Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Florida is preparing to execute a man convicted of raping and killing a college student in 1993 so he could steal her car. Barring a last-minute stay, 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch will be put to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison.
Senate Study Bill 3134 had been approved Monday by a Senate subcommittee on a 3-2 vote with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed. But Sen. Brad Zaun, R-Urbandale, chairman of the Iowa Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters Tuesday the bill won't be debated again this week, which means it will fail to meet a key legislative deadline.
The judge in the USS Cole terrorism case ordered prosecutors Tuesday to draft warrants instructing U.S. Marshals to seize two civilian defense attorneys who have quit the case and ignored his orders and a subpoena to appear at the war court. Air Force Col.
Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, speaks during the session, "A North American Perspective on the Death Penalty: The American, Mexican and Canadian Experiences," on Friday during the ABA Midyear Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. . When it comes to imposing the death penalty, the United States has long outpaced North American neighbors Canada and Mexico, according to the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project.
One of two Wisconsin girls who tried to kill a classmate to win favor with fictional horror character Slender Man is being sentenced for her role in the attack. Attorneys for a former Dallas accountant condemned for fatally shooting his two young daughters while their mother listened helplessly on the phone hoped a federal court would keep him from being put to death.
The Ohio Supreme Court is weighing arguments from an ex-death row inmate that the state's capital punishment law is unconstitutional because judges and not juries hand down death sentences. Convicted killer Maurice Mason says the U.S. Constitution requires juries to impose death sentences.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in a case with a surprise plot twist: The jurors were told that the accused was guilty of a triple murder - not by the prosecutor, but by the defense lawyer. "There is no way reasonably possible that you can listen to the evidence and not come" to that conclusion, he said.
Anyone proposing the death penalty is either a complete fool, an incorrigible cynic or mentally disturbed - or all of these. A fool would not understand the overwhelming evidence for the conclusion.
But Texas still held more executions than any other state. "Prosecutors, juries, judges, and the public are subjecting our state's death penalty practices to unprecedented scrutiny," said Kristin Houl, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, in the release of the group's annual report .
This undated photo provided by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction shows Austin Myers. Lawyers for the condemned Ohio killer say it's "patently unfair" that he received the death sentence for killing a friend during a burglary when the man's accomplice, who delivered the fatal knife wounds, received a life sentence instead.
The Supreme Court won't take up a death penalty case from Alabama in which attorneys said African-American jurors were improperly excluded from the jury. The justices said Monday they would not take the case of Christopher Floyd.
Late one spring night in 1984, the doorbell rang at the home of Norman and Mary Jane Stout. The Stouts, married thirty years, with three grown kids, lived in Guernsey County, Ohio, about a hundred yards off Interstate 70. Norman was a heavy-equipment operator; Mary Jane, who once worked as an office manager, was a collector of Holly Hobbie plates and figurines.
The next hearing in the case of a Minnesota man sentenced to death for killing a University of North Dakota student in 2003 has been delayed six months. Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. of Crookston, Minnesota, is appealing his conviction and sentence for kidnapping and killing Dru Sjodin, of Pequot Lakes, Minnesota.
The U.S. Supreme Court won't reconsider the case of a death row inmate convicted in the slayings of five fellow inmates during a 1993 prison riot in Ohio.
A judge on Wednesday halted the execution of a man known as the Houston area's "Tourniquet Killer" so authorities can investigate an alleged scheme in which the inmate says a fellow death row prisoner asked him to confess to another killing. Anthony Allen Shore was scheduled to be given a lethal injection Wednesday evening, but the judge withdrew the execution warrant at prosecutors' request just hours before Shore was set to die.
Texas plans to execute on Wednesday a man convicted of raping and murdering five children and young women, using a tourniquet to torture and strangle his victims.
A man who became known as Houston's "Tourniquet Killer" because of his signature murder technique on four female victims was set for execution Wednesday evening. Anthony Allen Shore confessed to the four slayings after a tiny particle collected from under the fingernail of a 21-year-old murder victim was matched to his DNA.
Delaware's Supreme Court has rejected the latest appeal from a double murderer who narrowly avoided the death penalty for crimes he committed as a juvenile. In a one-page order dated Tuesday, the court upheld a judge's summary dismissal last year of an appeal by Michael Jones.
This undated photo provided by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, shows Michael Lambrix in custody. Lambrix is scheduled for execution Thursday, Oct. 5, 2017, for the 1983 killings of Clarence Moore and Aleisha Bryants near LaBelle, Fla.
For the second time since her contentious hearing for an appellate court slot, the religious practice of Amy Coney Barrett has come into question, unleashing a firestorm about what what many call an unconscionable questioning of her faith and religious practice. The first furor came during her initial September hearing, when Sen. Diane Feinstein, referring to an article Barrett wrote about potentially having to recuse herself from death penalty cases because of her Catholic faith, questioned whether said Catholicism would prevent her from the fair adjudication of cases: Whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma.