Tag Archives: Capital Punishment

Sierra Leone parliament votes to abolish death penalty

DAKAR (Reuters) – Sierra Leone’s parliament voted unanimously on Friday to repeal the death penalty more than two decades after the West African country carried out its last execution.

President Julius Maada Bio is expected to soon sign the bill into law, which will make Sierra Leone the 23rd African country to abolish capital punishment.

The bill also gives judges additional discretion when issuing sentences, which opponents of capital punishment say is particularly important in cases where the person convicted is a victim of sexual violence.

Sierra Leone has observed a moratorium on executions since 1998, but prisoners sentenced to death still live separately from other inmates, which activists say is dehumanizing.

“This is exactly what we were calling for,” said Rhiannon Davis of Advocaid, an advocacy group in the capital Freetown.

“It allows for judges to interpret the law and pass sentence in individual cases, which is particularly important in cases involving people who have experienced sexual or gender-based violence,” she said.

Sierra Leone is one of several African countries moving to end capital punishment. Malawi’s Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in April, and Chad ended executions for those charged with terrorism last year.

Sierra Leone’s last executions took place in 1998, when 23 soldiers were executed by firing squad at the height of an 11-year civil war. But death sentences have continued to be issued.

As of June 2020, 99 people were on death row for crimes ranging from aggravated robbery to murder, despite pledges from the last three administrations to abolish capital punishment.

“One of the things we have to clarify in the fine print is how this will be interpreted for those currently on death row,” Davis said.

(Reporting by Cooper Inveen; Editing by Aaron Ross and Cynthia Osterman)

Biden administration pushes for Boston Marathon bomber death sentence

By Nate Raymond

BOSTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department has urged the Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, despite President Joe Biden’s stated opposition to capital punishment.

The department in a 48-page brief filed late on Monday argued that a lower court wrongly overturned Tsnarnaev’s death sentence and ordered a new trial to determine what sentence he deserved for carrying out with his older brother the attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

The filing marked the latest deviation between the policy views of Biden, a Democrat who has said he wants to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and the Justice Department, whose independence he has vowed to promote.

“The jury carefully considered each of respondent’s crimes and determined that capital punishment was warranted for the horrors that he personally inflicted,” Acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said in the Justice Department’s brief.

David Patton, Tsarnaev’s lawyer, has argued that the U.S. government should allow his client to serve life in prison. Patton did not respond to a request for comment.

In overturning Tsarnaev’s death sentence, the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in July 2020 ruled that the trial judge “fell short” in screening jurors for potential bias following pervasive news coverage of the bombing. It ordered a new trial over the sentence he should receive for the death penalty-eligible crimes for which he was convicted.

Tsarnaev is a Kyrgyzstan-born U.S. citizen.

The Justice Department under Republican former President Donald Trump initiated the government’s appeal of the 1st Circuit ruling, and the Supreme Court in March agreed to take up the case. It will hear arguments and issue a ruling in its next term, which starts in October and ends in June 2022.

Tsarnaev, now 27, and his brother, Tamerlan, precipitated five days of panic in Boston when they detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon’s finish line on April 15, 2013 – tearing through the packed crowd and causing many people to lose legs – and then tried to flee the city.

In the following days, they also killed a police officer, Sean Collier. Tsarnaev’s brother died after a gunfight with police.

Jurors in 2015 found Tsarnaev guilty of all 30 counts he faced and later determined he deserved execution for a bomb he planted that killed Martin Richard, 8, and Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, 23. Restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, was also killed.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham)

Virginia lawmakers vote to abolish death penalty

By Brendan O’Brien and Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – Lawmakers in Virginia voted on Friday to make it the first Southern U.S. state to abolish the death penalty, a significant sign of waning support for capital punishment across the country as the practice is weighed at the federal level.

The state’s Democratic-led House of Delegates voted 57-41 on a measure to end the practice. The Senate passed the measure earlier this week, and Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, said he will sign the repeal into law.

