Latest news with #capitalpunishment
CBS News
21 hours ago
- CBS News
4 executions are scheduled in 4 different states this week, amid an uptick nationwide
Four executions are expected to take place in the United States this week, with two scheduled Tuesday and one each on Thursday and Friday. The executions were ordered in Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma and South Carolina. If all of the procedures are carried out as planned, the inmates' deaths will bring the national total of executions to 24 so far this year. While four inmates being scheduled to die in the same week is not an anomaly in the U.S., their executions present an overall uptick in the use of capital punishment nationwide since January. They also come as the Trump administration seeks to resume death row executions at the federal level. Here's what to know about the executions that have been ordered this week. Gregory Hunt, Alabama Alabama inmate Gregory Hunt, 65, is scheduled to die by nitrogen hypoxia on Tuesday, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced in May. Hunt received capital punishment after his conviction for the 1998 murder of Karen Lane, according to the state's Department of Corrections. The death warrant, signed by Ivey, established a 30-hour time frame for the execution to occur, starting at 12 a.m. local time Tuesday and ending on Wednesday, at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. Hunt will be the fifth person in Alabama to die by nitrogen hypoxia — a controversial method in which the inmate is deprived of oxygen through inhalation of pure nitrogen. As states that still practice capital punishment faced difficulties obtaining drugs for lethal injections, nitrogen hypoxia was developed as a workaround to the primary method used around the country. Execution by nitrogen asphyxiation has been the subject of intense public scrutiny within the U.S. and overseas, with U.N. human rights advocates arguing that it "could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment under international human rights law." Alabama carried out the country's first known execution with method on Kenneth Smith in January 2024. Since then, Louisiana became the only other state to execute a death row inmate with nitrogen gas in March of this year. Anthony Wainwright, Florida Florida inmate Anthony Wainwright, 54, is scheduled to die by lethal injection potentially as soon as Tuesday. His death warrant, issued by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, set a weeklong window for the execution to take place at the Florida State Prison in Raiford. The window starts at 12 p.m. local time on Tuesday and closes at 12 p.m. the following Tuesday, June 17. Wainwright's execution will be the sixth in Florida in 2025. Wainwright was sentenced to death in 1995, after receiving multiple convictions related to a "crime spree" the previous year, which included the abduction and murder of Carmen Gayheart, according to court documents. He and an accomplice, Richard Hamilton, were found to have committed the crimes after escaping prison in North Carolina in 1994. John Fitzgerald Hanson, Oklahoma The execution of John Fitzgerald Hanson, also known as George John Hanson, 60, is scheduled for Thursday in Oklahoma, following his transfer from a Louisiana federal prison earlier this year. It will be the state's second execution this year. Hanson was convicted of capital murder in Oklahoma for the 1999 death of 77-year-old Mary Bowles in Tulsa, according to court records. In order to carry out Hanson's death sentence, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond requested his extradition back into the state from Louisiana, where the inmate had been incarcerated for decades while serving a separate life sentence for robbery. Stephen Stanko, South Carolina South Carolina is set to execute Stephen Stanko, 57, by lethal injection Friday for the 1997 murder of Laura Ling. It will be the state's fourth execution this year and its second using lethal drugs. The two death row inmates in South Carolina died by firing squad this year after the state legislature approved the method partly due to prison officials not being able to obtain drugs needed for lethal injections. Both of the inmates chose to die by bullets instead of lethal injection or the electric chair.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Woman wrongly held for years on US death row dies in Irish house fire
