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Florida on Wednesday executed a Tampa-area man who murdered his estranged wife and her young son in 1985, two years after he had been paroled for killing his previous spouse. It was the third U.S. execution in less than 24 hours since a botched April lethal injection in Oklahoma. John Ruthell Henry, 63, was pronounced dead at 7:43 p.m. after receiving a lethal injection for the stabbing death of Suzanne Henry. He also was convicted of stabbing her 5-year-old son, Eugene Christian, hours after the woman's murder.

Florida has executed a man who fatally stabbed his wife and her young son in 1985. It is the third U.S. execution in less than 24 hours since a botched April lethal injection in Oklahoma. The governor’s office says John Ruthell Henry was pronounced dead at 7:43 p.m. Wednesday. …

John Ruthell Henry is scheduled to die Wednesday for 1985 murders.A man who killed his estranged wife and her son two years after he had been paroled for murdering his previous spouse is scheduled to be executed this week, more than two decades after he was sentenced to death. John Ruthell Henry, 63, is scheduled to die Wednesday for the 1985 stabbing death of his wife, Suzanne Henry, in Pasco County. Gov. Rick Scott signed Henry's death warrant for that murder. He also was convicted in Hillsborough County of stabbing Suzanne Henry's 5-year-old son, Eugene Christian, near Plant City, hours...

<p>A Florida man was charged Friday in an alleged plot to lure a 9-year-old girl to a vacant home, kill the girl's family members and then videotape himself raping the child.</p> <p>State law enforcement officials said Friday that 29-year-old Shawn Thomas was charged with attempted premeditated homicide, attempting to commit capital sexual battery and possession of child pornography.</p>

James Herard came from a broken home. He was sexually abused by a family friend, and his mother inflicted forms of corporal punishment that some would consider abusive, a Broward jury was told Tuesday. And when Herard shot to kill during a string of violent robberies in 2008, it excited him. "I got a deranged mind," Herard said during an interview with detectives in late 2008. "It's like sex to me. I enjoyed it."

On Thursday, the New Republic published a series of photos from a 2006 botched lethal injection in Florida, weeks after the details of a similarly problematic procedure in Oklahoma made national news. The 2006 lethal injection death of Angel Diaz was well-reported at the time, but magazine editor Ben Crair's discovery of the photos — submitted as evidence during an appeal of a separate court challenge to lethal injections — adds a new depth to the conversation of the reality of modern capital punishment.   Diaz likely died a painful death. "Angel Diaz winced, his body shuddered and he remained alive...

Texas’ prison system doesn’t have to reveal where it gets its execution drugs, the state attorney general said Thursday, marking a reversal by the state’s top prosecutor on an issue being challenged in several death penalty states. Attorney General Greg Abbott, the Republican nominee for governor in the nation’s busiest death penalty state, had rebuffed three similar attempts by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice since 2010. His decision can be appealed to the courts. […] The issue has put Abbott in a thorny position during an election year in Texas, where the death penalty is like gun rights: Candidates...

The Supreme Court gave greater protection Tuesday to death row inmates seeking to prove they should not be executed because they are intellectually disabled, and ruled that laws like those in Florida and Virginia are too rigid. The court ruled 5 to 4 that state laws that draw a bright line on IQ-test results are unconstitutional. Under those laws, an inmate who scores above 70 on the test cannot be considered intellectually disabled and cannot present evidence that he or she should not be executed. Florida, Virginia and Kentucky have such laws, and a handful of others have similar rules....

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that Florida’s law restricting death row prisoners from trying to prove they are mentally impared is unconstitutional. Florida’s law mandates that prisoners must have an IQ of less than 70 “before being permitted to present any additional evidence of intellectual disability.” Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered the opinion, arguing Florida’s law violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. “This rigid rule creates an unacceptable risks that persons with intellectual disability will be executed, and thus is unconstitutional.”

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee has decided how it will respond to a nationwide scarcity of lethal injection drugs for death-row inmates: with the electric chair. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill into law Thursday allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event prisons are unable to obtain the drugs, which have become more and more scarce following a European-led boycott of drug sales for executions. Tennessee lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the electric chair legislation in April, with the Senate voting 23-3 and the House 68-13 in favor of the bill. Tennessee is the first state to...

