Free Republic

The man who killed 9-year-old Matthew Cecchi of Oroville, California, in 1998, was found hanged in his cell on death row on Thursday. Since the state re-instituted capital punishment in 1978, 86 inmates have died — 54 of natural causes, 19 by suicide and 13 by actual execution. I am sure that someday the argument will be that death row is cruel and unusual punishment because it “drives” so many people to suicide. The murder of Matthew Cecchi led to the Matthew Cecchi Public Safety Act, which provides for family restrooms in parks in San Diego. Erika Lyn Smith explained...

Death-row inmates headed to their executions will no longer be able to pick what they’d like for their last meal. Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, issued this statement in response to concerns from Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire: “I believe Senator Whitmire’s concerns regarding the practice of allowing death row offenders to choose their last meal are valid. Effective immediately, no such accommodations will be made. They will receive the same meal served to other offenders on the unit.” Here’s the original post about Whitmire’s concerns: Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman...

A chilling look inside the minds of female prisoners unfolds on Thursday with the première of the new TLC show, Prison Diaries. The first episode of the series focuses on Emilia Carr, one of just 63 women on death row in the U.S. Carr is seen in ankle chains and handcuffs, led by a burly, fully-armed female guard as she leaves her cell. She wears bright orange overalls and trainers, her long, dark hair allowed to fall around her hunched shoulders.

Humberto Leal Garcia was executed in Huntsville, Texas, Thursday after being convicted of raping and murdering a 16-year-old girl in 1994. His death comes after failed attempts by his attorney as well as the Obama administration to delay his execution until the end of this year due to concerns of rights violations. According to the local newspaper, Huntsville Item, Garcia accepted responsibility for his crimes and appeared remorseful prior to his death. While he was lying “strapped to a gurney in the death house, he apologized for his actions and said he wanted Christ in his life.” “I’ve hurt a...

A bill that seeks to abolish California's death penalty advanced Thursday after its first legislative hearing with support from the author of the state's death penalty and a former warden who presided over executions. Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, said she introduced the bill because California can no longer afford a capital punishment system that is both expensive and ineffective as it battles persistent multibillion-dollar budget deficits. If eventually signed into law, the bill would put the question before voters in 2012. The Assembly Public Safety Committee voted 5-2 along party lines in favor of SB490 after hearing testimony from Sacramento...

Texas is set to execute on Thursday Mexican national Humberto Leal Garcia for the rape and murder of a teenage girl, defying pleas by the Mexican government and President Barack Obama to delay it because his consular rights were violated

<p>The Obama administration is taking the unusual step of asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Texas from executing a Mexican citizen who was convicted and sentenced to die for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl.</p> <p>The administration is asking the court to delay the July 7 execution of Humberto Leal, 38, for as long as six months to give Congress time to consider legislation that would directly affect Leal's case.</p>

SOME 300 drug traffickers are on death row in Iran, the judiciary has announced, reflecting Tehran’s hard line on narcotics which has added to international concerns over its extensive use of capital punishment. "For 300 drug-related convicts, including those who were in possession of at least 30 grammes of heroin, execution verdicts have been issued," Sharq daily quoted Tehran prosecutor-general Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi as saying yesterday. Although the list was long it did not contain any big-time traffickers or ringleaders, he said. All the convicts face death by hanging. Amnesty International says Iran is second only to China for the...

Mississippi is set to execute later on Tuesday a man convicted in 1999 of slaying four people, the first inmate in the state to be put to death using a new drug as part of the lethal injection. Benny Joe Stevens is scheduled to be executed shortly after 6 p.m. local time on Tuesday, according to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. He will be executed using the drug pentobarbital, a sedative often used to euthanize animals, because of a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental. Several states have switched to pentobarbital because of the shortage.

The Obama administration has launched a quiet campaign over the past two months to seize from local officials a key drug used in lethal injections -- part of a spreading investigation that has contributed to a de facto death penalty freeze in several states. The investigation stems from concerns about the overseas source of the drug, though some question whether those concerns make a handy excuse to slow the pace of executions. "States have death penalty laws, and the federal government is trying to make it harder for the states to execute those laws," Saunders said.

