearing in a capital murder case, the defense may enter into evidence “any aspect of a defendant’s character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death.”

Does Capital Punishment Violate the Pro-Life Ethic?

Uhlman’s principal objection to the application of the death penalty in the United States is “the truth . . . that the capital punishment system is taking innocent lives.” Such injustices violate “the pro-life viewpoint.” Here Uhlman intertwines two distinct arguments, in a way that can be difficult to sort out.

The broader argument is that the death penalty in itself, apart from any imperfections in its application, is contrary to pro-life principles: “A question that must be considered is whether there is ever a time when capital punishment is justified. For the defender of life, the answer is no.” Beyond the simple fact that capital punishment takes a life, Uhlman does not explain why it is never justified. He does not, for example, address whether taking a human life in self-defense or in a just war violates the “pro-life ethic.” Uhlman writes, “While the justice system can be reasonably certain of guilt, the certainty that would merit execution is largely impossible.” This suggests that some murderers “merit execution” if we can be sufficiently certain of their guilt. Yet in some cases, such as a mass murderer apprehended at the scene, there is no doubt at all as to who committed the crime. Would Uhlman accept the justice of executing such killers?

Is Uhlman’s position that all executions for murder violate pro-life principles, or only executions for which there is some residual doubt of guilt, however small? In any system run by fallible human beings, however well-intended, mistakes are possible. Is the mere possibility of error enough to reject the death penalty in its entirety? Or is his position that wrongful executions are so common in the United States that the pro-life advocate should reject capital punishment as applied in this country at this time?

Is the mere possibility of error enough to reject the death penalty in its entirety?

How Common Are Wrongful Convictions and Executions?

Uhlman spends much time trying to convince the reader that wrongful convictions and executions are commonplace. He offers as evidence questions about the guilt of two recently executed individuals as well as quantitative data from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

Uhlman writes that “[s]ince 1973, more than 200 people have been wrongly sentenced to death in the United States.” Here he is drawing on the so-called “Innocence List” or “Innocence Database” maintained and publicized by the anti-death penalty organization, Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). But despite the name, DPIC does not claim that all those on the list are factually innocent of the crime that led to their death sentence.

The “Innocence Database” includes everyone since 1973 who was sentenced to death for murder and later “exonerated” through the criminal justice process by 1) being acquitted in a new trial (or occasionally by appellate courts); 2) having all the charges that landed them on death row dropped; or 3) receiving a complete pardon (usually by a governor) based on evidence of innocence. For the 200 on the current list, 64 (32 %) were acquitted, 128 (64 %) had the charges dropped, and 8 (4 %) were pardoned.

Note that except for the small number of pardons, inclusion on the list does not require new evidence of innocence. There are, for example, many reasons prosecutors might drop charges after a successful appeal even if they remain convinced that the individual was guilty of the crime. Higher courts may have excluded key evidence as improperly obtained, witnesses may have died, or essential evidence may have been lost many years after the crime. And for cases that do proceed to a new trial, evidence problems may make it impossible to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Is there any way to determine how many of those on the DPIC list did in fact commit the capital crime? In 2003, the California District Attorneys Association issued a lengthy report that included a careful review of the then 102 individuals on the DPIC list. The report concluded that only thirty-four (33 percent) had a persuasive claim of actual innocence. If this ratio held for the 200 now on the list, then we could conclude that of the 8,829 individuals sentenced to death since 1973, perhaps 65-70 (or 0.8 percent) have been removed from death row because of a wrongful conviction. (See By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed for a fuller account of this issue.)

Importantly, through the appellate process, the courts discovered these errors. Yet Uhlman holds that “the capital punishment system is taking innocent lives.” What is the evidence that innocent individuals have been executed? Uhlman describes doubts about the guilt of two individuals: Freddie Owens, executed in South Carolina on September 20, 2024, and Marcellus Williams, executed by the state of Missouri on September 24, 2024. While there is no room here to examine in detail the evidence in these two cases, it is wise when claims of innocence are advanced to keep the following admonition in mind, one that I insisted of my students every time I taught the death penalty: never conclude that an innocent person was executed by relying only on the account of the defense attorneys or of others opposed to capital punishment. Always review the prosecutors’ account of the evidence as well as assessments by appellate courts.

To his credit, Uhlman mentions that Owens bragged to his girlfriend and others that he had shot the store clerk (a single mother of three) in the head when she could not open the store safe, that the ski mask used by the killer as captured by the store’s camera was connected to Owens, and that just hours after Owens’s conviction in 1999 he murdered a jail inmate who was serving a few months on a traffic violation.

Regarding the murder of the jail inmate, Uhlman writes that “Owens was involved in an altercation with another inmate that ended in that inmate’s death.” More informative is Owens’s own account of the killing (as reported by the South Carolina Supreme Court):

I then walked into his cell and hit him in the eye. He fell down on his back. I got on top and started hitting him mostly in the face and throat. I took a pen from his right hand with my right hand and stabbed him in his right eye. Then I stabbed him in his throat.

I started hitting him in the face with my right hand. Then I started choking him with my right hand and pounding his head against the floor. . . .

He never fought back after the first punch, he was out of it. . . . I stood up and stomped his head and body with my feet. . . . I rammed his head into the wall. . . . I got back over him and rammed the pen up his right nostril. I closed his left nostril with my left hand and started choking him with my right hand.

Though this was not the crime for which Owens was executed, it speaks volumes about the character of the man that South Carolina put to death a few weeks ago. As to the unprovoked fatal shooting of the store clerk in the head, the state supreme court and the governor remained convinced throughout of Owens’s guilt.

Uhlman says less about Marcellus Williams, who was convicted of burglarizing a woman’s home in 1998 and then “ambush[ing] her as she left the shower, stab[ing] her 43 times and [leaving] the knife lodged in her neck, and then [stealing] items from her home.” Various abolitionist groups have asserted unambiguously that Williams did not commit the crime for which he was executed. Yet, after an “innocence hearing” in early September of this year and a careful review of all the evidence, a Missouri circuit court judge concluded that “there is no basis for a court to find that Williams is innocent, and no court has made such a finding. Williams is guilty of first-degree murder.” Shortly thereafter, Governor Mike Parson refused to intervene, issuing a statement affirming that “Nothing from the real facts of this case have [sic] led me to believe in Mr. Williams’ innocence.” He concluded his statement with a summary of the key evidence that led to Williams’s conviction.

Over the past half-century, 1,600 convicted murderers have been put to death in the United States. Were any of these actually innocent of the crime that led to their execution? In 2017, Edward Feser and I, after a close examination of the evidence, concluded that “Although there is no way to know this with certainty, it seems likely that at most 1 or 2 innocent persons—and very possibly none at all—have been executed since the Furman decision of 1972.” Nothing that has happened, or been learned, in the past 7 years changes that judgment.

Does Capital Punishment Promote the Common Good?

No reasonable defender of the death penalty denies the possibility of errors in the criminal justice system run by fallible human beings. We arm half a million police officers in the United States even though a few may negligently, or even intentionally, take an innocent life. We do this because it serves a larger social good, a good that cannot be achieved without the risk of an innocent person being harmed or killed. Similarly, the death penalty serves a larger social good that cannot be achieved without the risk, however small, of an innocent person being executed. This includes deterring potential murderers; reinforcing society’s condemnation of murder, thus making it less likely that those growing up in a community with capital punishment would even consider killing someone in the first place; reassuring the families of murder victims that they live in a just society that shows respect for the lives of their loved one; and promoting belief in and respect for the majesty of the moral order and for the system of human law that both derives from and supports that moral order.

(source: Joseph Bessette, thepublicdiscourse.com)

JAPAN:

Japan local police chief apologizes to man acquitted in 1966 murders

A local police chief in Japan on Monday apologized in person to an 88-year-old man who spent nearly half a century on death row before being acquitted in a retrial over a 1966 quadruple murder case.

"I am sorry for the unspeakable burden and trouble we have caused you over the long 58 years from the time of your arrest to your acquittal being finalized," Takayoshi Tsuda, chief of the Shizuoka Prefectural Police, said during a visit to Iwao Hakamata's home in Hamamatsu.

It was the 1st time that an official of the police or prosecutors has directly apologized to Hakamata, who was arrested by Shizuoka police in 1966 but released in 2014 after new evidence cast doubt on his conviction.

Recognized the same year as the world's longest-serving death row prisoner, he was acquitted in a retrial in September, with the verdict finalized earlier this month when prosecutors decided not to appeal.

His 91-year-old sister Hideko, who was at the meeting, told Tsuda, "Now I think it was fate. At this point, I have no intention of making complaints to the police. Thank you very much for coming all the way here today."

Hakamata has difficulties communicating with others after his mental state deteriorated during his years of incarceration on death row.

Speaking to reporters following the meeting, Tsuda again apologized, saying "coercive and intimidating interrogation" had been used against Hakamata. "We will conduct more thorough and appropriate investigations in the future," he said.

In its Sept. 26 ruling acquitting Hakamata, the Shizuoka District Court said investigators had fabricated evidence, including five pieces of clothing Hakamata allegedly wore during the incident. The items played a key role in his conviction.

The court also said his confession during questioning was "forced by inflicting physical and mental pain," calling his interrogation "inhumane."

The ruling was finalized on Oct. 9, marking an end to his family's decades-long struggle for justice.

Tsuda's visit to Hakamata came after he had told reporters he intended to offer him an apology in person and that the prefectural police were "sorry that Mr. Hakamata was placed in an unstable legal status for a long time."

His remark followed a similar statement issued by Prosecutor General Naomi Unemoto apologizing to Hakamata.

The former professional boxer was a live-in employee at a miso maker when he was arrested for allegedly killing the firm's senior managing director, his wife and two of their children. They were found dead from stab wounds at their house in Shizuoka Prefecture, which had been burned down.

Indicted for murder, robbery and arson, his death sentence was finalized in 1980.

(source: kyodonews.com)

ISRAEL:

Likud minister calls for death penalty for treason

Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar calls for Israel to impose the death penalty on those convicted of treason during times of war.

His call comes after it was announced that seven Israelis were arrested on suspicion of spying for Iran, having carried out hundreds of tasks for Tehran. There have been a string of recent incidents of Israelis being arrested for carrying out missions on behalf of Iranian agents in exchange for cash.

“The phenomenon of traitors to the country harming Israel’s security for the sake of money while we are fighting for our future in an existential war demands the harshest measures, including a law allowing for the death penalty for aiding the enemy in wartime. This is the only way we can create a clear deterrent that will prevent further similar cases,” Zohar says in a statement.

It’s not clear why Zohar issues the call as Israel’s penal code already includes capital punishment but only for exceedingly rare cases, treason being one of them.

(source: The Times of Israel)

IRAN:

Iranian Woman Faces Death Penalty Over Son's Crime

Human rights organizations have raised concerns about the imminent execution of Soudabeh Irandegani, a 34-year-old Iranian woman sentenced to death for "premeditated murder."

According to the Norway-based Iran Human Rights organization, Irandegani is scheduled to be executed in Iranshahr Prison.

Irandegani, a mother of 6, was arrested in 2022 and sentenced to death for a crime she did not commit.

According to a source familiar with the case, she confessed to the murder to protect her son, who was the actual perpetrator.

"Irandegani had a verbal altercation with another woman. Unfortunately, her son intervened, leading to the accidental death of the other woman's five-year-old child. Irandegani took the blame to protect her son," the source explained.

The victim's family is demanding two billion tomans ($31,000) in blood money, with 800 million tomans ($12,500) already paid. The family has until October 29th to pay the remaining amount or face the execution.

The blood money rate in Iran, set at 1.2 billion tomans by the judiciary, can be increased by the victim's family when making their demands.

(source: iranwire.com)

*************

Hunger Strike of 7 Political Prisoners in Sheiban Prison, Ahvaz----These 7 political prisoners had also gone on hunger strike on July 10, 2024, but after a while, they ended their strike with the promise of investigation and cooperation from the prison authorities and the judiciary?

On Sunday, October 20, 2024, 7 political prisoners in Sheiban Prison, Ahvaz, went on hunger strike. These prisoners are protesting their uncertain status and the failure of authorities to fulfill promises regarding their release. The prison officials, instead of addressing the prisoners’ demands, transferred them to solitary confinement.

These 7 political prisoners are:

Rouhollah Khosravi, Farshid Kazemi, Maziyar Nekouei, Ramin Mohammadi, Reza Karimnejad, Ashkan Mohammadi, and Houman Almasi.

These political prisoners had previously gone on hunger strike on July 10, 2024. However, they ended their strike after receiving assurances from prison officials and the judiciary that their cases would be addressed. After three months without any progress on their demands, they resumed their hunger strike.

Currently, there is no available information about the condition of these 7 political prisoners, and there is significant concern about their physical state, particularly given their placement in solitary confinement.

Human Rights Violations: Arbitrary Arrest and Prolonged Detention

Arbitrary arrest and keeping detainees in indefinite detention is a serious violation of human rights that directly contradicts international principles and obligations.

According to human rights laws, every arrested person has the right to informed promptly of the reasons for their detention and to brought before a court without delay. This right clearly outlined in Articles 9 and 14 of the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” one of the core human rights documents of the United Nations.

Article 9 specifically emphasizes every individual’s right to personal freedom and security, stating that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention.

It also mandates that anyone arrested must promptly informed of the reasons for their arrest and brought before a judicial authority as soon as possible to determine the legitimacy of their detention.

Keeping individuals in custody without informing them of the charges and without access to a court directly violates Article 9.

Article 14 further underscores the right to a fair trial, ensuring that every individual has the opportunity to defend themselves and benefit from an independent and impartial court.

Keeping prisoners in indefinite detention without trial not only violates this article but also causes immense suffering and injustice for the detainee.

In conclusion, such practices are clear violations of human dignity and justice. Under the fundamental principles of human rights, all nations obligated to uphold the rights of detainees and provide a fair and timely judicial process.

Detaining individuals, particularly without access to legal counsel and the courts, is a breach of basic rights and undermines the rule of law.

(source: en.iranhrs.org)

*************

Baluch Woman Soudabeh Irandegani to be Executed if She Cannot Pay Blood Money in 10 Days

Soudabeh Irandegani, a Baluch woman on death row for murder, is scheduled to be executed in Iranshahr Prison on 29 October if she cannot pay the €32k demanded by the victim’s family. Per informed sources, Soudabeh took responsibility for the murder to save her son.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, Soudabeh Irandegani, a 34-year-old Baluch mother of 6, is at imminent risk of execution in Iranshahr Prison.

She was arrested on 28 October 2021 and sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Soudabeh didn’t actually commit murder, she took the fall for her son. Soudabeh was arguing with another woman when both their children got involved and unfortunately the other woman’s 5-year-old was killed. Soudabeh claimed responsibility to save her son.”

“The victims family have asked for 2 billion tomans (€32,000) as diya by 29 October. 800 million tomans has been paid but she will be executed if the rest isn’t paid by the deadline,” the source added.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

***********

Nourmorad Geravand Executed in Qazvin

Nourmorad Geravand, a man on death row for drug-related offences, was executed in Qazvin Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Qazvin (Choobindar) Central Prison on 17 October. His identity has been established as 30-year-old Nourmorad Geravand from Kouhdasht.

He was arrested on the Qazvin motorway four years ago and sentenced to death for drug-related charges by the Revolutionary Court.

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

************

Bahman Sheikh Hosseini Executed in Birjand Despite Suicide Attempt

Bahman Sheikh Hosseini, a Baluch man on death row for drug-related offences, was executed Birjand Central Prison despite attempting to commit suicide.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Birjand Central Prison 20 October. His identity has been established as Bahman Sheikh Hosseini, a 32-year-old Baluch father of three from the Sheikh Hosseini tribe. He was arrested in Birjand four years ago and sentenced to death for drug-related charges by the Revolutionary Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Bahman had attempted to commit suicide prior to his execution but the sentence was carried out without any regard.”

IHRNGO reported his transfer to the pre-execution cells the day prior.

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

****************

Mohammad Ashouri Executed in Isfahan Due to Inability to Pay Blood Money

Mohammad Ashouri, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Isfahan Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Isfahan Central Prison on 16 October. His identity has been established as 32-year-old Mohammad Ashouri from Mamasani county in Fars province. He was arrested six years ago and sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Mohammad Ashouri went to the gallows last year but managed to obtain an extension from the plaintiff to pay the blood money.”

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

***************

Reza Abbasi Executed in Rasht

Reza Abbasi, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Rasht Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Rasht (Lakan) Central Prison on 19 October. His identity has been established as 29-year-old Reza Abbasi from Rasht. He was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Reza Abbasi was arrested for murder during a group fight 4 years ago and sentenced to qisas.”

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

(source for all: iranhr.net)

OCTOBER 20, 2024:

TEXAS:

As Robert Roberson’s execution neared, Gov. Greg Abbott stuck to silence----It’s rare for governors to step in to halt executions. In the case of Robert Roberson, it ended up being state lawmakers who took extraordinary steps.

In a state where the death penalty is as ingrained as cowboy boots and conservative politics, news of Robert Roberson’s death sentence broke through in Texas after the rarest of phenoms: a noisy, bipartisan effort that bypassed the governor’s office to save a man from lethal injection.

For years, the appeals of Roberson’s capital murder conviction for the 2002 death of his chronically ill, 2-year-old daughter had lumbered through the courts, tracing a byzantine process that often fails to register with residents of the nation’s execution capital, where 591 inmates have been put to death in the state since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.

But while lawmakers were making historic interventions, many Texans took note of the silence by the person traditionally empowered to step in at the last minute: Gov. Greg Abbott.

“Abbott’s silence is deafening,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston.

After all, Abbott had at his disposal the power to grant a 30-day reprieve for Roberson, whose lawyers claim was wrongfully convicted based on junk science. A U.S. Supreme Court Justice urged him to take that step. If Abbott had, there would have been no frantic and unprecedented rush by lawmakers to issue a subpoena of Roberson and then go to court to block the execution — first to a Travis County judge, then to Texas’ two high courts before Roberson’s execution was finally called off.

There’s been no public statement from Abbott about Roberson’s case before or since. If the execution had gone forward, Roberson would have been the first person in the nation to be put to death in a shaken baby syndrome case, a diagnosis that has come into question in recent years. Multiple requests for comment to the governor’s office by The Texas Tribune went unanswered.

The silence “certainly signals his willingness to go his own way against the Legislature and also reflects that, like Gov. Perry before him, the realization that being tough on crime is an essential element of muscularity for national Republicans,” Rottinghaus said.

Silence on executions, not unusual

Unlike the Hollywood image of a governor making a frantic phone call to stop an execution, the reality, especially in Texas, is far less dramatic. Texas governors can only act on a recommendation of clemency from their own appointees to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Or they can opt for the 30-day reprieve.

According to the Associated Press, the Texas parole board has recommended clemency in a death row case only six times since the state resumed executions in 1982. In three of those cases, death row inmates had their sentences commuted to life in prison. In two of the cases, Perry rejected the parole board's recommendation to commute a death sentence to life in prison, and the two prisoners were executed.

But despite that limited power, Abbott may have inadvertently raised the Texas public’s expectations of intervention last year. That’s when he was quick to jump in publicly after a jury convicted an Austin man of fatally shooting a Black Lives Matter protester. Abbott posted on social media that he would quickly seek a pardon. The parole board did recommend a pardon a year later, and Abbott made good on his promise.

But veteran court watchers say Abbott’s silence on even a high profile death penalty case is not out of the ordinary.

“It’s typical,” said Elsa Alcala, who served for seven years as a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, before stepping down in 2018. “Usually, the governor doesn’t get involved.”

So far, more than 60 executions have been carried out while Abbott has been governor, a fraction of the more than 200 that occurred when former Gov. Rick Perry was in office. That’s the result of increased judicial scrutiny on death row cases and more prosecutors seeking life in prison instead of the death penalty.

Abbott has only commuted 1 death sentence. In 2018, he spared the life of Thomas “Bart” Whitaker, who masterminded a murder-for-hire scheme that resulted in the death of his mother and younger brother and injured his construction company executive father, who ultimately forgave his son. Whitaker’s case was reduced to a life sentence.

“Even going back to Ann Richards, I don’t think there’s a history of Texas governors in capital cases giving reprieves,” said Kenneth Williams, the Fred Gray Endowed Chair for Civil Rights and Constitutional Law at Texas Tech University. “They rarely do in capital cases.”

Longtime Texas political observer Cal Jillson agreed.

“Governors at least going back to George W. Bush, in the case of a mentally challenged inmate named Oliver Cruz, and Rick Perry, in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, have been reluctant to intervene in death penalty cases for fear of appearing ‘soft on crime,’” said Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.

The added fact that Abbott, before he was first elected governor in 2014, was the state’s longest-serving attorney general, whose office is charged with ensuring a trial court’s death sentence is carried out, could help explain why Texans don’t hear much from him regarding an individual’s case.

“He defended these cases, so that may weigh on him as governor,” said Williams, the Texas Tech University law professor, adding that Abbott’s lack of intervention in this or any other case is not out of step with governors in other states.

“Most governors are reluctant to grant any kind of clemency after there’s been conviction,” he said. “I don’t think they want the blowback in that.”.

How the case unfolded

Roberson, 57, of Palestine, was convicted of his daughter’s death in 2003 after an autopsy determined his daughter, Nikki, who had been ill with a fever, had died of shaking and blows. Investigators believed that Roberson’s emotionless demeanor was further evidence of his guilt. Roberson has since been diagnosed as having autism, which could explain Roberson’s behavior at the time. A police detective whose investigation sent the East Texas man to death row, now supports Roberson’s claims of innocence.

On Wednesday, as both the Texas parole board and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Roberson’s last-minute appeals, the House committee members issued their subpoena, arguing that only Roberson could provide unique testimony on Texas’ pioneering 2013 junk science law — which Roberson had tried, and failed, to use to prove his innocence. Last month, 80 Texas lawmakers, including supporters of the death penalty, wrote Texas parole board members in support of Roberson’s request for clemency.

The law is designed to allow defendants an avenue to prove their innocence if they were convicted based on science that is later shown to be faulty. In fact, no Texas death row inmate has successfully used the law to obtain a new trial, leading the Texas Defender Service to conclude that the statute “is not operating as the Texas Legislature intended.”

The steps legislators took to halt the execution were unprecedented, and drew some complaints of overstepping their authority.

“I will absolutely defend what we did,” state Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, a member of the House jurisprudence committee who began looking into Roberson’s cases a few months ago on the recommendation of a colleague. “We have to protect the integrity of the criminal justice system.”

Harrison confirmed that lawmakers contacted Abbott after their subpoena was issued but did not want to discuss specifics of those conversations, describing them only as “professional and productive.”

Many of those who tracked the Roberson saga this week were struck more by the actions of the Legislature than the inaction of Abbott.

“What is unusual in the case of Robert Roberson is not so much Abbott’s silence, as the bipartisan effort to slow this execution at least long enough to take a closer look,” Jillson said.

But Amanda Marzullo, the former executive director of the Texas Defender Service, said it was necessary for the Legislature to step in, given that the use of clemency by American governors has waned.

“We have seen a massive atrophy in the clemency power,” she said. “It was something governors did all the time.”

She pointed to how more than 200 years ago, a governor’s pardon power was used more often because death was often the punishment for far lesser crimes.

"This is how this system was designed,” Marzullo said. “So no one branch is doing all of the work in a particular sector.”

(source: The Texas Tribune)

***********

Robert Roberson does not deserve the death penalty

What nearly became the last hours of Robert Roberson’s life can barely be imagined. On Thursday evening, he sat for hours in a cell next to the death chamber at a Texas state prison awaiting execution for an act that may well not have been a crime at all: the death, over 20 years ago, of his infant daughter Nikki.

While 3 successive Texan courts decided whether to grant a reprieve, Roberson endured what must have felt like torture. Relief came just 90 minutes before his scheduled execution, when the Texas Supreme Court issued a temporary stay. Next week he will get a final chance to present evidence of his innocence.

In one respect, this case is exceptional: Roberson would have been the 1st prisoner in the US to be executed on the basis of “shaken baby syndrome”, a pseudo-medical concept that describes the shaking to death of infants that should have been consigned to forensic dustbin long ago.

Its other aspects are all too typical, and include serious flaws in the procedural safeguards for those accused of capital offences, a slow and ineffective appellate process, and the psychological trauma inflicted on those sentenced to death. It also illustrates a gap between justice in the US and international law.

The revelation that forensic science is neither immutable nor infallible has for the past few decades undermined confidence in criminal justice systems worldwide. Shaken baby syndrome is an especially fallible category.

Starting in the Seventies, British and American prosecutors secured murder convictions with testimony from “experts” who said that when a baby died without fractures or visible wounds, their death resulted from a “non-accidental head injury” caused by someone taking care of them. They claimed that intracranial injuries such as cerebral bleeds were proof of a violent death, and could only arise from shaking. Any other explanation offered by a parent — such as a fall — was deemed to be a lie.

However, since Roberson’s trial in 2003, there has been an enormous shift, and the consensus now is that intracranial injuries are not infallible evidence of homicide at all. In 2020, the American Association of Paediatrics determined that shaken baby syndrome had been misinterpreted by legal and health authorities.

On both sides of the Atlantic, this has led to successful appeals, and if Roberson gets a new trial, the jury will be told that the prosecution’s science has been discredited.

Fresh evidence also suggests that Nikki died from pneumonia leading to sepsis. She had suffered antibiotic-resistant infections, requiring treatment in hospital — where she was given toxic drugs now thought inappropriate for infants.

International law does not prohibit the death penalty, but allows it for only the “most serious” offences, defined as “intentional crimes with lethal or other extremely grave consequences”. Clearly, Roberson’s daughter died in his care, but there is no evidence that this was his intention, nor that a crime was committed.

For a conviction to be quashed by appeal courts, there does not have to be proof of innocence, only evidence that it is unsafe. In Roberson’s case, there is plenty. However, while exonerations of innocent people in America have induced some states to abolish the death penalty, US courts have repeatedly shown themselves reluctant to reverse convictions based on faulty science — as, until now, they have been with Roberson’s.

International law does prohibit the death penalty following unsafe and arbitrary processes, and insists that the evidence must be properly scrutinised throughout the trial and subsequent appeals. Yet despite the flaws in the prosecution case and the failure thus far to address them, Roberson found himself waiting hours from death while his lawyers and a bipartisan committee of politicians pleaded with the authorities to stop the execution.

Welcome as it was, his stay was far from timely, and his ordeal could arguably be seen as torture — which unlike the death penalty, is prohibited under international law.

This has led some abolitionists to consider whether the death penalty per se could be also defined as torture, and indeed, some of the 55 countries that retain capital punishment have already determined that long spells on death row in themselves constitute unacceptable mental anguish, often described by psychiatrists as “death row syndrome”.

In Jamaica, for example, any prisoner who has been on death row for more than 5 years will have their sentence commuted to life. In America, the average gap between sentencing and execution has climbed to about 23 years. Like other US death row inmates, Roberson will have spent his time on the row largely in solitary confinement, all the while aware he is likely to be put to death.

Arguably, this alone amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment” in breach of the US constitution, and a case could be made that, like his wait to learn if he would live or die on Thursday, it equates to torture.

Yet prisoners’ rights to appeal when the state intends to kill them cannot be curtailed, especially when science is evolving: there is, therefore, a contradiction between avoiding death row syndrome and allowing enough time for appeals. Abolishing the death penalty altogether is the only feasible way to resolve it, and to remedy its myriad injustices.

(source: Professor Carolyn Hoyle is Director of the Death Penalty Research Unit, part of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Criminology at the Faculty of Law, and co-author of Reasons to Doubt, a study of wrongful convictions----unherd.com)

***************

AG says Robert Roberson to testify before Texas House virtually, cites safety concerns----Lawmakers and Robert Roberson’s attorneys had said arrangements were being made for the death row inmate to testify Monday in person.

Robert Roberson III is expected to testify virtually Monday before the Texas House committee whose unprecedented legal maneuver delayed his execution earlier this week, according to a letter from the attorney general’s office obtained Saturday by The Dallas Morning News.

The committee and Roberson’s legal team previously said the 57-year-old would appear in person at the Texas Capitol in Austin, presenting logistical challenges for officials to accommodate a high-security prisoner and crowds likely comprised of media outlets from across the country, curious spectators and protesters.

The letter said the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees the prison system and carries out executions, would make Roberson available virtually in accordance with department policies and “in the interest of public safety” and Roberson’s “well-being.”

Security at the Capitol is handled by the Texas Department of Public Safety. A spokesperson previously declined to discuss security arrangements.

Whether the committee would push back on the attorney general’s position in the letter was unclear Saturday evening. One of the lawmakers addressed in the letter, Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice also did not immediately respond to requests for comment. TDCJ officials previously said the department was working with lawmakers to comply with the committee’s subpoena.

In the letter, an attorney with the attorney general’s office instructed lawmakers to “refrain from any further communication” with the department and speak to them, as the department’s legal representation, instead.

The hearing Monday will be streamed online and open to the public.

*****************

Texas Capitol braces for a wild Monday as death row’s Robert Roberson is set to testify----A high-security prisoner and expected crowds present a logistical and safety challenge.

State leaders are bracing for a potential maelstrom at the Texas Capitol on Monday as death row inmate Robert Roberson is set to appear in person at a House committee — the 1st time a condemned prisoner has testified before state lawmakers.

The evening before Roberson was set to be executed around 6 p.m. Thursday, the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee voted 7-0 to issue a subpoena ordering Roberson to appear before the panel.

Committee members, saying they feared Texas was about to execute a potentially innocent man, wanted Roberson to testify about the effectiveness of a state law that lets inmates challenge convictions based on discredited or erroneous science.

Monday’s hearing will be streamed online and open to the public, presenting logistical challenges as officials struggle to accommodate a high-security prisoner and crowds expected to include media from across the country, curious spectators and protesters.

The committee has reserved a hearing room in the underground extension of the Capitol. That room has the capacity for 146 people — 98 seated audience members, 15 for standing room, six wheelchairs, the committee members and staff.

The Capitol has seen its share of packed hearings, spirited protests and crowded hallways.

There is no precedent, however, for handling a death row prisoner during a public meeting inside a public building, and officials were tight-lipped on security plans involving a man whose life-or-death case has drawn attention from as far as away as the Vatican.

Information was not available Friday about how prison officials plan to transport Roberson to Austin, how he will be secured in the Capitol, and how law enforcement would maintain order throughout the building.

Calls to lawmakers, public safety officials and the prison system yielded brief, vague answers with few details.

“The agency will work with lawmakers to comply with the subpoena,” said Hannah Haney, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, in response to a list of questions about how they plan to keep Roberson secure.

The Texas Department of Public Safety will be in charge of Capitol security, which could include a heightened presence of officers on Capitol grounds and in the hallways near the committee room.

Facility officials said they could implement crowd-control measures such as tighter security on the grounds, overflow rooms to accommodate members of the public and the media, and cordoned-off sections of Capitol hallways if lines form.

A DPS spokesperson declined to discuss security arrangements.

“The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) is responsible for providing security at the Texas State Capitol to protect all officials, employees and visitors,” DPS press secretary Sheridan Nolen said in an email to The Dallas Morning News. “While we do not discuss operational specifics. DPS will continue to adjust our operations as needed.”

Officials at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees the prison system, did not respond to questions about Roberson, including whether he would be secured in leg irons or handcuffs while testifying and whether he would wear his prison jumpsuit or street clothes.

Calls and emails to the House committee were not answered Friday.

Roberson’s 2003 capital murder conviction in the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, in their East Texas home has sparked international interest and wide political debate. Defense lawyers argue his conviction and death sentence were based on allegations that the girl died from “shaken baby syndrome,” which they say is a “junk science” theory that has since been disproven.

Legal challenges to the House committee’s subpoena delayed Roberson’s execution, which was halted around 9:40 p.m. Thursday when the Texas Supreme Court issued a stay of execution to give the court time to examine the legality of the subpoena.

Roberson, who was diagnosed 5 years ago with autism, has maintained his innocence while a growing bipartisan cadre of supporters in the Texas Legislature have called for his case to be re-examined under the 11-year-old junk science law.

Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican with the power to grant a single 30-day stay of execution, has not commented on the case and ignored shouted questions by reporters at an event in Corpus Christi late Thursday.

Roberson will be among several witnesses to testify at Monday’s committee hearing, state Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican and one of the architects of the Roberson subpoena, told conservative radio host Mark Davis on Friday. Leach declined to name the witnesses and did not say what time Roberson was expected to testify.

Roberson, Leach told Davis, “wants to be heard, and he should be heard.”

“I’m not opining on his ultimate guilt or innocence,” Leach said. “I do believe, though, that the system failed him and that he needs to be given another trial.”

Leach did not say why Roberson would testify in person instead of video from death row, telling Davis the logistics of access, security and crowd control were “still being worked out.”

Officials at the State Preservation Board, which oversees events at the Capitol, told The Dallas Morning News on Friday the committee had not yet reserved an overflow room for spectators or media but that could happen as needed Monday. Overflow rooms with live feeds are frequently used for committee hearings that draw large crowds.

There could also be crowd-control measures such as cordoning off hallways for lines and crowd counters for fire safety, preservation board staff said.

Davis, echoing criticism from other conservatives, questioned on his show Friday whether the “dog and pony show” surrounding Roberson’s appearance was merely a planned media circus.

While agreeing the hearing could shed light on new evidence in the case, Davis said the chaos Roberson’s testimony would bring to a publicly accessible hearing wasn’t necessary.

“Dragging this guy … to Austin and parading him through the halls of the Capitol and sitting him down so that he can have his 10 minutes, so that he can be heard, looks like a dog and pony show designed for emotional appeal, designed for emotional impact,” Davis said.

*************

Texas high court punted Robert Roberson’s case to a lower court. Here’s what that means----If the Anderson County District Attorney’s Office, which convicted Roberson in 2003 of killing his daughter, requests a new execution date, one could be set no sooner than 90 days in the future

Robert Roberson III has known for months he was scheduled to die Thursday afternoon. A lethal dose of pentobarbital would enter his veins sometime after the hour of 6 p.m., based on what an East Texas judge ordered this summer.

Since then, the date and time had remained firm despite a number of appeals in lower courts and the nation’s highest court, the state’s parole board and Gov. Greg Abbott. That was until a Travis County judge granted a novel request from a bipartisan group of Texas House members that threw the state’s plans into question.

The lawmakers subpoenaed Roberson, a Palestine man convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter more than 2 decades ago, Wednesday night to appear in Austin and testify on Monday — 4 days after the state was supposed to kill him.

The judge signed the order at 5:30 p.m., a half-hour before the state planned to execute the 57-year-old by lethal injection in Huntsville.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office swiftly appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeals, which overruled the lower court’s order and put execution back on track. But an appeal from the lawmakers to the Texas Supreme Court was the final say Thursday: The execution, for now, was off.

