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Tag: capital punishment

  • China executes 4 more members of Myanmar-based group in crackdown on scam operations

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    Taipei, TAIWAN — China executed four people found guilty of causing the deaths of six Chinese citizens and running scam and gambling operations out of Myanmar worth more than $4 billion, authorities said on Monday.

    The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court in south China announced the executions in a statement Monday morning, though it was not clear when they had been carried out.

    The executions of 11 other people accused of running scam centers in Myanmar were announced last week.

    The Shenzhen court had sentenced five people, including members of the notorious Bai family, accused of running a network of scam centers and casinos, to death in November.

    One of the defendants, group leader Bai Suocheng, died of illness after his conviction, the court said.

    The group had established industrial parks in Myanmar’s Kokang region bordering China, from where they were accused of running gambling and telecom scam operations involving kidnappings, extortion, forced prostitution and drug manufacturing and trafficking.

    They defrauded victims of more than 29 billion yuan ($4.2 billion) and caused the death of six Chinese citizens and injuries to others, the court said.

    Their crimes “were exceptionally heinous, with particularly serious circumstances and consequences, posing a tremendous threat to society,” the court’s statement read.

    The defendants had initially appealed their verdict, but the Guangdong Provincial High People’s Court dismissed their appeals, it added.

    The executions are part of a broader crackdown by Beijing on scam operations in Southeast Asia, where scam parks have become an industrial scale business, especially in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. A mix of trafficked and willing labor there have carried out digital scams on victims around the world, including thousands of Chinese citizens.

    Authorities in the region face growing international pressure from China, the United States and other nations to address the proliferation of crime.

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  • Luigi Mangione will not face death penalty, judge rules

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    Luigi Mangione will not face death penalty, judge rules

    I’M JASON NEWTON AND I’M ASHLEY HINSON. LUIGI MANGIONE. DEFENSE ATTORNEYS WANT TO BLOCK CERTAIN EVIDENCE FROM HIS UPCOMING TRIAL. MAGGIONI IS ACCUSED OF KILLING UNITEDHEALTHCARE CEO BRIAN THOMPSON IN MANHATTAN. THAT WAS A YEAR AGO TODAY, THOUGH, POLICE OFFICERS FROM ALTOONA, PENNSYLVANIA, CONTINUE THEIR TESTIMONY ABOUT THE DAY OF MANGIONE’S ARREST. KHIREE JOINING US NOW IN KAI BODY CAMERA VIDEO PLAYED IN COURT TODAY, RIGHT? IT DID. AND ASHLEY JASON, THE BODY CAMERA VIDEO SHOWS THE MOMENTS AFTER POLICE RESPONDED TO THE ALTOONA MCDONALD’S WHERE THEY FOUND MANGIONE. THIS HAPPENED FIVE DAYS AFTER BRIAN THOMPSON’S MURDER. IN THE VIDEO, YOU CAN HEAR ONE OF THE OFFICERS SAY, QUOTE, IT’S HIM, DUDE, IT’S HIM. THAT’S IN REFERENCE TO PHOTOS CIRCULATING ONLINE SHOWING THE MAN POLICE SAY KILLED THOMPSON. ACCORDING TO OFFICER CHRISTINA WASSER, THEY BEGAN SEARCHING MANGIONE’S BAG AFTER PUTTING HIM IN HANDCUFFS. INSIDE THE BAG, THEY FOUND A LOADED GUN MAGAZINE. THE MAGAZINE WAS WRAPPED UP IN A PAIR OF UNDERWEAR. MANGIONE’S DEFENSE WANTS THE CONTENTS OF THAT BAG EXCLUDED FROM HIS TRIAL. THEY CLAIM OFFICERS DIDN’T HAVE A PROPER WARRANT TO SEARCH IT. TODAY, OFFICER WASSER SAID THAT SHE WAS FOLLOWING POLICE PROTOCOLS. THOSE PROTOCOLS, SHE TOLD THE COURT, REQUIRE OFFICERS SEARCH A SUSPECT’S PROPERTY AT THE TIME OF AN ARREST. OFFICER WASSER ALSO TESTIFIED MANGIONE WAS TOLD OF HIS RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT, WHICH HE INVOKED WHILE OFFICERS FOUND THE MAGAZINE AT THE SCENE. THEY DID NOT UNCOVER THE NOTEBOOK UNTIL THEY RETURNED TO THE POLICE STATION. MANGIONE HAS PLEADED NOT GUILTY TO STATE AND FEDERAL MURDER CHARGES. HIS TEAM TODAY ALSO CALLED ON A JUDGE TO BAN THE WORDS,

    Luigi Mangione will not face the death penalty for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, a federal district judge ruled.The decision is a loss for federal prosecutors, who were adamant about pursuing the death penalty in the case.This is a developing story and will be updated.