PHILADELPHIA -- A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered a new sentencing hearing for convicted police killer and death-row activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, finding for a second time that the death-penalty instructions given to the jury at his 1982 trial were potentially misleading. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals told prosecutors to conduct the new sentencing hearing for the former Black Panther within six months or agree to a life sentence. Abu-Jamal's first-degree murder conviction still stands in the fatal shooting of Officer Daniel Faulkner, who was white.

On the eve of his execution, a Texas death row is saying that he does not want to be the state’s guinea pig for the use of a new drug for lethal injection. Cleve Foster, who is accused of murdering Sudanese refugee Nyaneur Pal in 2002, is set to be executed on Tuesday, but he doesn’t want to be the first Texan to be executed with the new drug pentobarbital.

Prison officials say an inmate at San Quentin State Prison has died of natural causes while awaiting execution for a 1994 slaying in Sacramento County. The state corrections department says Richard Ray Parson died at an outside hospital Monday. He was 67.

Shirley Lynette Ledford was a pretty, 16-year-old teenage girl just coming into her own in 1979, the year she was kidnapped and murdered. She would have turned 48 this year. I got to thinking about her Wednesday after reading another story about how we can't seem to come up with a humane way to thin out the waiting list on San Quentin's death row without causing murderers too much pain and suffering. It's a hard argument to swallow when you know the pain and suffering Ledford went through at the end of her short life. I can still hear her...

The Indian government Wednesday said it would not abolish death penalty, but that capital punishment is awarded only to criminals involved in heinous crime considered as rarest of rare cases. "There is no proposal under consideration of the government to abolish capital punishment," Minister of State for Home Affairs Mullappally Ramachandran told the Indian Parliament in a written reply. Stating that since 2007, the UN General Assembly has adopted three resolutions titled "Moratorium on the use of the death penalty", the minister said that all these resolutions have been passed after a vote. But, he said that 141 countries had...

The state of Oklahoma is planning to execute death row inmates with drugs intended for use on animals. Lawmakers want to switch away from the only brand of anaesthetic that has been used in the US for lethal injections because there is not enough to go around. The replacement is likely to attract controversy because it is currently used by vets to anesthetise animals for operations. Other states are watching closely and may well follow suit, but such a move is likely to face a challenge from human rights groups to ensure that it is safe to use.

Excuse the vanity please. The Rats remind of a death row inmate who gets a 3 month stay as he's walking to the gas chamber. You can tell they fully expected to lose the Senate and maybe 80 seats or more in the House. They were scared. In a few days they'll again begin to realize their dire plight.

The state of Arizona executed a convicted murderer on Tuesday night despite objections from attorneys that the state would use a non-approved drug from overseas for the lethal injection. Just hours before Jeffrey Landrigan's death, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to lift a stay issued by a federal judge to halt the execution. "There is no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug obtained from a foreign source is unsafe," the Supreme Court said Due to a U.S. shortage, the state turned to a non-FDA approved drug. It was later revealed that the source was the U.K., although...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger delayed the state's first execution since 2006 by nearly two days Monday to allow more time for courts to consider the condemned inmate's appeals. Albert Greenwood Brown is now scheduled to die by lethal injection at 9 p.m. Thursday, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

BREAKING: Schwarzenegger delays California's first execution in nearly five years

Jarratt, Va. (CNN) -- Teresa Lewis, a 41-year-old grandmother, met with family members and a spiritual adviser Thursday, hours before she was scheduled to be the first woman executed in Virginia in nearly a century. Lewis is set to die by lethal injection at 9 p.m. ET at Greensville Correctional Center. The victims' family members are to witness the execution, state Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor said. The death row inmate pleaded guilty in the 2002 slayings of her husband and stepson in their rural home near Danville, Virginia, about 145 miles from Richmond.

RICHMOND, Va. -- Virginia was moving forward Thursday with its first execution of a woman in nearly a century amid appeals from the European Union and repercussions that reached as far away as Iran. SNIP Teresa Lewis, 41, was scheduled to die by injection at 9 p.m. at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt for the October 2002 hired killings of her husband and stepson. To procure the hit men, prosecutors said, she used sex, cash and a promised cut of the insurance benefits the killings would reap her. The U.S. Supreme Court and Gov. Bob McDonnell declined to intervene. All...

