Apr 14, 2021 · Texas’ highest criminal court tosses death sentence of Raymond Riles, state’s longest-serving death row inmate. Riles has been deemed mentally incompetent for execution repeatedly in his ...
Jun 13, 2019 · Stitt was convicted of ordering the murder of three people in Norfolk, Virginia. He was sentenced to death by a jury in November 1998 after a joint trial with three codefendants, who did not face the death penalty. Stitt’s death sentence was overturnedby a federal District Court judge in April 2005 because of ineffectiveness of counsel. In March 2006, a panel of the …
Apr 26, 2019 · John Thomas Alford was convicted and sentenced to death in 1975. Alford was tried with a codefendant who confessed to the murder. Alford presented evidence and witnesses that he was not at the scene of the crime, but he was not allowed to offer his codefendant’s confession as evidence of his innocence.
Oct 21, 2021 · WASHINGTON – An appeals court Thursday rejected an Arizona death-row inmate’s argument that his sentence was unconstitutional because his crime, burning a former roommate to death, was committed in a brief window when the state was revising its death penalty law. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also flatly ...
Gauger received a pardon based on innocence from Governor George H. Ryan in December 2002. In 2004 he received $60,150 from the Illinois Court of Claims, but a federal lawsuit against county officials was dismissed. Gauger later filed a lawsuit in McHenry County Circuit Court and a jury found against him.Apr 18, 2020
The study concluded that death row prisoners ""face a one-in-three chance of being executed without having the case properly investigated by a competent attorney or without having any claims of innocence or unfairness heard. ""
More than 185 people who were sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated and released since 1973, with official misconduct and perjury/false accusation the leading causes of their wrongful convictions.
(CNN) The death sentence of Julius Jones was commuted by Oklahoma's governor Thursday to life in prison without the possibility of parole, stopping his impending execution. Jones had been scheduled to be executed Thursday afternoon for the murder of Paul Howell in 1999. Jones, however, says he is innocent.Nov 18, 2021
Lawyers are drawn to capital work because of the role race and economic disadvantage play in the system, because they are philosophically opposed (either for religious or secular reasons) to capital punishment, because they self-identify as outsiders, and, perhaps most critically, because they have deeply held views ...Apr 20, 2020
According to James Pitkin (2008) “Advocates of the death penalty argue that it deters crime, is a good tool for police and prosecutors (in plea bargaining for example), makes sure that convicted criminals do not offend again and is a just penalty for atrocious crimes such as child murders, serial killers or torture ...
On June 23, 2000, Gary Graham was executed in Texas, despite claims that he was innocent. Graham was 17 when he was charged with the 1981 robbery and shooting of Bobby Lambert outside a Houston supermarket.
Payne, who is Black, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1987 for the murders of 28-year-old Charisse Christopher and her 2-year-old daughter Lacie, who were White.Feb 2, 2022
186Since 1973, 186 former death-row prisoners have been exonerated of all charges related to the wrongful convictions that had put them on death row.
The 2018 testing found there is one chance in 110 million that the DNA on the bandana does not match Jones. No blood or other biological material was found on the bandana and Jones' attorneys say that because the bandana was at his house, the DNA does not prove he wore it the night of Howell's murder.Dec 1, 2021
On the night of July 28th, 1999, Paul Howell was brutally murdered in front of his sister and two young daughters as he pulled his Suburban into his parents' driveway after an evening of back-to-school shopping. Julius Jones walked up to the car and put the gun to Paul's head, pulling the trigger.
Oklahoma's governor has halted the execution of prisoner Julius Jones hours before he was due to be put to death. Kevin Stitt said he was commuting the sentence to life imprisonment without parole.Nov 18, 2021
Despite several execution dates being set, he has repeatedly been deemed mentally incompetent to be put to death, instead lingering on the row and the prison’s psychiatric units for more than 45 years. At one point, he set himself on fire ...
Fierro, who had also been on death row for four decades for the murder of a taxi driver, was released on parole last year after the El Paso District Attorney decided not to again the seek death penalty.
On October 29, 2004, a jury recommended a death sentence for Ra’id for the murder of two white bank employees during a robbery attempt at a Porter, Indiana bank in 2002. Ra’id’s sentence will be the first one in the history of the Northern District of Indiana federal court system.
Mitchell was executed on August 26, 2020. Keith Nelson — White. Nelson was convicted of kidnapping a girl from her Kansas home and murdering her in Missouri. On November 28, 2001 a jury recommended the death penalty for Nelson, and on March 11, 2002, a federal judge imposed the death penalty.
Len Davis — Black. Davis, a New Orleans police officer who was under investigation in a drug conspiracy case, was sentenced to death on two convictions in April 1996 for ordering the murder of a young black woman who had previously seen him beat a witness in an unrelated incident.