    NEW YORK —

    Luigi Mangione will not face the death penalty for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, a federal district judge ruled.

    The decision is a loss for federal prosecutors, who were adamant about pursuing the death penalty in the case.

    This is a developing story and will be updated.

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  • Florida sets execution date for man convicted of killing a traveling salesman

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    TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A man convicted of killing a traveling salesman during a robbery is set to become Florida’s first execution of 2026 under a death warrant signed Friday by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed off on a record 19 executions last year.

    Ronald Palmer Heath, 64, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Feb. 10 at Florida State Prison. DeSantis oversaw more executions in a single year in 2025 than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The previous record was set in 2014 with eight executions.

    Heath was convicted of first-degree murder, robbery with a death weapon and multiple forgery charges in 1990.

    According to court records, Heath and his brother, Kenneth Heath, met traveling salesman Michael Sheridan at a Gainesville bar in May 1989. After hanging out at the bar for some time, the three men agreed to go somewhere else to smoke marijuana.

    At some point, the brothers plotted to rob the other man, investigators said. Ronald Heath drove the group to a remote area, where Kenneth Heath pulled a handgun on Sheridan. The man initially refused to give the brothers anything, and Kenneth Heath shot Sheridan in the chest.

    As Sheridan emptied his pockets, Ronald Heath began kicking the man and stabbing him with a hunting knife, prosecutors said. Kenneth Heath then shot Sheridan twice in the head.

    The brothers dumped Sheridan’s body in a wooded area and returned to the Gainesville bar to take items from his rental car. The brothers made multiple purchases with Sheridan’s credit cards the next day at a Gainesville mall.

    Ronald Heath was arrested several weeks later at his Douglas, Georgia, home after investigators connected him to the stolen credit cards. Officers recovered clothing purchased with the stolen cards, as well as Sheridan’s watch, according to court records.

    Kenneth Heath was also charged with Sheridan’s murder, but he was sentenced to life in prison as part of a plea agreement.

    Attorneys for Ronald Heath are expected to file appeals to the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.

    A total of 47 people were executed in the U.S. in 2025. Florida led the way with a flurry of death warrants signed by DeSantis. The state’s final execution of 2025 was the Dec. 18 lethal injection of Frank Athen Walls, who was convicted of fatally shooting a man and his girlfriend during a home invasion robbery.

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  • Judge halts Georgia execution over inmate’s concerns about clemency process

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    KENNESAW, Ga. — A Georgia judge on Monday ordered a temporary pause to a December execution that was already put on hold, saying questions about the state’s clemency process must be addressed before Stacey Humphreys ‘ death sentence could be carried out.

    Humphreys, 52, was facing scheduled execution Dec. 17 but the procedure was paused just days before he was to have received a lethal injection.

    He was convicted of malice murder and other crimes in the 2003 shooting deaths of Cyndi Williams, 33, and Lori Brown, 21, at the real estate office where they worked in Cobb County, northwest of Atlanta.

    At issue: Humphreys’ lawyers contend that two members of Georgia’s parole board have conflicts of interest which would taint their participation in a clemency hearing.

    Humphreys’ lawyers earlier this month filed a petition asking a judge to order the two members of the parole board to recuse themselves from considering his clemency petition.

    The lawyers said one of those board members, Kimberly McCoy, was previously a victim advocate with the Cobb County district attorney’s office at the time of Humphreys’ trial and was assigned to work with victims in the case.

    Another board member, Wayne Bennett, was the sheriff in Glynn County, where the trial was moved because of pretrial publicity. Humphreys’ lawyers say Bennett oversaw security for the jurors and Humphreys himself during the case.

    In an order filed Monday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote that “pressing ‘pause’ on the execution machinery until we answer the non-frivolous question raised by Petitioner concerning the proper composition of the Board for his clemency hearing is the correct course of action.”

    He ordered lawyers for both sides to file additional legal briefs on the issue by Jan. 19.

    Additionally, the judge wrote in his order that Humphreys deserves to have the conflict of interest question researched and argued thoroughly so that a parole board free of conflicts of interest can decide his case at a clemency hearing.

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  • Louisiana death row inmate released on bail after decades behind bars

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    NEW ORLEANS — A Louisiana man who spent nearly three decades on death row has been released on bail Wednesday after his conviction was overturned earlier this year.

    Jimmie Duncan had originally been convicted of first-degree murder in 1998 after prosecutors accused him of raping and drowning 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux, the daughter of his then-girlfriend Allison Layton Statham.