After enduring hellish years on America's death row for a crime she did not commit, Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs found an idyll, and healing, in rural Ireland. But in a final, cruel twist, her sanctuary claimed her life. Jacobs, 78, and her carer, Kevin Kelly, were found dead on Tuesday after a fire at her cottage near the village of Casla, in County Galway. It was a tragic end to a remarkable life that was chronicled in books, a play and a film and made Jacobs a symbol of second chances and the campaign against capital punishment. Emergency services were alerted to the blaze at 6.19am and pronounced Jacobs and Kelly, a local man in his 30s, dead at the scene. Police are examining the bungalow to determine the cause of the fire. The news prompted grief and tributes from Jacobs' friends and supporters. 'Sunny was a fierce advocate for justice and a guiding light,' the Sunny Center Foundation, a nonprofit she founded that campaigns against wrongful convictions, said in a statement. 'Fair winds and full sails on your crossing, Sunny. Your memory is a blessing to us.' In 1976, Jacobs was a 28-year-old American hippy travelling in Florida with her 10-month-old daughter Christina, nine-year-old son Eric, and boyfriend Jesse Tafero, Christina's father. They accepted a lift from an acquaintance, Walter Rhodes, unaware he had a criminal record and had broken parole conditions. At a traffic stop, Rhodes shot dead two police officers and sped away with his passengers. He later surrendered, and in a plea deal he blamed the murders on Jacobs and Tafero, who were sentenced to death despite both maintaining their innocence. Rhodes later confessed to the murders, although he subsequently recanted. Tafero was executed in 1990. A malfunctioning electric chair meant it took several attempts and 13 minutes to kill him. Flames reportedly shot out of his head. Jacobs spent 17 years in prison, including five years in a tiny, windowless cell on death row and in solitary confinement, before being exonerated and released in 1992, aged 45. During her incarceration, her parents died in a plane crash, further traumatising her children. Christina was put into foster care and Eric, then in his mid-teens, supported himself as a pizza delivery boy. Jacobs sought to rebuild a bond with her children and to live without bitterness, drawing in part on the yoga and meditation that had sustained her in prison. In 1998 she visited Ireland to speak at an Amnesty International event and met Peter Pringle, a Dubliner who had been condemned to death and served 15 years in prison for the murder of two gardaí, John Morley and Henry Byrne, during a bank robbery, before the conviction was quashed and he was released. Jacobs married Pringle and lived with him in Galway's Irish-speaking Gaeltacht area. They grew vegetables, shared their home with dogs, cats, hens, ducks and goats and each published memoirs. Jacobs' story was included in a play, The Exonerated, that was performed in New York, Edinburgh and London and was turned into a film in 2005. She was played by actors such as Mia Farrow, Lynn Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, Kathleen Turner, Brooke Shields and Marlo Thomas. Jacobs gave talks, set up the Sunny Center Foundation and, despite meagre income, shared an apparently happy life with Pringle. 'Everyone gets challenged in life and you can either spend the rest of your life looking backwards or you can make a decision to keep going. That's the choice I made,' she told the Guardian in 2013. Pringle died in 2023, aged 84. In recent years Jacobs suffered from ill health and disability, but neighbours said she remained upbeat and mentally sharp in her adopted homeland. 'The stone in the west of Ireland makes me feel grounded; it anchors me,' Jacobs once told an interviewer.
South China Morning Post
26-05-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
New book examines evolution of justice during Hong Kong's death penalty era
In 1904, Hong Kong's Supreme Court held a maiden sessions: no criminal cases were recorded for the whole month of November. Following an English tradition to mark the occasion, the chief justice, Sir Henry Berkeley, was presented with a pair of white gloves by the registrar 'in token of the spotless innocence of the whole population'. Berkeley replied how remarkable the achievement was in a place like Hong Kong, with its vast, transient class of villains. He attributed the success to 'dealing with criminals by deportation', i.e. sending them across the border to China. That month's maiden sessions was estimated to be the eighth in Hong Kong's history and there would be seven more. (The last was in 1960.) But, as Christopher Munn demonstrates in his book Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong (2025), the black caps donned by judges to hand down death sentences greatly outnumbered the white gloves; and much grey uncertainty stretched between the two. Readers will come away with the uneasy sense that some innocents – not exactly spotless but almost certainly not guilty – went to the gallows condemned by cultural confusion, inept translation, blind racism and what the English author E.M. Forster would have called 'muddle'. Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong (2025). Photo: courtesy Christopher Munn In fact, the phrase was first used by another chief justice, Sir Francis Piggott, in a 1908 murder case during which the defendants, who both spoke the Hoklo dialect, hadn't understood the Cantonese-speaking witnesses or the English-speaking lawyers. After 14 minutes, the jury – hedging its bets – had found them guilty of manslaughter. Their counsel then objected to the lack of an interpreter; the prosecutor, in his turn, objected to the potential nuisance of, say, three prisoners speaking three dialects, each requiring translations. Piggott stated that providing interpreters, inconvenient though it would be, was 'one of the penalties of Empire'. The Hoklo men were acquitted. 'It's one example – of many – how the colonists regarded themselves as victims rather than perpetrators,' says Munn. 'But I would say that the Hong Kong experience in criminal justice was not as extreme as some other places, particularly India. There was a reasonable concentration of fairly able lawyers who were, mostly, on the commercial side but did criminal work as well. And because there was legal aid in capital cases from a fairly early date, Hong Kong was not the worst.' Penalties of Empire tracks the colony's forensic experience across nine capital trials dating from 1857 to 1934. These, he explains, were chosen partly because of good source material and partly to illustrate judicial turning points, such as the legal-aid provision or the creation of the Court of Final Appeal. They are not typical of Hong Kong's capital trials, which mostly consisted of murders committed during robberies or quarrels; nor are they written in the breathless style of true-crime, cold-case-exhumed podcasts. 'I didn't want to retry any of these cases,' he says. 'I wanted it to be an exploration of how the justice system works in reality, not how it was said to work, so I focus more on what's going on in the courtroom and among the various people involved. I wanted it to be a more sober, rather than sensational, account and as matter-of-fact as possible.'
CTV News
22-05-2025
- CTV News
Tennessee man is executed for killing his wife and her 2 sons, 3 years after last-minute reprieve
Capital punishment protesters pray on the grounds of the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution before the scheduled execution of inmate Oscar Smith, April 21, 2022, in Nashville, Tenn. AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File) NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee inmate Oscar Smith was executed by lethal injection on Thursday morning for the 1989 murders of his estranged wife Judith Smith and her teenage sons, Jason and Chad Burnett. Smith, 75, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital at 10:10 a.m. The 75-year-old had maintained his innocence, and in a lengthy series of final words, in part said, 'Somebody needs to tell the governor the justice system doesn't work.' Witnesses also heard Smith say, 'I didn't kill her.' In a recent interview with AP, he primarily wanted to discuss the ways he felt the court system had failed him. He was convicted of fatally stabbing and shooting Judith Smith, 13-year-old Jason Burnett and 16-year-old Chad Burnett at their Nashville, Tennessee, home on Oct. 1, 1989. He was sentenced to death by a Davidson County jury in July 1990 for the murders. In 2022, a Davidson County Criminal Court judge denied requests to reopen his case despite some new evidence that the DNA of an unknown person was on one of the murder weapons. The judge wrote that the evidence of Smith's guilt was overwhelming and the DNA evidence did not tip the scales in his favor. Two of Smith's co-workers testified at trial that he had solicited them to kill Judith Smith, and he had a history of threats and violence against her and the boys. Smith had also taken out insurance policies on all three victims. And one of the child victims could be heard yelling what prosecutors said was, 'Frank, no!' in the background of a 911 call on the night of the murder. Frank is Smith's middle name and the one that he used regularly. Darlene Kimbrough, who knows Smith through her visits to another inmate on death row over the past decade, said she sent him a card recently. It just said, '`I hope you know that you are loved,'' Kimbrough said. Unexpectedly, she received a letter in reply on Tuesday, thanking her. She thinks that Smith was at peace with the idea of death, she said. Tennessee executions have been on hold for five years, first because of COVID-19 and then because of missteps by the Tennessee Department of Correction. Smith came within minutes of execution in 2022 before he was saved by a surprise reprieve from Republican Gov. Bill Lee. It later turned out the lethal drugs that were going to be used had not been properly tested. A yearlong investigation turned up numerous other problems with Tennessee executions. The correction department issued new guidelines for executions in December. The new execution manual contains a single page on the lethal injection chemicals with no specific directions for testing the drugs. It also removes the requirement that the drugs come from a licensed pharmacist. Smith's attorney, Amy Harwell, has said, 'It's as if, having been caught breaking their own rules, TDOC decided, `Let's just not have rules.'' The new protocols are the subject of a lawsuit filed by Smith and other death row inmates. A trial in that case is set for next January. Travis Loller, The Associated Press