Marvin Gabrion — White. On March 16, 2002, Marvin Gabrion was sentenced to death for a 1997 murder in Michigan’s Manistee National Forest. Although Michigan does not have the death penalty, Gabrion was sentenced under the federal system because the victim was killed on federal property.
Gary Sampson — White. Sampson pled guilty to the carjacking and murder of two Massachusetts men during a weeklong crime spree. A jury sentenced Sampson to death on December 23, 2003. Sampson is only the second federal case tried in Massachusetts since the federal government reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988.
Kenneth Lighty — Black. On Nov. 10, 2005, a federal jury in Maryland recommended a death sentence for Lighty for the kidnapping and murder of Eric Hayes (black), an alleged PCP dealer and son of a D.C. police lieutenant, in 2001. The kidnapping occurred in Washington, DC and the murder was committed in Maryland.
Joseph Ebron — Black. On May 11, 2009, a jury convicted Ebron of the 2005 murder of Keith Davis, also black , in a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas. The District Court judge followed the jury’s recommendation and condemned Ebron to death on May 18.
The original trial, however, was marred by corruption, as the the judge in the case, Circuit Judge Thomas Maloney, accepted a $10,000 bribe during the trial. Thomas Maloney, who died in 2008, was ultimately convicted and spent 13 years in prison for fixing murder trials.
During Hoffman’s first trial, the state’s key witness, Johnell Porter, received immunity from federal charges for testifying against his cousin. In fact, Porter received thousands of dollars for his testimony. Neither the defense attorney nor the judge knew of this deal—an omission that resulted in the criminal investigation of Ken Honeycutt and Scott Brewer, the prosecutors in the original trial.
Timothy Howard and Gary James were arrested in December, 1976 for a Columbus, Ohio bank robbery in which one of the bank guards was murdered. Both men maintained their innocence throughout the trial. In 1978, Ohio’s death penalty was held to be unconstitutional and all death row inmates were re-sentenced. Howard and James were given life sentences. With funding from Centurion Ministries of New Jersey, Howard and James were subsequently able to uncover new evidence not made available to their defense attorneys at the time of their trial, including conflicting witness statements and fingerprints. James agreed to and passed a state-administered polygraph test, prompting Franklin County prosecutor Ron O’Brien to dismiss all charges “in the interest of justice.” Howard was freed earlier on April 23 when Franklin County Common Pleas judge Michael Watson overturned his conviction, citing evidence not disclosed or available at trial. The state dropped its appeal of the judge’s ruling, thereby clearing him of the same charges. While O’Brien said that releasing the two men was an admission of a 26-year-old unsolved murder and robbery, “ [w]e don’t want anybody in prison serving time for something they didn’t do.”
With newly discovered confessions and DNA evidence pointing to the prosecution’s chief witness as the actual killer, Seminole County, Florida prosecutors dropped all charges against Honduran national Clemente Javier Aguirre. Aguirre was convicted and sentenced to death in 2006 of the murder of two neighbors—an elderly woman and her adult daughter—in 2004. He steadfastly maintained his innocence, saying he had discovered the women after they had been killed. He did not report the murders to authorities, he said, because he was an undocumented immigrant and feared deportation. The prosecution’s chief witness against Aguirre was Samantha Williams, the mentally ill daughter and grand-daughter of the victims. During the post-conviction process, Aguirre’s lawyers discovered that Williams had confessed to at least five different people that she had killed her relatives. None of the DNA found on the 84 items from the crime scene that were tested matched Aguirre. Most blood samples matched the two victims, and Samatha Williams’s DNA was found on eight bloodstains collected from four different rooms—including in the bathroom where the state had argued at trial that the killer would have cleaned up. Each of Williams’s samples was found inches away from the victims’ blood. On October 27, 2016, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously vacated Aguirre’s conviction and granted him a new trial.
The Florida Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction of death row inmate John Robert Ballard and ordered his acquittal in the 1999 murders of two of his acquaintances (Ballard v Florida, No. SC03-1012, February 23, 2006). The Court concluded that the circumstantial evidence against Ballard was insufficient to sustain his conviction. The state’s primary evidence presented against Ballard was a hair and a fingerprint, both of which he could have left during his many visits to the victims’ apartment. Bloody fingerprints and 100 other hair samples were found associated with the crime scene, none of them belonging to Ballard, who has always maintained his innocence. The Supreme Court’s acquittal in this case was rare. In fact, since 1976 the Florida Supreme Court has acquitted only three people of all charges.