    Fourth Judicial District Court Judge Alvin Sharp threw out that conviction in April after hearing expert testimony that the forensic evidence which put Duncan behind bars was “not scientifically defensible” and that Oliveaux’s death appeared to be the result of an “accidental drowning.” Similar faulty forensic bite mark analysis has led to dozens of other wrongful convictions or charges.

    “The presumption is not great that he is guilty,” Sharp wrote in his order Friday granting Duncan bail, citing the new evidence presented at an evidentiary hearing last year and Duncan’s lack of prior criminal history.

    Duncan’s attorneys said in a statement that Sharp’s ruling earlier this year provided “clear and convincing evidence showing that Mr. Duncan is factually innocent.” They added that Duncan’s release on bail “marks a significant step forward for Mr. Duncan’s complete exoneration.”

    Since 1973, more than 200 people on death row have been exonerated, including 12 people in Louisiana, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. In Louisiana, which has one of the highest wrongful conviction rates in the nation, the last death row exoneration came in 2016. Earlier this month, a man who served decades in prison before being exonerated won election to serve as the chief recordkeeper of New Orleans’ criminal court.

    Duncan, whose vacated conviction is still being reviewed by the Louisiana Supreme Court, was released after posting a $150,000 bond. He plans to live with a relative in central Louisiana.

    Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who is pushing to hasten executions of death row inmates, said that Duncan should not be released on bail while the Louisiana Supreme Court reviews his case.

    But the high court agreed to let a district judge rule on Duncan’s bail request.

    During Duncan’s bail hearing in Ouachita Parish, the mother of the girl he was accused of killing told the judge that she had become convinced of Duncan’s innocence. Instead, Statham believed her daughter, who she said had a history of seizures, had accidentally drowned in a bathtub.

    Her daughter “wasn’t killed,” Statham said according to court records. “Haley died because she was sick.”

    Statham told the court that the lives of her family and Duncan “have been destroyed by the lie” she believed prosecutors and forensic experts had concocted.

    Prosecutors had relied on bite mark analysis and an autopsy conducted by two experts later linked to at least 10 wrongful convictions, according to Duncan’s legal team, which described the pair as discredited “charlatans.”

    Mississippi-based forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Steven Hayne examined Oliveaux’s body.

    A video recording of the examination shows West “forcibly pushing a mold of Mr. Duncan’s teeth into the child’s body — creating the bite marks” later used to convict him, a court-filing from Duncan’s legal team stated. A state-appointed expert, unaware of this method, testified during trial that the bite marks on the body matched Duncan’s.

    “The horror story that they put out and desecrated my baby’s memory makes me infuriated,” Statham said.

    “I was not informed of anything that would have exonerated Mr. Duncan at all,” she added. “Had I been then, things would have turned out a lot different for Mr. Duncan and all of our families.”

    An Associated Press review from 2013 found at least two dozen wrongful convictions or charges based on bite mark evidence since 2000.

    “Bite mark evidence is junk science, and there is no more prejudicial type of junk science that exists than bite mark evidence,” M. Chris Fabricant, an Innocence Project lawyer representing Duncan, told the court during the bail hearing.

    Hayne, the pathologist, is deceased. West has previously said that DNA testing has made bite mark analysis obsolete, yet he has defended his work in other cases that led to overturned convictions. The pair’s testimony led two Mississippi men, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, to serve a combined three decades in prison in two separate cases for the rape and murder of young girls until DNA evidence cleared them of the crimes.

    Prosecutors are seeking to reinstate Duncan’s conviction and pointed to the 1994 grand jury indictment in his case as grounds for keeping him locked up, court records show. The office of Ouachita Parish District Attorney Robert Tew declined to comment, citing the Louisiana Supreme Court’s pending review.

    Duncan was one of 55 people on death row in Louisiana, held at the state prison in Angola. After a 15-year hiatus, Louisiana carried out its first execution in March.

    Duncan’s legal team described him as a “model prisoner” who helped other death row inmates obtain their GEDs and has “strong community support for his release.”

    ___

    Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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  • How Florida compares with other states on the death penalty

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    Florida has executed more people in 2025 than in any single year since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The state carried out its 17th execution Nov. 20, with two more scheduled by the end of the year.

    When asked about the increase, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said COVID-19 and other factors slowed executions in some years. He said he believes the system for executions should move more quickly. DeSantis has authorized 28 executions since he assumed office in 2019, with zero executions in 2020, 2021 and 2022. His predecessor, Republican Sen. Rick Scott, oversaw 28 executions over eight years.

    “It’s an appropriate punishment for the worst offenders. We have lengthy reviews and appeals that I think should be shorter,” DeSantis said in a Nov. 3 news conference.

