When Michael Tisius (photo, left) was 19, he participated in a jailbreak. He killed two unarmed guards, and landed on Missouri’s death row (see story here). Twenty-three years later, as his execution approached, Huffington Post ran a story (here) pleading for commutation of his death sentence.[...]
Posts Tagged ‘death penalty’
March 12th, 2023 - 11:28 pm § in Law and Courts
Texas death factory
No, not the Mexican border. The courtrooms of Harris County, Texas. This county’s judges send more people to death row than any other U.S. county. This isn’t some out of the way place where justice is meted out by cowboy judges to hapless defendants represented by country lawyers. Harris[...]
February 22nd, 2023 - 1:06 pm § in Law and Courts
What if a state refuses to obey the Supreme Court?
Arizona badly wants to execute cop killer John Montenegro Cruz (photo, left), and has defied Supreme Court rulings standing in the way. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled that if prosecutors seek a death sentence by telling jurors a defendant is a threat to society, the judge must allow his attorneys [...]
Trump’s Supreme Court is a hanging court
The Supreme Court is no longer a place you can go to stop the execution of an innocent person, or of someone whose sentencing was influenced by racial bias. Since 2019, when Trump put his first two appointees on the court, the new conservative court majority hasn’t accepted a single death pena[...]
June 19th, 2022 - 5:55 pm § in Law and Courts
Why I’m for the death penalty
You can put names on my reasons. Timothy McVeigh, for example, the Oklahoma City bomber who murdered 168 people, including 19 kids, and injured 680 more with a truck bomb in 1994 and was executed in 2001. Today’s name: Ricky Dubose. He was convicted this month of murdering two prison guards du[...]
May 24th, 2022 - 7:18 pm § in Law and Courts
SCOTUS reactionaries are blind to dubious death sentences
The Supreme Court’s conservatives don’t want federal judges to consider death row inmates’ innocence claims. Still want to argue they’re pro-life? Read story here. Clarence Thomas finally got to do what he’s been itching for years to do: Write a majority opinion saying [...]
May 11th, 2022 - 4:48 pm § in Law and Courts, Racism
He was innocent, but they didn’t execute him like Texas would have
Claude Garrett of Tennessee served 30 years of a life sentence before the state decided the fire that killed his girlfriend was an accident. But at least they didn’t kill him. After a judge ruled Garrett, now 65, demonstrated “actual innocence” he was released from prison on Tuesda[...]
October 28th, 2021 - 11:05 pm § in Law and Courts
Oklahoma botches 3rd consecutive execution
States using lethal injection to execute killers struggle to get execution drugs because pharmaceutical companies won’t provide them. So prison officials get creative. They go to compounding pharmacies that create the drugs for them. It doesn’t always work as it should. In fact it often [...]
May 10th, 2021 - 10:49 pm § in Law and Courts
If Arkansas executed the wrong man and the real killer is caught, can he claim double jeopardy?
Debra Reese, 26, didn’t die of natural causes. She was beaten and strangled in her home. After losing the 2020 election, Trump went on an execution spree, relieving 6 federal death row inmates of their lives before incoming President Biden could get a chance to spare them. In 2017, Arkansas Go[...]
September 23rd, 2020 - 1:19 am § in Law and Courts
He had it coming
This article is news with not-so-liberal commentary. William Emmett LeCroy (photo), 50, was executed on Tuesday, September 22, 2020, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, for the 2001 rape and murder of a Georgia nurse he believed had put a hex on him. (Read story here.) LeCroy was a neighb[...]