Daniel Wade Moore was acquitted of all charges by a jury in Alabama on May 14. Moore was originally found guilty of the murder and sexual assault of Karen Tipton in 2002. The judge overruled the jury’s recommendation of a life sentence and instead sentenced him to death in January 2003, calling the murder one of the worst ever in the county. A new trial was ordered in 2003 because of evidence withheld by the prosecution. (See State V. Moore, No. CR-04—0805, Ala. Ct. of Crim. App. (2206) (providing procedural summary at pp.2-3; the circuit judge’s order for a new trial was upheld by the Ala. Supreme Court, State v. Moore, No. Ms. 1030218, Nov. 6, 2003)). A second trial in 2008 ended in a mistrial with the jury deadlocked at 8-4 for acquittal.
Former death row inmate Ricky Jackson was exonerated on November 21 in Ohio, after spending 39 years in prison. A judge in Cleveland dismissed all charges against Jackson, with the prosecution in agreement. Jackson was one of three men convicted of the 1975 murder of Harold Franks.
State: Kentucky#N#Lawyer: Ferdinand “Fred” Radolovich#N#Client: Jeffrey Leonard (a.k.a. James Earl Slaughter)#N#Circumstances: Leonard was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1983. It turned out that Radolovich, Leonard’s lawyer, had failed to investigate his background, and so had missed evidence that might have convinced a jury to spare his client’s life. (He’d also missed the fact that his client’s surname was Leonard—not Slaughter, a name with obvious downsides in a capital murder trial.) Radolovich ultimately surrendered his law license after being charged with perjury for claiming he’d handled four death penalty cases before Leonard’s—investigators discovered that he’d actually never been a lead attorney in a capital case.#N#Outcome: A federal district court granted Leonard a new sentencing, but in 2006, the 6th Circuit reversed the district court’s decision and reimposed the death sentence. The following year, Gov. Ernie Fletcher commuted Leonard’s sentence to life without parole, citing concerns about Radolovich’s lawyering.
Attorney: Norman Scott. Client: Willie Cooper. Circumstances: Cooper had already been convicted of killing his brother’s pregnant girlfriend when Scott rose during the trial’s penalty phase, intending to ask the jury to sentence his client to life without parole, rather than death. Here’s what he said:
State: Texas. Attorney: Jerome Godinich. Clients: Johnny Ray Johnson, Keith Steven Thurmond. Circumstances: Godinich missed the deadline for filing a federal appeal—a right guaranteed by the Constitution—in the unrelated capital cases of Johnson and Thurmond, who had been tried and sentenced to death.
State: Oklahoma#N#Lawyers: E. Melvin Porter and Johnny Albert#N#Client: James T. Fisher#N#Circumstances: Porter, a state senator at the time he represented Fisher, had an extraordinarily busy schedule, even by the standards of his profession; with Fisher’s 1983 trial approaching, he had at least 25 cases on the jury docket at the same time—and he had tried another capital case the week before Fisher’s. Not surprisingly, Fisher was found guilty of murder. During the sentencing phase, Porter waived his opening and closing statements. In fact, he spoke only nine words during the entire sentencing. “Four were the equivalent of judicial pleasantries,” wrote a federal appeals judge. And the “other five words formed an ill-founded, unsupported and ultimately rejected objection to one portion of the prosecutor’s closing argument.”#N#Outcome: Nineteen years after Fisher was sentenced to death, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals granted him a new trial based on Porter’s ineffectiveness. In 2005, he was retried, convicted, and sentenced to death again. He would eventually be granted yet another trial. His second-round lawyer, Johnny Albert, “spent less time working on cases and more time drinking beer and playing pool during work hours,” several appeals witnesses testified. In addition, Albert physically threatened Fisher at a pretrial hearing. Consequently, Fisher chose not to attend his own trial. Albert admitted that “his life began to crumble and he began drinking heavily and abusing cocaine,” around the time of the trial. Finally, in 2010, the Oklahoma authorities offered to release Fisher if he pleaded guilty to the 1983 offense and agreed to leave the state for good. He gladly accepted.
Capital jurisprudence is replete with examples of lawyers who were drunk or sleeping during trials, who demeaned their clients in front of the jury, who missed key deadlines or used a “one brief fits all” appeals format. Yet the quality of capital representation can literally be the difference between life and death.
For instance, the prosecutor must file a notice of intent to seek the death penalty within 60 days of the defendant’s arraignment (where the charges are formally announced), unless the parties agree to a different arrangement or the court finds good reason to allow a delayed notice.
When a prosecutor seeks the death penalty, the case is referred to as capital. A non-capital case is one in which the death penalty is not being sought. In those exceptional cases where execution is both permitted by law and sought by the prosecutor, certain factors must be in place in accordance with Utah Code § 76-5-202.
Attorney Darwin Overson has more than 16 years of experience defending clients against a wide variety of felony murder charges in Utah, including manslaughter, negligent homicide, child abuse homicide, and homicide by assault. To set up a free, confidential legal consultation, call Darwin at (801) 758-2287 right away.
In this article, Salt Lake City murder defense attorney Darwin Overson will explain when the death penalty is prohibited in Utah.