Virginia has conducted 1,390 executions since 1608, the most in the United States and 68 more than Texas, the state with the second most executions. Virginia last carried out an execution in 2017.

Two men remain on Virginia’s death row, including Thomas Porter, who was convicted of killing a police officer in 2005.

Public support for capital punishment has declined in the United States. According to Gallup, support has dropped from 80% in the 1990 to 55% in 2020.

It is also being weighed at the national level.

Former President Donald Trump, a Republican, resumed the execution of prisoners on federal death row last summer after a 17-year hiatus, killing 13 people convicted of murder. That followed six decades which saw a total of three federal executions. Last year was the first time the U.S. government executed more people than all 50 state governments combined.

Democrat Joe Biden took office last month as the first U.S. president to commit to seeking to abolish the federal death penalty. Lawmakers in Congress are asking him to support bills that would repeal the death penalty.

Most countries have abolished capital punishment, and the United Nations has long called for a moratorium on executions and urged its abolition worldwide.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and David Gregorio)

U.S. to put murderer to death as federal executions spree continues

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – The U.S. government plans to execute William LeCroy, a convicted rapist and murderer, on Tuesday, the sixth in a spate of federal executions after a long hiatus in capital punishment.

The Department of Justice says it will kill LeCroy using lethal injections of pentobarbital, a barbiturate, at its execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Under President Donald Trump, who took office in early 2017 and has long been an outspoken advocate for capital punishment, the federal government has executed more men than all of Trump’s predecessors combined going back to 1963.

Another execution is planned for Thursday, when Christopher Vialva, a convicted murderer, is set to become the first Black man to face the federal death penalty under Trump.

Trump’s administration ended an informal 17-year-hiatus in carrying out the death sentence after announcing last year it would use a new one-drug lethal-injection protocol, replacing the three-drug protocol used in the last federal execution in 2003.

The new protocol revived long-running legal challenges to lethal injections. While a U.S. District Court judge, Tanya Chutkan, in Washington, D.C., last month sided with condemned men who sued the government, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the judge had made “insufficient findings and conclusions” in blocking the execution of Keith Nelson over an issue related to federal safety law on prescription drugs.

Chutkan has previously issued multiple orders halting planned executions while litigation continued, but which were soon overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose conservative majority said that legal challenges to pentobarbital injections, which are also used by several state governments to execute prisoners, were unlikely to prevail.

On Sunday, Chutkan declined to halt this week’s executions, saying the government’s violation of prescription laws did not itself amount to “irreparable harm.” She also ruled that the question of whether a condemned man would still be conscious after injection of the caustic drug and suffer agony as his lungs filled with bloody fluid prior to death was “one upon which reasonable minds could differ.”

LeCroy was convicted and sentenced to death in Georgia in 2004 for the carjacking, rape and murder of Joann Tiesler, a 30-year-old nurse, after breaking into her home. He was caught two days later in Tiesler’s vehicle at the U.S.-Canadian border with notes scribbled on the back of a torn map, according to prosecutors.

“Please, please, please forgive me Joanne,” read one note by LeCroy, who misspelled the victim’s name. “You were an angel and I killed you. Now I have to live with that and I can never go home. I am a vagabond and doomed to hell.”

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Leslie Adler)

U.S. to carry out fifth federal execution after 17-year pause

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – The U.S. government was due to execute Keith Nelson, a convicted child murderer, on Friday afternoon in what would be its fifth execution since it resumed carrying out capital punishment this summer after a 17-year hiatus.

The execution was scheduled to take place at 4 p.m. (2000 GMT) at the U.S. Department of Justice’s execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, using lethal injections of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate.

On Thursday, a federal judge overseeing legal challenges to the execution protocol by Nelson and other death row inmates ruled that the Justice Department’s protocol violated drug safety laws.

Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court in Washington ordered Nelson’s execution be delayed until the Justice Department revised its protocol to comply with the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, including a requirement that a drug can only be issued on a clinician’s prescription.

The Justice Department challenged the injunction delaying the execution in the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit. The appeals court overturned the injunction on Thursday evening, ruling that Chutkan had not established that violations of the act constituted “irreparable harm.”

Chutkan spoke with lawyers representing Nelson and the Justice Department in a telephone conference on Friday as she considered a request by Nelson’s lawyers to revise her order or issue a new one blocking Friday’s execution.

Nelson, who was convicted of raping and murdering 10-year-old Pamela Butler in Kansas in 1999, is one of more than a dozen inmates on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, who sued the Justice Department over its lethal injection protocol, which was announced in 2019, replacing the old three-drug protocol last used in 2003.

Three of those plaintiffs have since been executed by the Justice Department after the U.S. Supreme Court swiftly dismissed earlier injunctions issued by Chutkan delaying the executions to allow the litigation to proceed.

U.S. government plans to end week with third execution after 17-year hiatus

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – A week that marked the return of capital punishment by the U.S. government after a 17-year hiatus was due to end on Friday with a third planned execution of a federal prisoner.

If President Donald Trump’s administration faces no legal obstacle in putting Dustin Lee Honken, a convicted murderer, to death by lethal injection at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT), it will have completed as many executions in a few days as happened in the preceding 57 years.

Lawyers for the condemned men have amassed legal challenges, which include arguments that the U.S. Department of Justice’s new one-drug lethal-injection protocol breaches a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

These arguments have been rejected twice this week in overnight rulings by a 5-4 majority in the Supreme Court.

Dustin Honken was a dealer in illegal methamphetamine when he and his girlfriend murdered five people in Iowa in 1993, including two girls aged 10 and 6. He was convicted in 2004.

He is one of several inmates on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, who have said the new one-drug protocol, which replaces a three-drug protocol the government last used in 2003, would cause an unnecessarily painful death.

The litigation will continue in the U.S. District Court in Washington with the surviving inmates. Since last year, Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the cases, has ordered injunctions on three occasions delaying the scheduled executions to allow the legal challenges to play out. All three were overruled by the Supreme Court.

Two other men convicted of murdering children were executed in Terre Haute earlier this week: Daniel Lee on Tuesday, and Wesley Purkey on Thursday.

Families of the killers’ victims have been divided, reflecting broader public disagreement over capital punishment, which has been abolished by most other countries. Relatives of Lee’s victims pleaded for Trump to scrap Lee’s execution. The father of the 16-year-old girl murdered by Purkey told reporters that Purkey’s death brought some resolution to his grief.

Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, called it “a truly dark period for our country.” She joined the condemned men’s lawyers in criticizing higher courts in what they called a rush to short-circuit their legal rights.

While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority wrote that it had established that lethal injection was a constitutional method, some of the liberal justices complained new problems raised by the changed protocol were being dismissed too hastily.

“I remain convinced of the importance of reconsidering the constitutionality of the death penalty itself,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a dissenting opinion on Thursday.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Oklahoma to resume lethal injections after plan to use gas for executions stalls

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – Oklahoma intends to resume executions of condemned inmates using lethal injections after suspending capital punishment in 2015 following a series of botched executions, state officials said on Thursday.

The state had been developing a new execution protocol in which it would instead asphyxiate inmates using nitrogen gas, a plan Attorney General Mike Hunter unveiled in 2018.

But development of the new gassing protocol was taking too long and the state has since found a new supply of lethal drugs, Hunter said at a news conference in Oklahoma City alongside Governor Kevin Stitt.

“It is important that the state is implementing our death penalty law with a procedure that is humane and swift for those convicted of the most heinous of crimes,” said Stitt, a Republican.

Lawyers for death-row inmates said the announcement would revive their ongoing challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol, which they say lacks transparency and breaches the U.S. Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment in its current form.

“Oklahoma’s history of mistakes and malfeasance reveals a culture of carelessness around executions that should give everyone pause,” Dale Baich, a federal defender representing some of the inmates, said in a statement.

Until 2015, Oklahoma had one of the busiest execution chambers in a country where a majority of states and the federal government allow capital punishment, a practice most countries have abolished.