Virginia is slated to execute Teresa Lewis by lethal injection on Thursday, The Associated Press reported. The 41-year-old woman was sentenced to die after pleading guilty to capital murder for hiring two men to kill her husband and stepson so she could collect a $250,000 life insurance policy. Rodney Fuller and Lewis' lover, Matthew Shallenberger, entered her home on Oct. 30, 2002, and fatally shot Julian Clifton, Jr., 51, and Charles Lewis, 25. Teresa then rummaged through her husband's pockets for money while he was dying. She also waited nearly an hour before calling 911. The triggermen were sentenced to...

A man facing the death penalty in Fairfax County for two murders, and who was convicted of a third in California, is now a suspect in two more California homicides committed in the same fashion, his attorneys revealed in court Monday. If Alfredo R. Prieto is charged with the two slayings in Riverside County, Calif., he then will have been charged with six homicides and four rapes -- allegedly all of them committed at the time of the killings -- in slightly more than two years between 1988 and 1990. He has not been charged with the most recently revealed...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Lacking enough of the anesthetic essential to the cocktail of lethal drugs administered during executions, several US states are being forced to postpone the procedure until early next year. At the heart of the drug supply problem is Hospira, the only pharmaceutical company that produces the anesthetic sodium thiopental. "We are working to get it back on the market and we anticipate we will by 2011," Hospira spokesman told AFP. The US Food and Drug Administration does not approve the drug's use in lethal injections and Hospira does not sell it for that purpose, though prison officials...

A prison guard doing routine checks found a 70-year-old San Quentin inmate dead in his death row cell early Saturday, prison officials said. George Hatton Smithey apparently hanged himself with his bed sheets, Lt. Sam Robinson said. Smithey had been on death row since July 1989 for the 1988 murder and attempted rape of Cheryl Anne Nesler during the commission of an armed robbery and burglary, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement. Earlier this week a Calaveras County Superior Court judge reduced Smithey's sentence to life without the possibility of parole after prosecutors determined he...

Alonzo Hardy's confession paved the way for the exonerations of two Dallas County men wrongly convicted in a 1997 murder. But a court filing now claims Hardy was lying and promised money when he said he and another man were the real killers. Defense attorneys for the man Hardy claims was his accomplice, Don Michael Anderson, say Hardy was offered cash by the sister of one of the men originally arrested and later cleared in the murder. They say it was an elaborate scheme to spring the men from prison. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, a Democrat up for...

Actress and model Victoria Redstall believes an Oklahoma death row inmate set for execution in August is actually innocent. Prosecutors say Redstall is wrong and the twice-convicted man should be put to death. A blond British bombshell once portrayed as a serial killer's groupie has taken up the cause of saving an Oklahoma death row inmate from execution. Victoria Redtall - an actress, model, television host, weather girl, producer and game show contestant — vehemently repudiates the groupie label, saying she is an investigative journalist who has proved Jeffrey David Matthews is innocent. "I've made it my life's mission," Redstall...

Irving Davis, convicted of raping and killing a 15-year-old El Paso girl, has asked a Texas appeals court to throw out his death sentence, arguing that jurors should not have been told about his new religion — Satanism. The revelation, defense lawyers argue, violated Davis' free exercise of religion and improperly prejudiced jurors against the 27-year-old inmate. Prosecutors counter that allegiance to the Church of Satan was relevant information for jurors, who had to determine whether Davis should be put to death as a continuing threat to society.

Joseph Paul Franklin awaits his date with death. ​Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster is tired of Joseph Paul Franklin, the white supremacist and serial killer who claimed responsibility for shooting Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, breathing his state's air. Koster wants the Missouri Supreme Court to set an execution date for Franklin now that the U.S. Supreme Court has kicked out Clemons v. Crawford. The man who claims he and paralyzed Larry Flynt is on death row in Missouri. ​"Today's decision clears up any lingering ambiguities related to the constitutionality of Missouri's death penalty protocols," Koster said today in a...