    Referring to inmates on death row for crimes committed decades ago, DeSantis said victims’ families are owed quicker executions and that a more streamlined process could deter crime.

    Death penalty supporters and opponents have long offered competing studies on whether capital punishment deters crime. Some point to comparable violent crimes in states with and without the death penalty. Others argue there are statistical correlations between the death penalty and certain crime reductions.

    Experts said it isn’t well understood whether the promise of swift executions would be more of a deterrent; they said it’s inconclusive whether such a change would have a meaningful effect.

    Mark Schlackman, senior director for Florida State University’s Center for the Advancement of Human Rights and a Florida death penalty expert, said research generally shows that swift and severe punishment may be a deterrent, but it isn’t clear whether that extends to the death penalty and how quickly it’s carried out.

    Here is what we know about capital punishment in Florida.

    How long do Florida inmates spend on death row? How does that compare with the rest of the country?

    Death row timelines vary by jurisdiction, but the average time for Florida inmates is around 22.6 years, according to 2023 Bureau of Justice Statistics data.

    Florida’s average is in line with other states with the death penalty and the federal system. 

    Lengthy stretches between sentencing and execution are common. 

    “Death sentences are the most serious sanctions that governments can inflict on human beings, so all must be carefully reviewed for accuracy and fairness before an execution is scheduled,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that provides capital punishment data. “A thoughtful and careful review of the claims in a case often takes time.”

    Many cases get sent back to lower courts when constitutional errors are identified. Appeals can take years if the government is slow to respond or rule on a petition, Maher said.

    Maher’s group found that since 1973, about 200 people on death row have been exonerated in the U.S. — with some spending more than 40 years to prove their innocence.  

    Currently, 27 states, the federal government and the U.S. military authorize capital punishment. The first Trump administration resumed federal executions in 2020 after a 17-year hiatus.

    How many people have been exonerated in Florida?

    Thirty people have been exonerated in Florida, more than any other state. Illinois is second with 23, followed by Texas with 18.

    Some experts point to Florida’s broad death penalty criteria and overburdened public defender system as reasons for the high number, and said the state has a shortage of experienced defense attorneys.

    Stephen Harper, a Florida International University professor who runs a legal clinic for death penalty cases, told the Florida Phoenix that Florida prosecutors also have wide discretion on when they can seek the death penalty.

    Mishandled evidence and unreliable forensic procedures have also played a role in the state’s wrongful convictions, experts said. DNA evidence has been a contributing factor in several of Florida’s exonerations.

    “There have been cases advanced by ‘junk science’ that were ultimately discredited and also instances of prosecutorial overreach, which isn’t necessarily unique to Florida,” Schlackman said.

    How has death penalty sentencing evolved in Florida?

    Florida’s lawmakers have altered capital punishment sentencing multiple times over the past decade, with the latest changes making it easier for prosecutors to get death sentences and have them upheld.

    In 2020, the state’s Supreme Court ended the practice of having courts review capital sentences. These reviews required an appeals court to compare a death penalty sentence with similar cases to ensure constitutional standards were met and the sentence was warranted.

    In 2023, Florida enacted two laws that broadened capital punishment sentencing. One lowered the threshold from requiring a unanimous jury vote of 12 to 0 to a vote of 8 to 4 — the lowest in the country. The state also expanded the death penalty to apply to some non-homicide crimes, such as certain sexual offenses against children.

    Florida is “one of just two states to allow non-unanimous death sentencing, making it a clear outlier even among active death penalty states,” Maher said. The other state, Alabama, requires 10 votes in favor of a death sentence.

    Does quick death penalty sentencing serve as a crime deterrent, as DeSantis said?

    Criminal justice and capital punishment experts said data neither supports nor negates the idea that the death penalty or swifter executions deter crime. 

    Daniel Nagin, who chaired the National Research Council’s Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty, previously said the “certainty of apprehension” has been shown to be a more effective crime deterrent, versus the severity of consequences.

    Studying deterrence related to the death penalty is challenging, experts said. Capital punishment is applied rarely, making it difficult to disentangle the number of homicides the sentence could have deterred from changes in homicide rates caused by other factors.

    In 2012, the National Research Council released Deterrence and the Death Penalty, a review of more than three decades of studies on capital punishment’s effect on homicide rates. The group concluded the research wasn’t conclusive and recommended against using the studies to inform policy decisions.

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  • Former Bangladeshi Leader Sheikh Hasina Sentenced to Death Over Protest Crackdown

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    The decision

    A special court in Bangladesh sentenced the country’s former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, to death on Monday for her role in the killing of at least 1,400 protesters who participated in nationwide demonstrations last year that ultimately led to her ouster.