Roberson is slated to testify in person Monday about the state’s “junk” science law, which the lawmakers say was not correctly applied in his case. Gretchen Sween, Roberson’s attorney, said she did not know of the lawmakers’ plan until she was contacted to receive the subpoena on his behalf.

“I am so grateful there is a Monday,” Sween said in an interview Friday.

Roberson’s attorneys and lawmakers, including half of the Republican-controlled House, argue his case was based on shaken baby syndrome, a medical determination that abuse has caused serious or fatal head trauma. The diagnosis has come under broad scrutiny in the years since the conviction.

Opponents, which include Anderson County’s district attorney and the Texas Attorney General’s Office, contend that shaken baby syndrome was not central to securing the conviction. Multiple courts since have declined to intervene in subsequent appeals.

After Roberson testifies Monday, attorneys will again debate his fate. What the forthcoming stretch of legal sparring will entail was not clear Friday.

Texas high court ruling sends case back to convicting court

The Texas Supreme Court order, in part, states it does not preclude further proceedings in the Anderson County district court that convicted Roberson in 2003.

An execution order signed by a judge is required to put someone to death. Such an order comes from the convicting court. The execution date may not be earlier than the 91st day after the date the convicting court enters the order setting the date, according to the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.

When an execution order may be sought is unclear. The statutory 91-day period between the setting of an execution date and the execution itself means that Roberson’s execution would take place in early 2025, at the earliest.

Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell, whose office tried the case, has said evidence in the 2003 trial showed Roberson had abused his daughter, Nikki.

Speaking before the House committee that later subpoenaed Roberson, Mitchell said she was certain, citing evidence in the original trial and the appeals and hearings thereafter, that Nikki’s death was a murder.

While fielding questions from lawmakers, Mitchell at times said she needed to check the record — something Sween recalled Friday.

“It’s clear there are at least some things about this case she doesn’t know,” Sween said of Mitchell, whom she said she “hopes does not rush” to seek another execution order.

Mitchell did not respond to inquiries seeking additional information Friday.

In November 2017, Mitchell told the Palestine Herald-Press she believed the death penalty could be appropriate depending on the case.

“Capital punishment is part of the law of Texas,” Mitchell told the newspaper. “Regardless of a prosecutor’s personal beliefs, he or she has sworn to uphold the law. That is what I intend to do.”

Earlier that month, with the help of the attorney general’s office, Mitchell’s office secured a conviction of a man who killed 6 people, including a 6-year-old and a 76-year-old, in 2015.

The scope of further appeals Roberson’s attorney may seek is also unclear.

Roberson has had his execution delayed once before. In 2016, the Court of Criminal Appeals — the state’s highest criminal court — halted the execution so his attorneys could present new medical evidence. The court, on subsequent appeals, has not intervened.

Shortly after the Travis County judge issued her order Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a separate case, again rejected an appeal from Roberson’s attorneys to step in.

A day before, the Texas Attorney General’s Office had filed a brief with the nation’s highest court arguing the execution should go forward, citing evidence from the 2003 trial.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office did not respond to an emailed list of questions Friday.

Roberson lawyers, lawmakers seek executive intervention

Roberson’s attorneys and lawmakers had called on Abbott to delay the execution by 30 days, something he has the authority to do.

Abbott, a supporter of the death penalty, has not publicly commented on the case. He was in Corpus Christi for an event Thursday evening but did not take questions from local reporters, according to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

Spokespeople for Abbott did not respond to an emailed list of questions Friday.

The one time Abbott halted an execution was in 2018 when he spared the life of Thomas Whitaker, who was set to die for the 2003 murders of his mother and brother in Fort Bend County. In that case, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles — which had rejected Roberson’s request — made a unanimous recommendation to grant clemency.

Among those calling for the pause in Roberson’s planned execution was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The statement from the justice, who has criticized the state’s use of the death penalty before, came after the court declined to intervene again Thursday afternoon.

“Under these circumstances, a stay permitting examination of Roberson’s credible claims of actual innocence is imperative; yet this Court is unable to grant it,” Sotomayor wrote. “That means only one avenue for relief remains open: an executive reprieve.”

Earlier in the day, state Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, said lawmakers were hopeful that Abbott would pause the execution.

“I spent a long time with the governor’s office last night,” Harrison told radio host Mark Davis. “What I would say is very fruitful and productive discussions are happening.”

The pause didn’t come.

(source for all: Dallas Morning News)

****************

Texas Lawmakers’ Unprecedented Actions Halt Robert Roberson’s Execution — For Now----Following the state Supreme Court’s last-minute intervention, Roberson is expected to testify next week at a legislative hearing on Texas’s junk science law.

The Texas Supreme Court halted Robert Roberson’s scheduled execution late Thursday night, following an extraordinary series of legal twists and turns spurred by a bipartisan group of state lawmakers.

The legislators, including influential members of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, deployed a sequence of jiu-jitsu-like moves to give Roberson a chance to prove his innocence. Their efforts centered around a first-of-its-kind statute in Texas that allows people incarcerated based on flawed forensics to challenge their convictions.

“The vast team fighting for Robert Roberson — people all across Texas, the country, and the world — are elated tonight that a contingent of brave, bipartisan Texas lawmakers chose to dig deep into the facts of Robert’s case that no court had yet considered and recognized that his life was worth fighting for,” Roberson’s lawyer, Gretchen Sween, said in a statement. “He lives to fight another day and hopes that his experience can help improve the integrity of our criminal legal system.”

Roberson was sent to death row in 2003 for killing his 2-year-old daughter Nikki. Medical professionals attributed the child’s death to so-called shaken baby syndrome, or SBS: a diagnosis based on the belief that a certain combination of injuries found in a baby or toddler could only be caused by violent shaking. This theory has since been disproven by scientific research. Across the country, 34 people convicted based on SBS have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Roberson, who insists he is innocent, challenged his conviction using the state’s so-called junk science law. But Texas courts ignored the overwhelming evidence undermining the state’s case against him, greenlighting his execution on October 17. As that date approached, Roberson gained the support of a bipartisan group of more than 80 Texas lawmakers, who implored both the board and the courts to spare his life.

Separation of Powers

Less than 2 hours before the 6 p.m. scheduled execution on Thursday, Texas Republican Rep. Jeff Leach and Democrat Rep. Joe Moody sought a restraining order to block the state from killing Roberson. The day before, members of the Texas House’s criminal jurisprudence committee had held an 8-hour hearing on capital punishment and the state’s junk science law. The hearing focused almost exclusively on Roberson’s case and concluded with the unprecedented decision to subpoena him to testify at a hearing on October 21 — 4 days after his scheduled execution.

The lawmakers’ dramatic move came after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had already rejected Roberson’s most recent appeal, and the Board of Pardons and Paroles had declined to recommend clemency.

During a short hearing Thursday afternoon before a judge in Austin, Moody argued that the committee members have independent legal power to subpoena witnesses who are crucial to their job of ensuring state laws are operating as intended. In this case, Moody said that hearing testimony made it “very clear” that Texas courts are not following the junk science statute.

“That is inappropriate, that is improper,” he told the judge. “And if that’s the case, it is absolutely within the legislature’s jurisdiction, and within our power, to be able to look at that. And that is the crux of why we need Mr. Roberson to testify.”

Ed Marshall, a state assistant attorney general, argued that “Shaken Baby Syndrome just doesn’t play a role” in Roberson’s case and that the judge had no power to counter the Court of Criminal Appeals’ decision to deny his appeals. Still, he conceded that the lawmakers’ subpoena was valid and legal. The judge granted the restraining order, and the AG’s office appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeals, which sided with the state, writing that “no other court of this state has the authority to overrule or circumvent its decisions, or disobey its mandates.”

The issue, however, was not actually for the Court of Criminal Appeals to decide. While the court has jurisdiction and final say over criminal matters in the state, the restraining order was issued as part of a civil law process where the lawmakers were attempting to invoke their legislative rights. The lawmakers appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, which has the final say on civil matters, to make their case.

Shortly before midnight, the Supreme Court weighed in, explaining that the situation raised serious questions about the separation of powers. “The question implicates the distribution of authority among the three branches of government, pitting 2 branches against the other,” Justice Evan Young wrote. After the CCA denied Roberson’s appeals, the state’s department of corrections — an executive branch office — was tasked with carrying out the execution. In seeking to stop the department from doing so, the lawmakers were flexing their legislative branch muscles, creating the conflict.

“Would proceeding with an execution in these circumstances entail the executive branch’s intrusion into the broad authority of the legislative branch?” Young wrote. “Or, contrariwise, would allowing various committees of the Legislature to subpoena an inmate who is subject to an impending death sentence constitute the legislative branch’s intrusion into the orderly functioning of the law, risking manipulation of the judicial process … ?”

Faced with this conflict, the Texas Supreme Court said that it, and not the Court of Criminal Appeals, had the job of deciding whether the restraining order should stand.

A Chance to Be Heard

The effect of the ruling was to block the state from carrying out the execution — for now. The Supreme Court urged the district court to address the separation of powers issues quickly. In the meantime, Roberson is expected to appear at the House committee’s hearing on October 21.

The committee members are determined to amend the junk science writ to ensure that it works as intended and that Roberson has an opportunity to avail himself of its protections. Because the Texas Legislature only meets in odd-numbered years, that would likely mean forestalling Roberson’s execution until the fall of 2025.

The 11th-hour stay of execution came many hours after Roberson’s legal options appeared to have run out. His legal team had unsuccessfully appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, to take up the case. In a statement, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that Roberson had not raised an issue the federal court could readily address, but she echoed the Texas lawmakers’ concerns, lamenting that convictions rooted in junk science have proven hard to overturn in the courts. “This case is emblematic of this problem,” she wrote. And while Sotomayor has previously called on states to pass junk science laws like Texas’s, she noted that “tragically, that statute did not help Roberson in this case.”

Sotomayor called out the Court of Criminal Appeals for its disparate treatment of Roberson in light of the Texas court’s decision to order a new trial last week in a different case that turned on SBS. As the court “has itself confirmed, the scientific basis for shaken baby syndrome has since been called into significant question,” the justice wrote. Roberson’s case relied on the same medical expert, she noted, and yet the court looked the other way. Though the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction to halt Roberson’s looming execution, Sotomayor described it as a potential “miscarriage of justice.”

“Few cases more urgently call for such a remedy than one where the accused has made a serious showing of actual innocence, as Roberson has here.”

Moody and Leach celebrated the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling in a statement late Thursday night. “While some courthouses have failed him, the Texas House has not,” they wrote.

“We’re deeply grateful to the Texas Supreme Court for respecting the role of the Texas legislature in such consequential matters. We look forward to welcoming Robert to the Texas Capitol, and along with 31 million Texans, finally giving him — and the truth — a chance to be heard.”

(source: Liliana Segura, Jordan Smith----theintercept.com)

SOUTH CAROLINA:

South Carolina Gov. McMaster says he will be fair in clemency decision for Spartanburg man

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster has told the United States District Court that he will be fair when deciding Richard Moore's request for clemency.

According to district court fillings, McMaster declared in a sworn statement that he would be fair and impartial regarding clemency or petitions dealing with death row inmates, including Moore.

Moore's attorneys at the Columbia-based law firm Justice 360 filed a lawsuit questioning McMaster’s impartiality because of his former job as South Carolina Attorney General and his role in defending Moore’s death sentence. McMaster was the state's top attorney from 2002-2011. On Oct. 15, District Court Judge Mary Geiger Lewis asked McMaster to swear impartialness.

Lewis said she would have a final decision on the case but did not set a date. Moore is scheduled for execution on Nov. 1.

In a document filed alongside the sworn statement, McMaster’s chief legal counsel, Thomas Limehouse Jr., said that the governor doesn’t want to make similar sworn statements in the future.

“By voluntarily providing this Declaration, however, Governor McMaster does not intend to submit any such affirmations in the future or open the door for courts to invite, request, or require the same or similar statements in the context of future clemency matters.”

McMaster’s legal team argued 3 reasons for not making similar statements in the future — there is no judicial authority that would require him to submit a declaration; also, requesting or requiring a similar sworn statement from the governor risks intruding upon his authority, and requesting affirmation from the governor creates burden-shifting and it's unnecessary when needing it to refute Justice 360's arguments.

Moore was sentenced to death on Oct. 22, 2001. A jury found him guilty of murder for shooting 42-year-old James Mahoney on Sept. 16, 1999, at Nikki's Speedy Mart in Spartanburg's Whitney Community. On Oct. 4, the state Supreme Court sent a notice to execute Moore.

Moore's execution would be the 2nd in 5 weeks in South Carolina, which previously had not had an execution in more than a decade. Freddie Owens of Greenville was executed on Sept. 20.

On Friday, Moore elected lethal injection as the method of execution. Owens also was executed via lethal injection. South Carolina uses the drug pentobarbital for its lethal injections.

Lindsey Vann, lead attorney for Justice 360, did not respond to requests for comment.

(source: greenvilleonline.com)

FLORIDA:

Florida woman faces death penalty for ordering Rottweiler to fatally attack helpless 9-year-old girl

A woman is facing the death penalty after being accused of a horrific campaign of abuse against a child, culminating in her allegedly ordering her large rottweiler to kill the young girl. Shocking video footage reveals Tyshael Martin, 35, restraining the 50kg dog on a leash at her family home in Montverde, Florida, on June 16, looming over 9-year-old Jamaria Sessions.

It's alleged that she encouraged the dog to attack and bite the terrified child, with audio capturing her saying: "I'm fixin' to kill her."

Authorities report that Jamaria was discovered dead the next morning, her body covered in bites, burns, cuts and bruises. Her father, LoJuan Sessions, 27, faces charges of aggravated manslaughter for his apparent failure to protect his daughter.

Justice officials are seeking the death penalty for Martin, charging her with 1st-degree murder. Over 3,000 disturbing home CCTV videos seized by police have helped reconstruct the horrifying ordeal the girl endured, revealing burns and other injuries even before the dog attack.

The footage also captures the moment Martin unleashed the large dog on the child during the June 16 incident. Lake County deputies were called to the residence by paramedics the following morning when Jamaria was found lifeless and unresponsive in bed, reports the Mirror.

Court documents reveal she had "a significant number of abrasions, small punctures, burns, possible bite marks, and bruising covering her body, all in various stages of healing."A probable cause affidavit reveals a video that allegedly shows Jamaia being "viciously attacked by the family pet, a 103lb male rottweiler."

Local media reports suggest Martin is seen holding the dog's leash, "encouraging the dog to bite" Jamaria as she lies on the floor, just out of the camera shot. The document continues: "The next clips show Jamaria Sessions staggering, nude and disheveled. Jamaria's hair, previously in a partial bun, was now messy, and her extensions were falling out of her hair. It appeared that the dog had bitten the child's head, pulling at her hair, at the command of Tyshael Martin."

Martin then allegedly forces the girl to stand in place with her arms held up in the air but she is so badly hurt she begins to stagger, says the document.

Apparently furious, Martin lashes out with a vicious kick sending Jamaria crashing to the floor. The affidavit continues: "The child lay motionless, moaning in pain, as Tyshael Martin continued to kick her hip and eventually her stomach area at full force."

"When the child did not get up, Tyshael Martin then grabbed the child by her hair, pulling her across the floor, with minimal resistance by Jamaria Sessions, who appeared to be disorientated and motionless."An autopsy determined Jamaria died of blunt force injuries to the head, torso and extremities and burns to her right foot.

Martin is facing charges of 1st-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter of a child, and aggravated child abuse. Earlier this month, state attorneys in Florida's Fifth Judicial Circuit expressed their intention to seek the death penalty against her.

In order to impose capital punishment in the state, prosecutors must establish at least 1 aggravating factor beyond a reasonable doubt. They argue that Martin's "cold, calculated, and premeditated" method of torture and murder is just 1 of 5 factors they believe warrants her execution. Both Martin and Sessions are currently detained in Lake County Jail without the possibility of bail.

(source: themirror.com)

OHIO:

Execution dates delayed for 2 Valley death row inmates----The execution date for Stanley Adams has been set for February 16, 2028. Additionally, the execution date for John Drummond was set for March 15, 2028.

Execution dates have been set for 2 death row inmates in the Mahoning Valley.

According to a press release, the execution date for Stanley Adams has been set for February 16, 2028. Additionally, the execution date for John Drummond was set for March 15, 2028.

Both Adams and Drummond were originally set to be executed in 2025, but this had to be delayed due to ongoing issues involving the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers to provide drugs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections without endangering other Ohioans.

Adams has been on death row since 2001. He was convicted in the 1999 double aggravated murder of of Esther Cook of Warren and her 12-year-old daughter Ashley Dawn Cook.

Investigators say Adams beat and stabbed Esther and raped, beat and strangled her daughter.

Adams was also convicted of the 1999 beating, raping and strangling of Roslyn Taylor of Hubbard.

Meanwhile, Drummond has been on death row since 2004 when he was convicted in the 2003 drive-by murder of 3-month-old Jiyen Dent on Youngstown's east side.

Drummond used an assault rifle to fire 11 shots into the Dent family home on Rutledge Drive.

Dent's father said he was watching a movie while his son was in a baby swing in the living room when "bullets started coming through the windows and walls."

Dent was ultimately shot in the head.

(source: WFMJ news)

INDIANA:

Jury questionnaire approved in Boards case

A proposed jury questionnaire has been approved by the state and attorneys for Carl Roy Webb Boards II.

Boards, 44, is charged in the 2022 shooting death of Elwood police officer Noah Shahnavaz.

The trial is scheduled for January 2025.

Attorney Joe Duepner, representing Boards, said Friday during a court hearing that the defense agreed with the state’s proposed questions that will be sent to potential jurors in Delaware County.

Duepner did object to the state’s proposal to include the name of Boards and potential witnesses in the questionnaire to be sent to jurors.

“We’re trying to get an impartial jury,” he said. “We’re giving them a lot of information.”

Duepner was concerned jurors might decide to research the case or talk to people familiar with it.

“There can be a synopsis of the case without the defendant’s name,” he said. “We don’t want jurors to do research.”

Andrew Hanna, chief deputy prosecutor, said the questionnaire would provide background on the case.

Hanna didn’t object to the removal of the witness names.

“We’re sending out the questionnaire to potential jurors,” he said. “We agree that people are naturally curious, but it’s important to frame what the case is about.”

He said potential jurors should be admonished by the court to refrain from doing any research.

“We’re seeking a pool of jurors, despite the media reports, that don’t know anything about the case,” Duepner said. “If they have the name of the defendant, they can talk to people about the case and do research.”

He asked that the court remove both Boards name and that of Officer Shahnavaz.

Hanna recommended the questionnaire could state a police officer was shot and killed during a traffic stop and the defendant has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

The questionnaire also contained several questions about how jurors would react to a defendant’s mental health and childhood issues that might impact the case.

Hanna said the possible sentences include the death penalty and life without parole.

Another question is asking if the death penalty is appropriate in certain cases.

Boards is accused of fatally shooting Shahnavaz, 24, through the windshield of his police cruiser early on July 31, 2022 in Elwood during a traffic stop.

(source: The Herald Bulletin)

KANSAS:

Kansas hasn’t executed anyone in 6 decades. Kobach is preparing for that to change

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is preparing for the state’s 1st execution in nearly 6 decades – a moment the Republican believes is finally approaching. Kobach wants change in state law that would require death warrants – the formal judicial documents authorizing officials to kill a prisoner – to be issued within 30 days of a death row prisoner exhausting their appeals.

His proposal would take the responsibility for issuing death warrants away from the Kansas Supreme Court and place it with district judges.

Kansas should also allow executions by hypoxia, Kobach says. The controversial execution method deprives a person of oxygen and was used in the United States for the 1st time last month, when Alabama executed a man using nitrogen gas.

Witnesses said he writhed violently, according to the Associated Press.

At a news conference on Thursday, Kobach voiced concern that existing law would prevent an execution from taking place because it does not clearly state how an execution is ordered and lethal injection drugs are difficult to obtain. Kobach, who was joined by the family members of crime victims, said the Legislature needs to address the situation soon as death row prisoners may soon begin exhausting their appeals.

He said at least 1 death row prisoner could exhaust his appeals in 9 months. In a statement prior to the press conference he said Kansas was likely to execute a prisoner in the next year or 2.

“We are lying to the people of Kansas if we say that we have the death penalty but we actually can’t carry out an execution,” Kobach said.

The changes would ensure family members of victims don’t have to wait any longer than already necessary to see justice served, Kobach said.

“There is no closure,” Brian Sanderholm said of the years he’s spent waiting for his daughter’s killer, Justin Thurber, to be executed. But critics say the bill allows executions in an inhumane manner and speeds up the execution process in a way that risks limiting a defendant’s ability to exhaust their federal and state appeals.

Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas, called the proposed legislation extreme.

“We are truly disturbed by AG Kobach’s desire to not only boost the power of the state to kill in a novel, potentially painful way – but to also remove the safeguards against this most brutal kind of government overreach. Looking across the country, states that use the death penalty actively are far from safer because of it,” Kubic said.

Others say the bill contains vague language open to interpretation that would lead to litigation.

9 people are on death row in Kansas. None have exhausted their appeals.

NEW DEATH WARRANT PROCESS

Under existing law, the Kansas Supreme Court issues a death warrant once a prisoner has exhausted the appeals process. But the law imposes no required timeline.

Kobach’s bill would instead require the high court to notify the district court where the case began that appeals have been exhausted. Within 30 days that district court judge would be required to present a death warrant to the Kansas Department of Corrections.

Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat, said it seemed to him that the bill may be crafted to bypass a state Supreme Court or governor unwilling to let an execution go forward.

“I think what they’re attempting to do here is to shortcut if you will so that when the judge pronounces the sentence of death the judge can also sign the so-called warrant,” Carmichael said.

The Kansas Supreme Court has not recently considered the legality of the death penalty. Still, Justice Caleb Stegall, the court’s most conservative member, said in a concurring decision affirming a death sentence last month that he was open to considering whether the death penalty is constitutional.

And Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, has long been a vocal opponent to the death penalty, voting as a state senator to abolish the practice and reiterating that belief on the campaign trail in 2022.

In a statement this week, Kelly’s office said the governor still opposes the death penalty, but did not say how she would respond if an execution was ordered while she remained in office. Kelly has the power to offer clemency to any Kansas prisoner, eliminating or reducing their sentence.

“Governor Kelly has long supported repealing the death penalty, both as a state senator and on the campaign trail, because it is impractical, expensive, and inhumane,” Kelly spokeswoman Grace Hoge said in a statement. She added that the office has not received any clemency applications from a defendant facing a death sentence.

“If our office were to receive one, it would first have to be reviewed by the Prisoner Review Board and then Governor Kelly would make a determination based on the details of the case.”

Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett said Kobach’s bill adds needed clarity to the death penalty process by making district courts responsible for ordering an execution rather than landing with the Kansas Supreme Court. He said this mirrors other types of cases where the Supreme Court decides a legal issue and sends it back to lower courts to deliver a sentence.

“When the appeals are finally over, the new law would dictate that the order of the Supreme Court would go back to the district court directing the KDOC to implement a specific schedule to implement the death sentence,” Bennett said in an email.

“That clarity would seem to benefit the families of the victims.”

USE OF HYPOXIA

Robert Dunham, director of policy for the Death Penalty Policy Project, said Kansas’ bill was problematic for several reasons, especially in light of Alabama’s use of hypoxia. Witnesses to the Alabama execution reported Kenneth Smith was convulsing and gasping for several minutes.

“If we go down that path, Kansas will be an international pariah,” Dunham said.

“The U.S. will lose even more moral authority on issues of human rights.”

Dunham also said bills in other states specify that nitrogen gas be used in executions while Kansas’ bill says hypoxia, which is a broader term. Either way, Dunham said, using gas equates to “human experimentation.”

It also presents risks to corrections staff and spiritual advisors, who are allowed in an execution chamber during a prisoner’s last moments, Dunham said.

Heather Cessna, executive director of the Kansas State Board of Indigents’ Defense Services, said hypoxia was not clearly defined in the bill.

“We have a lot of concerns about hypoxia, both the definition of hypoxia because of its vagueness and the variety of things that could be covered underneath it,” she said. “I think it’s going to open up the doors to a whole slew of litigation.”

The language has prompted questions about specific procedures that could be used as well as worries about cruel and unusual punishment. Hypoxia is defined as the deprivation of oxygen.

Alabama used nitrogen gas for its hypoxia execution, but Kobach’s bill does not specify.

“I have human concern for any of our clients that might be subjected to that sort of treatment at the hands of the state,” Cessna said. Cessna said the proposal would almost certainly prompt a new round of litigation over the method of execution.

She called Kobach’s timeline for an execution in Kansas “ambitious.”

Kobach told reporters he believed hypoxia was the most humane way to conduct an execution, but said he did not limit the form to the most common method of hypoxia via nitrogen gas, suggesting other gasses, like helium, could be used.

The Alabama Attorney General’s Office, Kobach said, has said the descriptions of the Alabama execution using hypoxia were inaccurate.

“Even if there were some discomfort, which I don’t think there was in the Alabama case, we need to remember the victims who suffered extraordinary pain,” Kobach said.

‘IT’S DANGEROUS’

The language of Kobach’s bill has prompted wide ranging concerns among opponents to the death penalty. The measure directs district courts to send the secretary of corrections a death warrant within 30 days after a final judgment. But it doesn’t specify whether a federal or state court makes that final judgment.

Ron Wurtz, vice chair of Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty, is a retired attorney who worked on capital cases. He said if final judgment refers to the Kansas Supreme Court, it causes problems because a defendant could still pursue a federal case.

30 days is not much time to file a federal court challenge, he said.

“It’s dangerous,” he said. “There’s definitely a problem there.”

Wurtz also voiced other longstanding concerns with the death penalty that go beyond Kobach’s proposal, including the cost of litigating death penalty cases and the possibility of executing someone who is innocent.

More than 130 people have been exonerated from death row, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Kobach said the final judgment would only come after a court had determined both federal and state appeals were exhausted. The Kansas attorney general’s push for changes come as Kansas death penalty opponents have tried for years to eliminate it altogether.

Rep. Mark Schreiber, an Emporia Republican who has introduced several bills to abolish the death penalty, said he would oppose any effort to expedite executions or greenlight a new execution method.

While Kobach’s bill may open a door for amendments to abolish the death penalty, Schreiber said he didn’t believe the Legislature would ban it before a prisoner has exhausted their appeals process in the coming years.

“There’s a substantial number of my colleagues that would support abolishing the death penalty, I don’t know if we’d get to 63 in the House,” he said, referring to the number of votes needed to pass a bill through the chamber.

Kubic, with the ACLU of Kansas, urged legislators to reject the bill, which he said was “utterly antithetical to the values of this state.” “Kansans have lost the appetite for this brand of false justice.”

(source: kansascity.com)

SINGAPORE:

Exclusive: Inside the prison that executes people for supplying cannabis

Though he is provided with a straw mat, Matthew says he prefers to sleep on the concrete floor of his cell in the maximum-security wing of Singapore’s Changi Prison.

“It’s more cooling that way,” says the 41-year-old former schoolteacher, who was sentenced to more than 7 years in prison and 7 strokes of the cane for selling methamphetamine.

CNN met Matthew, who spoke on condition that his last name be withheld, during an exclusive tour of Changi Prison provided by Singapore authorities as they defended the city-state’s uncompromising position on drugs.

In recent years, dozens of US states and countries ranging from Canada to Portugal have decriminalized marijuana.

But Singapore imposes a mandatory death penalty for people convicted of supplying certain amounts of illicit drugs – 15 grams (half an ounce) of heroin, 30 grams of cocaine, 250 grams of methamphetamine and 500 grams of cannabis.

A 64-year-old man was hanged for drug offenses this week – the fourth person to be hanged so far this year.

The harsh sentencing puts the wealthy city-state in a small club of countries that includes Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia, which execute criminals convicted of drug offenses.

K Shanmugam, Singapore’s Minister for Home Affairs and Law, characterizes the country’s war on drugs as an “existential battle,” and claims any easing of the government’s hardline stance could lead to chaos.

“Look around the world,” Shanmugam says. “Any time there has been a certain laxity in the approach to drugs, homicides go up. Killings, torture, kidnappings … that goes up.”

A lucrative drugs market

Visitors to Singapore get a stark warning about the island’s zero tolerance for drugs as international flights descend for landing.

“Drug trafficking may be punishable by death,” a woman’s voice announces over the loudspeaker, amid instructions to passengers to buckle seat belts and stow away tray tables.

Many citizens of this Southeast Asian city-state are also aware that it is illegal for them to consume drugs overseas.

Returning Singaporeans and permanent residents run the risk of facing drug tests upon arrival.

“When you come back, and if there is a reason to believe you have taken drugs, you could be tested,” Shanmugam says.

Per capita, Singapore is one of the world’s wealthiest countries. With a population of nearly 6 million people, it has an annual GDP per capita of nearly $134,000.

This regional transport and financial hub has a reputation for safety, efficiency and strictness under de facto single-party rule.

The People’s Action Party, of which Shanmugam is a member, has governed Singapore since its independence nearly 6 decades ago.

Speaking from a balcony in the Home Affairs Ministry overlooking tidy neighborhoods of parks and villas, Shanmugam argues his country is a potentially lucrative market in a part of Asia he says is awash with drugs.

“If you are able to traffic into Singapore, the street price here compared to the street price in some other parts [of the world], it’s a magnet.”

Singapore stands in relatively close proximity to the notorious Golden Triangle, the mountainous intersection of Thailand, Laos and civil war-torn Myanmar. Last year, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) labeled the region the world’s largest source of opium. Production of methamphetamine in the region has also surged in recent years, outpacing heroin and opium.

Singapore’s anti-drug czar claims strict punishment serves as a deterrent to drug traffickers.

“Our philosophy on prisons is not the same as, say, the Scandinavian philosophy,” Shanmugam says. “We choose to make it harsh,” he adds. “It is not a holiday home.

“It is intended to be tough.”

Single cells in stifling heat

Singapore’s Changi Prison Complex is a walled compound of guard towers and imposing gates built in the shadow of the country’s main airport.

More than 10,000 prisoners are held here, and according to the prison’s latest annual report, most are serving time for drug offenses.

CNN was given access to 1 floor of a maximum-security wing that holds around 160 prisoners jailed for felonies ranging from drug dealing to violent crimes including manslaughter.

A network of security cameras mounted inside and outside individual cells and even over toilets allow just 5 guards to monitor the entire floor.

At mealtimes, the metallic clang of shutting gates echoes through the cell block, as a prisoner distributes meal trays through a ground-level hatch at the bottom of each cell door.

Authorities allowed CNN to interview only one prisoner, Matthew, the former schoolteacher, who said he was addicted to the same drug he was selling.

His single-occupancy cell is austere, measuring just 7 square meters (75 square feet), with a squat toilet beneath a shower. Inmates are not allowed to have furniture, so there’s no bed or anything to sit on.

It is also steam-bath hot year-round in Singapore’s tropical climate, where maximum daily temperatures regularly rise above 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit).

The effect of extreme heat on prisoners has become more of a concern around the world as temperatures rise due to climate change.

“You will notice that there aren’t any fans or aircon,” Matthew explains. “There are some periods of time where it’s unbearable.”

Asked whether the threat of the death penalty had any deterrent effect on his drug dealing, Matthew says, “I would like to say yes.”

“But the truth is at that point in time I wasn’t thinking about it. In fact, I was actively avoiding the whole issue of consequences.”

‘Captains of life’

The prison’s deliberately harsh conditions contrast sharply with abundant emotional wellness messaging in the facility’s common areas.

The workshop, where prisoners pack anti-dandruff shampoo and instant coffee for a small salary, is plastered with motivational quotes from luminaries such as Steve Jobs and Nelson Mandela.

Cartoon characters and photos of waterfalls decorate classrooms where prisoners get lessons in anger management and job training.

Officials from the Singapore Prison Service say they encourage guards to think of themselves as “Captains of Life,” helping rehabilitate the prison population.

From an air-conditioned room known as “the fish tank,” they monitor inmates on live feeds from dozens of security cameras positioned around the prison.

Reuben Leong, the officer in charge of the correctional unit, says the job is not without risk. Violent incidents – usually fights between inmates – take place every few weeks, he says.

“There will be periods of time where they can be demanding, they can be rude, they can be hostile to you,” he adds.

The Yellow Ribbon Project is a government program aimed at rehabilitating former convicts, with job placement and community engagement.

Despite these efforts, Singaporean officials say roughly one in five former prisoners will likely end up back behind bars within 2 years. By comparison, 1 in 3 return to prison within 2 years in the United States, which has some of the highest recidivism rates in the world.

Meanwhile, there is no rehabilitation for death row inmates.

Singapore executed 11 prisoners by hanging in 2022, and 5 last year, according to the latest figures. All were convicted of drug charges.

Officials did not allow CNN to visit Institution A1, where more than 40 death row inmates await the same fate.

‘Give my son a 2nd chance’

Outside the prison walls, relatives of death row inmates hold an agonizing vigil awaiting the fate of their loved ones.

Halinda binte Ismail has a shock of bleach blond hair and sports a small stud in her left nostril.

By her count, the 61-year-old has been in prison at least 7 times, always for drugs. Halinda says she was just 12 when she first smoked heroin.

Her last arrest was in 2017, when police raided the building where she lived with her eldest son, Muhammed Izwan bin Borhan.

Both mother and son were convicted for narcotics. But while Halinda ended up serving 5 years, her son was sentenced to death after police caught him with 6 packets of meth and heroin, according to court documents. He is still in prison, awaiting execution.

“I’m very angry with why the government doesn’t give [my son] a chance to change his life,” Halinda says.

Singapore swimming hero Joseph Schooling admits using cannabis while competing in Vietnam

“I always pray to the government ‘give my son a second chance.’”

Halinda is now part of a small movement of activists seeking to ban Singapore’s death penalty.

“It’s not solving anything, and it’s just disproportionately used against some of the most marginalized and weakest people in society,” says Kirsten Han, a journalist and activist with the Transformative Justice Collective, who lobbies on behalf of death row inmates.

“I just feel like it’s very morally wrong.”

Han’s outspoken criticism of Singapore’s system of executions has won her the personal enmity of Shanmugam, the Home Affairs minister.

“She is one of those who romanticizes the people on death row,” Shanmugam tells CNN. However, Shanmugam confirms one of Han’s observations.

Among more than 40 inmates he says are currently on death row, most are in the “lower social-economic category.”

One of the 11 prisoners executed in 2022 for drug offenses was Nazeri bin Lajim.

“I was hoping that they [would] give him the life sentence, but they literally hanged my brother,” says his surviving sister Nazira.

Singapore’s pre-execution photos seek to soften a policy activists say doesn’t work

Nazira says her brother was a life-long drug addict, but not a violent man.

She shows a series of portraits in her phone of Nazeri, dressed in a brightly printed T-shirt, smiling and holding up a victory sign for the camera.

Before each execution, authorities organize a professional photo shoot in which inmates trade their prison uniforms for civilian clothes.

Nazira doesn’t appreciate the gesture.

“It’s fake happiness,” she says.

She says she is encouraging her adult children to leave Singapore permanently to emigrate to Australia.

War on drugs

Singaporean officials point to surveys that show overwhelming public support for the government’s war on drugs.

In public appearances, Shanmugam often highlights public drug use on the streets of European and American cities to justify Singapore’s approach to the problem.

But it may be more fitting to compare Singapore’s record with Hong Kong, another former British colony that has a zero-tolerance approach to drugs.

Hong Kong’s population is around 25% larger than Singapore’s, and it does not impose the death penalty for drug offenses.

Yet despite its considerably larger population, Hong Kong made 3,406 drug arrests in 2023 – just a few hundred more than the 3,101 drug arrests in Singapore.

And according to Shanmugam, drug arrests in Singapore surged 10% in 2023 – suggesting that perhaps the threat of death is failing to act as a deterrent to crime.

“It’s a fight that you never say you’ve won,” Shanmugam says.

“It’s a continuous work in progress.”

(source: CNN)

INDIA:

Over 81,000 criminals convicted in UP since March 2017

Of these, 54 awarded death penalty, 3,125 life imprisonment, at least 9,076 sentenced to more than 10 years in prison and 16,941 sentenced to less than 10 years in prison, says ADG

The Prosecution Directorate of the UP Police made significant strides in combating crime and successfully prosecuted over 80,000 criminals over the past 7 1/2 years, demonstrating the effectiveness of its legal advocacy across various state courts.

Over 81,196 criminals were convicted since March 2017. Of these, 54 were awarded death penalty, 3,125 life imprisonment, at least 9,076 were sentenced to more than 10 years in prison and 16,941 sentenced to less than 10 years in prison, said ADG Deepesh Juneja.

The directorate had been sidelined under previous administrations, but the Yogi Adityanath-led state government prioritised its role, enhancing its capacity to tackle crime effectively.

In the last 16 months, as part of Operation Conviction, the police and prosecution department convicted and sentenced nearly 52,000 criminals. Specifically in cases involving women and children, 28,700 criminals were punished for serious offences, including sexual assault and crimes under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act. Of these, 16,565 criminals were punished for sexual crimes and related offences, with 9 of them sentenced death, 1,720 awarded life imprisonment, 4,443 receiving sentences of more than 10 years’ imprisonment, and 10,393 awarded imprisonments below 10 years.

(source: hindustantimes.com)

***********

HC reduces death penalty to life imprisonment without remission for 25 years----The 4 convicts had challenged the trial court’s judgment dated April 18, 2015, in an appeal before the High Court through Advocate Ateeb Kanth

The High Court of J&K and Ladakh has reduced the death sentence to life imprisonment without remission for a minimum of 25 years to four convicts for the gruesome rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl in north Kashmir’s Handwara area in 2007.

In 2015, Principal Sessions Court Kupwara sentenced to death 4 persons, Muhammad Sadiq Mir alias Sada of Langate Kupwara, Jehangir Ansari of Nawada Jungoo area of West Bengal, Azhar Ahmad Mir alias Billa of Shatapora Langate, and Suresh Kumar Sasi alias Mouchi of Rajasthan, at present Amritsar Punjab after they were found guilty for abduction, rape, and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl.

The trial court had called the offence “the rarest of rare” and observed that the convicts were a menace to society and to “conceal their evil deed, they had committed a drastic and extreme brutal act which has resulted in depriving the life of a minor who was helpless and innocent”.

The 4 convicts had challenged the trial court’s judgment dated April 18, 2015, in an appeal before the High Court through Advocate Ateeb Kanth.

“We are inclined to modify the sentence of death imposed by the trial court on the appellants (convicts) for commission of offence punishable under Section 302 RPC and instead sentence the appellants to imprisonment for life without remission for at least 25 years that is they should not be released for any reason, whatsoever, before serving the minimum sentence of 25 years,” a division bench of Justice Sanjeev Kumar and Justice M A Chowdhary said.

However, the bench held that the rest of the sentences imposed by the trial court would remain intact and those of imprisonment run concurrently with imprisonment for life.

“The trial court will issue a warrant for execution of sentences, in terms of this judgment,” it said.

Besides the death penalty for offences under Section 302/34 of the Ranbir Penal Code (RPC), now repealed, the convicts were sentenced to rigorous imprisonment of seven years for an offence punishable under Section 363/34 of the RPC.

They were also sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for 10 years for the offence punishable under Sections 376(G)/34 of the RPC.

In addition, they were sentenced to simple imprisonment of a month for offences punishable under Section 341/ 34 of the RPC.

The hapless minor girl was gang raped and killed in orchards near Batapora Wuder on July 20, 2007, when she was on her way from school to home.

Afterwards, the Police arrested 4 persons and filed a chargesheet following an investigation which culminated in their conviction and death penalty in 2015.

“Public opinion is difficult to fit in ‘rarest of the rare’ doctrine. People’s perception of crime is neither an objective circumstance relating to crime nor to the criminal,” the bench said. “Perception of the public is extraneous to conviction as also sentencing according to the Mandate of Bachan Singh (SC verdict).”

The court observed that the “public opinion may also run counter to rule of law and constitutionalism”. It said: “There is also a danger of capital sentencing becoming a spectacle in the media. And if a media trial is a possibility, sentencing by media cannot be ruled out.”

The court noted that it was suffice to say that it does not dispute that the crime of rape and murder is always gruesome and abhorrent.

“However, having regard to the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court from time to time and explained in the case of Bachan Singh and Machi Singh, the case does not fall in the definition of ‘rarest of the rare case,” it said.

“We have not found anything on record to show the previous conviction of any of the appellants in the police record. The witnesses have orally referred to the registration of some cases for commission of minor offences but the prosecution has not placed on record any documentary evidence to substantiate the aforesaid aspect,” the court said.

It observed that nothing had been brought to its notice by the prosecution from which it could be inferred that convicts were a menace to the society.

The court said: “Merely saying so at the time of arguments, is not good enough to believe that there are no chances of appellants’ reformation.”

(source: greaterkashmir.com)

JAPAN:

'This is the beginning': 91-year-old sister of longest death row inmate sees hope in his acquittal

Hideko Hakamada, 91, spent much of her life working to free her brother from nearly a half-century on death row. Now that he has been acquitted she feels that the siblings are beginning a new chapter of their lives.

She backed her brother, Iwao Hakamada, the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, through decades of frustrating, at times apparently hopeless, legal wrangling as his mental condition worsened.

“No matter what people said about me, I lived my own life and appreciated my freedom. I did not belittle myself as the sister of a death row inmate. I lived without shame,” she told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview at her home in the central Japanese city of Hamamatsu. “My little brother only happened to be a death row inmate.”

While working as an accountant to support herself, she helped cover her brother’s legal costs, made regular long trips to Tokyo to see him on death row and helped shape public opinion in his favor.

It wasn’t easy, and there were times she felt helpless.

“I was desperately working to win him a retrial, because that was the only way to save his life," she said. But sometimes she felt "at a loss and even unsure who I should be fighting against. … It was like I was fighting against an invisible power.”

To maintain a sense of herself, outside of her brother's legal fight, she invested her savings and took out loans to have a building constructed. She now rents out apartments in the building, where the siblings live.

Iwao Hakamada, a former boxer, was acquitted in September by the Shizuoka District Court, which said police and prosecutors had collaborated to fabricate and plant evidence against him, and forced him to confess with violent, hourslong, closed interrogations.

Earlier in the week, he received in the mail his voting ticket for Oct. 27 parliamentary elections, a verification his civil rights are being restored. Though he was freed from his solitary death row cell after a 2014 court order for a retrial, his conviction was not cleared and his rights were not fully restored until the recent decision.

Hideko Hakamada said she is “filled with happiness” over the acquittal, and that being able to vote "means he has finally been allowed back into society.”

“I will definitely go vote with him. It doesn’t matter which candidate" he votes for, she said. "To me what’s important is that he casts a vote.”

Her brother's long death row confinement took a toll on his mental health. He often drifts between reality and his imagination. He understands his acquittal but doesn’t seem to be fully convinced, she said.

Because of his difficulty carrying on a conversation and to avoid stress, Iwao Hakamada could not speak with the AP and left while his sister was interviewed. Volunteers took him on his daily ride and a brief walk. His supporters say he thinks he is going out “patrolling” as a guardian for the neighborhood.

He was convicted of murder in the 1966 killing of an executive at a miso bean paste company and 3 of his family members in Hamamatsu. He was sentenced to death in a 1968 district court ruling, but was not executed because of the lengthy appeal and retrial process in Japan’s labyrinth-like criminal justice system.

It took 27 years for the Supreme Court to deny his 1st appeal for a retrial. His 2nd appeal for a retrial was filed in 2008 by his sister, and that request was granted in 2014.

Hideko Hakamada said her brother’s training as a professional boxer helped him survive. She maintained a rock-solid trust in her brother, who was the closest to her among their 6 siblings.

For his first few years in prison, her brother wrote to his mother every day, repeating that he was innocent, asking about his mother’s health and expressing optimism about his fate.

“I am innocent,” he wrote in a letter to his mother while on trial in 1967.

After the top court finalized his death penalty in 1980, Hideko Hakamada noticed changes in her brother.

He expressed fear and anger at being falsely accused. “When I go to sleep in a soundless solitary cell every night, I sometimes cannot help cursing God. I have not done anything wrong,” he wrote to his family. “What a cold-blooded act to inflict such cruelty on me.”

The only way for her to make sure he was alive was to go to visit him in person at the Tokyo Detention House. She could only see him for up to 30 minutes per visit. She also arranged care packages of fruit and sweets. There were times he refused to meet, presumably because of the deterioration of his mental health.

Executions are carried out in secrecy in Japan, and prisoners are not informed of their fate until the morning they are hanged. In 2007, Japan began disclosing the names of those executed and some details of their crimes, but disclosures are still limited. Japan and the United States are the only 2 countries in the Group of 7 advanced nations that have capital punishment.

Hakamada was the world’s longest-serving death row prisoner and only the 5th death row inmate to be acquitted in a retrial in postwar Japan, where prosecutors have near-perfect conviction rates and retrials are extremely rare.

Hideko Hakamada wants that changed, based on the lessons learned from her brother’s case, which has raised criticism about prosecutorial actions.

She rarely complained about her ordeal or the harsh public comments she faced or her fear that her brother would be executed despite her belief that he was wrongfully accused. She has been praised for her positive attitude and strength. But, she says, “It is Iwao who deserves praise for surviving, for walking out of confinement after more than 50 years.”

As her brother’s legal fight dragged on, she decided to build a home so she could feel a sense of achievement for herself.

“That became something to strive for,” she said.

To stay fit enough for her regular trips from Hamamatsu to Tokyo to visit her brother, she started exercising every morning, a mix of stretching and gymnastic exercises. She still keeps up with her morning routine.

“I’m 91, but age has nothing on me. People say ordinary 91-year-olds live more quietly, but that's not what I’m doing. I want to do everything I can while I’m still in good health,” she said.

“I’m not done yet," she said, with a laugh. "This is the beginning.”

(source: Associated Press)

IRAN----executions<

Khamenei’s Execution and Repression Machine Continues Unabated in Fear of Uprising and Overthrow----Brutal execution of 15 prisoners on Wednesday and Thursday, October 16 and 17, and the execution of 12 women during Pezeshkian’s term

Ali Khamenei’s machinery of execution and repression is relentlessly active in fear of uprising and overthrow. On Thursday, October 17, 6 prisoners were hanged. On this day, Abbas Karimi, 36, and Mohammad Ali Najafi, 35, were executed in Isfahan, while Noormorad Garavand and a prisoner named Sanjari were executed in Qazvin, and 2 prisoners were hanged in Qom.

On Wednesday, October 16, in another brutal massacre, 9 prisoners were hanged by the regime’s executioners. One of them was previously named in an earlier statement. The remaining 8 included Rasoul Faily and a female prisoner in Hamedan, Abdulbari Tajik, Pasha Pashto, Javid Ahmad Khani, and a prisoner named Rahman in Qezelhessar prison, Mohsen Mokhtari in Shiraz, and another prisoner in Mashhad. On October 14, in addition to an execution mentioned in the previous statement, Alireza Khashaveh-Pour was hanged in Mashhad.

Thus, since July 2024, when Massoud Pezeshkian took office, at least 316 prisoners, including 12 women, have been sent to the gallows.

Engaging in negotiations and deals with the regime, which holds the record for executions and torture in today’s world, is a blatant violation of universal human rights principles. It only encourages this regime to continue its brutal and systematic violation of human rights, as well as its export of terrorism and warmongering. Diplomatic and commercial relations with this regime must be conditional on the cessation of torture and execution, and its leaders must be brought to justice for four decades of crimes against humanity and genocide.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)

(source: ncr-iran.org)

***********

At Least 6 Men Including 4 Afghans Executed in Karaj

At least 6 men including 4 Afghan nationals were executed for drug-related and murder charges in Ghezelhesar Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, at least 6 men were executed in Ghezelhesar Prison in Karaj on 16 October. 4 of the men were sentenced to death for drug-related charges. 3 of their identities have been established as Javid Ahmadi and Afghan nationals Abdolbari Tajik and Pasha Pashto. The 4th man has not been identified at the time of writing.

The 2 other men were Afghan national who were sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder. IHRNGO is working to establish their identities.

4 others who were transferred to Ghezelhesar Prison for execution are also reported to have been executed which IHRNGO has not been able to verify at the time of writing.

At the time of writing, their executions have not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

************

Amir Soleimani Executed in Urmia

Amir Soleimani, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Urmia Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Urmia (Darya) Central Prison on 15 October. His identity has been established as 33-year-old Amir Soleimani from Urmia.

He was arrested for murder charges 3 years ago and sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

***********

Alireza Kheshavehpour Executed in Mashhad

Alireza Kheshavehpour, a man on death row for drug-related offences, was executed in Mashhad Central Prison.

According to HRANA news agency, a man was executed in Mashhad (Vakil Abad) Central Prison on 14th October. His identity has been reported as Alireza Kheshavehpour who was sentenced to death for drug-related offences by the Revolutionary Court. He was transferred for execution the day prior.

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

************

Vali Heshmatpour Executed in Shirvan

Vali Heshmatpour, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Shirvan Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Shirvan Prison in North Khorasan Razavi province on 15th October. His identity has been established as Vali Heshmatpour who was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Vali Heshmatpour was transferred from another prison for execution in Shirvan Prison. The murder he was convicted for took place in Shiravan.”

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

*************

Ali Maroufkhani Executed in Qazvin

Ali Maroufkhani, a man on death row for drug-related offences, was executed in Qazvin Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Qazvin (Choobindar) Central Prison on 10th October. His identity has been established as Ali Maroufkhani who was sentenced to death for drug-related offences by the Revolutionary Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Ali Maroufkhani was arrested for drug charges with another person nearly 4 years ago and both were sentenced to death.”

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Drug-related executions have continuously risen every year since 2021. According to IHRNGO’s 2023 Annual Report on the Death Penalty, at least 471 people were executed for drug-related charges, an 84% increase compared to 2022 (256) and about 18 times the average of drug-related executions in 2018-2020. In the first 6 months of 2024, at least 147 people were executed for the charges.

On 10 April 2024, 80+ Iranian and international organisations and groups called for joint action to stop drug-related executions, urging UNODC to make “any cooperation with the Islamic Republic contingent on a complete halt on drug-related executions.”

(source for all: iranhr.net)

OCTOBER 19, 2024:

TEXAS:

Texas Death Row Inmate to Testify Before Lawmakers Who Secured Reprieve

A man on death row in Texas who had expected to be executed on Thursday night is now set to testify next week before the state lawmakers who believe he may have been wrongly convicted of murdering his 2-year-old daughter and secured him an extraordinary reprieve.

Robert Roberson, 56, had been scheduled for the execution by lethal injection. He was convicted in 2002 based on a since-discredited understanding of shaken baby syndrome.

Lawmakers in the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives have been reviewing Roberson's case as they debate whether to strengthen a Texas statute that addresses convictions linked to so-called junk science.

Roberson has said he found that his daughter, Nikki, had fallen out of bed and, soon after, stopped breathing - days after a doctor diagnosed her with a viral infection and prescribed medicine that, according to medical experts, should not be given to young children.

In recent years, doctors have said that shaken baby syndrome abuse occurs and can cause symptoms that brain scans showed Nikki had, but that these also may be present in cases in which no abuse took place.

Roberson had repeatedly and unsuccessfully sought a new trial after Texas passed a 2013 law that gave convicted people a new avenue to appeal if their prosecution had turned on scientific evidence and hypotheses that had since become outdated or debunked.

On Wednesday, the lawmakers voted to issue a subpoena for Roberson to testify before the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence. On Thursday, they secured an order from a Texas judge staying the execution and forbidding state officials from preventing Roberson from answering the subpoena.

Roberson is expected to appear in person at the state Capitol in Austin on Monday afternoon.

"This was an extraordinary maneuver by these Texas lawmakers, and it did the trick," said Robin Maher, director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. "What I hope is that everyone involved in this case, particularly state officials pushing for a new execution date, will have an opportunity to reconsider their options."

(source: Reuters)

****************

The entire Texas government is fighting over whether to save a man’s life----Robert Roberson was sentenced to die on a theory that’s now widely viewed with skepticism by medical experts.

On Thursday night, the Texas Supreme Court handed down an extraordinary order saving Robert Roberson from execution — but potentially not for very long.

Roberson was convicted in 2003 of murdering his daughter on the theory that she died of “shaken baby syndrome.” However, in an extraordinary turn of events, it now appears likely that Roberson is innocent. Not only that, but it is far from clear that his daughter was even a victim of murder in the first place.

One reason to doubt the conviction is that modern science looks at shaken baby syndrome with increasing skepticism. More importantly, however, the evidence in Roberson’s case suggests that his poor girl actually died from a combination of pneumonia and medications that should never have been prescribed to such a young patient, and that the injuries that a 2003 jury attributed to child abuse may have resulted from a surgery.

Another reason why the order in In re Texas House of Representatives is so extraordinary is that it involves what may be an unprecedented conflict between the state’s legislature and its governor. Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott (R) has the power to issue a 30-day pause on Roberson’s execution (although not to grant him permanent clemency) but has thus far refused to do so, and the state intended to execute Roberson Thursday night.

The day before, however, a bipartisan group of state lawmakers issued a subpoena seeking Roberson’s testimony before a committee of the state’s House of Representatives. This hearing isn’t scheduled until Monday, and Roberson obviously could not comply with this subpoena if he had been killed Thursday night.

So Roberson’s case raises what may be a unique separation of powers issue under the Texas Constitution: Can Texas’s executive branch of government carry out an otherwise lawful execution if doing so would prevent its legislative branch from hearing testimony from a witness it has already subpoenaed?

Roberson’s case has proved to be divisive within Texas’s Republican-controlled government

The Texas Supreme Court’s order in Texas House has nothing to say about whether or not Roberson is innocent. Indeed, the state Supreme Court isn’t ordinarily allowed to weigh in on criminal appeals at all — those are handled by an entirely separate court known as the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which has repeatedly denied relief to Roberson. Nor did the state Supreme Court definitively rule on whether the House’s subpoena can halt an execution.

Instead, in a concurring opinion joined by two other justices, Justice Evan Young explains that he voted to temporarily halt Roberson’s execution in order to give the courts time to figure out what is supposed to happen in the unusual circumstance when the legislature seeks testimony from a death row inmate on the eve of his execution.

“We do not have clear precedent on this question,” Young writes, which is unsurprising given the highly unlikely situation that led to this case coming before his court.

2 other aspects of the case are worth noting. One is that this case has pitted many of the states’ Republicans against each other. While Abbott, who has yet to intervene on Roberson’s behalf, is a Republican, so too are the two Texas lawmakers who introduced the resolution to subpoena Roberson. Every justice on the Texas Supreme Court is a Republican, as is every judge on the Court of Criminal Appeals, which most recently voted 5-4 to deny relief to Roberson.

The other aspect is that Roberson’s fate likely rests with Texas’s Board of Pardons and Paroles, which already voted once on Wednesday not to recommend clemency for him. If this board recommends clemency, Abbott may commute Roberson’s death sentence altogether. Without a clemency recommendation, however, Abbott can only delay the execution by 30 days.

For now, Roberson’s attorneys are trying to buy him time. At most, the legislative subpoena may prevent Texas from rescheduling his execution until after Monday, when his testimony is supposed to occur. Then it’s likely up to Abbott to grant him another 30 days to convince the pardon board to reverse its decision.

The striking thing about this case, however, is that virtually everyone who has touched it wants Roberson to live except for the few people in Texas’s government (the Court of Criminal Appeals, the pardon board, and Abbott) who actually have the power to save him. One of Roberson’s advocates is Brian Wharton, the lead detective in his case who now believes he is innocent.

Another is US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned a 10-page statement explaining that the US Supreme Court is unable to intervene because Roberson does not claim that any of his rights under federal law are being violated. Yet, while Sotomayor agreed that she is powerless because Roberson “presents no cognizable federal claim,” her statement practically begs the state officials who can actually save Roberson’s life to do so.

“An executive reprieve of thirty days would provide the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles with an opportunity to reconsider the evidence of Roberson’s actual innocence,” Sotomayor writes at the end of that statement. “That could prevent a miscarriage of justice from occurring: executing a man who has raised credible evidence of actual innocence.”

(source: Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.----vox.com)

************

How a stunning 11th-hour race to save a Texas death row inmate from execution in ‘shaken baby’ case unfolded

Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson sat praying in a cell Thursday night, just feet from the execution chamber where he was set to die by lethal injection for the “shaken baby” death of his toddler.

While he prayed, the state and his advocates were fighting over his fate in a remarkable exchange of 11th-hour legal maneuvers.

Roberson’s life was ultimately spared, for now, by the Texas Supreme Court, which issued a temporary stay of his execution shortly before his death warrant was set to expire at midnight.

A new date must now be set for Roberson’s execution, providing precious time for his attorneys and a bipartisan group of Texas House members who believe he was wrongfully convicted of murder in the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, which was attributed to shaken baby syndrome.

Shock washed over Roberson as a group of Texas officials informed him of the stay Thursday night, and he began to praise God and “claimed his innocence,” just as he has done for the past two decades, according to Amanda Hernandez, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The dramatic turn began Wednesday when, in an unusual last-ditch effort to delay Roberson’s death, the bipartisan Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a subpoena calling for him to testify before the panel next week as it reconsiders the lawfulness of his case.

The committee’s action provided new hope for Roberson’s attorneys as all other avenues to halt the execution failed. In a matter of days, his legal team lost multiple appeals in state courts, the Texas pardons board rejected his bid for clemency and the US Supreme Court declined to intervene.

“The vast team fighting for Robert Roberson – people all across Texas, the country, and the world – are elated tonight that a contingent of brave, bipartisan Texas lawmakers chose to dig deep into the facts of Robert’s case that no court had yet considered and recognized that his life was worth fighting for,” Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sween said Thursday night.

Having a legislative body step in to prevent a pending execution is unprecedented, experts say.

“We are in uncharted waters legally in Texas,” Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, told CNN’s Erica Hill Friday.

Just over 90 minutes before Roberson’s execution was set to begin, the House committee was able to secure a temporary restraining order against the state, pausing the execution. The victory was short-lived, however, as a divided Texas Court of Criminal Appeals struck down the order.

Following the appeals court’s decision, the House committee asked the Texas Supreme Court to issue an injunction against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and Texas Department of Criminal Justice Correctional Institutions Division. Though the high court swiftly issued a temporary stay halting the execution, the petition for the injunction is still pending.

“For over 20 years, Roberson has spent 23.5 hours of every single day in solitary confinement in a cell no bigger than the closets of most Texans, longing and striving to be heard,” said committee members Rep. Joe Moody and Rep. Jeff Leach in a joint statement following the stay. “And while some courthouses may have failed him, the Texas House has not.”

As the volley of legal challenges played out, Roberson sat in a cell of the Huntsville Unit where his execution was set to take place. He spent time in prayer and also spoke several times to his wife and other family members, according to his sister-in-law, Jennifer Roberson.

“When we spoke to Robert earlier, I was thinking to myself, ‘You need to be strong, you need to comfort him.’ And that’s the exact opposite of what happened,” she said. “I was a nervous wreck and he was comforting me, telling me to be obedient to God, stay strong, keep the faith, keep the hope.”

Roberson’s family is feeling “amazing” after the stay, Jennifer Roberson said. “It’s taken almost 22 years for Texas to step up and do the right thing.”

Among those desperately waiting for news in the case was Brian Wharton, the former Palestine, Texas, detective who led the investigation into Nikki’s death. Wharton has since said the investigation was too narrowly focused and has joined the fight to save Roberson.

“Finally, this evening, they did come and tell us that he got a stay, and his wife started crying, and everybody else just kind of took a deep breath. Because we all know he’s innocent,” Wharton told CNN Thursday. “We’ve been fighting this fight for a while and trying to get a fair hearing.”

Roberson is scheduled to testify before the House committee on Monday, or possibly sooner if ordered by the court.

“We look forward to welcoming Robert to the Texas Capitol, and along with 31 million Texans, finally giving him – and the truth – a chance to be heard,” Reps. Moody and Leach said in their statement.

CNN has reached out to the offices of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for comment on the court’s decision.

Roberson’s case is called into question

Advocates for Roberson insist the diagnosis that his daughter died from shaken baby syndrome is inaccurate and has been discredited.

The Texas House committee voted to subpoena Roberson as it considers the application of a law commonly referred to as the “junk science writ” – which opened a path for people to challenge their convictions if new scientific evidence has emerged since their trial.

The lawmakers said medical evidence presented at Roberson’s 2003 trial “is inconsistent with modern scientific principles.”

While child abuse pediatricians remain firm on the validity of the shaken baby syndrome diagnosis, Roberson’s attorneys say there is ample evidence his daughter, Nikki Curtis, did not die of child abuse.

At the time of her death, she had double pneumonia that had progressed to sepsis, and she was prescribed two medications now seen as inappropriate for children that would have further hindered her ability to breathe, they argue, citing medical experts.

Additionally, she had fallen off a bed, and was particularly vulnerable in her sickly condition, Roberson’s attorneys say.

Other factors, too, contributed to his conviction, they argue. Doctors treating Nikki “presumed” abuse based on her symptoms and common thinking at the time of her death without exploring her recent medical history, the inmate’s attorneys claim. His behavior in the emergency room – viewed as uncaring by doctors, nurses and the police, who believed it a sign of his guilt – was actually a manifestation of autism spectrum disorder, which went undiagnosed until 2018, according to his attorneys.

Roberson’s attorneys are not disputing babies can and do die from being shaken. But they contend more benign explanations, including illness, can mimic the symptoms of shaking, and those alternative explanations should be ruled out before a medical expert testifies with certainty that the cause of death was abuse.

Shaken baby syndrome is accepted as a valid diagnosis by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by child abuse pediatricians who spoke with CNN. The condition, first described in the mid-1970s, has for the past 15 or so years been considered a type of “abusive head trauma” – a broader term used to reflect actions other than shaking, like an impact to a child’s head.

Criminal defense lawyers also have oversimplified how doctors diagnose abusive head trauma, child abuse pediatricians say, noting many factors are considered to determine it.

“The conclusion is simply (Nikki) was a victim of abusive head trauma. Unequivocally,” Dr. Sandeep Narang, a child abuse pediatrician and a lawyer, told CNN after he said he was asked by a supporter of Roberson’s defense to review trial testimony in the case.

Still, the diagnosis has been the focus of debates in courtrooms across the country. Since 1992, courts in at least 17 states and the US Army have exonerated 32 people convicted in shaken baby syndrome cases, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Child abuse pediatricians like Dr. Antoinette Laskey, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, dispute these statistics. She pointed to a 2021 paper that found just 3% of all convictions in shaken baby syndrome cases between 2008 and 2018 were overturned, and only 1% of them were overturned because of medical evidence.

(source: CNN)

PENNSYLVANIA:

Lawyers argue whether Pittsburgh triple homicide defendant's intellect should bar death penalty

A judge Friday delayed jury selection in a triple homicide case in Pittsburgh that was supposed to start after the weekend as lawyers continued to fight over whether the defendant ought to face the death penalty.

Prosecutors are seeking capital punishment for Ronald Steave, 32, whose alleged victims include a 12-year-old boy.

But Steave’s defense attorneys say the death penalty should be off the table because their client has an IQ of 70, making him, they say, intellectually disabled.

Under a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case, it is unconstitutional to sentence a person with intellectual disability to death.

Prosecutors in May 2022 announced their desire to put Steave to death. His lawyers have filed various motions in the case, including to contest the death penalty, but it wasn’t until this month that they tried to argue that his intellect should make him ineligible for capital punishment.

A hearing on the matter was scheduled for Friday morning, but the defense expert wasn’t available.

Meanwhile, an expert who evaluated Steave for the court said he didn’t have enough information before him to make a final decision.

The parties are expected to reconvene Monday morning.

Earlier this week, Steave’s lawyers and prosecutors battled over whether a statement the defendant made to police that pinned the blame on one of the victims should be admitted.

The prosecution admitted to making a mistake by not turning over the evidence, and the defense asked for the entire case to be thrown out. But Allegheny County Judge Edward J. Borkowski declined to dismiss the case, ruling that the oversight was not a level of prosecutorial misconduct that would warrant a dismissal.

‘Sub-average intelligence’

Pittsburgh police said Steave killed his ex-girlfriend, Nandi Fitzgerald, 28; her son, Denzel “Buddy” Nowlin Jr, 12; and her friend, Tatiana “Tay” Hill, 28, at a home on Hamilton Avenue in Homewood on Dec. 31, 2021.

Five months later, the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office filed a notice that it would seek the death penalty against Steave, citing seven aggravating factors in the case, such as that he has a significant history of felony convictions involving violence.

Dr. Bruce Wright, a psychiatrist, testified Friday that he evaluated Steave the day before.

Wright agreed with the defense expert that Steave’s IQ is 70, signaling “significantly sub-average intelligence.”

But Wright told Allegheny Common Pleas Judge Edward J. Borkowski that he would need additional information about the defendant’s social skills and ability to function in society before he could render a final opinion.

Wright said that Steave has lived independently, earned his GED, has a driver’s license and is able to cook. But Wright had no information available about Steave’s childhood, medical or school history.

Deputy District Attorney Brian Catanzarite told the court that the prosecution is planning to call an expert from Philadelphia to evaluate Steave and provide a second opinion, prompting frustration from the judge.

“For 20 years, your office has relied on Dr. Wright, who’s respected on both sides of the aisle,” Borkowski said.

“The commonwealth is entitled to their own expert,” Catanzarite responded.

“In terms of the ethics and integrity of your office, if Dr. Wright says Steave is intellectually disabled, you want to contest that?” Borkowski asked.

“We may want to contest it, yes,” Catanzarite said.

Moratorium still in place

There are currently 7 pending death penalty cases in Allegheny County. There had been an 8th against a man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend at their Blawnox workplace, but prosecutors withdrew it earlier this month after the victim’s family told prosecutors that the death penalty would negatively impact their children’s well being.

All of the pending cases have been filed since former Gov. Tom Wolf declared a moratorium on the death penalty in February 2015.

Since taking office last year, Gov. Josh Shapiro has called on the state legislature to abolish it.

The last execution in Pennsylvania was in 1999, and there are currently 95 people on death row, including 6 from Allegheny County.

The most recent person to be sentenced to capital punishment was Richard Poplawski, who was convicted of killing 3 Pittsburgh police officers in 2011.

(source: triblive.com)

SOUTH CAROLINA----impending execution

2nd SC inmate set for execution this year chooses to die by lethal injection

South Carolina inmate Richard Moore has selected lethal injection as the method for his Nov. 1 execution, while his attorneys and family continue to fight for a reprieve.

Moore’s decision was filed with the state Supreme Court on Friday, two weeks before his scheduled execution, which is the deadline set by state law. If he had not made a choice, the default method is electrocution.

Moore’s attorneys are challenging his execution on multiple fronts.

The 59-year-old was convicted in 2001 by a Spartanburg County jury of murder, armed robbery, and assault with intent to kill in the death of gas station clerk James Mahoney two years earlier.

His attorneys are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the execution as excessive, noting he was unarmed when he went into the gas station, and he was sentenced by an all-white jury. The state Supreme Court has already declined to overturn his sentence on those arguments.

Beyond calling the sentence disproportionate, Moore’s son, Lyndall Moore, said his father is a changed man who clearly regrets what he did and has spent the last 20 years trying to make up for it, reports The Associated Press.

Moore’s inmate record shows zero disciplinary issues since his conviction.

Amnesty International has also gotten involved, publicly calling on Gov. Henry McMaster to have mercy on Moore and commute his sentence to life in prison.

That Moore entered the station unarmed demonstrates a “lack of premeditation that raises serious questions as to whether the crime rose to the level for which the death penalty is reserved in U.S. constitutional law,” reads Amnesty’s call to action. Its website urges people to write letters to McMaster.

No governor in South Carolina has granted clemency to a death row inmate since a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling reinstated capital punishment.

A separate federal lawsuit seeks more information on the state’s supply of pentobarbital, the drug that will be used in the execution. That ongoing case, filed on behalf of several death row inmates, failed to stop last month’s execution of Freddie Owens, who was the 1st person executed in South Carolina in 13 years.

Then last week, Moore’s attorneys filed a new federal lawsuit arguing McMaster should not have the final say on clemency for Moore, since in his former role as the state’s attorney general, McMaster successfully fought Moore’s appeals. They also pointed to comments the governor made in 2022, when Moore was last scheduled for execution.

The federal judge said Tuesday she doesn’t think the law requires the governor to be impartial, but she asked McMaster’s attorneys to submit a signed statement assuring the court that he would fully consider Moore’s petition. They did so Thursday.

“As governor, it is and has been my firm intention and commitment to fulfill these obligations in all official matters and circumstances before me, including those involving capital punishment and executive clemency,” reads McMaster’s statement. “In such matters, it is and has been my intention and commitment to take care to understand the issues presented, including those from my review and consideration of applications, petitions, and requests for clemency presented to me by or on behalf of a condemned inmate in advance of an execution date.”

Moore becomes the 2nd death row inmate this year to select lethal injection. The other option is death by firing squad, which the Legislature added in 2021 as part of the same law that reverted to the electric chair as the default. That law was an attempt to resume executions amid the state’s inability to restock its lethal injection drugs.