The state’s executions stopped after serious errors. In 2014, an inmate convulsed and took more than 40 minutes to die after the state used an untested combination of three lethal drugs. In 2015, another inmate was executed using the wrong drug.

Oklahoma is returning to the same three-drug combination used in the botched 2014 execution, Hunter said, but has updated its protocol to include better training and oversight. The drugs are midazolam, a sedative; vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

Hunter declined to say how the drugs were being obtained, citing state secrecy laws. He said development of the gassing method would continue in case lethal injection drugs again become unavailable.

The European Union bans the sale of drugs for use in executions, and pharmaceutical companies have refused to sell such drugs to U.S. prison systems. Several states have complained that they are no longer able to obtain the drugs.

There are 47 inmates on Oklahoma’s death row, Hunter said. A federal court ordered the state to give those inmates at least 150 days notice of a new protocol, and no execution dates have been set.

Death-penalty experts criticized the state for not changing the drugs it planned to use.

“No improvement in the protocol will address the fact that midazolam is an inappropriate drug to use in executions,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit watchdog group. “Midazolam is not capable of knocking somebody out and keeping them insensate during the period in which other drugs are administered.”

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Dan Grebler)

Number of U.S. executions and support for capital punishment decline in 2019: report finds

By Brendan O’Brien

(Reuters) – The number of executions carried out in the United States dropped in 2019 and public support for the death penalty fell to nearly a five-decade low, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Twenty-two executions were carried out during the year, down from 25 in 2018. Texas conducted nine executions, while Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia conducted three apiece in 2019.

It was the fifth straight year with fewer than 30 executions, marking a sharp decline from 52 in 2009, the Death Penalty Information Center said in its annual report.

It was also the fifth year in a row with fewer than 50 death sentences handed down, a steep decrease from the 118 imposed in 2009, said the non-profit organization that collects data on the death penalty in the United States.

Support for capital punishment dropped to a 47-year low as 60% of Americans told a Gallup poll they preferred life imprisonment over the death penalty. In 2014, the last time the poll asked the question, 45% of Americans said they preferred life over the death penalty, the report said.

Public support for the death penalty was driven down as the guilt of several condemned inmates in high-profile cases came into question in 2019, said Robert Dunham, the center’s executive director.

“2019 came close to being the year of executing the innocent,” he said in the report. “Our courts and public officials too frequently flat out ignore potentially deadly mistakes, and often take steps to obstruct the truth.”

One such case was that of Rodney Reed, who was scheduled to be executed on Nov. 20, two decades after he was convicted and sentenced to death in Texas for the killing of his 19-year-old lover. After questions arose about evidence in the case and calls for Reed’s exoneration grew more intense, a Texas appeals court halted his execution.

The final execution in the United States this year took place last Wednesday when Texas put to death Travis Runnels, who was convicted of killing a prison supervisor.

The year also saw two states taking action against the death penalty. California imposed a moratorium on executions and New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish the death penalty.

In announcing reprieves to all 737 inmates on death row and closing California’s execution chamber, Governor Gavin Newsom said the death penalty discriminated against poor and minority defendants and those who suffer from mental illness.

“Our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure,” said the Democratic governor of the most-populous U.S. state.

Plans by President Donald Trump’s administration to resume federal executions in December after a 16-year hiatus were dashed by a U.S. judge who halted the scheduled executions of four inmates on death row. In early December, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Peter Cooney)

U.S. Justice Department resumes use of the death penalty, schedules five executions

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Attorney General William Barr at the "2019 Prison Reform Summit" in the East Room of the White House in Washington, U.S., April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department announced on Thursday it was reinstating a two-decades long-dormant policy to resume the federal government’s use of capital punishment and immediately scheduled the executions for five death row federal inmates.

“Congress has expressly authorized the death penalty through legislation adopted by the people’s representatives in both houses of Congress and signed by the President,” Attorney General William Barr said in a statement.”