    The International Crimes Tribunal ruled that Hasina and several of her top officials were guilty of crimes against humanity, including inciting and abetting organized violence against peaceful student protesters in July and August 2024, and conspiring in the killing of civilians, among other charges.

    Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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    Shan Li

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  • Former Marine who killed 6-year-old girl decades ago set for execution in Florida

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    STARKE, Fla. — A former Marine convicted of killing a 6-year-old girl more than four decades ago is scheduled Thursday to be executed in Florida, which would be the record 16th death sentence carried out under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    Barring a last-minute reprieve, Bryan Frederick Jennings, 66, is set to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison near Starke. Jennings was convicted and sentenced to death twice for the 1979 murder in Brevard County, both of which were reversed on appeal. The final trial in 1986 resulted in a third death sentence.

    The U.S. Supreme Court denied his final appeal Wednesday.

    According to court records, Jennings was a 20-year-old on leave from the Marine Corps on May 11, 1979, when he took down a screen at the bedroom window of 6-year-old Rebecca Kunash while her parents were in another room.

    Jennings abducted the girl, took her in his car to a canal and raped her, trial testimony showed. He then “swung her by her legs to the ground with such force that she fractured her skull,” court records show. The girl was then drowned in the canal, where her body was found later that day.

    Jennings was arrested a few hours later on a traffic warrant, where investigators found he matched the description of a man seen near the Kunash home when Rebecca disappeared. Shoe prints found at the home matched those Jennings was wearing, his fingerprints were found on the girl’s windowsill, and his clothes and hair were wet.

    DeSantis has ordered more executions in a single year than any Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The previous record was set in 2014 with eight executions. After Jennings, executions this year are scheduled Nov. 20 for Richard Barry Randolph and Dec. 9 for Mark Allen Geralds, which would bring the year’s total so far to 18.

    At a recent news conference, DeSantis explained the unprecedented number of executions by saying his goal is to bring justice to victim families who have waited decades for the death sentences to be carried out.

    “Some of these crimes were committed in the ’80s,” DeSantis said. “Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly. If I honestly through someone was innocent, I would not pull the trigger.”

    Jennings has filed numerous appeals in state and federal courts, most recently contending that he went months without a lawyer prior to DeSantis signing his death warrant in violation of his right to counsel. His current attorneys also say Jennings has improperly not had a clemency hearing since 1988.

    An anti-capital punishment group, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, sought U.S. Supreme Court review of the issues and what it called the politicization of the process.

    “Florida’s death penalty system has become unrecognizable from the one the law promises,” said Maria DeLiberato, legal and policy director for the group. “Bryan Jennings was left without a state court lawyer for years, denied a clemency review in this century, and then selected for execution because of favorable political timing.”

    In addition to the murder conviction, Jennings was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping, sexual assault and burglary.

    A total of 40 men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., and at least 18 other people are scheduled to be put to death during the remainder of 2025 and next year.

    Florida’s lethal injections are carried out with a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state Department of Corrections.

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  • South Carolina court rejects death row appeal days before execution

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina’s highest court has refused to stop the execution of a man who killed three people over five days more than 20 years ago while leaving taunting messages for police in the blood of one of his victims.

    Stephen Bryant, 44, is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Friday by firing squad at a Columbia prison.

    Lawyers for Bryant made a last ditch appeal arguing the judge who sentenced him to die never got to consider how badly his brain was damaged from his mother’s alcohol and drug use while pregnant.

    But the South Carolina Supreme Court rejected that appeal late Monday writing that even if Bryant’s defense had done more investigation into whether he had Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, it simply would have given a different reason for his problems while not changing the outcome of a death sentence.

    “By any stretch, (Bryant) demonstrated a high level of planning, decision making, and calculation,” the justices wrote in Monday’s unanimous decision.

    Bryant is being executed for killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in his home in October 2004. Investigators said Bryant burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted “catch me if u can” and other taunting messages on the wall with the victim’s blood.

    Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two men he was giving rides to as they stepped out of his truck to urinate over five days that terrorized Sumter County.

    In what may be their final appeal. Bryant’s lawyers said while his original defense team said he was unnerved in the months before the killings because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they didn’t detail how that abuse had affected his ability to conform to the law.

    Bryant’s lawyers said he didn’t get a full brain scan before his 2008 trial that could have identified in-utero damage that was never repaired, according to court papers.

    They also included what they said was newly uncovered evidence including a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist where Bryant described abuse he suffered from male relatives, his mother, a preacher’s wife and several strippers in his neighborhood before he became a teenager.

    The justices sided with prosecutors who said the three killings, along with another shooting and two burglaries mostly along dirt roads in the rural Sumter County east of Columbia weren’t impulsive crimes from a damaged brain but were methodical and cunning.

