Category: Death Penalty

Death Penalty Sought for UnitedHealth Killer

by · Apr 1, 2025 2:41 pm

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has decided to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione. The press release says:

“Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson — an innocent man and father of two young children — was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America. After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.” Continue reading . . .

Louisiana Nitrogen Execution

by · Mar 20, 2025 2:50 pm

AP has this report by Sara Cline on Tuesday’s execution via nitrogen gas in Louisiana.

Jessie Hoffman Jr., 46, was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, authorities said, adding the nitrogen gas had flowed for 19 minutes during what one official characterized as a “flawless” execution.

Witnesses to the execution said Hoffman appeared to involuntarily shake or had “some convulsive activity.” But the three witnesses who spoke — including two members of the media — agreed that, based on the protocol and what they learned about the execution method, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Continue reading . . .

Courts Block Executions in Texas and Louisiana

by · Mar 12, 2025 1:17 pm

On Tuesday the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals voted 6-2, with one abstaining, to stay the execution of, David Leonard Wood, “the Desert Killer.” On the same day a federal district judge in Louisiana stayed the nitrogen gas execution of a rapist/murderer, Jessie Hoffman, Jr. Alexis Simmerman, Amanda Lee Meyers and Aaron Martinez of the Austin American Statesman report that the Texas court did not state the reasons for staying David Leonard Wood’s execution in its per-curiam opinion. The same court blocked Wood’s execution in 2009 based on his lawyers claim that he was too mentally retarded to qualify for it.  Wood, an habitual sex offender, was convicted in 1987 of the kidnapping, rape and murders of six young women and girls, whose bodies were found in shallow graves in the desert near El Paso. Jurors heard testimony from two cellmates that Woods told about the killings.  A sex  worker also testified that Wood raped her in the same desert area, where the bodies were found, but she escaped when a noise startled him while digging her grave. Wood was convicted of that rape. His attorneys for the murder charges argued that all three were lying.

Continue reading . . .

Executive Order on Death Penalty

by · Jan 21, 2025 9:44 am

Among the torrent of executive orders issuing from the White House is one titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety.”

One of its provisions directs the Attorney General to assert federal jurisdiction and seek the death penalty “for every federal capital crime involving: (i) The murder of a law-enforcement officer; or (ii) A capital crime committed by an alien illegally present in this country.” We shall see how that works in actual practice.

Also included is a directive to help states obtain execution drugs and to get DOJ off its tush with certifying states under the comatose Chapter 154 fast track program.

Along with the latter, the illegal poison pill inserted by the Obama Administration on its way out the door needs to be repealed.
Continue reading . . .

Biden Pardon Misuse Escalates to Murderers

by · Dec 23, 2024 1:14 pm

President Biden’s misuse of the pardon power during the post-election period continues. He began with his influence-peddling, cocaine-snorting son, continued with a variety of undeserving miscreants, noted here, and now has expanding to reducing the sentences of 37 murderers. Jess Bravin has this story in the WSJ:

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said.

Mistake? Biden is the one who has un-condemned these justly sentenced murderers. He is the one who has compounded the “unimaginable and irreparable loss.” This move is not based on any individual problems with the cases but only on long-standing criticisms of capital punishment. So why didn’t Mr. Biden do this much earlier? Like, before the election? Because he knew that would have diminished his own electoral chances, before he dropped out, or his party’s afterward.

The 3:25 pm ET version of the WSJ story has these reactions:

“Joe Biden is using his last days in office to spare the worst monsters in America,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) said on X. “Democrats can’t even defend Biden’s outrageous decision as some kind of principled, across-the-board opposition to the death penalty since he didn’t commute the three most politically toxic cases.”

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, called the commutations “a gross miscarriage of justice.” Scheidegger, whose group advocates for crime victims and supports capital punishment, said the Constitution should be amended “to suspend the pardon power during the lame-duck period, as that is when the worst abuses occur.”

Continue reading . . .

Santa Clara County Judges Line Up with DA on Death Sentence Reversal

by · Nov 21, 2024 10:58 am

Ron Matthias and Dolores Carr have this op-ed in the San Jose Spotlight with the above title.

Since August, local judges have been nullifying murderers’ death sentences one by one. But there’s a problem: The law the judges have been relying on to reduce those death sentences doesn’t apply to death sentences. And that’s not the only problem.