Two years ago, Moore chose death by firing squad as a better option than the electric chair, even as he continued to fight the constitutionality of both methods. That execution was ultimately halted amid legal challenges.

A separate law legislators passed last year, which guaranteed secrecy surrounding the drugs’ procurement, enabled the Department of Corrections to buy enough pentobarbital to carry out a death sentence by lethal injection.

Moore is the 2nd of 6 inmates expected to be executed over the coming months after the state’s high court declared both electrocution and the firing squad constitutional.

(source: South Carolina Daily Gazette)

**************

South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty to host event Oct. 23

South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty will be hosting an event at the Lexington County Public Library on August Road from 6 to 7 p.m. on Oct. 23.

The event is part of SCDAP's Palmetto Journey of Hope series. The mission of the series "is to empower the voices of system-impacted people toward the abolition of the death penalty and to educate the audience on the current state of the death penalty in SC and to engage them in conversation with people directly impacted by death row and the death penalty," according to the press release.

SCADP's main goal is to abolish the death penalty in South Carolina through the mobilzation and education of local communities, rehumanizing death row inmates, advocating with legistlators and other community leaders and helping former death row prisoners adapt to life outside of prision.

The event will feature 2 speakers whose lives have been impacted by the death penalty: Sherrerd Hartness whose family member was murdered and Moses Peterson who survived the death row.

(source: Lexington County Chronicle)

OHIO:

Governor DeWine grants reprieves to 3 death row inmates in Chillicothe

In a significant move, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has issued reprieves of execution for 3 death row inmates at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution, citing ongoing difficulties in obtaining lethal injection drugs. The affected inmates—Stanley Adams, John Drummond, and James Hanna—will now face new execution dates in 2028, giving the state time to address the persistent problem.

Stanley Adams, who was originally scheduled to be executed on February 19, 2025, has had his execution date moved to February 16, 2028. John Drummond, scheduled for April 16, 2025, now faces execution on March 15, 2028. James Hanna’s execution, which was to take place on May 14, 2025, has been postponed to April 19, 2028.

The reprieves come as Ohio continues to grapple with a shortage of lethal injection drugs, a problem that has plagued the state for years. Governor DeWine attributed the delays to difficulties in securing drugs for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) without jeopardizing public safety. Pharmaceutical suppliers have been increasingly reluctant to sell drugs for use in executions, fearing legal challenges and the potential impact on their broader business operations.

Ohio has struggled with this issue since at least 2014, when several executions were delayed due to the state’s inability to obtain a reliable drug supply. Despite Ohio’s ongoing challenges, many states have continued to carry out executions using a variety of methods. In 2024 alone, 20 inmates were executed in 8 states across the country, according to available records. While some have argued that other states’ ability to carry out executions undermines Ohio’s position, the state has faced unique hurdles that persist, making the procurement of drugs more complicated.

The future of the death penalty in Ohio remains uncertain as lawmakers, advocacy groups, and the public debate the ethical and logistical challenges associated with lethal injection. With these latest reprieves, the focus will likely return to finding a permanent solution to Ohio’s execution drug shortage.

Governor Mike DeWine has been a consistent voice in Ohio’s evolving debate over the death penalty. Though not outright abolishing it, his actions and statements in recent years suggest increasing opposition to the practice in its current form.

Since taking office, DeWine has repeatedly delayed executions, citing concerns over the availability and legality of the lethal injection drugs Ohio uses. His reprieves of execution for Stanley Adams, John Drummond, and James Hanna are part of a broader trend that reflects his discomfort with the death penalty’s implementation. He has called the current system “unsustainable” due to the difficulties in acquiring execution drugs, legal complications, and the growing opposition from pharmaceutical companies.

In fact, DeWine has repeatedly expressed concern that, under current conditions, Ohio is unlikely to carry out further executions unless the state can change its lethal injection protocol. He has also supported efforts in the state legislature to examine alternatives to lethal injection, or even consider whether the death penalty should remain part of Ohio’s justice system.

Though DeWine has not publicly called for an end to capital punishment, his consistent delays in executions and his remarks about the system’s flaws have led many to speculate that his opposition to the death penalty is growing. His actions contrast with the more traditional approach in Ohio, where the death penalty has historically been supported by many lawmakers and law enforcement officials.

As Governor, DeWine faces pressure from both sides of the issue, with some calling for the abolition of the death penalty and others pushing for the resumption of executions. While he hasn’t fully committed to either camp, his administration’s consistent reprieves and push for drug protocol reform suggest that Ohio’s use of the death penalty may be on pause for the foreseeable future.

(source: sciotovalleyguardian.com)

OKLAHOMA----impending execution

Oklahoma sets next execution date

An Oklahoma death row inmate is set to be put to death on his birthday in December for the 2006 murder of a 10-year-old girl in Purcell.

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals scheduled 44-year-old Kevin Ray Underwood to be executed on Dec. 19, his birthday, after the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office requested the date following the execution off Emmanuel Littlejohn in September.

A Cleveland County jury sentenced Underwood to death for acting on his fantasies of cannibalism and killing Jamie Rose Bolin on April 12, 2006, in his apartment.

He admitted to investigators during an interview he lured the girl into his apartment to play with his pet rat. While watching a cartoon show, he admitted to hitting the girl in the back of the head with a cutting board before suffocating her.

Underwood also admitted he tried to sexually assault the girl’s body and attempted to remove her head with a knife.

The man said he then became “disgusted with himself” and did not eat the girl as he planned to fulfill his fantasy.

Bolin was found stuffed in a plastic container by an FBI agent in Underwood’s apartment.

“Go ahead and arrest me,” Underwood told the agent. “She’s in there. I hit her and chopped her up. I’m going to burn in hell.”

The AG’s Office in court documents said Underwood “committed an unimaginable murder; one of the most depraved this state has ever seen.”

Attorneys for Underwood are challenging the constitutionality of the state’s execution protocol, arguing the Oklahoma Department of Corrections’ policies can be changed at any moment without legislative oversight, making it unconstitutional.

State prosecutors said despite the challenge filed with the Oklahoma Supreme Court, there is plenty of time for the challenge to be resolved prior to the Dec. 19 execution date and that a stay of execution was not needed.

He was originally scheduled to be executed on Dec. 7, 2023, prior to the AG’s office asking for more time in between executions to lessen the workload on Oklahoma Department of Corrections employees.

(source: theadanews.com)

IDAHO:

OPINION: A new reason to question Idaho’s death penalty

The planned 2nd attempt to execute Thomas Creech on Nov. 13 offers another opportunity for Idahoans to weigh whether the death penalty should be the law of the land in Idaho.

We tend to think not.

The 1st failed attempt to kill Creech, now 74, earlier this year offers perhaps the best reason the state shouldn’t be in the business of killing people.

You might recall that in February, the state called off Creech’s execution after trying unsuccessfully for an hour to find a suitable vein to insert an IV for lethal injection.

The results of the state’s failed execution of Creech, fortunately, were not as horrific as botched executions in other states.

But there are other good reasons to reconsider the death penalty in Idaho.

Among them is the fact that the state gets it wrong often enough. Look no further than the case of Christopher Tapp, wrongly accused and convicted of killing Angie Dodge in Idaho Falls in 1996.

Angie Dodge’s mother initially called on the state to seek the death penalty for Tapp. But after it became clear police had botched the investigation, and that Tapp was innocent, she became one of the most forceful advocates for his exoneration. It’s a good thing the state didn’t administer the death penalty in Tapp’s case, since the real killer was found and convicted 25 years later.

Someone who did come close to execution in Idaho was Charles Fain, who was wrongfully convicted and spent nearly 20 years on death row for the 1982 sexual assault and murder of 9-year-old Daralyn Johnson. Fain was exonerated in 2001 after DNA evidence cleared him of the crime.

Donald Paradis was also sentenced to death for a 1980 murder, only to be exonerated after spending two decades on death row.

Revenge and retribution are understandable natural reactions to the brutal murder of a loved one.

In the case of Creech, there is little doubt that he’s guilty of the crimes he’s been convicted of.

We acknowledge that the family members of one of Creech’s victims have urged Creech’s execution.

But revenge and retribution, however understandable, aren’t justice.

In a state like Idaho with a strong faith community, one would think society would lean toward the Christian principles of forgiveness and redemption.

We recognize that the death penalty is the law in Idaho, as passed by the Idaho Legislature, which reaffirmed its support for the death penalty by approving the firing squad as a means of execution, and it’s the duty of the attorney general and the Department of Correction to carry out the death penalty.

But it’s still worth questioning the morality and humanity of the death penalty in Idaho.

Another attempt to kill Thomas Creech should give Idahoans — particularly legislators — a chance to reflect on the death penalty and reconsider whether it’s the right thing to do.

(source: Guest Editorial: Another Newspaper’s Opinion----This editorial was published in The Idaho Statesman of Boise----The Lewiston Tribune)

USA:

Does Religion Impact Support for the Death Penalty?

In late September of 2024, there were a number of news stories surrounding the planned execution of Marcellus Williams by the state of Missouri. Williams had been tried, convicted and sentenced to death for murdering Lisha Gayle in suburban St. Louis in 1998. As the date of Williams’ lethal injection drew near, criticism of the entire process grew on several fronts. One was that the prosecutor who argued the case against the defendant, “now admitted they were wrong and zealously fought to undo the conviction and save Mr. Williams’ life.” There were a number of issues with the case including some uncertainty about the DNA evidence that was discussed at the trial.

The other was the simple fact that the family of the victim did not want to see the state execute Marcellus Williams. In their petition to commute his sentence, they wrote, “The family defines closure as Marcellus being allowed to live. Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.” On September 24, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to stay the execution, with the court breaking down across their typical ideological lines. In his final statement, Williams wrote, “All Praise Be to Allah in Every Situation!!!”

The use of capital punishment is certainly a hotly discussed topic, and it’s important to look at some of the numbers related to the practice. The Associated Press reports that:

In 2023, there were 24 executions in the United States.

That same year, 21 new people were sentenced to death.

In the last 9 years, there’s never been more than 30 people who were executed by the state in any given year.

5 states used capital punishment in 2023: Texas, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Alabama.

There have been 198 death row exonerations since 1975.

29 states have either abolished the death penalty or paused executions.

A week before Marcellus Williams faced lethal injection, 69 faith leaders united in a call for clemency from the state’s governor. They wrote that, “We are advocating for life without parole and that Marcellus will remain in prison, with the message that his life can remain open to redemption, mercy, and the healing power of God and that he will continue to serve the Muslim community.”

Anyone remember Pat Buchanan? He was a far-right conservative who ran an insurgent campaign against George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination in 1992. When Bush announced his desire to run for a 2nd term, it was assumed that he would have no real challenger in his own party. But Buchanan was a bomb thrower and excoriated Bush for being too moderate.

This case got me thinking about the issue of capital punishment and if the public has shifted their view of the practice over the last 40 years. The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA), houses the General Social Survey. That instrument has been asking about capital punishment with regularity since 1974. The question is simply, “Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”

Let me start by showing the trend lines in the entire sample then among Republicans and Democrats. We will move on to religious groups a little later.

Among the general public, there has always been majority support for the death penalty. In 1974, 2/3 of the sample believed that convicted murderers should be subject to the death penalty. Support clearly rose from there and peaked from the early 1980s through the early 1990s when nearly 80% of the sample were in favor. From that point forward, support has somewhat eroded. In 2021, just 56% of the sample favored capital punishment, but that number bumped back up to 62% in the 2022 data.

There’s a clear partisan divide on this issue. Republicans have always been more supportive of the death penalty, but the gap wasn’t huge in the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, in the mid-1980s, about 85% of Republicans supported capital punishment compared to 75% of Democrats. However, the difference in the views of the two major parties has widened significantly. In the 2022 data, 81% of Republicans were in favor compared to just 43% of Democrats. It’s interesting to note that even a majority of Democrats favored the death penalty as recently as 2014.

What happens when the sample is broken down into major religious traditions? There are some interesting findings related to support for capital punishment.

Evangelical Christians don’t show a lot of variation over time. In the 1970s, about 70% of them supported capital punishment. That did rise during the next decade or so, hitting a peak around 1995 at 85%. However, support has slid since then. Today, among evangelicals, I think it’s fair to say that support for the death penalty looks very similar to the statistics from the 1970s.

Is there a lot of variation when breaking down evangelicals by church attendance?

I think it’s fair to say there’s a bit of a difference between high-attending and low-attending evangelicals. It’s notable that in the early 1970s, there was no difference at all in support for capital punishment among evangelicals by church attendance. It was just about 70% for all groups. That didn’t last long. By 1990, low-attending evangelicals were noticeably more supportive of capital punishment compared to those who attended more regularly, creating about a 5-point gap.

In the last 20 years or so, there’s been a slight decline in support for capital punishment among low-attending evangelicals, but it’s still robust—about 80%. Among those who attend more frequently, the decline has been larger. While support was above 75% even through 2000, today it’s much more accurate to say that 60-65% of active evangelicals support capital punishment.

Another group I wanted to highlight is Roman Catholics. While support among evangelicals and mainline Protestants is essentially the same in 2022 as in 1974, that’s certainly not the case among Catholics in the GSS. In the 1974 data, about 3/4 of them believed that a convicted murderer should face the death penalty. That percentage stayed high through the early 1990s, but then it began to drop. By 2005, it was below 65%, and in recent years it has been closer to 60%. That’s a decline of about 13 points from the start of the time series.

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

I wanted to look behind the curtain a little bit among Catholics and try and figure out why their support for capital punishment declined, though. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops makes their position plain on this topic, “[T]he death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Pope John Paul II made statements in opposition to capital punishment, which were echoed by Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis stated clearly, “the death penalty is inadmissible” in 2018.

Perhaps attending Mass more often is a key predictor of lower support for the death penalty among rank-and-file Roman Catholics.

That’s exactly what appears in the data. When the sample of Catholics is broken down into 4 attendance categories, ranging from “never/seldom” to “nearly every week,” there’s a huge difference in views on capital punishment. Among Catholics who attend once a year or less, there’s still robust support for the death penalty. In the 1970s, about 75% of low-attending Catholics supported capital punishment, and that level remained through 2000. It only began to decline in the last 20 years, and even today about 2/3 of these Catholics support capital punishment.

For Catholics who attend nearly every week or more, it’s a much different story. Even in the 1970s, only 70% of high-attending Catholics supported capital punishment. It stayed at that level through 1990 but then started dropping quickly. By 2002, it was down to 60%, and a decade later it was 20 points lower than that. In the most recent data, just 40% of weekly-attending Catholics were supportive of the death penalty. That’s 20 points lower than the general public.

I wanted to take that Catholic analysis one step further. Is Mass attendance having a real impact on views of capital punishment even when controlling for political ideology? I restricted the sample to Catholics who reported attending Mass at least once a month and divided the sample into liberals, moderates, and conservatives.

It’s fair to say that conservative Catholics have always been more supportive of the death penalty than liberal ones. In the late 1980s, the gap between the groups was fairly small—less than 8 % points. But 1990 looks like a real inflection point. The trend lines among active Roman Catholics all began to track downward. By 2000, 70% of conservative Catholics were in favor of capital punishment compared to 55% of liberals. In the most recent data, among conservative Catholics who regularly attend Mass, just 55% favor the death penalty for convicted murderers. For liberal Catholics, it’s about 40%.

To me, this is compelling evidence that Catholicism has had a measurable impact on views of capital punishment. A conservative Catholic who attends Mass regularly is about 12-15 points less supportive of the death penalty than evangelicals or mainline Protestants. That’s remarkable, and it’s one instance where I feel fairly confident in saying that religion matters.

I’ve been known to say that politics is the master identity recently—people pick their religion based on their politics, not their candidate based on their theology. Yet in this situation, it does appear that the Church’s teachings on this one specific issue have filtered down into the pews and really changed how the average Catholic thinks about the death penalty.

(source: Ryan Burge, Baptist News Global)

ZIMBABWE:

Death penalty is a colonial legacy law which must be removed urgently — says MP Mambipiri, calls on Parly to expedite its abolition

FIREBRAND legislator, Gift Mambipiri has urged government and the Parliament of Zimbabwe to expedite modalities to remove the abhorrent death penalty.

The Member of Parliament (MP) for Kadoma Central, described capital punishment as “colonial legacy law”, which must be purged as a matter of urgency.

Addressing Parliament this Thursday on a point of national interest, Mambipiri told Deputy Speaker Tsitsi Gezi that while the nation has made strides in halting executions, there was urgent need to legislate a ban on capital of punishment.

“While the prospect of abolishing the death penalty in Zimbabwe is encouraging, it is crucial that the government and Parliament move with speed to pass the Bill so that Zimbabwe joins other nations including our SADC (Southern African Development Community) sisters such South Africa, Namibia, Zambia and others to remove this colonial legacy law,” said Mambipiri.

He added that according to the annual report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,170 States have abolished the death penalty, or introduced a moratorium on it, either in law or in practice or have ceased executions for more than 10 years.

“Zimbabwe currently falls under countries that do not carry out executions and have not done so for the past 10 years.

“Following many years of advocacy, on November 15, 2023, Honourable Edwin Mushoriwa sought leave to introduce a Private Member’s Bill in the National Assembly to abolish the death penalty.

“The National Assembly swiftly approved his motion on November 16, 2023, and the Bill underwent its 1st reading that same day. The Bill garnered significant bipartisan support, demonstrating a growing consensus among Zimbabwean lawmakers on this important issue.

“On May 28, 2024, the Bill began its 2nd reading and was then taken over by the Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs; it is now a Government Bill.

“The President during SONA (State of The Nation Address) speech implored this Parliament to quickly pass the Death penalty Abolishment Bill among other Bills that had not progressed well in the first session,” said the Kadoma lawmaker.

The World Day Against Death Penalty is commemorated on October 10 every year, and 2024 marks its 22nd anniversary.

(source: newzimbabwe.com)

INDIA:

Madras HC issues notice to 4 convicts facing death penalty in 2014 case----A bench comprising Justices CV Karthikeyan and R Poornima gave the direction after the said death penalties were referred to the high court for approval.

The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court on Friday issued notice to 4 persons who were recently sentenced to death by the II Additional District Sessions Court for PCR Act Cases in Tirunelveli for murdering 3 Scheduled Caste men near Thiruvengadam in 2014.

A bench comprising Justices CV Karthikeyan and R Poornima gave the direction after the said death penalties were referred to the high court for approval.

The judges also sought to know if any of the 4 convicts - Ponnumani, Gurusamy, Muthukrishnan, Kaliraj - had preferred appeals against the conviction and sentence. The case was adjourned to November 11.

(It may be noted that whenever trial courts impose death penalty, they should refer the same to the concerned high court for approval, and such cases are called 'Referred trial' cases. Death penalties can be executed only after the high court's approval even if the convicts do not challenge the trial court's verdict.)

(source: newindianexpress.com)

SAUDI ARABIA:

Saudi Arabia executed 213 so far in 2024, highest in over 30 years----The increase in executions in Saudi Arabia is primarily due to terrorism-related offenses and the resumption of executions for drug offenses.

The authorities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) have executed at least 213 people since the beginning of 2024, according to Bristish-based rights group Reprieve.

This is the highest number of executions carried out in the Kingdom since 1990.

“As the world’s attention fixates on horror elsewhere in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is clearing death row with a bloodbath,” Reprieve’s deputy director, Harriet McCulloch, told Middle East Eye (MEE).

The increase in executions in Saudi Arabia is primarily due to terrorism-related offenses and the resumption of executions for drug offenses.

Saudi authorities defends the death penalty, despite international condemnation, arguing that it is necessary for public order and justified under Sharia law.

In 2024, Saudi authorities have so far executed 53 individuals solely for drug-related offences after only 2 executions for drug-related offences were recorded in the country in 2023, according to a report by Amnesty International,

“Saudi Arabia’s authorities are pursuing a relentless killing spree displaying a chilling disregard for human life while promoting an empty-worded campaign to rebrand their image,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

She added, “The only way to polish the country’s image is through genuine reform and adherence to human rights and international law. Anything less than that will leave these repressive milestones at the forefront of any campaign.”

The number of recorded executions tripled from 65 in 2021 to 196 in 2022 in the Kingdom. In 2022, Saudi Arabia ranked third in the world for the number of executions carried out.

In 2023, Saudi Arabia executed 170 people.

(source: siasat.com)

IRAN:

Amnesty International Condemns Iran’s Death Sentence for Juvenile Offender in Shiraz

Amnesty International, on Friday, October 18, issued a statement urging Iran’s regime to not execute Mohammad Reza Azizi, a 21-year-old who was only 17 at the time of the crime he was charged with.

Amnesty International stated that Iranian authorities plan to carry out Azizi’s execution on Monday, October 21, in Shiraz.

The international human rights organization condemned Azizi’s death sentence as a violation of international laws that prohibit executing individuals who were under 18 at the time of the alleged crime, a commitment to which Iran’s regime is also a signatory.

Mohammad Reza Azizi, a juvenile offender incarcerated in Shiraz Central Prison, was arrested and sentenced to qisas (retribution) for “premeditated murder.”

Azizi, born on August 24, 2003, was arrested on September 19, 2020, when he was just 17 years and 27 days old.

In response, Sara Hashash, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, said:

“The planned execution of Mohammed Reza Azizi puts on full display the Iranian authorities’ cruelty. Their repeated flagrant disregard for the right to life is an abhorrent assault on children’s rights. Using the death penalty against someone who was a child at the time of the crime is prohibited under international human rights and customary law and violates Iran’s international obligations.”

Amnesty International has called for the immediate cancellation of Azizi’s death sentence and urged the regime to give him a retrial, fully adhering to international standards, without resorting to the death penalty.

Amnesty International claims to have reviewed the legal documents of the case and found that the Iranian Legal Medicine Organization, under the supervision of the judiciary, concluded—without explaining the circumstances of the crime—that Azizi had reached mental maturity at the time of the offense.

The “No to Executions on Tuesdays” campaign, made up of prisoners on hunger strike in over 22 Iranian prisons, issued a statement on October 15, announcing that more than 36 people had been executed the previous week. Among them were two juveniles, Mehdi Barahoui and Ali Shirvani, aged 17 and 15 at the time of their arrest, who were executed in violation of the “Convention on the Rights of the Child.”

The Iranian regime has repeatedly sentenced juvenile offenders to death, and Iran has the highest number of executions of minors in the world.

Despite the fact that the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibit the sentencing and execution of individuals under 18, the Iranian regime continues to enforce such sentences, justifying it as being in accordance with Sharia law and domestic regulations.

(source: iranfocus.com)

OCTOBER 18, 2024:

TEXAS----execution halted

Texas Supreme Court Halts Execution in Shaken Baby Case----Robert Roberson had been set to be executed on Thursday night for the death of his 2-year-old child. But after a bipartisan intervention by Texas lawmakers, the Supreme Court issued a stay.

The Texas Supreme Court on Thursday halted the execution of Robert Roberson, a Texas man convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter, after a roller-coaster series of legal maneuvers initiated by an unusual intervention from a bipartisan group of Texas House members.

The decision by the state’s highest civil court related to a procedural question raised by the legislators’ issuing a subpoena for Mr. Roberson to testify before the Legislature on Monday and not the details of his case. But the effect was to run out the clock for the time being.

Because the execution could not be carried out before midnight, a new date would now have to be set.

“We’re deeply grateful to the Texas Supreme Court,” 2 of the legislators, Jeff Leach, a Dallas-area Republican, and Joe Moody, an El Paso Democrat, said in a joint statement. “We look forward to welcoming Robert to the Texas Capitol, and along with 31 million Texans, finally giving him — and the truth — a chance to be heard.”

The execution by lethal injection, which had been set to take place at a prison in Huntsville, would have been the 1st in a case attributed to shaken baby syndrome, a diagnosis that has raised questions in the scientific community, death penalty experts said.

Lawyers for Mr. Roberson had sought to prevent the execution by appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court and requesting a reprieve from Gov. Greg Abbott. But neither stepped in.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued a separate order declining to stay the execution. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a statement along with the court’s order, said that while the court could not stop the execution, Mr. Abbott of Texas could and should grant a temporary reprieve.

“An executive reprieve of 30 days would provide the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles with an opportunity to reconsider the evidence of Roberson’s actual innocence,” the justice wrote. “That could prevent a miscarriage of justice from occurring.”

Instead, it was members of the Texas House, outraged by what they saw as injustice in Mr. Roberson’s case, and seeking to make time for a new hearing on the evidence, who forced the execution’s postponement.

Mr. Roberson’s execution was one of two scheduled in the country on Thursday. In Alabama, officials carried out the execution of Derrick Dearman, who had admitted to killing 5 of his girlfriend’s relatives in 2016. Mr. Dearman, 36, died by lethal injection. He had stopped fighting his death sentence this year and said he wanted to be executed so that his victims’ family members could have justice.

Mr. Roberson’s case has drawn intense national scrutiny because of the role that the shaken baby diagnosis played in his conviction. His lawyers maintain that no crime was committed at all and have presented evidence and expert testimony that his daughter, Nikki, most likely died in 2002 from pneumonia exacerbated by medication that she had been prescribed.

Gretchen Sween, a lawyer for Mr. Roberson, said that his supporters were “elated tonight” by the actions of the “brave, bipartisan Texas lawmakers” who dug into the facts of Mr. Roberson’s case. “He lives to fight another day and hopes that his experience can help improve the integrity of our criminal legal system,” she said.

Shaken baby syndrome is a medical determination that abuse has caused serious or fatal head trauma, and it has played a role in criminal convictions for decades.

The American Academy of Pediatrics still recognizes the diagnosis, but it has come under scrutiny in recent years as some doctors and defense lawyers have challenged its reliability, particularly in cases where little other evidence of abuse exists.

Mr. Roberson’s lawyers have also said that his autism, diagnosed after his trial, played a role in the conviction because investigators saw his apparent lack of emotion or grief as evidence of guilt.

More than half of the Republican-dominated Texas House has lobbied for the case to be reviewed. The detective who helped convict him now says he believes Mr. Roberson is innocent. John Grisham, a novelist who has been supporting Mr. Roberson, pleaded this week for the execution to be halted.

Mr. Roberson, 56, has granted several television interviews from death row, including one this week with Phil McGraw on “Dr. Phil Primetime.”

With few options left, Mr. Roberson’s lawyers had appealed to Mr. Abbott to step in and order a one-time, 30-day reprieve to allow for further legal challenges. Under Texas law, the governor cannot grant clemency after the state board has recommended against it.

Members of the Texas House, urging the courts to reconsider the case, began their attempt to intervene on Wednesday, when they issued a subpoena seeking to delay the execution by compelling Mr. Roberson to testify before a legislative committee on Monday.

Hours before the execution, Mr. Leach and Mr. Moody sought a court order to temporarily halt the execution so that Mr. Roberson could respond to the subpoena. Mr. Leach appeared in the video hearing sitting in his car, an indication of how quickly the proceeding had been arranged.

“This is an extraordinary remedy that the Legislature is seeking,” Mr. Leach said. But he argued that it fell within the powers granted to the Texas House under the State Constitution.

The district court ruled on the validity of the legislators’ subpoena but did not address the merits of the arguments in defense of Mr. Roberson. Soon after, the state’s highest criminal court, the Court of Criminal Appeals, overruled the lower-court decision on the subpoena.

At roughly the same time — and with the execution primed to go ahead once again — the House members then filed an emergency motion with the Texas Supreme Court, which stepped in and ruled that the question of the subpoena was a civil one and should have properly been handled by the State Supreme Court and not the high criminal court.

But the court said in its order that it would not consider the details of Mr. Roberson’s case.

“Anything other than laser-like focus on the specific civil-law questions presented — and especially the competing authority of the legislative and executive branches in this situation — is therefore off limits,” Justice Evan A. Young wrote in a concurrence to the court’s order that was joined by the chief justice, Nathan L. Hecht, and Justice Rebeca Aizpuru Huddle. There was no dissent.

The matter now returns to the district court in Travis County where the Texas attorney general would represent the executive branch against the House members.

Earlier, the attorney general’s office had cited evidence from the trial in opposing the defense’s requests for a stay of execution.

“Roberson has repeatedly challenged the validity of his conviction and death sentence, and he has been properly rejected in each instance,” the state wrote in its brief to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It said there was testimony from Mr. Roberson’s girlfriend that before his daughter’s death, Mr. Roberson was “violent towards Nikki; he had paddled the toddler, shaken and thrown her, threatened her and screamed at her.”

In response, Ms. Sween, Mr. Roberson’s lawyer, said that the attorney general’s description was an “inaccurate summary of testimony from wholly incredible witnesses manufactured for trial” and that the accusations were “unsupported by any contemporaneous records.” She said Mr. Roberson had no history of violence.

Mr. Roberson’s lawyers have argued that the understanding of shaken baby syndrome has changed in the two decades since his trial, and that he was convicted under a narrow understanding of the medical condition when Nikki stopped breathing and Mr. Roberson took her to the emergency room on Jan. 31, 2002.

Mr. Roberson said at the time that a bruise on Nikki’s head could be explained by her having fallen from the bed where they were both sleeping.

Scans taken at the hospital showed subdural bleeding, brain swelling and retinal hemorrhages. The three conditions, taken together, have been used in the past to infer abuse in shaken baby cases.

But those conditions can also appear as a result of disease. Mr. Roberson’s lawyers have argued that Nikki’s condition was more likely explained by the respiratory infection that she had been fighting in the days before her death, and the medication prescribed to her that could have suppressed her breathing.

Mr. Roberson has had his execution delayed once before, in 2016. At that time, the Court of Criminal Appeals intervened so that new medical and expert evidence could be presented by his lawyers.

But the court ultimately ruled against him. It also denied appeals to reconsider his conviction under the state’s “junk science” law, which allows for convictions to be challenged based on changes to the science that was relied upon in their cases.

(source: New York Times)

***************

Texas high court blocks execution of Robert Roberson after novel legal maneuver----The Texas Supreme Court ordered the state to allow Robert Roberson III to comply with a subpoena for this testimony.

The Texas Supreme Court late Thursday blocked the execution of Robert Roberson III, ordering the state to allow the East Texas man to comply with a House committee-issued subpoena for his testimony next week.

The order bookends a string of court hearings in Austin as Roberson prepared to be put to death more than 100 miles away in Huntsville. The evening ruling by the Texas Supreme Court does not vacate the conviction; more legal sparring will follow in the coming weeks.

In a brief order issued around 9:40 p.m., the court said state corrections officials were temporarily barred from impairing Roberson’s ability to comply with a subpoena, issued a day earlier, to appear before the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, “including by executing Mr. Roberson, until further order of this Court.”

At the conclusion of a 20-minute Zoom hearing held to discuss the subpoena earlier in the day, state District Judge Jessica Mangrum in Travis County granted a temporary restraining order halting the state’s plans, throwing the execution slated for 6 p.m. Thursday into question.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office swiftly appealed to the state’s highest criminal court, which threw out the lower court’s order. The lawmakers on the House committee then appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.

In a joint statement, Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, and Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, marked the order as a legal victory that corrects how they say the criminal justice system — at multiple levels — has fallen short in Roberson’s case.

“And while some courthouses may have failed him, the Texas House has not,” the statement reads. “We’re deeply grateful to the Texas Supreme Court for respecting the role of the Texas legislature in such consequential matters. We look forward to welcoming Robert to the Texas Capitol, and along with 31 million Texans, finally giving him — and the truth — a chance to be heard.”

The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to an emailed inquiry after the order.

While the Court of Criminal Appeals delayed Roberson’s planned execution once before, in 2016, in part so new medical evidence could be presented, it had declined to intervene in the appeals process since.

After the Travis County hearing, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Roberson’s attorneys Thursday afternoon, again declining to halt the execution.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor urged Gov. Greg Abbott to issue a 30-day pause — an ask that echos calls from Roberson’s attorney and some Texas lawmakers. Spokespeople for Abbott didn’t respond to three text messages requesting comment Thursday.

Texas was slated to put Roberson, 57, to death Thursday evening in what could be an unprecedented execution of a disabled man convicted of killing his daughter based on scrutinized science.

Roberson — who has maintained his innocence while on death row for more than 2 decades — was sentenced to death in 2003 for reportedly fatally shaking his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki. He was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Huntsville.

If he’s put to death, Roberson, who is autistic, will become the 1st person in the country to be executed in a “shaken baby syndrome” case, according to lawmakers.

The Texas House committee wants Roberson to testify Monday at a hearing about how a state’s “junk science” law allowing people to challenge convictions with new science was applied in his case.

Lawmakers on the committee — Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, and Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso — argued during the hearing that Roberson’s testimony was needed to explore the law’s effectiveness and whether it was applied correctly.

Lawmakers, Roberson’s family gather in Huntsville

More than a hundred miles away, a crowd of TV cameras and reporters descended on a grassy lawn in front of the Huntsville Unit’s red-brick main entrance. Corrections officers in gray uniforms surrounded the group, anticipating possible demonstrations from anti-death penalty groups.

Inside the unit, Roberson spent the early morning reading, packing his possessions and watching TV, according to an hour-by-hour schedule provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. At 11 a.m. — the last entry — Roberson was talking with a visitor.

Outside, a crowd of protesters had swelled to roughly 30 people at about 6 p.m.

Roberson’s niece, Monica Bradford, said she’s putting her faith in God. She said she’d just gotten off a phone call with her uncle, who told her that his “faith is in Jesus.”

”I know my uncle is saved at the end of the day,” Bradford said.

Jennifer Martin, Roberson’s sister-in-law, fighting back tears and a huff in her voice, said she’s heartbroken, frustrated and confused following the Travis County’s judge’s intervention.

Sophia Moreau, 62, of Houston, sat in a lawn chair in front of barricades and caution tape blocking the entrance to the Huntsville Unit. Moreau said she’s been involved in anti-death penalty activism for about 20 years and demonstrated outside more than 100 executions.

”The system in Texas has proven that it can’t correct itself when it makes a mistake,” she said.

She added: “The only real victim in this case is Robert Roberson because the evidence is very clear … she unfortunately died of her illness and it wasn’t any kind of violence. Really the only victim is what the state of Texas has done to the family.”

Moreau said she’s friends with people who may witness Roberson’s execution and came down early to offer support. According to Moreau, the witnesses went inside a waiting area at the prison complex before 5 p.m.

”They’re on a rollercoaster, it’s a really tough moment,” she said, “and so all we can do is be here and listen.”

Earlier in the afternoon, Rep. John Bucy, D-Austin, said he was about to go inside the prison about 5 p.m. He said he plans to attend the execution if it goes forward. Bucy, who was among a bipartisan group of lawmakers who visited Roberson to pray with him last month, said he is “worried and grieving” for Roberson.