    Bryant can still ask the governor to reduce his death sentence to life in prison in a decision that, if made, won’t be announced until minutes before the execution is set to start. No South Carolina governor has ever granted clemency in the modern era of the death penalty.

    Bryant will be the third man executed by firing squad in South Carolina this year.

    Struggles to find drugs to use for lethal injection led to an unintended 13-year pause in executions and state lawmakers to introduce the method that’s often associated with mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West or as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

    Outside of South Carolina, only three other prisoners in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1977. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.

    Bryant’s execution will be the seventh in South Carolina since executions restarted in September 2024. All the others have chosen execution by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the drug needed because of a secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.

    Bryant will have a hood placed on his head before he is shot by three volunteers from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.

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  • Lawyers for Stephen Bryant make final appeal over brain damage to stop South Carolina execution

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. — Lawyers for a man on South Carolina’s death row are trying to stop his execution later this month by arguing the judge who sentenced him to die never got to consider how badly his brain was damaged from his mother’s alcohol and drug use while pregnant.

    Stephen Bryant, 44, is being put to death for killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in his home in October 2004. Investigators said Bryant burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted “catch me if u can” and other taunting messages on the wall with the victim’s blood. Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two men he was giving rides to over five days that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.

    Attorneys for the state argue that the three killings, along with another shooting and two burglaries mostly along dirt roads in the rural county east of Columbia weren’t impulsive crimes from a damaged brain but were methodical and cunning.

    But Bryant’s lawyers are arguing in a final appeal to the state Supreme Court that while his original defense team said he was unnerved in the months before the killings because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they didn’t detail how Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder had affected his ability to conform to the law.

    Bryant’s lawyers said he didn’t get a full brain scan before his 2008 trial that could have identified in-utero damage that was never repaired, according to court papers.

    They also submitted a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist wherein Bryant described abuse he suffered from male relatives, his mother, a preacher’s wife and several strippers in his neighborhood before he became a teenager.

    Prosecutors have pushed back, saying Bryant’s attorneys shouldn’t be allowed to make a different case to keep him from being put to death after the first one failed.

    They argue that the number of crimes, their planning and Bryant’s lingering Tietjen’s home to desecrate his body, as well as taunting Tietjen’s wife and daughter over the phone, were deliberate acts of evil — not impulses from a broken brain.

    “Bryant was methodical, cunning, and took pleasure in deadly rampage including the gratuitous infliction of horror on Mr. Tietjen’s family,” they wrote in court papers.

    They said the only way the legal system could fail is to delay his Nov. 14 execution by firing squad.

    Beyond the appeal, Bryant can also ask the governor to reduce his death sentence to life in prison in a decision that, if made, won’t be announced until minutes before the execution is set to start. No South Carolina governor has ever granted clemency in the modern era of the death penalty.

    Bryant will be the third man executed by firing squad in South Carolina this year.

    Struggles to find drugs to use for lethal injection led to an unintended 13-year pause in executions and state lawmakers to introduce the method that’s often associated with mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West or as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

    Outside of South Carolina, only three other prisoners in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1977. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.

    Bryant’s execution will be the seventh in South Carolina since executions restarted in September 2024. All the others have chosen execution by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the drug needed because of a secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.

    Bryant will have a hood placed on his head before he is shot by three volunteers from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.

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  • Alabama to execute man for 1993 murder in state’s latest nitrogen gas execution

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    MONTGOMERY, Ala. — MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama inmate convicted of killing a man over a drug debt was set to be executed Thursday evening in the state’s latest death sentence carried out with nitrogen gas.

    Anthony Boyd, 54, was sentenced to death for his role in killing Gregory Huguley in Talladega County more than 30 years ago. Prosecutors said Huguley was doused in gasoline and set on fire after he didn’t pay for $200 worth of cocaine.

    Lawyers for Boyd were unsuccessfully in their attempts to have courts give additional scrutiny to the execution method to be used when his sentence is carried out Thursday evening at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in southern Alabama. They argued it was unconstitutionally cruel.

    The method that Alabama began using last year uses a gas mask strapped over the inmate’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing the person to die from lack of oxygen.

    Nationally, the method has now been used in seven executions: six times in Alabama and once in Louisiana.

    A jury convicted Boyd of capital murder during a kidnapping and recommended by a vote of 10-2 that he receive a death sentence for his part in the killing of Huguley, whose burned body was found Aug. 1, 1993, in a rural Talladega County ballfield. Prosecutors said Boyd was one of four men who kidnapped Huguley the prior evening.