CTV News
21-05-2025
- CTV News
Tennessee prepares to execute Oscar Smith, 3 years after last-minute reprieve
Capital punishment protesters pray on the grounds of Riverbend Maximum Security Institution before the scheduled execution of inmate Oscar Smith, April 21, 2022, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey) NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Just over three years ago, Oscar Smith came within minutes of being executed before Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee issued a surprise reprieve that revealed problems with the lethal injection drugs. On Thursday, the state is prepared to try again. Asked in a recent phone interview about coming so close to death in 2022, Smith declined to reflect very deeply on it but instead expressed a wish that Lee had not intervened, saying the past three years on death row have been 'more than hell.' Without going into specifics, he said conditions at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, have deteriorated, and he accused its officials of not following policies. Smith, 75, said he asked his family to stay away on Thursday and not witness his execution because 'they don't need to see anything like that.' Smith was convicted of fatally stabbing and shooting his estranged wife, Judith Smith, and her sons, Jason and Chad, 13 and 16, at their Nashville home on Oct. 1, 1989. A Davidson County jury sentenced him to death the following year. Some relatives of Smith's victims do plan to attend the execution, Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson Dorinda Carter said in an email. The Associated Press requested to interview relatives through the Tennessee Attorney General's victim services office, but no one agreed to be interviewed. 'My own personal minister will be with me in the execution chamber with her hand on my shoulder praying,' Smith said. He is grateful for that, but also worried about her. 'I'm having a real hard time adjusting to the idea of having a young lady in the execution chamber,' he said. 'She doesn't need any bad experiences.' Smith will be the first Tennessee inmate to be executed under a new lethal injection process released in late December that uses a single dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital. While the method is new to Tennessee, it has been used by other states and the federal government. A review of the drug under President Joe Biden's administration led then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to halt its use in federal executions, finding it had the potential to cause ' unnecessary pain and suffering.' New Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered the Justice Department to reconsider that decision. Smith is suing Tennessee over the update to the execution protocols, arguing TDOC failed to follow the recommendations of a yearlong independent investigation called for by Lee in 2022. However, that trial is not until next January — too late to change anything for Smith. Only Lee has the power to stop the execution. He said on Tuesday that he plans to let it go forward. While lethal injection is the state's preferred method of execution, some Tennessee inmates in recent years have exercised the option of death in the electric chair, expressing the opinion that it would be quicker and less painful. Smith, too, had the option to choose the electric chair, but declined to make a choice. 'Because of my religious beliefs, I wouldn't participate or sign anything,' he said. 'I was taught that taking your own life, or having anything to do with it, is a sin.' Smith has continued to claim that he is innocent. In a phone interview on May 7 — shortly before he was to begin a 14-day period of relative isolation that is part of the new Tennessee execution protocol — Smith mostly wanted to discuss his case and the various ways he feels his trial was unfair. In 2022, a Davidson County Criminal Court judge denied requests to reopen his case after a new type of DNA analysis found the DNA of an unknown person on one of the murder weapons. 'Now that I could rebut everything they used against me, the courts don't want to hear it,' is the way Smith sees it. He says he wants a new trial and 'to be found truly innocent by a jury of my peers.' However, the judge who declined to reopen his case found the evidence of Smith's guilt extensive, citing prior threats and a life insurance policy taken out by Smith for the three victims. Speaking about the execution, Smith said, 'It sounds like we're going back to medieval times, to the gladiators. People want to see blood sports. 'Why anyone wants to see anyone being killed, I don't understand it. We're supposed to be a civilized country.' Travis Loller, The Associated Press