In response to the attorney general office’s argument during the Travis County hearing, Bucy said the office’s assertion that shaken baby syndrome is not at the crux of Roberson’s conviction is “misleading and flat-out lying.”

”If the state fails to stop this and this innocent man is killed — which will not be the 1st time in the history of the state — we want to make sure we’re here to tell the story of Robert Roberson,” Bucy said.

Lawmaker says “productive” discussions are happening within Gov. Greg Abbott’s office

State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, said lawmakers were hopeful that Abbott, who was set to deliver remarks on border security in Corpus Christi later Thursday, would pause the execution.

”I spent a long time with the governor’s office last night,” Harrison told radio host Mark Davis on Thursday morning. “What I would say is very fruitful and productive discussions are happening.”

Harrison said Roberson needs a new trial because there was no direct evidence of abuse and Roberson’s own lawyer supported the shaken baby syndrome theory rather than arguing for his innocence. Roberson’s lawyers have made a slew of 11th-hour pleas to stop his execution, arguing the prosecution hinged on “junk science.”

When Roberson found Nikki unresponsive in 2002, court documents say he rushed her blue, limp body to a Palestine hospital. Roberson said she fell from a bed, but medical staff suspected child abuse and called police because of her injuries, which included bruises on her face, a bump on the back of her head and bleeding outside her brain. Her cause of death was ruled to be blunt-force head injuries.

The case against Roberson — who had just become Nikki’s sole caretaker — relied on doctors’ testimony that her death was consistent with shaken baby syndrome, when an infant is severely injured from being violently shaken.

Roberson’s lawyers have said new evidence shows Nikki, who was chronically ill, died of natural and accidental causes, including “severe, undiagnosed” pneumonia. According to court documents, she had a 104.5-degree fever days before she died; her medical history included chronic infections undeterred by multiple strains of antibiotics and “alarming breathing apnea spells.”

During the Travis County hearing, Marshall, the attorney with the attorney general’s office, said the case was not a “shaken baby” case and argued the Court of Criminal Appeals had exclusive jurisdiction.

“The evidence supports the fact there were multiple blunt force impacts to the child’s head, and there was a history of abuse from this particular inmate against this child,” Marshall said during the hearing. “Shaken baby syndrome just doesn’t play a role in this case, so whether or not it’s been discredited in the community of pediatrics specialists — it’s just not the central feature of this case.”

Just last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vacated the conviction of a Dallas County man accused of injuring a child because scientific advancements undermined shaken baby syndrome. More than 30 people who served time in prison after convictions involving the theory have been declared innocent, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Marshall also pointed to past rejections by higher courts to intervene, including recently.

An Anderson County judge Tuesday rejected arguments from Roberson’s attorneys that his death warrant is illegitimate because the judge who oversaw post-conviction proceedings erred.

The state’s highest criminal appeals court has also repeatedly refused to intervene with Roberson’s death sentence. The parole board Wednesday did not recommend clemency to Roberson, who had petitioned for his death sentence be commuted or the execution delayed 180 days.

A coalition of bipartisan state lawmakers, bestselling author and Innocence Project board member John Grisham, and a former Palestine detective whose testimony helped convict Roberson, have denounced his impending execution.

The detective, Brian Wharton, said he believes Roberson is innocent. Despite earning Roberson’s forgiveness, Wharton has said he will be “forever haunted” by participating in his arrest and prosecution.

“We rushed to judgment,” Wharton wrote in a letter to the state’s parole board. “We were wrong, the jury was misinformed, and Robert is not guilty of any crime. If we are truly a nation of laws, a people who love justice in the most meaningful sense of that word, then Robert Leslie Roberson III must be set free.”

Roberson would be the 6th person put to death this year in Texas, which has led the nation in executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. 8 people were executed in the state in 2023.

************

Supreme Court justice unhappy with Texas court’s handling of Roberson’s death row case----The state’s top criminal court has been inconsistent on shaken baby syndrome rulings, Sonia Sotomayor wrote.

When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop Texas from executing death row inmate Robert Roberson III, the Thursday evening ruling included sharp words from Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

It was not the 1st time Sotomayor criticized the way Texas and the courts have handled death penalty cases.

Roberson was convicted of capital murder in 2003 after his daughter died of what medical experts believed to be a case of shaken baby syndrome. Defense lawyers, backed by a bipartisan group of state lawmakers, pressed to delay the execution, arguing Roberson’s conviction was based on debunked theories of shaken baby syndrome and that he is likely innocent.

When the Supreme Court rejected Roberson’s request for a stay of execution, Sotomayor cited a precedent establishing that the justices have “no power to tell state courts how they must write their opinions.”

“Nevertheless, it is notable that the [Texas Court of Criminal Appeals] decisions in this case do not address the whole of Roberson’s evidence of actual innocence,” she wrote.

Sotomayor also criticized the Texas appeals court for inconsistent rulings on cases involving shaken baby syndrome.

“The TCCA just this week granted a new trial to Andrew Wayne Roark, a non-capital defendant whose child-abuse conviction rested on the same shaken-baby-syndrome testimony, from the same expert witness, that led to Roberson’s conviction,” she wrote. “When Roberson sought a stay of execution based on the argument the TCCA credited in Roark, the TCCA summarily denied relief.”

Roberson filed his 4th post-conviction appeal after the Roark ruling, Sotomayor wrote, “illustrating in detail that the testimony as to shaken-baby syndrome in Roark had been nearly indistinguishable from the testimony in his case.”

Even so, she wrote, the Court of Criminal Appeals voted 5-4 to deny relief.

Sotomayor acknowledged Roberson’s request for a stay lacked a “cognizable federal claim” for the court to act upon but said “few cases more urgently call for such a remedy than one where the accused has made a serious showing of actual innocence, as Roberson has here.”

“Because this Court is powerless to act without a colorable federal claim, and because the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to recommend clemency, only one remedy remains: an executive grant of a reprieve delaying Roberson’s execution by thirty days,” she said.

Gov. Greg Abbott could grant Roberson a 30-day reprieve, and fellow Texas Republicans have called on him to do so.

“Under these circumstances, a stay permitting examination of Roberson’s credible claims of actual innocence is imperative; yet this Court is unable to grant it,” Sotomayor said. “That means only one avenue for relief remains open: an executive reprieve.”

She added: “That could prevent a miscarriage of justice from occurring: executing a man who has raised credible evidence of actual innocence.”

Sotomayor has disagreed with the way other Texas death row cases have been handled.

In April, after the Supreme Court declined inmate Dillion Compton’s appeal, Sotomayor pointed to arguments that Texas prosecutors improperly removed women as prospective jurors because of their gender.

“Striking even 1 prospective juror for a discriminatory reason violates the Constitution,” she wrote.

In 2022, when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Andre Thomas, a Black death row inmate who said he was denied a fair trial because three jurors opposed interracial marriage, Sotomayor wrote: “No jury deciding whether to recommend a death sentence should be tainted by potential racial biases that could infect its deliberations or decision.”

In 2018, Sotomayor chastised her court for declining to intervene in the case of Carlos Trevino, who argued his trial lawyer failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence, including brain damage and developmental delays due to prenatal exposure to alcohol.

The decision was “indefensible,” Sotomayor wrote, leaving Trevino sentenced to death with “inadequate consideration of his claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel, and with no jury having fairly appraised the substantial new mitigating evidence that a competent counsel would have discovered.”

(source for both: Dallas Morning News)

**************

Texas Supreme Court halts execution of man in shaken baby case after lawmakers’ last-minute appeal

The Texas Supreme Court halted Thursday night’s scheduled execution of a man who would have become the 1st person in the U.S. put to death for a murder conviction tied to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

Supporters of Robert Roberson, who was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter in 2002, turned to the Texas high court, which normally does not get involved in criminal cases, after both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, earlier in the day rejected appeals to halt his lethal injection.

Robertson’s supporters include a coalition of Republicans and Democrats who say Roberson is innocent and was convicted on faulty scientific evidence.

Hours after the original execution time of 6 p.m. local time had passed in Texas, Roberson had remained in a prison holding cell a few feet from the death chamber at the Walls Unit in Hunstville.

Gov. Greg Abbott had authority to delay Roberson’s punishment for 30 days. Abbott has halted only 1 imminent execution in nearly a decade as governor and has not spoken publicly about the case.

The Texas appeals court ruling was one of a flurry of legal decisions in the hours before Roberson’s scheduled lethal injection.

At the same time a state judge in Austin was issuing a temporary restraining order, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt the execution, although Justice Sonia Sotomayor — in a 10-page statement about the case — urged Abbott to grant a 30-day delay.

The state’s legal fight to get the execution carried out had faced a midnight CDT deadline when the death warrant authorizing Roberson’s execution would expire. It was likely, however, the case would need to be resolved well before that since officials must conduct procedures such as attaching intravenous needles and allow time for an injection to take effect and a physician to pronounce him dead.

Earlier Thursday evening, a judge in Austin had paused the execution after Texas lawmakers issued a subpoena for Roberson to testify in front of them next week in a last-ditch effort to pause the execution.

“This is an extraordinary remedy the Legislature is seeking. But it is not undue. The Legislature is allowed this constitutional authority,” state Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican and member of the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, said during the Zoom court hearing.

Roberson, 57, was convicted of killing of his daughter, Nikki Curtis, in the East Texas city of Palestine. Roberson has long proclaimed his innocence, backed by some notable Republican lawmakers, Texas GOP megadonor and conservative activist Doug Deason and the lead detective on the case. Roberson’s lawyers and some medical experts say his daughter died not from abuse but from complications related to pneumonia.

“He’s an innocent man and we’re very close to killing him for something he did not do,” said Brian Wharton, the lead detective with Palestine police who investigated Curtis’ death.

Lawyers ask Texas governor and Supreme Court to intervene

Roberson’s lawyers waited to see if Abbott would grant Roberson a 1-time 30-day reprieve. It’s the only action Abbott can take in the case as the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Wednesday denied Roberson’s clemency petition.

The board voted unanimously, 6-0, to not recommend that Roberson’s death sentence be commuted to life in prison or that his execution be delayed. All board members are appointed by the governor. The parole board has recommended clemency in a death row case only 6 times since the state resumed executions in 1982.

In his nearly 10 years as governor, Abbott has halted only 1 imminent execution, when he spared the life of Thomas Whitaker in 2018.

“We pray that Governor Abbott does everything in his power to prevent the tragic, irreversible mistake of executing an innocent man,” Gretchen Sween, one of Roberson’s attorneys, said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Abbott did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment.

Bipartisan committee takes extraordinary step to try to stop execution

The Texas committee on Wednesday held an all-day meeting on Roberson’s case. In a surprise move at the end of the hearing, the committee issued a subpoena for Roberson to testify next week.

During its meeting in Austin, the committee heard testimony about Roberson’s case and whether a 2013 law created to allow people in prison to challenge their convictions based on new scientific evidence was ignored in Roberson’s case.

Anderson County District Attorney Allyson Mitchell, whose office prosecuted Roberson, told the committee a court hearing was held in 2022 in which Roberson’s attorneys presented their new evidence to a judge, who rejected their claims.

“Based on the totality of the evidence, a murder took place here. Mr. Roberson took the life of his almost 3-year-old daughter,” Mitchell said.

Most of the members of the committee are part of a bipartisan group of more than 80 state lawmakers, including at least 30 Republicans, who had asked the parole board and Abbott to stop the execution.

Execution puts spotlight on shaken baby syndrome

Roberson’s case has renewed debate over shaken baby syndrome, known in the medical community as abusive head trauma.

His lawyers as well as the Texas lawmakers, medical experts and others including bestselling author John Grisham say his conviction was based on faulty and now outdated scientific evidence. The diagnosis refers to a serious brain injury caused when a child’s head is hurt through shaking or some other violent impact, like being slammed against a wall or thrown on the floor.

Roberson’s supporters don’t deny head and other injuries from child abuse are real. But they say doctors misdiagnosed Curtis’ injuries as being related to shaken baby syndrome and that new evidence has shown the girl died from complications related to severe pneumonia.

Roberson’s attorneys say his daughter had fallen out of bed in Roberson’s home after being seriously ill for a week.

Roberson’s lawyers also suggested his autism, then undiagnosed at the time of his daughter’s death, was used against him as authorities became suspicious of him because of his lack of emotion over her death. Autism affects how people communicate and interact with others.

(source: Associated Press)

FLORIDA:

Fleming Island contractor faces possible death sentence following guilty verdict----Jury takes less than 2 hours to convict Corey Binderim of gruesome 2019 killing

The same jury that took less than 4 hours to find Corey Louis Binderim guilty of 1st-degree murder, burglary and destroying evidence heard reasons why the 49-year-old should either spend the rest of his life in prison or die by lethal injection during the death penalty phase of his trial Wednesday.

The state called 33 witnesses during the 2-week trial and provided what the State Attorney’s Office called “overwhelming” proof that Binderman strangled and struck Susan Elizabeth Mauldin, a 65-year-old widow, disposed of her body in three demolition contractor trash bags, took her remains to the Rosemary Hill Solid Waste Management Facility in Green Cove Springs, which were then transferred to the Chesser Island Landfill in Folkston, Georgia – all to avoid repaying $12,000 he was paid months earlier by Mauldin to remodel her guest bathroom he didn’t complete.

Neighbors Phyllis and Daniel Yates reported her missing on Oct. 25, 2019, after they noticed her car in the garage. She didn’t answer her phone or front door. The couple told the Clay County Sheriff’s Office that day that Mauldin was fearful of Binderim and that she was attempting to recoup $12,000 for the unfinished project.

Mauldin’s body was eventually found in 3 separate contractor trash bags buried in the Georgia landfill on Jan. 29, 2020, more than three months after she was reported missing.

Binderim sat stoically in his seat as the clerk read the guilty verdicts. The state said he had a cocaine habit and used voluminous financial records to show he had money problems. It also used store videos from Fleming Island Home Depot that showed him buying the contractor trash bags and 2 60-pound bags of concrete, home surveillance cameras that showed him backing his truck in Mauldin’s driveway, arriving at his home minutes later at Margaret’s Walk on Fleming Island, at Rosemary Hill Landfill and his storage unit on U.S. Highway 17 on Fleming Island.

The state also used cellphone records that showed Binderim made 2 calls to Mauldin, which were answered on the morning of Oct. 24. No other calls were made or answered on Mauldin’s phone after that.

And a Human Remains Decomposition sniffing K-9 from the St. Johns Sheriff’s Office, Wall-E, detected the likely decompression on a tool bag in Binderim’s storage unit.

Mauldin kept a journal and tracked the appointments Binderim missed. She also complained to neighbors that she feared Binderim, felt uncomfortable around him and didn’t trust him.

The state called a jailmate, Thomas Smith, who said Binderim admitted he “choked her out” because Binderim and Mauldin got into an argument about the job and money and “she started getting loud, and he just shut her up.”

During closing arguments, the State Attorney’s Office painted Binderim as a desperate man in “dire straits.”

“On Oct. 24, 2019, instead of bringing a $12,000 check that he did not have, he brought his sturdy contractor bag. And after strangling Ms. Mauldin to death, he used that contractor bag as her tomb,” prosecutor Pam Hazel said.

Defense attorney Patrick Korody said the state’s case was based on circumstantial evidence. He also said Binderim wasn’t guilty because there wasn’t any DNA in or on the contractor bags. An unknown DNA sample was found on 1 of her fingernails.

“The searchers at the landfill, the medical examiner’s office and the lab, they were all suited up, so there’s no contamination,” Korody said during his closing argument. “They tested three bags, and they tested the nails. If that landfill is such a successful biological material, how in the world are they not finding any foreign DNA when they swab all those 3 bags? And the answer is because it’s not.”

Assistant State Attorney Dan Skinner delivered the cross-closing argument. He reminded the jury a trial is the search for truth. He also reminded them Susan Mauldin was a single woman who got along with everyone except Binderim.

“She’s having a dispute with no one else. She’s not struggling with any other human,” he said. “She sits there in her English club and just hangs out with friends and does what she does. She is living her life, minding her own business. We asked, ‘Is she getting along with everyone?’ Every friend goes, ‘Yes.’"

Skinner then looked directly at the jury and summed up 2 weeks of testimony in 30 seconds, telling them Binderim tore up her bathroom and was frustrated and in financial distress. Instead of facing the sheriff’s office, he killed Susan Mauldin.

A jury will decide if he deserves the same fate.

(source: claytodayonline.com)

*************

Jury selection continues for new penalty phase in high-profile, capital punishment case

Day 4 and still a jury has not been seated in a high-profile capital punishment case.

Panama City Beach Police Officer, Kevin Kight was killed in 2005. Robert Bailey was convicted of Kight’s murder.

In 2007, a jury sentenced him to death.

This week is the 2nd time a jury is being selected for the penalty phase of this case.

There has been a lot of back and forth on having a unanimous vote for the death penalty.

The jury selected this time will not have to vote unanimously in favor of the death penalty, for it to be imposed.

Whether the jury was unanimous in their vote was the reason this week’s re-sentencing is happening.

Since Bailey’s 1st sentencing, the state legislature amended its capital sentencing statute 3 times.

The most notable change came after the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Hurst versus Florida.

In 2017, the state abolished non-unanimous jury recommendations for the death penalty.

The Parkland Shooter was sentenced to life in prison in 2022 after the jury voted non-unanimously for the death penalty.

In 2023, a state law was enacted requiring 8 juror votes.

(source: WJHG news)

**********

Florida Supreme Court affirms death sentence for murderer who killed fellow inmate in Bradford County

The Florida Supreme Court will not stop the execution of a man convicted of killing an inmate in a state prison in Bradford County.

The court’s opinion released on Thursday denied Leo Boatman’s appeal of his death penalty sentence.

Boatman raised many claims on appeal, including that the trial court shouldn’t have found him competent to stand trial. The justices denied each claim.

Boatman was convicted and sentenced to death by jurors in Bradford County for the murder of William Chapman, a fellow inmate at Florida State Prison.

According to the ruling, prison security camera video showed Boatman and his accomplice William Wells attacking Chapman with a rope and shanks. As correctional officers tried to enter the room, Boatman blocked the door.

Boatman told investigators he committed the murder because he was angry that he was denied entry into the general prison population. He also claims Chapman made a sexual advance.

When arguing against the death penalty, defense attorneys told jurors of Boatman’s troubled childhood and past traumas. He was in prison serving a life sentence for the 2006 murder of 2 Santa Fe College students in the Ocala National Forest.

Amber Peck and John Parker were camping at Hidden Pond in the national forest when Boatman shot them with an AK-47 assault rifle.

He was also sentenced to an additional 7 years for the attempted murder of a prison inmate in Dixie County in 2010, and 15 more years for 3rd-degree murder for killing a cellmate in Charlotte County in 2013.

(source: WCJB news)

***********

‘I’m fixin’ to kill her’: Woman who ordered 100-pound rottweiler to attack boyfriend’s 9-year-old daughter should get the death penalty, prosecutors say

Florida prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against a woman accused of ordering her family’s 100-pound rottweiler to attack her boyfriend’s 9-year-old daughter before fatally beating the girl.

Tyshael Elise Martin, 35, is charged with 1st-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter of a child and aggravated child abuse in the June death of Jamaria Sessions in Montverde, about 25 miles west of Orlando. Investigators obtained videos from inside the home of the girl’s savage beating allegedly at Martin’s hands. An autopsy determined Jamaria died of blunt force injuries to the head, torso and extremities and thermal injury to the right foot. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.

State attorneys in Florida’s Fifth Judicial Circuit filed a motion stating their intent to seek the death penalty. In order to impose capital punishment for murder in the Sunshine State, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt at least one out of a list of aggravating factors.

In Martin’s case, they say they can prove 5:

1. Florida Statute § 921.141(6)(d) — The capital felony was committed while the defendant was engaged, or was an accomplice, in the commission of, or an attempt to commit aggravated child abuse.

2. Florida Statute § 921.141(6)(h) — The capital felony was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.

3. Florida Statute § 921.141(6)(i) — The capital felony was a homicide and was committed in a cold, calculated, and premeditated manner without any pretense of moral or legal justification.

4. Florida Statute § 921.141(6)(l) — The victim of the capital felony was a person less than 12 years of age.

5. Florida Statute § 921.141(6)(m) — The victim of the capital felony was particularly vulnerable because the defendant stood in a position of familial or custodial authority over the victim.

As Law&Crime previously reported, Lake County Sheriff deputies responded the morning of June 17 to a home in the 16000 block of Harbor Oaks Drive in Montverde. Paramedics found Jamaria naked with “a significant number of abrasions, small punctures, burns, possible bite marks, and bruising covering her body, all in various stages of healing,” a probable cause arrest affidavit said.

Martin said the family was supposed to take a flight that morning to California for vacation. She told cops she tried to wake up Jamaria, but she was unresponsive and cold to the touch.

Detectives obtained nearly 3,000 videos from inside and outside the home and ultimately focused in on 6 videos that were taken shortly before midnight on June 15. They allegedly show Jamaria being “viciously attacked by the family pet, a 103lb male rottweiler.” Martin is seen holding the dog’s leash, “encouraging the dog to bite” Jamaria as she’s lying on the floor, just out of the camera’s view, the affidavit said.

“The next clips show Jamaria Sessions staggering, nude and disheveled,” the affidavit says. “Jamaria’s hair, previously in a partial bun, was now messy, and her extensions were falling out of her hair. It appeared that the dog had bitten the child’s head, pulling at her hair, at the command of Tyshael Martin.”

Martin then allegedly forces the girl to stand in place with her arms held up in the air. Jamaria appeared to be disoriented and started to sway, which caused Martin to kick her, deputies wrote. The girl fell to the ground.

“The child lay motionless, moaning in pain, as Tyshael Martin continued to kick her hip and eventually her stomach area at full force,” deputies wrote. “When the child did not get up, Tyshael Martin then grabbed the child by her hair, pulling her across the floor, with minimal resistance by Jamaria Sessions, who appeared to be disorientated and motionless.”

According to deputies, Martin continued to beat Jamaria and said something that sounded like “I’m fixin’ to kill her.”

Detectives also learned that Martin apparently used exercises, including prolonged wall sits, running in place with her hands up and running on a treadmill, as a form of punishment, the affidavit said. Martin would also allegedly kick, punch and pinch the girl.

Jamaria’s father LoJuan Sessions, 27, is charged with aggravated manslaughter. Martin and Sessions are in the Lake County Jail without bond.

(source: lawandcrime.com)

ALABAMA----execution/volunteer

Alabama executes Derrick Dearman for 2016 murders; 5th execution of 2024

The state of Alabama Thursday executed Derrick Dearman for the 2016 murders of 5 people in Citronelle, outside of Mobile on Thursday by lethal injection.

Dearman, 36, was convicted in 2018 of the murders of Robert Lee Brown, Chelsea Reed, Justin Reed, Joseph Adam Turner, and Shannon Randall. Chelsea Reed was pregnant at the time of her death. Dearman abandoned his appeals earlier this year and asked state officials to schedule his execution.

“To the victims’ family, forgive me,” Dearman said as part of his final statement. “This is not for me, this is for you … I have taken so much … To my family, you all already know I love you.”

Media witnesses did not report any complications with the execution. The only reported movement was a twitching of the arm.

“It was not a sign of consciousness,” said ADOC Commissioner John Hamm in a press conference after Dearman was executed. “His arms did move a little bit. I saw both arms move a little bit, but it was not because he was conscious.”

The commissioner then read a statement from Bryant Henry Randall, the father of Chelsea Randall Reed and brother of Shannon Randall and Robert Lee Brown.

“Today, goodbye will be easy for me because we have all heard the horrific things that Derrick Dearman did to all the innocent individuals that you murdered,” Randall said. “Whether it was drugs or just pure hate, and the devil in his heart, Dearman will get a final goodbye whereas I am still waiting on mine.”

Robert Brown, the father of Robert Lee Brown, said the experience was a sample of “all this evil going on in this world.”

“If it doesn’t change, the Lord is coming back, and everybody in this world is all committing some kind of sin of some kind,” he said. “It doesn’t stop here, it goes all the way to the top, all this bickering, fighting, stealing, robbing, murdering, and these people out here are not even thinking about it. They are just all killing each other.”

The execution took place just three weeks after Alabama executed Alan Eugene Miller by nitrogen gas. It was the 5th carried out this year by the state, which is tied with Texas for the most in the nation so far.

According to court documents, Dearman drove to a house where his estranged girlfriend was staying and murdered the 5 people. Afterward, he drove the estranged girlfriend and the infant son of one of the victims to his father’s house in Mississippi, where he released them. He later turned himself in to law enforcement in Greene County, Mississippi.

“Six lives, including an unborn baby, were gruesomely taken by Mr. Dearman in 2016,” said Gov. Kay Ivey in a news release Thursday night. “In using an axe and then a gun, he clearly made the decision to kill. Then he made the clear decision to flee to his hometown in Mississippi. And now, he himself has clearly stated his guilt and asked to move forward with his death sentence. The state has obliged, and justice has been served. I pray for the loved ones of all these victims whose lives were taken far too soon.”

Dearman, who pleaded guilty at this original trial, withdrew his appeals in April, terminated his attorneys and wrote letters to Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall asking the state to schedule his execution.

Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual advisor to Dearman and other death row inmates, said Dearman was “deeply remorseful for what he did” at a news conference after the execution.

“He deeply believed that volunteering was a way that he could prove that he was sorry, that he was remorseful, and when he volunteered, I thought to myself, ‘man, this is going to give us the chance to really spend time together and grow spiritually, and do all these wonderful things so he could be at peace,’” Hood said.

Besides Miller, Alabama executed Kenneth Eugene Smith by nitrogen gas in January. Jamie Ray Mills, executed in May, and Keith Edmund Gavin, executed in July, were both killed by lethal injection.

Alabama is scheduled to execute Carey Grayson by nitrogen gas next month. If that execution takes place, it will be the most number of executions in Alabama since 2011.

(source: alabamareflector.com)

**************

Alabama executes man who killed 5 and asked to be put to death

Alabama executed a man Thursday who admitted to killing 5 people with an ax and gun during a drug-fueled rampage in 2016 and dropped his appeals to allow his lethal injection to go forward.

Derrick Dearman, 36, was pronounced dead at 6:14 p.m. Thursday at Holman prison in southern Alabama. He pleaded guilty in a rampage that began when he broke into the home where his estranged girlfriend had taken refuge.

Strapped to a gurney in the Alabama execution chamber, Dearman spoke to the family members of the victims and to his own family. “Forgive me. This is not for me. This is for you,” he said to the victims’ families before adding, “I’ve taken so much.” He closed by telling his own family, “I love y’all.”

Dearman had dropped his appeals this year. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to a judge, adding that “it’s not fair to the victims or their families to keep prolonging the justice that they so rightly deserve.”

Dearman’s execution was one of two planned Thursday in the U.S. Robert Roberson was scheduled to be the nation’s first person put to death for a murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, but a judge granted a request from Texas lawmakers to delay his execution. The judge’s order was expected to be quickly appealed by the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

Dearman’s was Alabama’s 5th execution of 2024. Two were carried out by nitrogen gas. The other 2 were by lethal injection, which remains the state’s primary method.

Killed on Aug. 20, 2016, at the home near Citronelle, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Mobile, were Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22.

Chelsea Reed, who was married to Justin Reed, was pregnant when she was killed. Turner, who was married to Randall, shared the home with the Reeds. Brown, who was Randall’s brother, was also staying there the night of the murders. Dearman’s girlfriend survived. Turner and Randall had their 3-month-old son with them when they were attacked, but the baby was unharmed.

The day before the killing, Joseph Turner, the brother of Dearman’s girlfriend, brought her to their home after Dearman became abusive toward her, according to a judge’s sentencing order.

Dearman had shown up at the home multiple times that night asking to see his girlfriend and was told he could not stay there. Sometime after 3 a.m., he returned when all the victims were asleep, according to a judge’s sentencing order. He worked his way through the house, attacking the victims with an ax taken from the yard and then with a gun found in the home, prosecutors said. He forced his girlfriend, who survived, to get in the car with him and drive to Mississippi.

Dearman surrendered to authorities at the request of his father, according to a judge’s 2018 sentencing order.

As he was escorted to jail, Dearman blamed the rampage on drugs, telling reporters that he was high on methamphetamine when he went into the home and that the “drugs were making me think things that weren’t really there happening.”

Dearman initially pleaded not guilty but changed his plea to guilty after firing his attorneys. Because it was a capital murder case, Alabama law required a jury to hear the evidence and determine whether the state had proven the case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended a death sentence.

Before he dropped his appeal, Dearman’s lawyers argued that his trial counsel failed to do enough to demonstrate Dearman’s mental illness and “lack of competency to plead guilty.” The Equal Justice Initiative, which represented Dearman in the appeal, wrote on its website Wednesday that Dearman “suffered from lifelong and severe mental illness, including bipolar disorder with psychotic features.”

Dearman had been on death row since 2018.

In the hours ahead of his execution by lethal injection, Dearman had visitation with his sons, sister and father.

(source: Associated Press)

*************

Derrick Dearman, who killed 5 in south Alabama axe murders, executed Thursday

Alabama death row inmate Derrick Dearman, who was convicted in the 2016 slayings of 5 people with an axe and 2 guns, was put to death Thursday night by lethal injection. He had given up his appeals earlier this year and volunteered to have his execution set.

Dearman, 36, put to death in Alabama’s execution chamber at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, is the 5th execution Alabama has carried out in 2024 and the 2nd in less than a month.

At 5:55 p.m., the prison warden asked if he had any final words.

Dearman‘s last words were: “To the victims’ family, forgive me. This is not for me, this is for you... I’ve taken so much... To my family, ya’ll already know I love you.” Several words were inaudible.

Dearman also appeared to speak after the execution process began and the drugs were flowing, but his words were inaudible to the viewing rooms.

At 6 p.m., Dearman briefly lifted his head off of the gurney and spoke, which was again inaudible.

A correctional officer performed a consciousness check by yelling Dearman’s name, pinching his arm and flicking his eyelid at 6:02 p.m. Dearman briefly moved his arm after the pinch.

He appeared to stop breathing at 6:04 p.m.

Final hours

An Alabama Department of Corrections spokesperson on Thursday afternoon released Dearman’s activity for the last 2 days.

On Wednesday, Dearman was visited by his spiritual advisor Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood, his father and his sister.

On Thursday, Dearman was visited by a friend, his father, 2 of his sons, his brother-in-law and his sister. He didn’t have any phone calls.

He had 5 witnesses planning to witness his execution: His father, sister, brother-in-law and 2 friends.

After the curtain closed, his family erupted in sobs. “Derrick... Derrick, no,” his father wailed.

Gave up appeals

Dearman had opted to die by the state’s 3-drug lethal cocktail instead of breathing in nitrogen gas. And he gave up his appeals earlier this year.

“I am willingly giving all that I can possibly give to try and repay a small portion of my debt to society for the terrible things that I have done,” Dearman said in a statement released earlier this week by his spiritual advisor.

“From this point forward, I hope that the focus will not be on me, but rather on the healing of all the people that I have hurt.”

In April, Dearman fired his attorneys from the Equal Justice Initiative and opted to end his appeals. He spoke to AL.com about his mindset at the time.

“I am guilty, plain and simple,” he said in a phone interview. “Everybody’s trying to talk me out of it,” he said. “But, I feel in my heart this is the right thing to do.”

Derrick Dearman murders

The murders

Dearman was sent to death row in 2018 for the brutal slayings of 5 family members of his then-girlfriend in Citronelle in 2016. The victims were Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Chelsea Marie Reed, 22; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Shannon Melissa Randall, 35. Chelsea Reed was pregnant with her and Justin Reed’s 1st child. Turner and Randall had a 3-month-old son in the bed with them when they were attacked, but he was unharmed.

After attacking his victims with an ax and then shooting them, Dearman forced his unharmed girlfriend, Laneta Lester, into a car, along with the 3-month-old boy, and drove them to Mississippi. The girlfriend and baby were later released.

The killings happened in the early-morning hours of Aug. 20, 2016. Dearman was dating Lester at the time. Her brother, Joseph Adam Turner, lived in a remote area of Mobile County near Citronelle.

According to court records, Dearman was abusive to Lester, his girlfriend. The day before the murders, Turner picked her up and brought her to his home. Dearman showed up multiple times to the Citronelle home that night, but no one would allow Dearman inside the house.

Early the next morning, Dearman returned. Court records state that he picked up an ax from the yard, broke into the home and attacked everyone inside except for the infant and his girlfriend.

After the ambush, Dearman forced Lester and the baby boy into a car and took them to a family member’s house in Mississippi.

Soon after, the girlfriend and baby returned to south Alabama unharmed in the car. Dearman turned himself into authorities the following day.

A post on the Equal Justice Initiative‘s website-- the legal nonprofit whom Dearman fired this spring-- said on the day of the slayings, Dearman “had been hearing voices, believed that people were ’after' him, had used a large amount of methamphetamine, and had not slept for 6 days.”

Representatives from the Equal Justice Initiative sent a comment via email from Director Bryan Stevenson. “Subjecting people with serious mental illness to the death penalty raises huge concerns in a nation that seeks to protect human rights. Important questions about a defendant’s competency to stand trial, the validity of a guilty plea, and whether the level of moral culpability necessary for the death penalty can be assigned to people impaired by delusions, hallucinations, or other symptoms of serious mental disorders—all issues in Derrick Dearman’s case—have been left unanswered.“

Stevenson continued, “The Constitution requires courts to resolve these questions before sentencing someone to death. However, in Mr. Dearman’s case, no Alabama court even conducted a hearing to evaluate his competency to plead guilty, waive his right to counsel, or stop his appeals, despite the fact that he has suffered from serious mental illness and suicidal ideation throughout his life.”

But on that post on their website, the lawyers said Dearman “has struggled with severe suicidal ideation for his entire life.”

After firing his attorneys this spring, Dearman said he wasn’t seeking an imminent death date. “I mean, who wants to say, you know what, just come on and kill me? Nobody wants to die,” he said at the time.

Derrick Dearman murders

But then the Alabama Supreme Court authorized several executions, and Gov. Kay Ivey set dates for Jamie Mills, Keith Gavin, and Alan Miller. Those three men were executed, while Dearman waited to die.

The court authorized an execution date to be set for Carey Dale Grayson—and the governor set it as Nov. 21—when Dearman wrote a letter to the Alabama Attorney General’s Office, expressing frustration that other men were set for execution before he was.

“I have done everything that is required to drop my appeals and have my sentence carried out and I am compotent (sic) and of a sound mind…can you please respond to this letter to let me know what the hold up is??????”

He wrote in the August letter, “All this is hard on not only me but my family and the longer it takes the more me and my family have to go through.”

Dearman’s former attorney had argued in court records he was severely mentally ill at the time of the crime. Dearman himself said that his mind wasn’t right at the time. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what happened, he told AL.com.

“I remember every bit of it,” Dearman said through the fuzzy audio at Holman prison. It’s the prison where most Alabama death row inmates are housed, and the only one in the state with an execution chamber.

“It was like someone else had the steering wheel. It was like being at the movie theater or watching a movie and you want to turn your head or close your eyes because you didn’t want to see that part or that scene because it was that scary or horrible and not being able to. It’s like something else had the wheel,” Dearman said.

He was the 5th person Alabama executed in 2024. 1st was Kenneth Smith, who was the 1st inmate killed using nitrogen gas in the country. Smith was executed in January, setting off controversy across the world after Smith writhed on the gurney.

In May, Jamie Ray Mills was executed by lethal injection for the beating deaths of an elderly couple with a machete, ball-peen hammer, and a tire iron 2 decades ago.

In July, Alabama executed 64-year-old Keith Edmund Gavin for a 1998 murder at a north Alabama ATM. He was put to death by lethal injection, because he didn’t change his method of execution to gas when he had the opportunity to do so in 2018.

In September, Alan Eugene Miller was the 2nd inmate to be executed using nitrogen pumped through a gas mask. He had no pending appeals at the time of his death, after he entered into a confidential settlement with the state weeks earlier.

Grayson is set to be the 6th inmate to be executed in Alabama this year on Nov. 21, and is set to die by nitrogen. His lawyers from the Federal Public Defenders for the Middle District of Alabama are currently fighting the way Alabama handles the nitrogen execution process. Grayson was convicted with 3 other men for the Feb. 22, 1994 slaying of Vicki Lynn DeBlieux, who was kidnapped while hitchhiking.

Dearman is also the 1st inmate since 2013 to be executed after spending less than a decade on Alabama death row. That year, Andrew Lackey was put to death for the 2005 murder of an 80-year-old World War II veteran he was trying to rob.

Like Dearman, Lackey had given up his appeals and asked for his execution to be scheduled.

The Equal Justice Initiaive wrote online, “Derrick Dearman stopped his appeals only after a lifetime of severe mental illness and suicidal behavior that Alabama courts have repeatedly ignored. The State of Alabama now plans to execute him despite serious questions about the constitutionality of his conviction and death sentence.”

After Dearman’s execution there are now 161 inmates on Alabama death row, including 5 women.

Dearman becomes the 5th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Alabama and the 77th overall since Alabama resumed capital punishment on April 22, 1983.

Dearman becomes the 20th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,602nd overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

(sources: al.com & Rick Halperin)

IDAHO----impending execution

Thomas Creech is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, at the Idaho Maximum Security Insitute near Kuna, Idaho. 74-year-old Thomas is convicted of murdering fellow inmate David Dale Jensen on May 13, 1981, in a maximum security wing at the Idaho State Correctional Institution. For the last 48 years, Thomas has resided on Idaho’s death row.

Thomas Creech was born in Ohio. His parents frequently argued, eventually divorcing. After the divorce, Thomas lived with his father, who eventually died in front of him. After his father’s death, it is believed that Thomas ran away and began traveling across the county. In December 1969, Thomas was arrested for unarmed robbery. He served time and was paroled in 1971. 2 years later he married a 17-year-old in Idaho, who was later committed to a psychiatric hospital where she committed suicide.

Thomas was arrested in August 1973 after he violated his parole by stealing 13 boxes of cigarettes. The charges were dropped after Thomas was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He was a model patient during his one-week stay. After his release, he went to Portland, Oregon, where he worked as a sexton for a church. He quit his job after a body was discovered in his living quarters. Thomas then began dating another 17-year-old and the couple moved to Idaho.

On November 6, 1874, Thomas Creech and his girlfriend were hitchhiking when two house painters, 34-year-old Edward Thomas Arnold and 40-year-old John Wayne Bradford, offered them a ride. The couple accepted but during the ride Creech shot both men in the back of their heads, killing them. He and his girlfriend buried their bodies. The bodies and the missing vehicle were found the following day.

2 days later Creech was arrested, along with his girlfriend. Creech was convicted and sentenced to death. During his trial, Creech admitted to committing 42 murders in several different states. Creech provided details to the police who were able to link him to several cold cases, but police were not able to verify all his claims. Eventually, Creech’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that death sentences must be given by a jury.

Creech was serving his time at the Idaho State Correctional Institution near Kuna. He was housed in a maximum security wing, which usually only permitted one inmate out of their cell at a time. However, Creech worked as a janitor, against the protests of prosecutors who maintained that Creech continued to present a threat, even to other inmates.

While working, Creech was often not the only inmate out of his cell. Creech had a few altercations with fellow inmate, 23-year-old David Dale Jensen. David was in prison for a non-violent car theft. David was also mentally handicapped, with a plastic plate in his skull. On May 13, 1981, the altercations between Creech and David turned physical and deadly, as David was beaten to death with a sock full of batteries. Creech was quickly tried and convicted. He did not dispute the charges against him and asked to be sentenced to death. His request was granted.

This is not Thomas Creech’s first execution date. His 1st execution date was halted by the Idaho Parole Board in order to conduct a hearing to consider changing Thomas’ sentence. Thomas is the longest-serving death row inmate in Idaho and was seeking to have his sentence reduced to life in prison due to his advanced age. His request was denied and a new execution date was scheduled. His next execution was called off hours after it scheduled to begin as the medical team was unable to establish an IV line after approximately one hour. Since then, the medical team has been given additional training and are able to pursue a central line IV rather than the standard IV.

Please pray for peace for the families of David Jensen, Edward Thomas Arnold, John Wayne Bradford, and any others affected by Thomas’ crimes. Please pray for strength for the family of Thomas. Pray that if Thomas is innocent, lacks the competency to be executed, or should not be executed for any other reason, that evidence will be presented before his execution. Pray that Thomas, who claims to be a “devout Christian,” will find peace through his personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

(source: theforgivenessfoundation.org)

******** Idaho Amends Lethal Injection Execution Protocol and Sets Second Execution Date for Thomas Creech

On October 15, 2024, the Idaho Department of Corrections (IDOC) amended its execution protocol and facilities to enable staff to place a central intravenous line, if necessary, to deliver lethal injection drugs to a prisoner. IDOC now has a new execution preparation room in which venous access would be established prior to transferring the prisoner to the execution chamber. This change, and accompanying prison renovations this past summer, came after the February 28, 2024 failed execution of the state’s oldest death row prisoner, Thomas Creech, whose execution was halted after correctional staff failed to set intravenous lines after an hour of effort and eight attempts. A day after the execution protocol was modified, Idaho issued a warrant scheduling Mr. Creech’s second execution date for November 13, 2024.

“Idaho has now made itself the 1st state in the history of the country to try to use lethal injection a second time on the same inmate after failing the first time,” said Deborah Czuba, one of Mr. Creech’s attorneys and supervising attorney for the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Defenders of Idaho in a written statement. “The state is sacrificing common decency and humanity in its haste for an execution. Mr. Creech’s legal team is fighting to save Mr. Creech’s life on many fronts. Mr. Creech has spent more than 50 years in prison and is now suffering from significant mental health issues because of the trauma he was subjected to when the state failed to execute him. We hope the courts will recognize the cruel and unusual level of punishment that this remorseful and harmless old man has already been through, and stop a needless execution.” The statement also highlighted the lack of public information or official review following the first failed execution attempt and criticized the state’s plan to use “virtually the same process and team of executioners” in their second attempt. His lawyers are also challenging the second attempt to execute Mr. Creech as unconstitutional.

According to IDOC’s press release on its updated execution protocols, when Mr. Creech’s execution team was unable to establish peripheral IV access it did not have an “appropriate environment” to establish a central line as protocol then dictated. Under the modified protocol, a prisoner would first be taken to the execution preparation room, where a medical team would determine if peripheral IV access is possible. If not, “a qualified physician will establish a central line.” Execution witnesses would be able to observe the entirety of this process via a live, closed-circuit video and audio feed. Once the prisoner’s IV access has been established, he would be transferred to the execution chamber.

“Our previous protocols proved effective at protecting the integrity of the process and ensuring adherence with 8th amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment,” said IDOC Director Josh Tewalt. “These changes enhance the State’s ability to carry out an execution by lethal injection by ensuring we have the infrastructure in place to establish IV access.”

Summer renovations to the F Block unit at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution to create an execution preparation room cost an estimated $313,915, according to IDOC public information officer Sanda Kuzeta-Cerimagic. The renovations included imaging, design, and engineering outlined in phase one construction to the unit but do not include phase two construction costs, including the creation of a secured facility for executions via firing squad, which was adopted as an alternate execution method in 2023. In total, phase two construction costs are estimated at $952,589, as reported by the Idaho Capital Sun.

If Mr. Creech’s execution is carried out, it would mark Idaho’s 1st execution in 12 years. There are 8 other prisoners on Idaho’s death row.

(source: Death Penalty Information Center)

**************

Condemned Idaho inmate appeals, trying to stop November execution

A man scheduled to die by lethal injection next month in Idaho is appealing, hoping to stop his execution.

Convicted killer Thomas Creech has been on Idaho death row since 1983, longer than any inmate currently sentenced to death.

The state botched his execution earlier this year and recently announced changes to the lethal injection process leading up to a new execution date on November 16.

Creech has tried several times to stop his execution, including recent attempts to say he was tortured when executioners tried for more than an hour to insert an IV through which to administer the lethal injection.

This week, Creech filed an appeal to the Idaho Supreme Court.

Creech contends that previous orders denying his relief violate his protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Creech was convicted of multiple murders and is suspected of several more.

In the decades since, he's applied several times for clemency. Those motions have been supported by unlikely people, including prison staffers and the former warden.

Creech's attorneys have asked for the recent appeals to be expedited, given the date of the upcoming scheduled execution.

The Idaho Supreme Court has scheduled a deadline for oral arguments on November 4.

(source: KXLY news)

IRAN----executions

Hamedan Central Prison: Two Prisoners, including a Woman, Executed

Amid a surge of executions in Iran, the mullahs’ regime hanged 2 prisoners, including a woman, at dawn on Wednesday, October 16, 2024, in Hamedan Central Prison.

The identity of the woman executed in Hamedan remains unknown. She had been sentenced to death on drug-related charges.

As of the time this report was prepared, the execution of these two prisoners has not been announced by government officials or state media.

32 women executed in the past year, 23 in 2024

The Iranian regime is the world’s top record holder of executions of women.

According to the data recorded by the NCRI Women’s Committee, the number of women executed in Iran has sharply increased over the past year, with 32 executions recorded between October 2023 and October 2024. This marks a troubling rise from previous years, up from 19 women executed in 2022–2023 and 21 in 2021–2022.

The current year’s figure is particularly alarming, surpassing the average rate of 21 executions under Ebrahim Raisi by 11 and more than double the annual average of 15 under former president Hassan Rouhani.

Given the clandestine nature of executions and the lack of public announcement by the judiciary, it is evident that the actual number is higher than reported.

This surge underscores the Iranian regime’s growing use of capital punishment, including against women—an escalation in human rights abuses now seen under the administration of Masoud Pezeshkian.

The total number of executions in Iran in 2024 has surpassed 600, so far, with more than 300 prisoners including 12 women executed since Pezeshkian took office.

It further proves that regardless of who holds the presidency, the rights of the Iranian people, especially women, continue to be trampled.

(source: wncri.org)

***********

Majid Jashlu Executed in Qom

Ramin Jashlu, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Qom Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Qom (Langroud) Central Prison on 16 October. His identity has been established as 35-year-old Majid Jashlu who was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Majid Jashlu was arrested for murder 2 years ago when he was 33 and sentenced to qisas.”

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

**************

Ramin Mohammadvand Executed in Dezful

Ramin Mohammadvand, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Dezful Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Dezful Prison in Khuzestan province on 16 October. His identity has been established as Ramin Mohammadvand from Sardasht.

He was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder during a street fight by the Criminal Court, per informed IHRNGO sources.

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

***********

Abbas Karimi and Mohammad Ali Najafi Executed in Isfahan; 92 Executions Recorded in 17 Days

Abbas Karimi and Mohammad Ali Najafi, 2 men on death row for murder, were executed in Isfahan Central Prison. Abbas Karimi had been granted an extension to raise the blood money but his family were unable to meet the deadline. IHRNGO has recorded 92 executions in the first 17 days of October.

Iran Human Rights calls for the abolition of the death penalty and the international community to react to the daily widespread executions in Iran.

IHRNGO Director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said: “The Islamic Republic promotes violence, cruelty and discrimination in society through inhuman retribution laws. Abbas Karimi was executed due to his inability to pay blood money.”

“In the shadow of the threat and news of war, not only the international community and abolitionist countries but diaspora Farsi media have also remained silent about the daily execution of 5-6 people in Iran, and the Islamic Republic is using that silence to carry out even more executions,” he added.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, 2 men were executed in Isfahan (Dastgerd) Central Prison on 17 October. Their identities have been established as 36-year-old Abbas Karimi and 35-year-old Mohammad Ali Najafi. Both men were sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder by the Criminal Court.

Abbas Karimi was on death row for 9 years for an unintentional murder during a street fight. He was previously transferred to the gallows on 3 October after failing to raise the 70 billion tomans (€1,060,000)blood money but the victim’s family granted a last minute extension in the case as he was about to be executed. They agreed to accept house deeds plus 40billion tomans. Despite all efforts and multiple fundraising efforts by Abbas Karimi’s family, they failed to raise the required amount by the set deadline.

Abbas Karimi’s children Ali and Aileen shared Instagram account posted: “We gave them 50 billion tomans in cheques and the deeds to 4 properties but they still executed my dad.”

IHRNGO has also received a recording of Abbas Karimi’s last phone call prior to execution.

The Head of Judiciary sets an annual indicative amount for diya based on inflation and other considerations, but the victim’s family can choose their own amount. They can demand a lower or higher amount than the judiciary’s indicative number but crucially, no upper limit is set. The diya indicative amounts, which are determined every March, were set at 900 million tomans (€18,000) for a Muslim man and 450 million tomans (€9,000) for a Muslim woman in March 2023. The amount set by families is usually higher than the indicative amount and even the indicative amount is higher than what most families can afford. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

Mohammad Ali Najafi was from Shahin Shahr and a father of 1. He was arrested for murder 3 years ago.

At the time of writing, their executions have not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness.

***********

Mohammad Mokhtari Executed in Shiraz

Mohsen Mokhtari, a man on death row for murder, was executed in Shiraz Central Prison.

According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, a man was executed in Shiraz Central (Adel Abad) Prison on 16 October. His identity has been established as Mohsen Mokhtari from Shiraz who was sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder.

An informed source told IHRNGO: “Mohsen Mokhtar was arrested for murder 5 years ago. He was transferred to the gallows from Ward 10 of the prison.”

At the time of writing, his execution has not been reported by domestic media or officials in Iran.

Those charged with the umbrella term of “intentional murder” are sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) regardless of intent or circumstances due to a lack of grading in law. Once a defendant has been convicted, the victim’s family are required to choose between death as retribution, diya (blood money) or forgiveness. Crucially, while an indicative amount is set by the Judiciary every year, there is no legal limit to how much can be demanded by families of the victims. IHRNGO has recorded many cases where defendants are executed because they cannot afford to pay the blood money.

In 2023, at least 282 people including 2 juvenile offenders and 15 women, were executed for murder charges, the 2nd highest number of qisas executions since 2010. Only 20% of the recorded qisas executions were announced by official sources. In 2023, Iran Human Rights also recorded 857 cases of families choosing diya or forgiveness instead of qisas executions.

(source for all: iranhr.net)

OCTOBER 17, 2024:

TEXAS----impending execution

Texas Is About to Execute Robert Roberson for a Crime That Never Happened----State courts refused to review Roberson’s case, clearing the way for his execution based on the junk science of shaken baby syndrome.

On the witness stand in March 2000, Dr. Janet Squires was unequivocal: The injuries suffered by the 13-month-old girl were “absolutely classic” signs of shaken baby syndrome. Commonly referred to by its acronym, SBS is a diagnosis based on the belief that a certain combination of injuries found in a baby or toddler could only be caused by violent shaking.

“When a baby is shaken their head flops back and forth like this,” she testified, demonstrating the violent force needed to cause injury. “And the rotational forces through the brain literally sort of shear the tissues of the brain.”

Coming from the then-director of pediatrics at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Squires’s testimony would be crucial to the conviction of Andrew Wayne Roark, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for violently shaking his girlfriend’s daughter, causing permanent brain damage.

Roark insisted he was innocent. 3 years earlier, in July 1997, Roark was babysitting the child, referred to in court documents as B.D., while her mother was at work. He took B.D. to the doctor for a regular check-up, then fed her ravioli for lunch before giving her a bath. According to Roark, the infant slipped in the tub, hitting the back of her head, but she seemed fine and Roark put her down for a nap. When he went to check on her, however, he found her face down next to the bed. She was limp, pale, and barely breathing. Roark called 911. At Children’s Medical Center, Squires determined that B.D. had been violently shaken. Roark was arrested that night and charged with injuring her.

A few years later, Squires would play a key role in securing a guilty verdict against another man, Robert Roberson, whom she said had violently shaken his 2-year-old daughter to death. “You really have to shake them really hard back and forth and then you typically slam them against something,” she testified at Roberson’s trial. “It’s an out of control, angry, violent adult.” Roberson, who maintained his innocence, was sentenced to death. (Squires did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

In the years after both men were sent to prison, the symptoms once believed to be indicative of SBS were called into question. For years, doctors like Squires had claimed that a triad of symptoms — subdural hematoma, brain swelling, and retinal hemorrhage — could only be explained by violent shaking. But subsequent research demonstrated that it is physically impossible for a human to cause such injuries by shaking alone and that each of the symptoms could be the result of myriad medical causes. To date, 34 people convicted based on SBS have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

In 2013, Texas enacted a first-of-its-kind law, allowing people prosecuted on the basis of junk science to challenge their convictions. Roark successfully argued to his trial court that SBS had been discredited and that he was entitled to a new trial. Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed that key medical experts in Roark’s case would not testify the same way if the trial were to take place today: “We find that if the newly evolved scientific evidence were presented … it is more likely than not, he would not have been convicted.”

Like Roark, Roberson challenged his conviction under the state’s junk science statute and presented evidence to his trial court that the experts against him had relied on supposed symptoms of SBS that have since been discredited.

But unlike Roark, the judge in Roberson’s case disagreed that a change in the science had undermined his conviction. The Court of Criminal Appeals signed off on the judge’s conclusions, providing no explanation for its decision and clearing the way for Roberson’s execution. Texas plans to kill him on Thursday.

The Court of Criminal Appeals’ decisions in the two cases leaves an irreconcilable disparity: In Roark’s case, the court concluded that expert testimony about SBS was unsupported by science, while simultaneously deciding, in Roberson’s case, that it’s perfectly fine to send a man to the death chamber based on such testimony.

“The same prosecution expert testified in both trials making many identical pronouncements about how shaking had to be the principal explanation for the child’s brain condition,” said Roberson’s attorney, Gretchen Sims Sween, who has been fighting tirelessly to save her client’s life. “The flaws in the expert testimony are nearly identical.”

Nevertheless, the Court of Criminal Appeals refused to reconsider its ruling against Roberson in light of Roark’s case. Unless the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Greg Abbott intervene to offer him clemency, Roberson will this week become the first person in the U.S. executed based on the debunked diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

Nikki was unconscious and her lips were blue when her father Robert Roberson found her in bed the morning of January 31, 2002.

The 2-year-old had been ill the previous week: coughing, vomiting, and running a high fever. Roberson had taken her to the doctor twice and both times was sent home with drugs that, today, would not be prescribed for children her age. The night before Roberson found his daughter unconscious, Nikki had fallen out of bed; he’d comforted her and everything seemed fine. Now, she was unresponsive. Roberson rushed Nikki to the local hospital in Palestine, Texas.

Although medical personnel were able to restart Nikki’s heart, she was already brain dead. They found one lump on the back of her head and took scans of her head, but found no signs of abuse. Nonetheless, they decided that Roberson was acting odd; he wasn’t as emotional as they believed a father should be given his daughter’s grave condition. They immediately called the police. Upon his arrival, Palestine Police Department Detective Brian Wharton also noted that Roberson was stoic and detached.

Before an autopsy had even been performed, Roberson was arrested and charged with killing Nikki.

Nikki was transferred to Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, where she was examined by Squires. A renowned pediatrician known for pioneering treatment of children with AIDS, she had more recently turned her attention to cases of child abuse. A few years earlier, in a Christmas Eve feature, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had spotlighted Squires as one of the community’s “angels,” naming her “Angel of the Innocent.” Squires quickly concluded that Nikki had been a victim of shaken baby syndrome. “There was some flinging or shaking component, which resulted in subdural hemorrhaging and diffuse brain injury,” Squires told police, along with an “impact” area on the back of Nikki’s head, which she declared was not related to the child’s fall from bed. Before an autopsy had even been performed, Roberson was arrested and charged with killing Nikki.

The following year, he was convicted and sentenced to death based largely on Squires’s claims, which were even accepted by Roberson’s defense lawyer, who said that Nikki had been killed due to violent shaking, which occurs when an adult loses control of their emotions. “It’s a bad thing,” the lawyer told the jury, “but it’s not something that rises to the level of capital murder.”

Roberson insisted he was innocent. In 2016, he challenged his conviction under Texas’s junk science law. He was a week away from execution when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals sent his case back to a trial court. During a nine-day evidentiary hearing, Roberson’s lawyers argued that SBS had been debunked and presented new evidence that undermined the state’s insistence that a crime had even occurred. A neuropsychologist who evaluated Roberson diagnosed him with autism and testified that the perception of his behavior as inappropriate by police officers and others was a misunderstanding of his neurodivergence.

Perhaps most important, Roberson’s lawyers presented crucial evidence that offered alternate explanations for Nikki’s death. Medical experts testified that Nikki was seriously ill with undiagnosed pneumonia and that the drugs she’d been previously prescribed had likely made her condition worse. And, in contrast to Squires’s insistence that Nikki’s head injury could only have been caused by a violent act, medical experts at the hearing said the evidence was consistent with Nikki having fallen off the bed, just as Roberson had described.

Notably, the prosecutor didn’t call Squires to testify at the hearing, claiming the doctor could not be located.

We Were Wrong

Given all the similarities between the Roark and Roberson cases, it is hard to square their sharply different outcomes before the courts. Yet there are notable differences: The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office agreed that Roark’s case deserved a 2nd look, while prosecutors in more rural Anderson County have stuck by Roberson’s conviction. And in Roark’s case, Squires conceded in an affidavit that a relatively minor portion of her testimony was inaccurate, but stood behind the broader SBS diagnosis. When Roberson’s attorneys reached out to Squires, she never responded.

Nevertheless, it remains true that the Court of Criminal Appeals has signed off on Roberson’s execution even though it featured the same flawed forensic testimony the court said required a new trial for Roark. This has happened before.

Cameron Todd Willingham and Ernest Willis were convicted of strikingly similar arson crimes based on the same flawed fire science. In 2004, Texas executed Willingham; Willis was exonerated later that year.

The Willingham execution sparked outrage and pushed Texas to confront the problem of wrongful convictions and flawed forensics, helping to lay the groundwork for the passage in 2013 of the state’s junk science law. The law was meant to prevent miscarriages of justice, but in the most high-stakes cases, like Roberson’s, it has not worked as intended. According to a recent report from the Texas Defender Service, no one on death row has ever successfully challenged their conviction under the junk science law.

2 decades after Texas executed an innocent man based on junk science, it is on the verge of doing so again. Though the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Greg Abbott can act to spare Roberson’s life, there’s little reason to think they will.

Under Texas law, the governor needs a recommendation from the board in order to grant clemency; without the board’s recommendation, the governor is only empowered to issue a one-time, 30-day reprieve. State law does not require that the board grant Roberson a hearing or even that it discuss his application for clemency. Historically, board members have not met to discuss clemency for people on death row and instead members have merely faxed in their individual decisions. Under Abbott, just a single person on death row has had their sentence commuted.

In asking the board and Abbott for mercy, Roberson has assembled an impressive clemency petition that includes letters of support from medical professionals, families who have been erroneously accused of child abuse, and a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers, some of whom have traveled to death row to pray with Roberson.

Also asking for the state to spare Roberson is Wharton, the former Palestine detective who investigated Nikki’s death. Now a Methodist preacher, he has been vocal about his regret over the role he played in sending Roberson to death row. In a letter to the board, he wrote that he was never comfortable with Roberson’s conviction and hoped for years that the courts would intervene.

“We, the State of Texas, are now working only to protect our capital system and a conviction,” Wharton wrote. “We have failed to hear Robert’s righteous plea of innocence. We rushed to judgment. We were wrong, the jury was misinformed, and Robert is not guilty of any crime.”

(source: Liliana Segura, Jordan Smith; theintercept.com)

*************

House panel issues “unprecedented subpoena” in last-ditch effort to halt Texas execution of Robert Roberson----The committee’s move came after Roberson’s bid for clemency was denied Wednesday, putting his execution on track for Thursday.

A Texas House committee voted unanimously on Wednesday to subpoena death row inmate Robert Roberson ahead of his Thursday execution, an extraordinary step that sought to give Roberson a final lifeline after a series of court rejections left him on track to become the 1st person in the country executed for allegedly shaking a baby to death.

The move "sets up a bit of a separation of powers issue that I think would result in him not being executed tomorrow night," Benjamin Wolff, director of the Texas Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, said on Wednesday, adding that he had not seen this maneuver attempted before, so it was not clear what could happen. "It’s an unprecedented subpoena and an unprecedented case.”

The subpoena — which was offered by state Reps. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, and Jeff Leach, R-Plano, who are on the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence — calls for Roberson to "provide all relevant testimony and information concerning the committee's inquiry."

Gretchen Sween, Roberson's attorney, said that she had "no knowledge" of a subpoena being used before in an effort to pump the brakes on an execution. "It shows how strongly the lawmakers who have learned about this case feel about the injustice," she said.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Parole’s 6 members voted unanimously earlier Wednesday to deny Roberson's clemency application. The decision came amid a thunderous bipartisan campaign to spare Roberson’s life, and as lawmakers raised concerns that the courts were not properly implementing a groundbreaking 2013 “junk science” law that was intended to provide justice to people convicted based on scientific evidence that has since changed or been debunked.

Roberson's lawyers also filed a request for a stay of execution and petition for relief with the U.S. Supreme Court after the board's decision.

“It is not shocking that the criminal justice system failed Mr. Roberson so badly. What’s shocking is that, so far, the system has been unable to correct itself," Sween said in a statement after the board's vote, adding that Roberson's team would ask Gov. Greg Abbott to issue a 30-day reprieve. “We pray that Governor Abbott does everything in his power to prevent the tragic, irreversible mistake of executing an innocent man.”

While Abbott can issue a 1-time reprieve, he cannot defy the board’s recommendation against clemency. Abbott's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brian Wharton, the lead detective in Roberson’s case who sided with the prosecution at trial, has called for his exoneration, as has bestselling author John Grisham. A large majority of the Texas House has asked the courts to take a 2nd look at his case. Doug Deason, a GOP megadonor and Abbott ally, also publicly said he believes in Roberson’s innocence, according to the Houston Chronicle.

“I felt like God was pushing me and telling me that I needed to get involved in this case,” Deason told the Chronicle. “Let’s not put a man to death when there are some issues and open questions.”

Roberson, who was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for the death of his ailing 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, has maintained his innocence over 20 years on death row.

“Governor Abbott, I did not do this,” Roberson said in an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt that aired Oct. 3. “And I’m just hoping and praying that you do the right thing.”

He has argued that his conviction was based on an unfounded shaken baby syndrome diagnosis given to his daughter, which presumed abuse and did not consider her severe illness before her death. Prosecutors have maintained that Nikki suffered multiple traumas and that there was clear evidence of abuse — conclusions that Roberson’s attorneys dispute.

The 4 Democrats and 5 Republicans on the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence urged the state’s highest criminal court on Tuesday to stay Roberson’s execution through the 2025 legislative session, saying that the junk science law “has been applied in a manner that raises serious constitutional and equitable concerns.”

“It is beyond dispute that medical evidence presented at Mr. Roberson’s trial in 2003 is inconsistent with modern scientific principles,” the lawmakers wrote to the court, requesting a stay so that the Legislature could consider amendments to the law. “We believe it would be a stain on the conscience of the State of Texas for an execution to proceed while efforts are underway to remedy deficiencies in how the law was applied to this case.”

The courts have rejected all of his appeals so far, with the state’s highest criminal court, on procedural grounds, declining on Wednesday to stop his execution. It previously denied his arguments, without considering their merits.

The refusal by the state’s highest criminal court to consider Roberson’s argument that his conviction relied on a faulty shaken baby syndrome diagnosis, lawmakers said, reflected a breakdown of due process and a failure to implement the junk science law as the Legislature intended.

“This was a pretty clear case where Robert Roberson did not have due process,” state Rep. Lacey Hull, R-Houston, said on CNN on Tuesday. “Texans deserve to know that our justice system is fair and just, and we cannot say that right now.”

The Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee held a hearing spotlighting Roberson’s case and the junk science law on Wednesday as the clemency recommendation loomed. Critics have argued that in the decade since the bill became law, it has rarely provided justice as intended to wrongfully convicted individuals.

“We have one of the best junk science statutes in the nation here in Texas, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem like that was used here,” Hull said on CNN. “Under the junk science statute, Robert Roberson deserves a new trial.”

The parole board has recommended clemency in just one capital case out of the 85 applications it has considered over the past decade.

Dozens of scientists, medical professionals, parental rights groups, organizations that advocate for people with autism and faith leaders submitted letters in support of clemency along with Roberson’s application.

Letters from his friends and loved ones depicted a gentle man of faith who remembered people’s favorite colors and sent handmade birthday cards to everyone he met.

“This man would never harm another person, especially not his small little baby girl!” Manuela Doris Roberson, whom Roberson married in 2022, wrote in one letter. “Robert’s life is worth more to me, his children, his friends and loved ones than all the treasures of this world.”

(source: The Texas Tribune)

**************

Robert Roberson denied clemency in ‘shaken baby’ case 1 day out from execution0000The 57-year-old is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Thursday evening in Huntsville.

1 day out from his execution date, the Texas Board of Paroles and Pardons has denied clemency to Robert Roberson III, an East Texas man who could become the 1st in the country to be put to death for the disputed “shaken baby syndrome” theory.

Roberson, 57, was convicted of capital murder in 2003 for reportedly shaking his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki, to death. He is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Thursday evening in Huntsville.

The clemency petition filed Sept. 17 asked for Roberson’s death sentence to be commuted, or the execution delayed 180 days to allow the board and Gov. Greg Abbott to give the filing “appropriate consideration.” The board voted unanimously to not recommend either. Abbott last agreed to spare the life of a death row inmate in 2018.

Roberson previously faced execution in 2016, but the date was stayed after his attorneys argued the conviction was based on “junk science” and “false, misleading and scientifically invalid testimony.”

When Roberson found Nikki unresponsive in February 2002, court documents state he rushed her blue, limp body to a Palestine hospital and said she fell from a bed. Medical staff suspected child abuse and called police. Her cause of death was ruled to be blunt-force head injuries.

Roberson’s prosecution largely centered on doctors’ testimony that Nikki’s death was consistent with shaken baby syndrome, or when an infant is severely injured from being violently shaken. Roberson’s lawyers have since said new evidence shows Nikki, who was chronically ill, died of natural and accidental causes, including “severe, undiagnosed” pneumonia. Experts have also argued research conducted in the two decades Roberson has been on death row shows the symptoms that shaken baby syndrome diagnoses were often based on are not “presumptive proof of abuse.”

“Here is yet another case of ‘too much doubt’ not only about a man’s guilt, but whether there was any crime committed at all,” Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action, said Wednesday in a statement. “Whether Mr. Roberson is innocent or guilty is irrelevant to the fact the legal system is so broken that finality is more important than facts. None of us really know the truth, and Texans should be asking themselves, ‘What if we got it wrong?’”

Roberson’s case has received support from bipartisan state lawmakers; John Grisham, bestselling author and Innocence Project board member; and Brian Wharton, the former Palestine detective who led the investigation and whose testimony helped convict him.

On Tuesday, an Anderson County judge rejected arguments from Roberson’s attorneys that his death warrant is illegitimate because the judge who oversaw post-conviction proceedings erred. The state’s highest criminal appeals court has also repeatedly denied a stay of Roberson’s death sentence.

Last week, the Court of Criminal Appeals vacated the conviction of a Dallas County man accused of injuring a child because scientific advancements undermined shaken baby syndrome. More than 30 people who served time in prison after convictions involving the theory have been declared innocent, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

(source: Dallas Morning News)

*************

Texas parole board votes against clemency for a man who could be the 1st in the U.S. to be executed over shaken baby syndrome.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Wednesday denied a request for clemency for a man who this week could be the 1st person in the U.S. executed for a murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

The parole board voted to not recommend that Robert Roberson’s death sentence be commuted to life in prison or that his execution be delayed.

Gov. Greg Abbott can only grant clemency after receiving a recommendation from the board. Abbott does have the power to grant a 1-time 30-day reprieve without a board recommendation.

In his nearly 10 years as governor, Abbott has halted only one imminent execution, in 2018 when he spared the life of Thomas Whitaker.

Roberson, 57, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection ThTursday evening for the 2002 killing of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in the East Texas city of Palestine. Roberson has long proclaimed his innocence.

The parole board’s decision came a day after an East Texas judge on Tuesday denied requests by Roberson’s attorneys to stop his lethal injection by vacating the execution warrant and recusing the judge who had issued the warrant.

Roberson’s scheduled execution has renewed debate over shaken baby syndrome, which is known in the medical community as abusive head trauma.

His lawyers as well as a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers, medical experts and others have urged Abbott to stop Roberson’s execution, saying his conviction was based on faulty and now outdated scientific evidence related to shaken baby syndrome. The diagnosis refers to a serious brain injury caused when a child’s head is hurt through shaking or some other violent impact, like being slammed against a wall or thrown on the floor.

Roberson’s supporters don’t deny that head and other injuries from child abuse are real. But they say doctors misdiagnosed Curtis’ injuries as being related to shaken baby syndrome and that new evidence has shown the girl died not from abuse but from complications related to severe pneumonia.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, other medical organizations and prosecutors say the diagnosis is valid and that doctors look at all possible things, including any illnesses, when determining if injuries were attributable to shaken baby syndrome.

The Anderson County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Roberson, has said in court documents that after a 2022 hearing to consider the new evidence in the case, a judge rejected the theories that pneumonia and other diseases caused Curtis’ death.