    Boyd was convicted after a prosecution witness, testifying as part of a plea deal, said Boyd taped Huguley’s feet together before another man doused him in gasoline and set him on fire.

    Boyd has maintained his innocence.

    “I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in any killing,” Boyd said by telephone during an Oct. 8 news conference organized by supporters.

    Defense lawyers said he was at a party on the night that Huguley was killed and that the plea deal testimony is unreliable. Boyd’s supporters placed multiple billboards across the state urging Alabama to halt the execution.

    Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office in an earlier statement said that Boyd’s case has been litigated for three decades and, “he has yet to provide evidence to show the jury got it wrong.”

    Boyd has been on Alabama’s death row since 1995. He is chairman of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, an anti-death penalty group founded by men on death row.

    Shawn Ingram, the man prosecutors accused of pouring the gasoline and then setting Huguley on fire, was also convicted of capital murder. He is also on death row.

    Earlier this month, a federal judge refused to stop Boyd’s execution. His lawyers had argued that execution by nitrogen gas violates the Eighth Amendment because inmates are subjected to “conscious suffocation” and feel the pain and terror of being deprived of oxygen.

    Boyd’s lawyers pointed to witnesses descriptions of inmates shaking and appearing to gasp during nitrogen executions. The state has maintained the method is constitutional and the movements are largely involuntary because of oxygen deprivation. The judge rejected Boyd’s request.

    The Rev. Jeff Hood, who was the spiritual adviser at the first nitrogen execution, will serve as Boyd’s spiritual adviser. Hood, who has also witnessed multiple lethal injections, said that the nitrogen execution was “most viscerally horrible by far.”

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  • Execution scheduled for man who taunted police with message in victim’s blood

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. — COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina inmate who killed a man, burned his eyes with cigarettes and then painted “catch me if u can” on the wall with the victim’s blood more than 20 years ago has been scheduled to be executed next month.

    The state Supreme Court issued the death warrant Friday for Stephen Bryant, 44. The court denied a request from Bryant’s lawyers, who asked for a delay because they work with the federal court system and the U.S. government is shut down.

    While Bryant is being put to death Nov. 14 for one killing, prosecutors said he also shot and killed two other men he was giving rides to as they were reliving themselves on the side of the road during a few weeks that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.

    Bryant will be the 50th person executed in South Carolina since the state restarted the death penalty in 1985 and the seventh inmate put to death in less than 14 months since the state was able to obtain a drug for lethal injection and reopen the death chamber after an unintentional 13-year pause.

    Bryant will have until Oct. 31 to choose if he wants to die by lethal injection, firing squad or in the electric chair. Since the long pause, four inmates have chosen lethal injection and two have died by bullets.

    A total of 38 men have been executed so far this year in the U.S., with an inmate scheduled to die Friday by lethal injection in Arizona. At least five other executions are set in the U.S. during the rest of 2025.

    Bryant admitted to killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen after stopping by his secluded home in rural Sumter County and saying he had car trouble.

    Tietjen was shot several times. Candles were lit around his body. Someone took a potholder made by his daughter when she was child, dipped the corner in blood and wrote “victem 4 in 2 weeks. catch me if u can” on the wall, authorities said.

    Tietjen’s daughter called him several times, getting more worried when he didn’t answer. On the sixth call, she testified a strange voice answered.

    The person on the other end told her she had the right number. Then she demanded to speak to her father.

    “And he said ‘you can’t, I killed him.’ And I said, ‘this isn’t funny, who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the prowler. And I said, ‘excuse me, who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the prowler,” Kimberly Dees testified before a judge who determined Bryant’s sentence.

    Prosecutors said Bryant also killed two men — one before and one after Tietjen. He gave the men rides and when they got out to urinate on the side of lonely, rural roads he shot them in the back.

    As deputies frantically looked for the killer, many of the 100,000 people in Sumter County lived in fear over the random attacks. Officers stopped nearly everyone driving on dirt roads and told people to be leery of anyone they did not know asking for help.

    Bryant’s lawyers said he was troubled in the months before the killing, begging a probation agent and his aunt to get him help because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by four male relatives when he was a child.

    “He was very upset. He looked like he was being tortured. It’s like his soul was just laid wide open. In his eyes you could see he was hurting and suffering and he was living the abuse over again as it was coming out,” aunt Terry Caulder testified.

    Bryant tried to help himself through the pain by using meth and smoking joints he sprayed with bug killer, his defense attorneys said.

    The six inmates executed in South Carolina since September 2024 have argued the state’s methods are cruel and unusual punishments, but have not been able to stop their deaths.