It’s easy for judges to make mistakes when they’re hearing only one side of the story, and that’s what happened here. The reductions are coming at the insistence of Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, who has recently discovered he doesn’t like capital punishment. Unsurprisingly, the murderers feel the same way.

California law has a serious problem with statutes that effectively enable prosecutors to nullify existing sentences when they simply disagree with the law under which the perpetrator was properly sentenced years before. An initiative is sorely needed to fix this and other related problems, building on the success of the effort to enact Proposition 36 this year.

Continue reading . . .

A One-Sided Battle of the Experts

by · Nov 6, 2024 5:10 pm

Following up on Mike’s post earlier today. I obtained the federal district court opinion in Grayson v. Hamm, M.D. Ala. No. 2:24-cv-00376-RAH and uploaded it here. It makes interesting reading. Here is one passage:

The evidence here presents the classic battle of the experts, and a battle where one expert (Dr. McAlary) [the inmate’s] has no supporting case studies or other supporting medical testimony while the other (Dr. Antognini) [the state’s] does. And when considering these medical experts and their opinions in the context of the evidence on which they rely, Grayson’s expert finds himself without any real foundational support other than an unsupported opinion – no supporting articles or case studies, reliance upon highly questionable hearsay witness accounts, no support in Smith’s autopsy report for an upper airway obstruction that led to negative pressure pulmonary edema, untested reliance on proposed alternatives with their own set of risks and complications, unfounded theories of risks of mask leaks or monitoring device failures, and unfounded theories that the execution team cannot adequately monitor pulse oximeter or EKG devices or make the simple interpretations intended from them. As such, the Court finds Dr. Antognini and his opinions on these subjects more credible and persuasive than those of Dr. McAlary.

I find it appalling that so many medical professionals consider it perfectly okay to testify to junk science so long as it supports the preferred narrative. Continue reading . . .

SCOTUS’s Unclear Reversal of Capital Case It Deems “Unclear”

by · Nov 4, 2024 10:31 am

The U.S. Supreme Court has finally acted on Alabama’s petition in the case of murderer Joseph Clifton Smith. The high court’s repeated relisting of this case for consideration in an unprecedented number of conferences has drawn considerable speculation as to what was going on.

The high court did not take the case up for full briefing and argument but instead sent it back to the Eleventh Circuit for a do-over. That is most unfortunate, because they failed to clean up a mess of their own creation.

In the 1989 case of Penry v. Lynaugh, the Supreme Court ruled correctly that its precedent in Lockett v. Ohio requires capital sentencing juries to consider mental retardation (as it was then known) as a mitigating circumstance. (Whether Lockett itself was correctly decided is another question. See this article.) In 2002, the high court decided that wasn’t good enough, and it made mental retardation (as it was still known then) a categorical exclusion. Along with the constitutional problems, there is a huge practical problem. The Court tried to draw a bright-line rule with a paint roller.

Intelligence is a continuous spectrum, and the breakdown into categories is entirely a human construction. There are no natural dividing lines set by objective science. The lines are therefore subject to manipulation, as discussed in this post. Continue reading . . .

U.S. Supreme Court Takes Up Supervised Release Revocation Case

by · Oct 21, 2024 9:27 am

The United States Supreme Court issued an orders list this morning, taking up one criminal case. In Esteras v. United States, No. 23-7483, the high court will ponder what factors a federal district court may consider when deciding whether to revoke the supervised release of a federal convict. It is, once again, a question of interpretation of federal criminal statutes which will have little, if any, impact on the state courts that handle most criminal cases in this country. Continue reading . . .

Glossip Case in SCOTUS Tomorrow

by · Oct 8, 2024 11:11 am

The notorious case of Richard Glossip will be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow. With the Oklahoma Attorney General supporting Glossip, the court appointed an amicus, Christopher Michel, to defend the decision of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. CJLF’s amicus brief in the case is here. Our press release is here. Utah law professor Paul Cassell has a three-part series of posts at the Volokh Conspiracy titled Glossip v. Oklahoma: The Story Behind How a Death Row Inmate and the Oklahoma A.G. Concocted a Phantom “Brady Violation” and Got Supreme Court Review here, here, and here. Continue reading . . .