Sometime after midnight Friday, Ronnie Lee Gardner is to be strapped into a chair in the execution chamber at the state prison in Draper, Utah. A black hood is to be slipped over the bald head of the 49-year-old convicted killer, if he wishes. A small circular target will be pinned over his heart. It has been 14 years since rifles were last fired in a state execution. Barring a last-minute reprieve, Gardner will be only the third person to die before a firing squad in Utah  or anywhere else in the nation  since the death penalty was...

POUND, Va. (AP) -- For seven days, Robert Gleason Jr. begged correctional officers and counselors at Wallens Ridge State Prison to move his new cellmate. The constant singing, screaming and obnoxious behavior were too much, and Gleason knew he was ready to snap. On the eighth day - May 8, 2009 - correctional officers found 63-year-old Harvey Gray Watson Jr. bound, gagged, beaten and strangled.....

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah is set to execute a convicted killer by firing squad in June after a judge agreed Friday to the inmate's request for the method, renewing a debate over what critics see as an antiquated, Old West-style of justice. Rest of story

SALT LAKE CITY -- Utah is set to execute a convicted killer by firing squad after a judge agreed Friday to the inmate's request for the method, renewing a debate over what critics see as an antiquated, Old West-style of justice. Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, was given the choice of being killed by lethal injection or shot by a five-man team of executioners firing from a set of matched rifles, a rarely used relic that harkens back to Utah's territorial history. "I would like the firing squad, please," Gardner told State court Judge Robin Reese Friday morning, after Reese told...

Since losing what may well be her last appeal in September, Linda Carty has had to deal with a lot of unsettling comments. 'They've come both from other inmates and guards,' she says. 'I hear them asking, "How come she's still here? How come she hasn't been executed?" All I can do is ignore it. 'Since the appeal, they've moved me to a cell that feels like it's 115 degrees inside. My nose bleeds every day - sometimes I get through four T-shirts. The doctor said the reason is the heat.' Carty, 51, who spoke last week to The Mail...

Kristie Reed was on the basement floor, her throat and wrists slashed. Her older sister, Stacie, was upstairs, dead from a stab wound to the heart. When police reached Kristie, who was then 14 years old, an officer leaned in and asked who had done this to her. Kristie mouthed two words: "Paul Powell." On Thursday night, more than 11 years later, Paul Warner Powell, 31, was executed in Virginia's electric chair. He was declared dead at 9:09 p.m. The Jan. 29, 1999, murder of one sister and the rape and near-slaying of the other in Manassas were among the...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (Associated Press) -- The state of Texas has executed a Dallas-area man convicted of fatally shooting a Brazilian engineer. Thirty-two-year-old Michael Sigala received a lethal injection Tuesday night for the August 2000 fatal shooting of 28-year-old Kleber Santos, whose job had brought him to Texas shortly after he was married. Santos' wife was also killed in the attack at their apartment in the Dallas suburb of Plano. Sigala was charged with the wife's slaying but was not tried.

FLORENCE, Ariz. — The oldest death row inmate in the U.S. has died of natural causes at age 94. An Arizona Department of Corrections spokesman says Viva Leroy Nash died late Friday at the state's prison complex in Florence. Nash was still on death row, but spokesman Barrett Marson said Sunday he did not know if Nash died in his cell or in a medical facility at the prison. Nash was born in 1915 and had a criminal record dating to the 1930s. He spent 25 years in prison for shooting a Connecticut police officer in 1947, and was sentenced...

FLORENCE, Ariz. (AP) -- The oldest death row inmate in the U.S. has died of natural causes at age 94. An Arizona Department of Corrections spokesman says Viva Leroy Nash died late Friday at the state's prison complex in Florence. Nash was still on death row, but spokesman Barrett Marson said Sunday he did not know if Nash died in his cell or in a medical facility at the prison. Nash was born in 1915 and had a criminal record dating to the 1930s. He spent 25 years in prison for shooting a Connecticut police officer in 1947....

<p>The oldest death row inmate in the U.S. has died of natural causes at age 94.</p> <p>An Arizona Department of Corrections spokesman says Viva Leroy Nash died late Friday at the state's prison complex in Florence.</p> <p>Nash was still on death row, but spokesman Barrett Marson said Sunday he did not know if Nash died in his cell or in a medical facility at the prison.</p>

Saddam Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majeed -- also known as Chemical Ali -- was executed Monday, an Iraqi government spokesman said. He was hanged after having been convicted on 13 counts of killings and genocide, Ali al-Dabagh said.