Prosecutors maintain Roberson’s new evidence does not disprove their case that Curtis died from injuries inflicted by her father.

The parole board has recommended clemency in a death row case only 6 times since the state resumed executions in 1982. In 3 of those cases — in 1998, 2007 and 2018 — death row inmates had their sentences commuted to life in prison within days of their scheduled executions. In 2 of the cases — from 2004 and 2009 — then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry rejected the parole board’s recommendation to commute a death sentence to life in prison and the 2 prisoners were executed.

In 2019, the parole board recommended a 120-day reprieve for Rodney Reed, just days before his scheduled execution. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed Reed’s execution before Abbott could take any action on the board’s recommendation.

(source: Asociated Press)

*************

Calls for mercy mount as Texas death row inmate faces execution for a crime his advocates say did not happen

Calls to spare the life of Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson are growing, with just over a day left before the state plans to execute him for the murder of his 2-year-old daughter – a crime Roberson’s advocates say did not happen.

If he’s put to death by lethal injection Thursday evening, Roberson’s attorneys say he would be the 1st person in the US executed based on a conviction that relied on shaken baby syndrome – a misdiagnosis in Roberson’s case, they argue, and one they say has been discredited.

While child abuse pediatricians remain firm on the validity of the diagnosis, Roberson’s attorneys say there is ample evidence his daughter, Nikki Curtis, did not die of child abuse. At the time of her death, she had double pneumonia that had progressed to sepsis, and she had been prescribed 2 medications now seen as inappropriate for children that would have further hindered her ability to breathe, they argue, citing medical experts. Additionally, she had fallen off a bed, and was particularly vulnerable in her sickly condition, Roberson’s attorneys say.

He was sentenced to death after his toddler died. Now, shaken baby syndrome is at the heart of Robert Roberson’s 11th-hour appeals

Other factors, too, contributed to his conviction, they argue. Doctors treating Nikki “presumed” abuse based on her symptoms and common thinking at the time of her death without exploring her recent medical history, the inmate’s attorneys claim. His behavior in the emergency room – viewed as uncaring by doctors, nurses and the police, who believed it a sign of his guilt – was actually a manifestation of autism spectrum disorder, which went undiagnosed until 2018.

Roberson’s attorneys are not disputing babies can and do die from being shaken. But they contend more benign explanations, including illness, can mimic the symptoms of shaking, and those alternative explanations should be ruled out before a medical expert testifies with certainty that the cause of death was abuse.

“Very early on, Robert was the focus of everything to the exclusion of any other possibilities,” said Brian Wharton, the former Palestine, Texas, detective who led what he now believes was a too-narrowly focused investigation into Nikki’s death. He has since joined Roberson’s supporters in fighting to spare his life.

Roberson’s innocence claim underscores an inherent risk of capital punishment: a potentially innocent person could be put to death. At least 200 people – 18 in Texas – have been exonerated since 1973 after being convicted and sentenced to die, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

As 2 of his latest appeals failed Tuesday, Roberson’s attorneys filed a request for a stay of execution with the US Supreme Court, arguing his due process rights were violated when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declined to consider additional evidence the inmate says would support his innocence claim. A separate appeal was also filed Tuesday with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Separately, Roberson’s attorneys have petitioned the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and GOP Gov. Greg Abbott for clemency, asking that this sentence be commuted to a lesser one, or that Roberson be granted a 180-day reprieve to allow time for his appeals to be argued in court.

The board is expected to issue its recommendation on clemency Wednesday. If it declines to recommend clemency, Abbott is limited to granting a 1-time, 30-day reprieve.

State legislators voice support

In the meantime, Roberson’s many supporters are taking their own steps to call attention to his case in hopes of pressing the state into halting the execution.

The Texas Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence plans to hold a hearing Wednesday where it will hear testimony “related to capital punishment” and a Texas law – commonly referred to as the “junk science writ” – which opened a path for someone to challenge their conviction if there is new scientific evidence unavailable at the time of their trial.

While Roberson’s name is not mentioned in a notice about the hearing, his advocates say he should benefit from this law – and a member of the committee, Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican from Collins County, told reporters Tuesday the hearing would “shine a light” on Roberson’s case “for all 31 million Texans to hear and watch and to see.”

“And we’re hopeful that by Thursday evening, we’re able to secure that pause button in this case,” said Leach, who supports the death penalty but has emerged as a key critic of its administration in cases featuring wrongful conviction claims.

The committee – made up of both Republicans and Democrats – has also urged the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to halt the execution, citing the “junk science” law. Committee members want Roberson to be granted a stay while lawmakers consider amendments to the “junk science” law, they wrote in a letter brief filed before the court.

“It is beyond dispute that medical evidence presented at Mr. Roberson’s trial in 2003 is inconsistent with modern scientific principles,” the lawmakers wrote.

“We believe it would be a stain on the conscience of the State of Texas for an execution to proceed while efforts are underway to remedy deficiencies in how the law was applied to this case.”

A bipartisan group of more than 80 Texas legislators has supported Roberson’s case, and his request for clemency. Rep. Joe Moody, chair of the criminal jurisprudence committee, said on X last week the state needed to “pump the brakes before this stains Texas justice for generations.”

The author John Grisham – a board member of the Innocence Project, which has backed Roberson’s claim – also called for mercy Tuesday in an op-ed for the Washington Post.

“The evidence is assembled and available to the Texas authorities, but no one with the power to stop Roberson’s execution is paying attention,” Grisham wrote. “The courts slammed all the doors on the basis of technicalities, and even politicians’ pleas have been ignored.”

(source: CNN)

****************

Death Row Families to come together with activists for the 25th year for the Texas Annual March & Rally to Abolish the Death Penalty, Saturday, Oct. 19.

In 2024, we declare: We’re in S.H.A.P.E. To Fight for Abolition as We Honor Families Standing Strong!

Every fall since 2000, Texas abolitionists, death row families, and their allies have gathered to demonstrate their opposition to the state-sanctioned murder of those on death row. This year, the often-overlooked impact of capital punishment on families will be highlighted.

On Saturday, Oct. 19, at 12 noon, a press conference will be held at the S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, 3815 Live Oak in the park. Families will be available to speak with the media about what their lives have been like since their loved one was sent to die at the hands of the state.

At 12:30 activists will march to an overpass on the Eastex Freeway and will drop a huge banner with giant letters reading “END THE DEATH PENALTY.”

After a march back to the S.H.A.P.E. Center, a rally will be held featuring the families.

Speakers will include the mother of Erica Sheppard, sent to death row at age 19 and now age 51; the brother of Clarence Brandley, exonerated in 1990; the wife and mother of Juan Balderas; and families of three men who had killed no one but were sentenced to death under Texas’ Law Of Parties. Also speaking will be Herman Lindsey, Executive Director of Witness to Innocence, who spent years on Florida’s death row before being exonerated. (https://www.witnesstoinnocence.org/)

Sponsors include: THE Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement, S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, Kids Against the Death Penalty, Austin Abolitionists, Save Jeff Wood Committee, The Judith Filler Foundation, and the Texas Moratorium Network.

(source: Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement)

SOUTH CAROLINA----impending execution

The son of a South Carolina inmate urges the governor to save his father from execution

Richard Moore never meant to kill anyone the night he robbed a South Carolina convenience store and the Black man was convicted by a jury with no African Americans, his son and lawyers say as they fight to save the inmate from execution next month.

Moore went unarmed into a Spartanburg County store to rob it in 1999, took a gun from a clerk when it was pointed at him and fatally shot the clerk in the chest as the 2 struggled.

The inmate’s son, Lyndall Moore, said his father is now the only prisoner left on the state’s death row convicted by a jury without any Black people.

“He’s a human being who made mistakes,” Moore added. “And this particular mistake led to the death of another human being. But his sentence is completely disproportionate to the actual crime.”

Executions resume as Moore’s supporters fight for his life

South Carolina ended a 13-year pause on executions last month with the lethal injection of Freddie Owens. Moore is set to be executed Nov. 1.

Moore’s lawyers have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution, saying a lower court should review whether it was fair that no African Americans were on the jury that considered Moore’s fate in Spartanburg County, which was 20% Black in the 2000 U.S. Census.

They also hope Moore will become the first South Carolina inmate whose death sentence is commuted to life without parole since executions in the U.S. resumed in 1976.

Only South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster can grant clemency. A former prosecutor, McMaster didn’t grant it for Owens and has said previously that he tends to trust juries and the court system.

But Moore’s family and lawyers contend executing Moore is too harsh a punishment. In a state where the governor and prison director have made a priority of getting inmates to turn their lives around, Moore’s spotless record behind bars and his reputation for helping other inmates merits a reprieve, they say.

“He’s very remorseful and sorry for the horrible, tragic decisions he made in his life. But he spent the past 20 years really trying to make up for that by loving the people he still has in his life,” attorney Lindsey Vann said.

Prosecutors push for death penalty 25 years ago

Moore killed clerk James Mahoney, 40, a man with some disabilities who loved his family and tried to take care of co-workers.

The prosecutors in Moore’s case included Trey Gowdy, a Republican who later served 4 terms in Congress, and Barry Barnette, currently the solicitor in Spartanburg County. Both have declined comment, with Gowdy saying the 1999 trial speaks for itself.

In asking the jury to sentence Moore to death, Gowdy reminded them of Moore’s criminal record for stealing and robbing to gain drug money.

He focused on how after shooting Mahoney, Moore — also shot in the arm in the struggle — walked over the dying clerk’s body looking for cash.

“The hopes and the goals and the dreams of a 40-year-old man are coming out of his heart, and the cold, wet drops of blood of a career criminal are dripping on his back,” Gowdy said. “There is a time for mercy, ladies and gentlemen. That time has come and gone.”

Defense team’s problems with the original trial

Moore’s supporters said the trial represents plenty that is wrong about the death penalty in South Carolina, how arbitrary it is because prosecutors can make political points by bringing a number of death penalty cases when the cases don’t represent the worst of unrepentant, cruel and heinous criminals.

And then there is the problem of a jury without Black representation, Vann said.

“I’m really struck by the image that I’ve had of Richard’s trial where there’s a white prosecutor, white judge, white defense attorneys, an all-white jury and he’s the only person in the room who is African American and he’s being judged by a jury who has no one who looks like him,” Vann said.

Moore has had 2 prior execution dates, both postponed at a time when the state only had the electric chair and a firing squad. Since then, lethal injection has been added as an option, aided by passage of a law allowing suppliers of lethal injection drugs to remain secret.

Urgent efforts as execution date looms

Lyndall Moore said the more people get to know his father, the more they realize what a tragedy it would be to take an awful thing Richard Moore did in killing a man and make it worse by taking someone who turned their life around and tried to give something back.

He said he hopes McMaster would take the time to really get to know his father, not just glance at a file on his desk.

“He’s not some menacing figure. He’s just a regular dude. … He’s had a lot of time to think about, to reflect on what’s gotten him to this point. He’s very clearly, very obviously regretful of everything,” Lyndall Moore said.

Richard Moore told The Post and Courier of Charleston in 2022 that his lawyers advised him not to reach out to Mahoney’s family, but if he did, he would let them know he is “truly, truly sorry that he died at the hands of my actions.”

“I am not the same person I was the night I took Mr. Mahoney’s life. I have grown. I feel as though I still have a story to tell,” Moore said.

(source: Associated Press)

FLORIDA:

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for A central Florida woman

Lake County’s Tyshael Elise Martin, 34, was arrested in the death of her boyfriend’s 9 year old daughter on June 17.

The medical examination indicated that the victim, Jamaria Sessions, suffered severe physical abuse.

Emergency responders reported multiple injuries such as bruises and possible bite marks on the victim.

Home security video evidence shows Martin instructing a 103 pound Rottweiler to viciously attack the girl while Martin holds the leash.

The video also shows Martin dragging the victims motionless body across the floor, punching and kicking her, and more.

Deputies say Martin was heard threatening to kill the girl.

The autopsy confirmed Jamaria’s death was ruled a homicide due to multiple blunt force injuries.

The victims father, Lo Juan Sessions, 26, also faces charges of aggravated manslaughter.

Now, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Martin, if found guilty of 1st degree murder.

(source: WCBO news)

**************

State to seek death penalty against man accused of stabbing Orlando teen to death

State officials say they will be seeking the death penalty against a man accused of raping and brutally murdering a young teen while she was on her way to a friend's apartment on the 4th of July.

In August, Jerry Dorisme, 28, was indicted by a grand jury for charges related to the death of 13-year-old Rose Thalie Dieujuste.

On July 4, deputies say Rose was on her way from her apartment on South Rio Grande Avenue to a friend's apartment in the same complex. When the young teen never showed up, and her belongings were found on a staircase, a frantic door-to-door search ensued.

Officials say Rose was eventually found inside a utility closet — stabbed, partially clothed and barely alive. The girl was rushed to the hospital but later died.

Deputies were able to access security footage from a nearby store that showed the suspect buying the assumed murder weapon, as well as apartment complex footage that showed the same man following Rose at a distance.

When those videos were posted online, deputies say there was an outpouring of tips from the community — including from the suspect's father.

Police were able to identify the suspect as Dorisme and arrest him soon after. According to officials, the man did not know Rose, but they said he frequents the area and lives nearby.

On Aug. 28, a grand jury indicted Dorisme for 1st-degree murder, kidnapping with intent to inflict bodily harm or terrorize, sexual battery and attempted sexual battery.

According to the state, they are seeking the death penalty against Dorisme based on the "facts of the offense and the defendant's prior record."

Court records show Orange County Sheriff’s deputies had a bizarre run-in with Dorisme about 2 weeks before Rose's murder. He was allegedly walking in front of a Pine Hills day care with a knife and punched the deputies who responded to a 911 call.

(source: WESH news)

ALABAMA----impending execution

Alabama to execute Derrick Dearman for murder of 5 family members. What to know----Dearman is set to be executed on Thursday for the murder of his then girlfriend's family members in August 2016. He says he deserves to die but his attorneys say that he has a 'serious mental illness'

Alabama is set to execute Derrick Dearman on Thursday for the mass murder of 5 family members, including a pregnant woman, who were are all related to his girlfriend.

Dearman, 36, is set to die by lethal injection 8 years after he used an ax and a gun to kill Laneta Lester’s family members as they slept on Aug. 20, 2016. They were: her brother Joseph Turner; Turner's wife Shannon Randall; Randall's brother Robert Brown; and Randall's niece Chelsea Reed, Reed's husband Justin and the couple's unborn baby.

The killings, which happened in the Turner home in the Mobile suburb of Citronelle, “shocked the whole town” in August 2016, former Mobile County prosecutor Ashley Rich told USA TODAY. “Nothing like this has ever happened in Citronelle.”

If the execution proceeds as scheduled, Dearman will be the 5th inmate executed in Alabama in 2024 and the 20th or 21st in the nation, depending on whether he is declared dead before or after Robert Leslie Roberson, an inmate set for execution in Texas on the same day despite significant evidence that he's innocent.

Dearman has written in letters that he's guilty and deserves to die so his victims' families can have justice.

Here’s what you need to know about Derrick Dearman’s execution.

Derrick Dearman is set to be executed on Thursday, 8 years after he killed 5 people, including his then girlfriend's relatives and friends.

Who is Derrick Dearman?

Dearman suffered from a slew of mental health and substance abuse issues for most of his life, according to a lengthy statement from the Equal Justice Initiative, which previously served as counsel for Dearman in appellate proceedings.

"At just 4 years old, Derrick Dearman displayed symptoms of severe depression and spoke to his mother 'about wanting to die.' He was prescribed antidepressants at age 12 and began self-medicating with crack cocaine at 14," according to the statement. "That year, Derrick barely survived a car accident that left him feeling that he 'should have died.' At 16, he started using methamphetamines, and at 19, he drove his car off the road in an attempt to kill himself.'

Dearman was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit in his early 20s, years before he became a murderer.

Dearman, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, was not in his right mind the day of the murders. He had been hearing voices, believed that people were “after” him, had used a large amount of methamphetamine, and had not slept for 6 days, they said.

"He later said of the crime: 'It was like someone else had the steering wheel,'" they said.

He also "cried and repeatedly expressed horror and remorse for what he had done" at the police station. Those feelings and thoughts, specifically suicidal ideation, continued after he was charged, they said.

His attorneys acknowledged that Dearman's execution date was set as a result of the letters he wrote to state officials asking them to carry out his sentence and that he no longer wished to appeal. But, they said that "Alabama courts have repeatedly failed to adequately consider his serious mental illness."

"Derrick Dearman stopped his appeals only after a lifetime of severe mental illness and suicidal behavior that Alabama courts have repeatedly ignored," they said. "The State of Alabama now plans to execute him despite serious questions about the constitutionality of his conviction and death sentence."

What was Derrick Dearman convicted of?

An Alabama jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended a death sentence in 2018 for the murder of all 5 family members.

Dearman, who had a history of drug abuse, went on a drug-fueled rampage through the home, using an ax he found in a tree and 2 guns to murder each victim one by one hours after he was repeatedly asked to leave the home.

Dearman also kidnapped Lester and Randall’s infant after the murders, making a couple of stops before he reached his father’s home in Mississippi. He later turned himself in.

Dearman decided to drop his appeals and fired his appellate attorneys in April, writing a series of letters to four state officials asking that his death sentence be carried out. Dearman’s execution date was set six months later by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey.

Dearman expressed remorse over his actions, according to a statement obtained by USA TODAY.

“I am willingly giving all that I can possibly give to try and repay a small portion of my debt to society for the terrible things that I have done," he said. "From this point forward, I hope that the focus will not be on me, but rather on the healing of all the people that I have hurt.”

Who were the 5 victims?

Joseph Turner and Shannon Randall were 1 of 2 couples at the house that night. They shared an infant son, who was kidnapped by Dearman after the killings.

Justin Reed and his wife Chelsea, the other couple, were high school sweethearts pregnant with their first child. They planned on naming the baby Aiden.

The Reeds were "outspoken, spontaneous, and fun," Justin Reed's cousin, Wes Risher, told AL.com in a 2016 interview.

"If he was right, or if he was wrong, she stood by him ... He showed a love for Chelsea that I have never seen in my 32 years," Risher said. "It was very heartwarming. I just liked being around them."

Robert Brown, Shannon’s brother, and Lester were also spending the night with the family.

When and where will Derrick Dearman be executed?

Dearman will executed around 6 p.m. CT on Thursday in the death chamber at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, a small city about 130 miles south of Montgomery.

Who will witness Derrick Dearman’s execution?

It was not immediately clear who, or how many of Dearman’s relatives will be in attendance. But “so many family members” related to the victims plan to be present, according to Rich.

Robert Brown's father, Robert F. Brown Sr., told WPMI-TV that he plans to witness the execution.

"I had so much more to give my son,” he said. “And it was all took away from me."

Members of the media will attend the execution, including:

The Montgomery Advertiser, part of the USA TODAY Network

The Associated Press

When is the nation’s next execution?

After Dearman's and Roberson's simultaneous executions on Thursday, the next execution in the U.S. is scheduled for Nov. 1 in South Carolina. Richard Moore is set to be executed for the 1999 fatal shooting of a convenience store clerk.

(source: USA Today)

*************

The strange case that the Supreme Court keeps refusing to decide----A mysterious Supreme Court case could change everything about criminal punishment.

Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of 2 books on the Supreme Court.

For more than a year, Joseph Clifton Smith, a man who says he is intellectually disabled, has sat on death row, waiting to find out if the Supreme Court will greenlight his execution.

Smith’s case, known as Hamm v. Smith, first arrived on the Court’s doorstep in August 2023. Since then, the justices have met more than two dozen times to decide what to do about the case, and each time they’ve put the decision off until a future meeting.

SCOTUS, ExplainedGet the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

No one outside of the Court can know for sure why the justices keep delaying, but if you follow the Court’s Eighth Amendment cases closely, it’s easy to see how the Hamm case could open up all kinds of internal rifts among the justices.

The Eighth Amendment, which has a vague ban on “cruel and unusual punishments,” is at the center of the Hamm case because, for decades, the Court has held this amendment forbids executions of intellectually disabled offenders (and offenders who commit a crime while they are juveniles). The idea is that both groups have diminished mental capacity, at least as compared to non-disabled adults, and thus bear less moral responsibility even for homicide crimes.

That idea, however, has long been contested by the Court’s various ideological factions, and the Hamm case potentially reopens up all of the Court’s issues with the amendment at once. Indeed, in the worst-case scenario for criminal defendants, the justices could potentially overrule more than 60 years of precedents protecting against excessive punishments.

This Supreme Court’s ongoing battles over the Eighth Amendment, briefly explained

In 2 2000s decisions, Atkins v. Virginia (2002) and Roper v. Simmons (2005), a coalition of Democratic and moderate Republican justices handed down decisions that barred youths and people who are intellectually disabled from being executed. Those majority decisions came down over bitter dissents from the Court’s right flank — the same right flank that has since gained a supermajority on the Supreme Court.

At least some of the current Court’s Republicans seem eager to use their newfound supermajority to blow up those 2 cases (and pretty much everything the Court has said about the Eighth Amendment in the last six or seven decades). So it’s possible that the Court is fighting over what to do with the Hamm case because many of the justices want a wholesale revolution in Eighth Amendment law.

Beginning in the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court maintained that the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Thus, as a particular method of punishment grew less common, the Court was increasingly likely to declare it cruel and unusual in violation of the Constitution.

At least some members of the Court’s Republican majority, however, have suggested that this “evolving standards of decency” framework should be abandoned. In Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), the Court considered whether states could use execution methods that risked causing the dying inmate a great deal of pain. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion, which held that potentially painful methods of execution are allowed, seems to exist in a completely different universe than the Court’s Eighth Amendment cases that look to evolving standards.

While the Court’s earlier opinions ask whether a particular form of punishment has fallen out of favor today, Gorsuch asked whether a method of punishment was out of favor at the time of the founding. Though his opinion does list some methods of execution, such as “disemboweling” and “burning alive” that violate the Eighth Amendment, Gorsuch wrote that these methods are unconstitutional because “by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become ‘unusual.’”

What makes Bucklew confusing, however, is that it didn’t explicitly overrule any of the previous decisions applying the evolving standards framework. So it’s unclear whether all five of the justices who joined that opinion share a desire to blow up more than a half-century of law, or if the justices who joined the Bucklew majority simply failed to rein in an overly ambitious opinion by Gorsuch, the Court’s most intellectually sloppy justice.

In any event, Hamm opens up at least two major potential divides within the Court. Smith says he is intellectually disabled; the state of Alabama wants to execute him anyway. So the case perfectly tees up a challenge to Atkins if a majority of the justices want to go there. Meanwhile, Bucklew looms like a vulture over any cruel and unusual punishment case heard by the Court, as it suggests that the Republican justices may hit the reset button on all of its Eighth Amendment precedents at any time.

So what is the specific legal issue in Hamm?

The Court receives thousands of petitions every year asking it to hear a particular appeal, and it typically only grants several dozen of these petitions. The vast majority of these cases are nominally discussed at one of the justices’ regular conferences, then promptly denied.

In recent years, the Court often discusses a case in 2 different conferences before agreeing to hear it — for this reason, I and other Supreme Court reporters often watch the list of cases the Court “relisted” for a second conference to identify cases the justices are more likely to hear. Occasionally, a case may be relisted for several conferences in a row. But this is rare, and typically is a sign either that the justices are negotiating over which issues they wish to decide in a particular case — or, more often, that a justice is dissenting from the Court’s decision not to hear a case and the “relists” are really just buying that justice time to draft an opinion.

Hamm, however, has now been relisted in every single conference since the justices first discussed it on October 27, 2023. That is, to say the least, highly unusual. And it suggests that some particularly bitter internal negotiations are ongoing. If someone were dissenting from the Court’s decision to turn the case away, they likely would have released that dissent last July, because the justices typically try to resolve loose ends before they go on their summer vacation.

Hamm involves a question that would inevitably arise once the Court decided Atkins — though it is unconstitutional to execute intellectually disabled offenders, there will always be some offenders who are on the borderline of what mental health professionals consider an intellectual disability. The specific question before the Court is what to do with these borderline cases.

As a general rule, someone must have an IQ of 70 or below to be considered intellectually disabled. But IQ tests aren’t particularly precise — as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Moore v. Texas (2017), the IQ of someone who scores 74 on a particular IQ test falls within “a range of 69 to 79.” So, if courts read IQ tests as if they can identify an offender’s IQ score exactly, an intellectually disabled person could be executed due to something as arbitrary as a measurement error.

Accordingly, the Court held in Hall v. Florida (2014) that a capital offender with an IQ score slightly above 70 must be given “the opportunity to present evidence of his intellectual disability, including deficits in adaptive functioning over his lifetime.” That is, such an offender must be allowed to present additional evidence beyond their IQ score to show that they are, in fact, intellectually disabled.

Hamm is such a case. Smith took five different IQ tests, four of which showed him with an IQ in the low to mid-70s. Accordingly, two lower courts looked at additional evidence of his disability, determined he is, in fact, intellectually disabled, and ruled that he must receive a sentence other than death.

In asking to execute Smith, in other words, Alabama is asking, among other things, that the Supreme Court overrule Moore and Hall, both cases that were handed down before former President Donald Trump remade the Court in the Federalist Society’s image. If the Court agrees, that alone would be a very significant legal development, both because it could allow intellectually disabled inmates to be executed due to a testing error, and because it would be a severe blow to stare decisis — the idea that judicial precedents shouldn’t be tossed out simply because the members of a court change.

Of course, this Court’s Republican majority has shown little regard for stare decisis, at least in cases that divide along partisan lines. Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave the Republican Party a supermajority on the Supreme Court in late 2020, the Court has behaved as if it was going down a checklist, overruling liberal victories such as the cases establishing a constitutional right to abortion or the line of cases permitting affirmative action in limited circumstances, and replacing them with whatever outcome the GOP prefers.

Yet, while this process has been painful for Democrats and toxic for the Court’s approval rating, it hasn’t been comprehensive — occasionally, one or more of the Republican justices signal that they will allow a previous liberal victory to remain in effect. Concurring in the Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, for example, Justice Brett Kavanaugh identified the Court’s past decisions protecting a right to contraception, as well as the right to marry a person of your own choosing, as cases he did not intend to overrule.

All of which is a long way of saying that there’s no good way to know if Atkins or Roper is on the Court’s checklist of past liberal decisions to be overruled. These justices’ approaches to specific cases are often idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and unbound by preexisting law — just look at the Republican justices’ recent decision holding that Trump was allowed to commit many crimes while he was in office. The question of whether Atkins survives or falls will turn on whether there are 5 justices who want intellectually disabled people to be executed, and nothing else.

But the fact Hamm has been relisted so many times suggests, at the very least, that there is a vocal faction within the Supreme Court that wants to use this case to aggressively reshape the law.

What can be made of Bucklew?

The other uncertainty looming over Hamm is the Bucklew decision, which didn’t so much overrule the Court’s last six decades of Eighth Amendment precedents as pretend that they didn’t exist.

Bucklew involved a death row inmate who claimed that the Eighth Amendment would not allow him to be executed using Missouri’s lethal injection protocol — he said he had an unusual medical condition that would cause him to experience extraordinary pain before his death. So the question was whether the Constitution allows a state to execute an inmate in a manner that may amount to torture.

Gorsuch’s opinion denying relief to this inmate reads like the Court’s “evolving standards of decency” framework never existed. This phrase appears nowhere in Gorsuch’s opinion, and the only citation to Trop v. Dulles (1958), the first Supreme Court case to use that phrase, appears in Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent.

Rather than follow longstanding law, Gorsuch asked whether capital offenders could be subjected to similar pain “at the time of the framing.” This is the Eighth Amendment rule long favored by the Court’s rightmost flank, including in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion in Atkins.

Scalia’s Atkins dissent, moreover, doesn’t simply disagree with the Court’s past decisions. It lays out many examples of how the law would change — and how much easier it would be to subject even minor criminal offenders to outlandish punishments — under a framework that looks to how things worked in the 1790s.

For starters, Scalia argues that only “severely or profoundly” intellectually disabled people enjoy some protection against execution (he argues these individuals were often “committed to civil confinement or made wards of the State” rather than being criminally punished). One of the sources Scalia cites suggests that only people with an IQ of 25 or below enjoy any constitutional protection.

More significantly, Scalia also argues that the Eighth Amendment only forbids “always-and-everywhere ‘cruel’ punishments, such as the rack and the thumbscrew,” and that it does not prohibit the government from imposing excessive punishments for minor crimes. Under Scalia’s framework, if the death penalty can constitutionally be applied to murderers (and he believes it can) then it can also be applied to shoplifters. If a rapist can be sentenced to life in prison, so too can a jaywalker.

Gorsuch’s Bucklew opinion elaborates on the sort of punishments that, under this originalist framework, are prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. He lists “dragging the prisoner to the place of execution, disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive” as examples.

So there is a faction within the Supreme Court that would drastically shrink Americans’ constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. This faction would allow more people to be executed. They would apparently eliminate any concern that punishments must be proportionate to the crime. And the kinds of punishments they do offer up as examples of impermissible sanctions are the kinds of things normally depicted in torture scenes from movies set in the Middle Ages.

Will 5 justices go there? It’s impossible to know. But that a total of 5 justices joined Gorsuch’s opinion in Bucklew suggests this faction could very well prevail — if and when the Court decides to take up Hamm.

(source: Ian Millhiser, vox.com)

OHIO:

Evidentiary Hearing Begins

Jeffrey Wogenstahl’s long-awaited evidentiary hearing began yesterday, Tuesday, October 15, 2024, at the Hamilton Court of Common Pleas.

An expert botanist quashed the significance of the foliage on Jeff’s jacket by explaining that such foliage is not restricted to the area where the body was found: it grows throughout Ohio.

A forensic hair expert confirmed that the hair testimony at Jeff’s trial was flawed and should be discounted. When asked if law enforcement would have had access to Jeff’s naturally shed hair, he replied that law enforcement possessed numerous hairs from drains and sheets in Jeff’s apartment, some of which might have been naturally shed. (In closing arguments at Jeff’s trial, the prosecutor was adamant that the state was not in possession of Jeff’s naturally shed hair.)

One of Amber Garrett’s classmates testified that she saw Amber sitting in a truck, crying, at about 10.00 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, November 24, 1991. (Jeff was already in custody at this time.) Other evidence referred to the suspicious behaviour of the church bus driver who picked up children, including Amber, on Sunday mornings. The police were made aware of both incidents, but failed to turn over this, and other, evidence to Jeff’s defense at the time of his trial.*

The hearing also heard that the prison witness, Bruce Wheeler, only found out about Jeff’s case when he saw it reported on television. He testified against Jeff because he hoped for favors for himself. (See more here: https://jeffreywogenstahl.com/2017/03/09/jeffrey-wogenstahl-death-row-ohio-suffered-snitch-testimony-full-of-lies-and-misrepresentation/)

The hearing continues today.

See more: Appellant Jeffrey Wogenstahl’s Motion to Remand Case to the Trial Court, filed in the Supreme Court of Ohio, October 7, 2016 – Case No. 2016-0423; pp. 61 – 63.

******************

Evidentiary Hearing: Day 2----Posted on October 17, 2024 by Justice for Willie Jeffrey Wogenstahl’s evidentiary hearing continued on Tuesday, October 16, 2024, with an expert’s unequivocal rejection of the state’s theories about Amber Garrett’s death. Brian S. Clark, an expert on Forensics and Investigations, was clear that no matter how the prosecutor chose to speculate, there was no evidence to support theories that Jeff’s car or apartment were linked to the murder. Clark’s report supporting his claims can be viewed here, with an addendum to the report here. Mellisa Ellis testified that she saw the victim’s mother, Peggy, in the early hours of Sunday, November 24, 1991. Peggy was with a man that the witness did not recognize, and seemed distraught. (See also information about the affidavits of Ellis and her late husband.) Jeff’s trial lawyer, Mark Krumbein, stated that at the time of the trial he was not shown police notes recording sightings of the victim after the time when Jeff was taken into custody. Krumbein agreed that these records would have helped him to build a defense if he had been given them. The hearing continues. (source for both: jeffreywogenstahl.com)

MISSOURI:

Amber Waterman sentenced to life in prison without parole for kidnapping, murdering Arkansas woman, unborn baby

The woman who pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murdering a Benton County woman in October 2022 has been sentenced.

Amber Waterman, 44, was given 2 life sentences without the possibility of parole on Tuesday during a sentencing hearing in Springfield, Mo. The sentences will serve concurrently.

The Pineville, Mo., woman pleaded guilty on July 30 to 1 count of kidnapping resulting in death and 1 count of thereby causing the death of a child in utero.

L The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri said in a news release after her plea change that by pleading guilty, Amber Waterman admitted to kidnapping Ashley Bush so she could claim Bush’s unborn child as her own.

Waterman admitted to communicating with Bush over Facebook while using a false name and offered her a job, the release said.

The 2 met at the public library in Gravette on October 28, 2022, and agreed to meet again 3 days later.

On October 31, 2022, Bush met Waterman at a convenience store in Maysville “under the pretext that Waterman was taking her to meet a supervisor to further discuss employment,” the release said.

Bush was then kidnapped by Waterman and taken to Waterman’s residence in Pineville, Missouri.

Around 5 p.m., emergency responders went to a store in Pineville for a call about a baby not breathing. Waterman told them she had given birth to the child in the vehicle on the way to the hospital.

“But in reality, she admitted, the child was Bush’s child, who died in utero, as a result of Waterman’s kidnapping that resulted in the death of Bush,” the release said.

Autopsy results showed Bush died as a result of penetrating trauma to her torso and the death was ruled a homicide.

The release said that under federal statutes, Waterman is subject to a mandatory life in federal prison sentence without parole on each count. KNWA/FOX24’s Kylie Neel and Sonya Hill spoke with Bush’s cousin, Lainey Boone after Waterman was sentenced.

“It’s not fair that she’s still here and Ashley’s not,” Boone said.

Waterman is still facing charges in Benton County. She faces 2 counts of capital murder and one count of kidnapping.

Benton County Prosecutor Joshua Robinson gave the following statement after Waterman’s sentence was announced.

“It was my understanding that Life was the only possible sentence. That being the case, the sentence was expected. I am glad that the Defendant has received some level of accountability and that the family of the victims is 1 step closer to finality in the criminal justice system. Hopefully, the State of Arkansas in general, and Benton County in particular, will finally be allowed to seek justice for 2 of our own that were taken in a deeply brutal and tragic way.”

Robinson previously said the state is seeking the death penalty against Waterman. However, that case is on hold due to double jeopardy.

Amber’s husband Jamie is set to have a plea change hearing at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday.