“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law – and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has called for increasing use of the death penalty for drug traffickers and mass shooters.

The Justice Department said it has scheduled executions for five federal inmates who have been convicted of horrific murders and sex crimes.

Those inmates include Daniel Lewis Lee, a white supremacist who was convicted in Arkansas for murdering a family of three, including an eight-year-old girl.

Another one of the five is Lezmond Mitchell, who was found guilty by a jury in Arizona of stabbing a 63-year-old grandmother and forcing her young granddaughter to sit next to her lifeless body on a car journey before slitting the girl’s throat.

“Each of these inmates has exhausted their appellate and post-conviction remedies,” the department said, adding that all five executions will take place at the U.S. Penitentiary Terre Haute in Indiana.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Sonya Hepinstall)

Father who forgave son for family’s murder asks Texas to spare his life

Thomas Whitaker appears in a booking photo by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville, Texas, U.S., obtained by Reuters on February 16, 2018. Texas Department of Criminal Justice/Handout via REUTERS

By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – A Texas man who survived a deadly domestic attack hatched by his son is pushing the state to grant clemency to the condemned man, although it has never spared a death row inmate solely at the formal request of the victim’s family.

Thomas “Bart” Whitaker is set to be put to death by lethal injection on Feb. 22 for masterminding a 2003 plot near Houston that left his mother Tricia, 51, and brother Keith, 19, dead and his father Kent with a bullet wound near his heart.

In the 31 states with capital punishment, district attorneys make the decision whether to seek death, balancing the punishment that they consider best serves society with the wishes of the victim’s family. In this case, the local Texas prosecutors pursued death and jurors decided Bart Whitaker, 38, deserved to be executed.

His father, a 69-year-old devout Christian and retired executive, says if that penalty is implemented, it will only intensify his pain.

“I am going to be thrown into a deeper grief at the hands of the state of Texas, in the name of justice,” Kent Whitaker said last week, after a 30-minute meeting with the chairman of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles in Austin.

Whitaker says his son has been a model inmate and has provided letters from death row prison guards to back him up. According to the clemency petition, Kent Whitaker, his relatives and his wife’s family do not want Texas to execute Bart.

The panel’s decision is due on Tuesday, two days before the execution. If it recommends commuting the death sentence to life in prison, Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, would make the final decision.

Tim Cole, an assistant professor of law at the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law and a former Texas district attorney, said the case points to a major flaw in the U.S. capital punishment system.

With no consistent criteria for prosecutors on whether they should seek execution, he said, the system is arbitrary.

“It is completely up to that one person, the district attorney, to seek death or not,” he said.

The Whitaker case is an outlier, however. In many cases, family members want the district attorney to seek the maximum punishment, Cole said.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, clemency at the request of a forgiving victim’s family has been almost unheard of, according to the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center, which monitors U.S. capital punishment. It did happen in Georgia in 1990, the group said.

It is far more common for courts to halt executions for reasons ranging from doubts over guilt to procedural problems with prosecutions than it is for a governor to grant clemency.

Money may have motivated Bart Whitaker to plan to murder his family with the help of two other men, court documents showed. One of those men, his roommate Chris Brashear, shot the father, mother and brother after the family returned from a dinner out.

He shot Bart in the bicep to make it look he had also been attacked, court documents said. The two other men helped prosecutors pin the crime on Whitaker and were not sentenced to death.

Local prosecutors said they considered the family’s views but stood by Whitaker’s sentence as appropriate for such a brutal crime.

“We represent all of the community. It is not just one person we represent,” said Fred Felcman, first assistant district attorney for the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s Office. “Legally, justice says that he should be executed.”

Felcman believes Bart Whitaker is a sociopath and a master manipulator.

In the clemency petition, Kent Whitaker recalled lying in his hospital bed and facing the choice of slipping into despair or offering his son forgiveness. He said his faith led him to the latter option, which he hopes will sway Texas officials.

“We are not asking them to forgive him, or to let him go,” he added. “We just want them to let him live.”

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Rosalba O’Brien)