San Quentin death-row inmate Justin Helzer, convicted in 2004 of murdering five people, including the daughter of blues guitarist Elvin Bishop, tried to kill himself and is hospitalized in critical condition, sources confirmed Friday. The sources said Helzer apparently tried to kill himself by jamming pens in each of his eyes. Although he didn't kill himself, the sources said Helzer did succeed in paralyzing himself on the right side and causing a level of brain damage that has yet to be determined.

Gov. Bob McDonnell may have ended plans to transfer to Germany a killer serving two life terms in Virginia. The issue, however, might not be over. Before he left office last week, then-Gov. Timothy M. Kaine approved a request from the German government asking the U.S. Department of Justice to transfer Jens Soering, 43, to his native Germany.

Anti-death penalty movement wooing conservatives LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Roy Brown seems like a rarity — a conservative who's against the death penalty. But to Brown, a state senator and the 2008 Republican nominee for governor of Montana, the philosophy aligns perfectly with conservative ideology. He's one of the more high-profile figures reaching out to other social and fiscal conservatives, hoping to create a bipartisan movement against capital punishment. "I believe that life is precious from the womb to a natural death," Brown said. The Roman Catholic church has long been an organized and vocal critic of the death penalty, but...

Saddam Hussein's notorious cousin "Chemical Ali" has been sentenced to death by hanging for his involvement in a poison gas attack on the city of Halabja. Families of some of the 5,000 Kurds killed in the 1988 attack cheered when the guilty verdict against Ali Hassan al-Majid was handed down Sunday. Other officials in Saddam's regime, including former Defense Minister Sultan Hashim al-Taie, also received jail terms at the Iraqi High Tribunal. The brutal attack on Halabja close to the Iranian border 22 years ago killed mostly women and children through a series of mustard and nerve gas bombings by...

Execution set for Thursday Julius Young beat a Tulsa woman and her 6-year-old son to death in 1993. His execution will be the state's first for the year. DEATH ROWJulius Ricardo Young: The 60-year-old was convicted of the beating deaths of Joyland Morgan and her 6-year-old son, Kewan. Their bodies were discovered in separate rooms of their apartment on Oct. 1, 1993. Evidence indicated that Young broke into their Tulsa home and beat the woman and child with a blunt instrument.   By DEON J. HAMPTON World Staff Writer Published: 1/10/2010  2:26 AM Last Modified: 1/10/2010  4:46 AM A death-row inmate...

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- The death sentence of a Florida man convicted of the 1981 killing of a convenience store clerk has been vacated because his IQ is too low. A judge in Daytona Beach last month signed an order setting aside the death sentence for Ted Herring. Circuit Judge Joseph Will wrote in his decision that Herring has significant limitations in his functioning. The state Attorney General's Office has appealed the decision to the Florida Supreme Court. If the order is affirmed, Herring will be sentenced to life in prison. A 2002 Florida law prohibits the execution of anybody...

<p>A 44-year-old Texas man was executed Thursday evening for raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl, despite pleas from his attorneys he was too mentally impaired to qualify for capital punishment.</p> <p>Bobby Wayne Woods received lethal injection about a half-hour after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt his punishment, which was delayed briefly until the high court ruled in his case. His lawyers had argued Woods was mentally impaired, making him ineligible for execution, and that previous appeals to spare Woods' life were unsuccessful because of shoddy work by his lawyer at the time.</p>

Shortly after a jury sentenced John "Jordan" Lewis to death yesterday for killing Philadelphia Police Officer Chuck Cassidy, Lewis' attorney made a prediction. "I told John at the end of the case that he's not going to be executed," said Michael Coard. "He looked at me like I was crazy." If history is any guide, Coard is probably right. Lewis became the 222d resident of Pennsylvania's death row and the seventh man sent there for killing a Philadelphia police officer. But since the death penalty was reinstated in the state in 1978, Pennsylvania has executed just three inmates, all of...