(source: KNWA news)

KANSAS:

ACLU and Partners Challenge Death Qualification and the Death Penalty in Kansas----Case: Challenging Death Qualification and the Death Penalty in Kansas (Kansas v. Fielder)

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kansas, the Kansas Death Penalty Unit, Hogan Lovells, and Ali & Lockwood filed a challenge yesterday to the Kansas death penalty and to an unconstitutional jury selection practice unique to death penalty trials. The practice, called “death qualification,” dictates that to serve on a capital jury, a prospective juror must be willing to impose the death penalty.

The ACLU and its co-counsel argue that death qualification is discriminatory, unconstitutional, and undermines the principles at the core of the legal system. Studies show that Black people, women, and those of religious faith are more likely to oppose the death penalty. As a result, death qualification warps the jury from a cross-section of peers to be whiter, more male, more conviction prone, less likely to debate the evidence, and far more likely to sentence a defendant to death.

“Every person accused of a crime is entitled to a fair, impartial jury, but that’s never the reality in capital cases,” said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. “The evidence is overwhelmingly consistent that Black Kansans are disproportionately disqualified from serving on capital juries. Death qualification, like the death penalty itself, is unconstitutional and undermines justice for everyone. We are committed to ending both.”

By systemically barring Black community members from fully participating in jury service, death qualification violates the rights of both the accused and prospective jurors alike. Removing Black voices from capital juries perpetuates the legacy of all-white juries that have long condemned Black individuals to death.

Death qualification is one piece of what makes the death penalty in Kansas racist, unjust, and unconstitutional. New evidence shows that every aspect of the death penalty — from who gets charged, to who has a fair trial, to who gets sentenced — echoes a long history of racial bias in the criminal legal system. In Kansas, there is an undeniable line connecting the state’s history of racial terror to its modern administration of the death penalty. When lynching became less publicly and politically acceptable, the death penalty emerged as a new form of racialized violence.

“The death penalty in Kansas is unjust from start to finish and goes against all of the most fundamental principles of justice,” said Katie Ali, attorney at Ali & Lockwood. “From its disproportionate impact on Black Kansans to the high risk of wrongful convictions, it is clear that the death penalty serves neither fairness nor public safety. It’s time for Kansas to abandon this deeply unjust system.”

In a series of hearings beginning on Oct. 28, the ACLU and co-counsel will present evidence and testimony from leading experts nationwide demonstrating that the death penalty in Kansas and death qualification are unconstitutional and racially discriminatory. The ACLU filed the challenges on behalf of Antoine Fielder, who is pretrial and facing capital charges in Wyandotte County. His case has been joined with another pretrial capital defendant, Hugo Villanueva, for the purpose of these hearings only.

(source: aclu.org)

OKLAHOMA:

We Thought the Supreme Court’s Death Penalty Cases Couldn’t Get Worse. We Thought Wrong.

Richard Glossip has been on death row for over 25 years. He has maintained his innocence in a murder-for-hire conviction that he first received in 1998. He has lived through 9 execution dates and eaten 3 last meals, and he claims that his death penalty trial was tainted by massive and egregious procedural error. Oddly enough, the state of Oklahoma agrees with him, and yet that state’s Supreme Court wants to execute him anyhow. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to his pro bono attorney, Don Knight, about last Wednesday’s oral argument in Glossip’s case at the high court. Knight is a trial attorney, licensed in Colorado, who advises on death penalty cases around the country. He’s been working to have Richard Glossip receive a fair trial for over a decade. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: This litigation has been going on for over a quarter of a century, from the date of the alleged murder for hire to the not 1 but 2 jury trials, to the many appeals that followed. Can you unroll the extent of the processes that have happened here and why this has been going on for over 2 decades?

Don Knight: Richard Glossip was accused in January of 1997 and didn’t face his 1st trial until June or July of 1998. He was represented at that time by an attorney that I think his family had known, a terrible lawyer. They paid him, I’m not kidding, $2,500 to do this death penalty case. That lawyer had never tried a capital case before. It was so bad that when it got around to the time of the penalty phase, he didn’t know what that penalty phase was. When it got to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, in a unanimous 5–0 decision, without even taking argument, they found ineffective assistance of counsel and sent it back for a new trial. In 2004, there was a 2nd trial. This time the lawyers were working with the Oklahoma Indigent Defense Services, and they really did no better job for Rich Glossip than that 1st trial. It’s important to note that trials are the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is all the things you have to do before you get to trial. You have to do the investigation, you have to talk to witnesses, you have to prepare witnesses, you have to know what the other side’s going to say, you have to be prepared to rebut it. There are so many things that go into doing a proper trial, and these lawyers did none of that.

There was also a lousy, lousy police investigation to begin with. Prosecutors in the 1st trial did things that they should not have done, then it all got overturned and went to these 2nd lawyers who picked it up. I don’t think they even read the transcripts. The transcripts are a golden opportunity for cross-examination purposes in any second trial, but it does take a lot of work. Reading transcripts is not easy. You have to go through it, and you have to prepare. They didn’t do any preparation at all. So the second trial was another travesty.

Next came the appeals. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals is the highest court of criminal jurisdiction in Oklahoma. There’s only 1 appeal to that court. In most states, there are 2 appeals, but in Oklahoma, there’s 1 appeal, and that’s to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. Then there’s the trip to the United States Supreme Court in 2015. I got involved in the spring of 2015 after Sister Helen Prejean called me and said, “Can you help? This guy’s innocent.” But by that point in time, there’s essentially no process left.

But in September and October of 2015 Richard Glossip was given 3 successive stays of execution. That gave me some time to get down to Oklahoma and to start talking to some witnesses. Oklahoma started a moratorium on executions that we thought would last a year, but it actually ended up lasting 6 years. With that 6 years, I started doing a lot of work on the case. A documentary was made about the case, and that gave us some more witnesses, but most importantly from the documentary, a politically connected man in Oklahoma watched the documentary and got in touch. He invited me down to do some bird hunting in Oklahoma. He introduced me to a lot of politicians, and we began to think that maybe the way through this process was to try to work with the other 2 branches of government, rather than the judicial branch. The judicial branch didn’t seem like they were very favorable to us in Oklahoma. So we decided we would see what politicians could do. We began to get some people who would look at the case in a fair way; politicians, and they would opine on Rich’s execution, and the fairness that he received or didn’t receive. That took us up to 2021 when they began to execute again. The legislators commissioned an independent investigation into Rich’s case, which produced an incredible 350-page report by the international law firm of Reed Smith. It said, “If a jury heard all the evidence that we now have, it’s very clear that they would not find this man guilty.”

We went through several more execution cycles. The governor gave us 2 reprieves along the way, 60-day reprieves, which saved Rich a couple of times. Then a new state attorney general came in who opened up these new boxes of documents related to the case. Those boxes contained documents that gave us the information that ultimately ended up in the petition that was granted before the United Supreme Court, which brings us to last Wednesday.

I’m remembering Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the 2015 Glossip case at the U.S. Supreme Court as a kind of cri de coeur, asking, Can we please talk about the death penalty? Can we please talk about the United States as an outlier? Can we talk about the racial bias? Can we talk about the unbelievable penalty you pay if you are poor on death row? Can we talk about all of the ways in which the death penalty as currently administered is a sin? But we are not having that conversation, are we? We were probably having it for a nanosecond after Justice Breyer’s Glossip dissent, but whatever it was that happened at oral argument last Wednesday in Glossip, it was not a meta-conversation about how we do capital punishment and what finality means. You’ve been doing this for a long time.

You live in these trenches. Am I wrong to just be slightly heartbroken that this conversation about jurisdiction and procedural bars is likely the most sophisticated conversation we will have this year at the Supreme Court about the way we execute people in America?

Breyer’s dissent in Glossip v. Gross was really a tour de force on the federal death penalty in this country, and probably the most powerful since Gregg v. Georgia back in the ’70s. I don’t know if somebody’s going to pick up the mantle from Justice Breyer and say that we need to talk about this, even though at argument we didn’t talk about this. We’re not even talking about whether he is innocent or not. We’re talking about whether he actually got fair process—and he didn’t get fair process. We know that, because the attorney general of the state of Oklahoma has said Richard Glossip didn’t get fair process. At what point in time do regular people say, I don’t trust our criminal justice system anymore? At what point do they say, I don’t trust that I’m going to get fair process when I go to court? And if that doesn’t happen in the criminal justice system, what about the civil system? What happens to a country where we get to a place where nobody believes in the rule of law anymore? I think we all know what happens, and it’s not OK.

(source: Dahlia Lithwick, slate.com)

UTAH:

Before he’s executed, Ralph Menzies needs a competency review. His attorneys argue it won’t be fair

Ralph Menzies could be Utah’s next death row inmate to be executed. But the question of whether the 65-year-old man with dementia is competent currently stands between him and the firing squad.

And Menzies’ attorneys are worried that competency review could be influenced by the Utah Attorney General’s Office — on Wednesday, 3rd District Court Judge Matthew Bates heard arguments for and against disqualifying the Attorney General’s Office from prosecuting the case over a conflict of interest.

Bates will decide in the coming weeks whether new prosecutors should be assigned to the case. But he did order the Attorney General’s Office to hand over emails which they had previously refused to provide, arguing they should be protected under attorney-client privilege.

The competency review is intended to determine whether Menzies, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering Maurine Hunsaker in 1988, is aware of and knows the reason for his upcoming execution.

His attorneys say that review could be tainted by the Utah Attorney General’s Office. The office is prosecuting Menzies’ case and advocating for his execution, while communicating with the state’s Department of Corrections and Department of Health and Human Services, which are tasked with the competency review.

It’s unclear what the agencies were communicating about. But that still poses a conflict of interest, said Eric Zuckerman, Menzies’ attorney, during Wednesday’s hearing. Those three agencies are supposed to be independent, he argued —- the prosecution should not be influencing what’s supposed to be a fair and impartial assessment of Menzies’ competency.

“They are working together. The conflict is there,” said Zuckerman. “They’re talking to each other. They’re not just emailing, but they’re talking to each other. There’s nothing this court can do to make this right again, because the independence has been violated.”

Attorneys for the state pushed back on the idea that their correspondence with the departments of Health and Human Services and Corrections is anything beyond information that’s already public. Zuckerman has not provided any evidence that there is anything happening between the 3 agencies that could sway the competency review, they said on Wednesday.

“There simply needs to be more concrete evidence of some collusion or some nefarious undertaking of the state, and I don’t see it here in Mr. Menzies’ motion,” said Daniel Boyer with the Utah Attorney General’s Office, telling the court that the “idea that we’re somehow influencing DHHS, you’re not going to see that if these emails are disclosed.”

Rather than handing over email correspondence between the agencies, the state’s lawyers say they should be protected under attorney-client privilege. Zuckerman said that alone warrants the emails being handed over — if it can be protected by attorney-client privilege, it goes beyond the scope of what’s allowed to be discussed between the 3 agencies.

“If counsel for the Utah Department of Corrections and counsel for Department of Health and Human Services are providing advice, direction or guidance to the prosecution,” Zuckerman said, “that is absolutely relevant.”

Ultimately, Bates ordered the state to hand over the emails, but for Zuckerman, that’s not enough. When asked whether viewing the emails would put to rest any concerns that there is still a conflict of interest, Zuckerman said no.

“It doesn’t change the fact they’ve admitted to working together. … There’s a clear remedy in this case and that remedy is to assign someone else,” he said.

Bates said he will determine whether the Attorney General’s Office should be thrown off the case in the next 14 days. If the judge were to rule in Menzies’ favor and disqualify the Attorney General’s Office, it would delay when Menzies’ competency review takes place.

Court will hear whether Menzies is competent enough to be executed

Menzies was diagnosed with dementia in March 2023 after he fell several times, according to court documents. After an MRI exam, he was shown to have brain atrophy, where the brain’s tissue deteriorates, leading to memory loss and a decline in cognitive function.

It’s unclear whether his mental state is so dire that he’ll be deemed incompetent to be executed, a high bar that is rarely met in capital punishment cases.

Per Utah code, the assessment must consider whether Menzies is aware of his impending execution and if he knows his murder conviction is the reason. The assessment also should determine the nature of his mental disorder and whether psychoactive medication is necessary to “maintain or restore the inmate’s competency.”

Menzies kidnapped Hunsaker in 1986 while she was working as a cashier at a gas station in Kearns. He took her up Big Cottonwood Canyon and kept her overnight in a picnic area, according to court documents. Two days later, her body was found tied to a tree with her throat slashed.

Menzies would be the second death row inmate to face a firing squad in recent decades, following Ronnie Lee Garnder’s execution in 2010.

In Utah, death row inmates sentenced before May 2004 had a choice between lethal injection and firing squad. For those sentenced after 2004, the default method of execution is lethal injection, unless the necessary drugs are not available.

This past August, Utah carried out its 1st death sentence since Gardner, executing Taberon Honie by lethal injection.

(source: utahnewsdispatch.com)

*************

Another twist in Utah’s most high-profile death penalty case

The third district court in West Jordan bore witness to a passionate testimony by Ralph Menzies’ attorney Eric Zuckerman, as he argued why the Attorney General’s office cannot continue prosecuting his death penalty case.

“I’m saying that the attorneys that counsel, all of the employees of the Department of Corrections, are working with the prosecution against Mr. Menzies and sharing information that we are not privy to,” Zuckerman told Judge Matthew Bates.

Ralph Menzies has been on death row for 36 years, convicted of killing Maurine Hunsaker in 1988. He abducted the 26-year-old mother of 3 from a Kearns convenience store where she worked. It was determined she was strangled, and her throat was cut after her body was later found at a Big Cottonwood Canyon picnic area.

He was sentenced to die by firing squad, but as recently as January of this year, his attorneys reported that he has been diagnosed with dementia, which they argue makes it unconstitutional to be executed because he apparently no longer remembers his crime.

After a motion was filed, the state agreed to assess his competency for execution, and agencies, including the Department of Corrections and the Department of Health and Human Services, have dedicated resources in likes of doctors and psychologists to do so.

However, Menzies’ attorneys are arguing that these agencies are not remaining independent to the case after numerous emails apparently have been sent back and forth between the AG’s office and the DHHS and the DOC.

Where this becomes complicated is the AG’s office represents state departments like the ones who are assessing Ralph Menzies. Zuckerman said emails being sent about Menzies between the prosecuting AG’s office and the DHHS or DOC was a clear conflict of interest.

“I know that the Council for the Department of Corrections is communicating with the prosecution and sharing information about the case in furtherance of the case, providing guidance or direction or taking guidance and direction. I mean, the link is pretty clear there.”

State Attorney Daniel Boyer rebutted, stating that because the departments are represented by the AG’s office, the emails sent between them are protected by attorney-client privilege. He rejected the notion made by Zuckerman that the AG’s office was attempting to influence Menzies’ assessments.

“There’s no evidence here, and we don’t believe any of these emails will show that we’re somehow curating or orchestrating the evidence and production of evidence to build a case for competency against Menzies, and especially not to influence the DHHS evaluations,” Boyer said.

After approximately 2 hours the hearing came to an end, and Judge Bates ordered that within 10 days all emails be turned over for review. Whether the AG’s office will be disqualified from the case will be determined in two weeks’ time.

(source: kslnewsradio.com)

IDAHO----new and impending execution date

State of Idaho schedules death row inmate Thomas Creech’s execution for Nov. 13

Correction officials in Idaho served death row inmate Thomas Creech on Wednesday with a death warrant scheduling his execution for Nov. 13, the Idaho Department of Correction announced in a news release on Wednesday.

Creech was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Feb. 28, but Idaho Department of Correction Director Josh Tewalt halted Creech’s execution after the medical team was unable to establish an IV line to administer the lethal injection chemicals, the Idaho Capital Sun previously reported.

Correction officials handed Creech the new death warrant on Wednesday less than 24 hours after state officials announced crews renovated the F Block unit at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise to create a new execution preparation room.

Creech is again scheduled to be executed by lethal injection, correction officials said. Tewalt will sign an affidavit certifying that the Department of Correction has obtained the chemical or chemicals necessary to carry out a lethal injection, Idaho Department of Correction officials said Wednesday.

Idaho Department of Correction officials declined additional comment, citing ongoing litigation.

In a written statement, Federal Defender Services of Idaho said Idaho is seeking to become the 1st state to attempt to use lethal injection a 2nd time on the same inmate after failing the 1st time.

“We are heartbroken and angered that Idaho would try again to execute Thomas Creech using virtually the same process and team of executioners, and before conducting any official review of what led to the botched attempt to take his life earlier this year,” Deborah A. Czuba, supervising attorney for the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Defender Services of Idaho, said in a written statement.

The state’s new execution preparation room provides a space where the medical team can work to establish an alternative central line to administer lethal injection chemicals if the team cannot establish peripheral IV access, which is what happened with Creech in February. The execution preparation room is a separate room from the execution chamber where witnesses assemble, state officials said Tuesday.

Under new Idaho execution procedures announced Tuesday, the condemned inmate will first be led into the execution preparation room for the team to determine if it can establish peripheral IV access. If not, the medical team will establish a central line. Once an IV line is established, the inmate will be led to the execution chamber.

State officials said Tuesday that a live audio and video feed from the execution preparation room will be available to witnesses throughout the entire time an inmate is in the execution preparation room.

The renovations to create the new execution preparation room did not include construction of a new secure facility necessary to carry out an execution by firing squad, which the Idaho Legislature added as an alternative method of execution in 2023. A public information officer said Tuesday it would cost an estimated $952,589 to create a secure facility necessary to carry out an execution by firing squad.

Including Creech, there are 9 inmates serving on death row in Idaho, state records show. The state of Idaho has not executed anyone in more than 12 years, since Richard Leavitt was executed by lethal injection in 2012.

Creech, 74, was convicted of killing 5 people, according to Idaho Gov. Brad Little’s office and the Idaho Department of Correction. Creech received a death penalty sentence in January 1983 after beating a fellow inmate to death in Ada County, according to the Idaho Department of Correction.

(source: Idaho Capital Sun)

*************

New execution date set for Idaho death row inmate

A man who survived the state's attempt to execute him earlier this year has another date with the death chamber.

An Ada County judge signed a new death warrant Tuesday for Thomas Creech.

He's now set to die by lethal injection on November 13.

The warrant comes the same day Idaho Department of Corrections announced new procedures for lethal injection.

Idaho will now be using central veins deep in the groin, neck, chest or arm if standard IV lines fail.

The changes come because of previous attempt to execute Creech, who has been in prison for 50 years.

In February, the state tried to execute Creech. After an hour of trying, they failed to find a suitable vein in which to inject the lethal chemicals.

He became the 1st prisoner in Idaho to survive an execution attempt.

In the time since, Creech has been waiting on death row and even sued the state, saying he had health complications from the failed lethal injection.

The same judge that signed the new death warrant dismissed that case last month.

Right now, Creech is 1 of 9 people on death row in Idaho. He has been there the longest, sentenced to death in 1983.

States across the country have struggled to obtain the necessary chemicals for lethal injection.

Earlier this year, 4 News Now made a public records request with Idaho Department of Corrections to determine where it purchased the chemicals.

The state would not disclose where the chemicals came from.

(source: KXLY news)

***********

State of Idaho Schedules New Date for the Execution of Thomas Creech

The Idaho Department of Correction served Thomas Creech with a death warrant Wednesday morning.

The warrant schedules the execution for November 13 at 10:00 a.m. Creech was moved to a cell in the Idaho Maximum Security Institution’s F-block, where the execution will take place. The department has procured the chemicals necessary to carry out an execution by lethal injection.

(source: KPVI news)

UNITED KINGDOM:

The UK and other OSCE participating States mark World Day against the Death Penalty at the OSCE.

Delivered on: 17 October 2024 (Transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered)

Thank you Mr Chair,

I am speaking on behalf of Canada, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, San Marino, the United Kingdom and my own country Switzerland.

The 10th of October marked the 22nd World Day against the Death Penalty.

We categorically oppose the death penalty under all circumstances, it is not consistent with human rights, including the right to life. In this context, we welcome the fact that the global trend towards the abolition of capital punishment continues unabated in all parts of the world, including the OSCE region. Today, almost 3/4 of states are abolitionist, either in law or in practice. Amid growing pressure on human rights and increasing instability, this positive development – that crosses the globe - should not go unnoticed.

However, it should also not invite complacency in our collective efforts against the death penalty, especially given recent setbacks observed. Last year, recorded global executions soared to their highest number in almost a decade.

In light of this, it is important to emphasize that the death penalty neither makes communities safer nor serves as a deterrent to crime. On the contrary, it exacerbates cycles of violence and is often used as a tool of repression. Responding to a crime, no matter how heinous, by committing another crime should never be the solution.

As of today, only two participating States of the OSCE continue to apply capital punishment: Belarus and the United States. Regarding Belarus, we deeply deplore the fact that the use of the death penalty has been extended twice in recent years. We therefore urge the Belarusian authorities to reverse this trend and establish a moratorium on executions as a first step towards abolition.

We also remain concerned that capital punishment continues to be used in the United States. We welcome the current moratorium on Federal executions and we call on the relevant US authorities to commute all Federal death sentences into prison terms

Mr Chair,

Our countries are committed to the universal abolition of the death penalty and call on all States, both within and beyond the OSCE, to completely abolish capital punishment or, as a first step, establish a moratorium on its use. In this context, we urge all participating States to vote in favour of the UN resolution, currently under negotiation at the UN General Assembly, which calls for a moratorium on capital punishment.

Thank you, Mr Chair.

(source: gov.uk)

UNITED NATIONS:

UN Human Rights Council 57: European Human Rights Ambassadors’ statement on the Death Penalty.----European Human Rights Ambassadors’ statement on World and European Day Against the Death Penalty. Delivered at the 57th Human Rights Council in Geneva on 10 October 2024.

On the World and European Day Against the Death Penalty, we, European Human Rights Ambassadors, reiterate our opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances as a matter of principle.

In 2023 alone, at least 1,150 death sentences were carried out. According to public statistics, most people were executed in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Somalia in 2023. However, we must assume that the global number is actually much higher, as countries such as China, Vietnam and North Korea do not publish the figures for their executions.

Iran provides a particularly egregious example, where use of the death penalty has reached a critical level: large numbers of executions have been carried out for alleged offences that do not meet the threshold of “the most serious crimes” under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Executions are also used as a means of political repression against demonstrators, dissidents and ethnic minorities in association with the “Woman Life Freedom” movement. We strongly condemn this application of the death penalty and call on Iran to end reprisals against human rights defenders immediately. We call on Iran to issue a moratorium on executions now.

Today, on the World and European Day Against the Death Penalty, our thoughts are especially with those who are sentenced to death and executed because of their political engagement, their commitment to human rights, their sexual orientation or their ethnic or religious affiliation.

(source: gov. uk)

EUROPE:

Right of Reply on the World Day Against the Death Penalty

As delivered by Deputy Chief of Mission Tim Hanway to the Permanent Council, Vienna

Neither international law nor OSCE commitments prohibit capital punishment. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognizes the authority of countries to impose the death penalty for the most serious crimes, carried out pursuant to a final judgment rendered by a competent court and in accordance with the laws of the country and all applicable legal protections, including fair trial guarantees. U.S. law and practice are consistent with these requirements.

The judicial system in the United States provides a system of protections at the state and federal levels intended to ensure that implementation of the death penalty is undertaken, after multiple layers of judicial review, in conformity with the U.S. Constitution and U.S. international obligations.

The use of capital punishment remains the subject of serious discussion and close examination in the United States, as evidenced by the fact that 23 States and the District of Columbia have abolished the death penalty, and three other States have a moratorium on it.

We reaffirm our longstanding opposition to the use of the death penalty after trials that do not respect fair trial guarantees, or for crimes that do not meet the “most serious crimes” threshold for capital punishment, as required under international law.

(source: osce.usmission.gov)

VIETNAM:

Vietnam convicts death-row tycoon of fraud in new trial----Life sentence given to Truong My Lan, who is still appealing earlier death penalty

A Vietnamese real estate tycoon facing the death penalty for fraud has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty on additional charges, showing the extent of the ruling Communist Party’s determination to crack down on corruption.

Truong My Lan was convicted of fraudulent appropriation of property, money laundering and illegally transporting currency across international borders.

While Vietnam has embarked on a sweeping anti-corruption crackdown that has forced top government officials to step down and sent some senior executives to jail, Lan’s case has grabbed global attention due to the severity of the sentences. Closer to home, the Communist government is showcasing that this is the high-level corruption it wants to go after.

The court judge said Lan “will have to take the highest responsibility” in the case. The tycoon, clad once again in a blue shirt and wearing a mask, sat quietly throughout proceedings in the Ho Chi Minh City court as the ruling took place with a heavy security presence outside the building.

Lan has denied several of the charges. It’s not yet clear whether she will appeal.

Lan and her 33 co-defendants were found guilty of the illegal transportation of roughly $4.5 billion across international borders, laundering some 446 trillion dong in pilfered assets from Saigon Commercial Bank, and misappropriating about 30 trillion dong from investors via bond issuances.

Many of the thousands of bondholders who have seen investments all but vanish turned out to watch the second trial on a big screen outside the courthouse.

The 68-year-old property mogul was sentenced to death in April for her role in Vietnam’s largest-ever fraud case, after being found guilty of embezzling copy2.3 billion from Saigon Commercial Bank, known as SCB, between February 2018 and October 2022. She is appealing her death sentence. Her lawyer has said a date for this hearing is yet to be fixed.

Lan is one of the highest-profile targets of the government’s years-long anti-corruption crackdown, known as the “blazing furnace” campaign. It was spearheaded by the late Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and his successor, To Lam, has said he will “resolutely” continue the aggressive push that has touched all aspects of society and led to the detention of scores of senior officials and business executives.

The corruption case involving SCB has also highlighted financial supervisory shortcomings in the country, Fitch Ratings said in a May report. The lender, which is receiving support from the State Bank through special loans, was put under “special scrutiny” shortly after Lan’s arrest, which led to a bank run in October 2022.

Seventeen government banking system inspectors were convicted of taking bribes to cover up the SCB violations, according to police reports. Among them was a former head of the State Bank’s inspection and supervision unit, Do Thi Nhan, who was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of accepting as much as $5.2 million in bribes.

During the month-long second trial, Lan broke down in tears at times, telling the court that she never expected her life to end this way, but was prepared to take responsibility, according to the news website VnExpress.

She also pleaded for reduced sentences for other defendants, including her niece and her driver, saying they were just carrying out their duties as employees.

(source: Bangkok Post)

AUSTRALIA:

Law Council of Australia joins call for universal abolition of death penalty----Statement expresses concern about penalty’s persistence or possible resurgence in certain countries

The Law Council of Australia, alongside its counterparts from around the world, has expressed its opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances for all people to mark the World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October.

The Law Council recently made a submission relating to the inquiry of the Human Rights Subcommittee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, which looked into Australia’s efforts to advocate for abolishing the death penalty internationally.

Its submission commended Australia’s ongoing commitment to promoting the abolition of the death penalty worldwide and maintaining a robust domestic legal and policy framework ensuring that Australia refrains from exposing anyone to a real risk of execution.

In a joint statement dated 10 October, the Law Council and other organisations representing the legal profession around the globe called for the universal abolition of the death penalty and expressed deep concern about the penalty’s persistence in many countries and its possible resurgence in certain countries where it has already been abolished.

The organisations urged all countries still imposing the death penalty to abolish it and, pending such abolition, to impose a moratorium on the penalty. They also urged all countries with such a moratorium to continue applying it and to refrain from revoking it.

Human rights

The organisations encouraged the relevant authorities and actors of society to participate in constructive dialogues, to share best practices, and to support each other in pursuing alternative, humane, and effective measures to fight crime and to protect society in a way that promotes and safeguards human rights and the rule of law.

In the joint call, the organisations said that they perceived the abolition of the death penalty as a way to foster and to protect human dignity and human rights and as a step toward achieving a world that respects the inherent worth of every individual and that pursues justice in a manner upholding the principles of fairness, humanity, and the rule of law.

The organisations recognised that every person has inherent dignity and a fundamental right to life, which is a right guaranteed by all major international and regional human rights instruments.

These include article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and Protocols No. 6 and 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights.

(source: thelawyermag.com)

INDIA:

Supreme Court Sets Aside Death Sentence Of Man In 'Triple-Murder' Of Mother, Wife, Daughter----The High Court had called it a planned, cold-blooded murder of mother, wife and daughter by the man and had upheld death sentence.

The Supreme Court on Thursday set aside the conviction and the death sentence awarded to a man for the alleged murder of his mother, wife and 2-year-old daughter noting the case was based on circumstantial evidence. In the chilling triple murder case, the trial court had convicted Vishwajeet Kerba Masalkar for murdering his wife, mother and daughter. The Bombay High Court had uphled the conviction and death sentence calling it a rarest of rare case.

A bench of Justices BR Gavai, Prashant Kumar Mishra and KV Viswanathan noted that the prosecution was unable to prove an unbroken chain of events.

"Since it is a case of circumstantial evidence where the prosecution has failed to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt, we have allowed the appeal," the top court said.

The man was convicted under Sections 302, 307 and 201 of IPC and was sentenced to death by a trial court. Following which, Masalkar challenged the trial court conviction in the Bombay High Court.

The Bombay High Court confirmed the death penalty to Masalkar, and held that the case deserved to be treated as rarest of the rare case. The High Court had called it a planned, cold-blooded murder of mother, wife and daughter by Masalkar. The high court said that by finishing the family, the accused has tried to shatter the basic foundation of the society.

The case came up, when Masalkar, a facility executive with a Pune-based company reported to police a theft at his house, during which his mother, wife and daughter were killed and one of his neighbour was injured.

At the outset, the police filed a case on his complaint under Sections 302 and 397 of IPC. However, in the course of investigation, the police found that theft no theft of gold ornaments or cash took place from the house, nor was there any forcible entry. According to the police, the gold ornaments alleged to have been stolen were discovered hidden behind a photo frame in the house.

The police later told the court that initially it was misled by Masalkar to believe that deaths occured during a theft at his house. But, later the investigation revealed that Masalkar was having an extramarital affair. The police suspected Masalkar and arrested him for tripple murder and injuring the neighbour to silence him.

(source: abplive.com)

***************

SC commutes death penalty for man who murdered his pregnant daughter over inter-caste marriage

The Supreme Court on Wednesday commuted the death penalty of a man, who had murdered his pregnant daughter for performing an inter-caste marriage against her family's will.

A bench of Justices B R Gavai, Aravind Kumar and K V Viswanathan set aside the death penalty but upheld the conviction of Eknath Kisan Kumbharkar from Nashik district in Maharashtra and sentenced him to 20 years in jail instead.

“The order of conviction as recorded by the trial court and confirmed by the high court of judicature at Bombay vide order dated August 6, 2019 in confirmation case…is affirmed,” the court said.

"However, the sentence of death penalty imposed by the courts below under Section 302 is converted to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment without remission," the bench held.

Kumbharkar had murdered his pregnant daughter Pramila on June 28, 2013 for marrying a man from a different caste against the family's wishes, according to the prosecution.

(source: hindustantimes.com)

IRAQ:

Iraq hands death, life sentences to 10 ISIS suspects in Nineveh

The Iraqi judiciary on Thursday issued death sentences and life imprisonment against 10 Islamic State (ISIS) suspects arrested in Nineveh province, the interior ministry said, the latest in a spate of executions by Baghdad against the jihadists.

“The judicial authorities issued severe sentences (execution and life imprisonment) against 10 terrorists arrested by our agency in Nineveh province. This came after investigations and confronting them with solid evidence, which they confessed to their affiliation with terrorist ISIS gangs,” said a statement by the interior ministry’s Federal Intelligence and Investigations Agency.

The agency said that the suspects were involved in “many terrorist attacks” during the rise of ISIS in 2014, “including carrying out killings of security forces members and innocent civilians.”

ISIS seized control of swathes of Iraqi land in 2014. The group was declared territorially defeated in 2017 but it continues to carry out bombings, hit-and-run attacks, and abductions across several provinces.

Thousands of people have been detained across Iraq since 2014 for suspected links to terrorist groups, including ISIS, and hundreds have been executed. Human rights monitors have criticized the trials, saying they depend on confessions obtained through torture, they do not investigate specific charges such as genocide, and they exclude the victims, thereby denying them justice.

Iraq has also routinely been criticized for poor prison conditions and harsh treatment of detainees and suspects.

More than 8,000 are purportedly on death row in Iraq, and authorities have been repeatedly condemned for carrying out hasty trials.

(source: rudaw.net)

************

Iraq Presidency denies mass execution claims after ongoing legal scrutiny of death sentences

On Thursday, the Iraqi Presidency rejected reports regarding the approval of mass death sentences for terrorists.

In a statement, the presidency clarified that “such false news, propagated by the enemies of Iraq, seeks to create chaos, confuse the public, and incite unrest during these exceptional circumstances the region is experiencing.”

The presidency said it is committed to fulfilling its responsibilities, stating, “The Presidency of the Republic will not hesitate to ratify death sentences for terrorists who have blood on their hands, but only after all legal procedures have been completed, including appeals, retrials, and reviews by the Special Amnesty Committee.”

“As the constitutional guardian, the President is dedicated to ensuring that all legal steps are meticulously followed for those convicted of terrorism, while also prioritizing the protection of innocent Iraqi lives and holding accountable those responsible for their deaths.”

The presidency called on individuals who have received death sentences or their families, whose legal processes have not been completed, to submit their requests to the Presidency so that they may be forwarded to the relevant judicial authorities.

Notably, Iraq has faced ongoing challenges related to terrorism and violence, resulting in a high number of convictions for terrorist-related crimes. In recent years, the Iraqi government has been criticized for its use of the death penalty, with human rights organizations raising concerns about the fairness of trials and the legal processes leading to such sentences.

Despite these concerns, Iraqi authorities maintain that the death penalty is “a necessary tool for combating terrorism and ensuring justice for victims of violence.”

On Saturday, the human rights organization AFAD condemned mass executions by Iraqi authorities, including elderly inmates and some carried out in "horrific" ways, holding President Abdul Latif Rashid responsible.

In a report, AFAD, which monitors the humanitarian and human rights situation in Iraq, revealed that the country carried out one of its largest mass executions since 2003, with at least 50 prisoners hanged at Nasiriyah Central Prison in September. AFAD's investigation found that the prison conducted four mass executions that month, the largest on the 24th, when 21 inmates were taken from their cells at dawn and hanged in groups of 6, sometimes amid sectarian insults.

The report also highlighted that “President Rashid signed the execution orders under political pressure from sectarian and armed factions in Baghdad, despite evidence of prisoners being tortured and coerced into confessions.”

The human rights organization held President Rashid accountable for what it called “a massacre,” which claimed the lives of at least 50 prisoners, ignoring calls to investigate torture-based confessions.

(source: shafaq.com)

***********************************************