Tennessee has decided to bring back the electric chair. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam on Thursday signed a bill into law allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event the state is unable to obtain drugs used for lethal injections. […] Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said Tennessee is the first state to enact a law to reintroduce the electric chair without giving prisoners an option. …

A self-proclaimed Satanist who claimed to have killed almost two dozen people could face the death penalty in the killing of a man she and her husband are accused of luring to his death through a Craigslist ad, a Pennsylvania judge ruled Monday.

A Missouri inmate facing execution next week says he is scared that the lethal drug could cause him to suffer...

The botched execution of a brutal murderer in Oklahoma has done nothing to change American minds about the death penalty, but does have them looking to the past for better solutions. A new NBC poll shows the death penalty enjoying a significant level of public support — more than many other government policies — if still down from its peak twenty years ago: A badly botched lethal injection in Oklahoma has not chipped away at the American public’s support of the death penalty, although two-thirds of voters would back alternatives to the needle, an exclusive NBC News poll shows....

A federal appeals court has stayed the Texas execution of a convicted rapist and murderer, saying that his defense team should have more time to make their case that Campbell is intellectually disabled. Robert James Campbell's execution had been scheduled for Tuesday. It would have been the first execution in the United States since a botched lethal injection in Oklahoma left an inmate writhing in pain before death. His defense team now will have more time to appeal his death sentence. "It is regrettable that we are now reviewing evidence of intellectual disability at the eleventh hour before Campbell's scheduled...

The death-penalty debate goes on. After a piece that I wrote about the debate last week, National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke wrote a response, followed later by a much stronger attack by the Washington Post’s Radley Balko. Cooke’s response was philosophical and drew a distinction between killing someone in self-defense and using the death penalty, though given the evidence that the death penalty deters murders and thus saves lives, that distinction isn’t as clear as he thinks. Balko, a blogger/reporter for the Washington Post, based his reply on empirical evidence. He puts a lot of faith in studies by...

After the recent mishandled execution in Oklahoma, in which the murderer ended up dying from a heart attack, death-penalty opponents pounced. Not surprisingly, the Sunday-morning talk shows focused on whether we should keep the death penalty. ABC News’s This Week was hardly a balanced panel, with four members wanting to abolish the death penalty and the fifth wanting “maybe a halfway point between eliminating it” and what we currently have. Let’s analyze the three main arguments made on ABC against the death penalty. 1. “Support for the death penalty has fallen from 80 percent in 1993 [actually 1994] to...

Last week, Oklahoma authorities botched the execution of a murderer named Clayton Lockett. The execution by lethal injection took more than 40 minutes. According to witnesses, he twitched and gasped and said, "oh, man" after officials had thought he was unconscious. Opponents of the death penalty outdid one another in expressing their outrage. It was the left's hysteria-of-the-week. In contrast, many Oklahomans were not nearly as upset. "Who cares if he feels pain," stylist April Sewell, at Hair Naturally in Perry told Oklahoma TV station KFOR. "You know, honestly, he's getting away a lot easier than how his victim...

The recent and ghastly botched execution of a man in Oklahoma has rekindled my thoughts on capital punishment -- a practice outlawed in most civilized countries. Indeed, most of the industrialized world looks with horror on the United States, in this regard, as a primitive and backward country. Just in passing fact, capital punishment was banned in the Netherlands in 1870, in Costa Rica in 1877, in Colombia in 1910. In allowing the death penalty, the United States stands with Libya, Uganda, Cuba, Egypt and Equatorial Guinea, among our other peers. It's a sad commentary on justice in this country...

With his decision Friday to inject himself and the White House into the death penalty debate, President Obama once again inflamed a racial controversy in the country – with the only apparent goal of benefiting the Democratic Party in upcoming elections. It’s Trayvon Martin all over again. In March 2012, President Obama was looking at a tough re-election fight when he used a White House news conference to inject himself and his office into the debate over the fatal shooting of the black Florida teenager. On Friday, looking at a disastrous mid-term election looming in November, he used a White...