Category: Death Penalty

…alternative methods will be found.  Since, as the Court held in Glossip, “the death penalty is constitutional,” and since a majority of our citizens continue to support it, and since gruesome murders continue to be committed that warrant it, we will continue to administer it.  This is true despite false claims that “the death penalty is dying.”  Instead, over the last five years, we have had an average of one execution every 17 days, and, after years of decline (as the murder rate declined), support for capital punishment has held stable at 55% over that time.

The latest news is from South Carolina, which is bringing back firing squads.

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As Kent reported yesterday the Supreme Court granted the government’s petition for cert in the Boston Marathon bomber case.  The questions presented are whether the trial court held a sufficiently extensive voir dire, and whether it erred by excluding evidence that the bomber’s older brother was allegedly involved in different crimes two years before the Boston Marathon murders.

I spent the first few years of my career at the Justice Department answering defendants’ petitions for cert.  The thing that immediately struck me about the government’s cert petition was that the questions presented went only to the application of reasonably settled law to the facts of an individual case.  That is generally a classic formulation of a reason that the Court will not grant review.  There is no broadly applicable area of law in need of elaboration, and no circuit split.

It could be that the case is sufficiently notorious that the Court thought it worthy of review simply standing on its own.  But that seems unlikely; the Court tends to use its scarce time to address contentious legal questions regardless of a case’s public notoriety.  So what’s going on? Continue reading . . .

Oklahoma’s highest criminal court has upheld the conviction and death sentence of a man who beheaded one woman and injured another in September of 2014.  The Associated Press reports that the court rejected murderer Alton Nolen’s not guilty by reason of insanity claim.  Abby Uhlheiser of the Washington Post reports that of Nolen, an habitual felon who converted to Islam while in prison,  had been suspended from his job at a food processing plant and sought revenge later that day.   That afternoon Nolan entered the company’s administrative office armed with a large serrated knife, and approached 54-year-old Coleen Hufford from behind.  In front of witnesses Nolen beheaded the woman and then attacked another female employee before a company security officer shot Nolen, stopping the attack.

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A unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the conviction and death sentence of habitual felon Robert Walden Jr.  for the rape and murder of one woman and the rapes of two others in 1991.  Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services reports that at the time of the murders, Walden was on probation for aggravated assault and kidnapping charges stemming from separate attacks on two woman.   On appeal Walden raised multiple claims challenging the photo lineup where his surviving victims identified him, the judge’s decision to allow a single trial for the rapes and the murder, and first time claims challenging the competence of his defense counsel.  The court rejected all of them.

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