    With the firing squad, attorneys for the inmates say the three volunteers with rifles nearly missed the heart of the second man killed, Mikal Mahdi. They suggested Mahdi was in agonizing pain for three or four times longer than experts say he would have been if his heart had been hit directly.

    Condemned inmates have also scrutinized the lethal injection procedures, which appear to now use two doses of the powerful sedative pentobarbital. They said inmates drown in a rush of fluid into their lungs but are paralyzed and cannot react.

    Witnesses to the four executions have not seen any signs of struggle and report the prisoners appear to have lost consciousness in about a minute.

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  • Arizona set to execute a man who killed 4 members of a Phoenix family in 1993

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    PHOENIX — PHOENIX (AP) — A man who was convicted of killing four members of a Phoenix family over 30 years ago as an act of revenge is set to be put to death Friday in what is set be Arizona’s second execution of the year.

    Richard Kenneth Djerf, 55, is scheduled to die by pentobarbital injection at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence.

    He pleaded guilty to murder in the deaths of couple Albert Luna Sr. and Patricia Luna; their daughter Rochelle Luna, 18; and son Damien Luna, 5, at their home on Sept. 14, 1993. Djerf, who has been in prison for over 29 years, chose not to seek clemency.

    If the execution is carried out, it will be the fourth in the country this week and the 39th of the year.

    Prosecutors said Djerf blamed another family member, Albert Luna Jr., who did not witness the killings, for an earlier theft of electronics from his apartment. Djerf became obsessed with exacting revenge and went to the home months later claiming to be delivering flowers, prosecutors said.

    Authorities say Djerf sexually assaulted Rochelle Luna and slashed her throat; beat Albert Luna Sr. with an aluminum baseball bat and stabbed and shot him; and tied Patricia and Damien Luna to kitchen chairs before fatally shooting them. During Friday’s execution, a team of four people including medical doctors and a phlebotomist will prepare syringes of saline and pentobarbital, insert an IV and inject the chemicals into Djerf. Arizona has been criticized in the past for taking too long to insert IVs during lethal injection executions. Experts say it should take seven to 10 minutes from the beginning of insertion until a proclamation of death. The state has paused executions twice since 2014 amid concerns over its use of the death penalty.

    There was a nearly eight-year hiatus brought on by difficulties in obtaining the needed drugs and criticism that a 2014 execution was botched: Joseph Wood was injected with 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours, leading him to snort repeatedly and gasp hundreds of times before he died.

    Executions resumed in 2022, and three prisoners were put to death that year. They were paused again in 2023 after Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs ordered a review of the capital punishment protocol and Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes agreed not to pursue any. The review ended in November 2024, when Hobbs fired a retired federal magistrate she had appointed to examine execution procedures, and the state corrections department announced changes in the lethal injection team.

    Arizona last carried out a death sentence in mid-March, executing Aaron Brian Gunches for the 2002 killing of Ted Price.

    There are currently 108 prisoners on the state’s death row.

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  • Florida sets execution date for man who raped and murdered 6-year-old girl in 1979

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    TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A man convicted of raping and killing a 6-year-old girl in central Florida is scheduled to be put to death in November under a death warrant signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who continues to set a record pace for executions.

    Bryan Fredrick Jennings, 66, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Nov. 13 at Florida State Prison. Jennings would be the 16th person set for execution in Florida in 2025, with DeSantis overseeing more executions in a single year than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

    DeSantis signed the death warrant Friday, just days before the scheduled execution Tuesday of Samuel Lee Smithers. Another convicted killer, Norman Mearle Grim Jr., is set to die Oct. 28.

    Jennings was convicted of murder, kidnapping and sexual battery and sentenced to death in 1986 after two previous convictions were overturned.

    According to court records, Jennings climbed through the window of a Brevard County home in May 1979 and abducted 6-year-old Rebecca Kunash. Investigators said Jennings drove the girl to an area near a Merritt Island canal and raped her. Following the assault, Jennings smashed the girl’s head on the ground and then drowned her in the nearby canal, where police later found her body.

    A short time later, Jennings was arrested on a traffic warrant, and police eventually linked him to the girl’s murder.

    Attorneys for Jennings are expected to file appeals to the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.

    So far 35 people have been executed in the U.S. in 2025 , with Florida leading the way behind a flurry of death warrants signed by DeSantis. The most recent execution in Florida was the Sept. 30 lethal injection of Victory Tony Jones, convicted of killing a married couple during a 1990 robbery in South Florida.

    The previous record for executions in one year in Florida was eight, most recently in 2014.

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  • Luigi Mangione’s lawyers seek dismissal of federal charges in assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO

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    NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Lawyers for Luigi Mangione asked a New York federal judge Saturday to dismiss some criminal charges, including the only count for which he could face the death penalty, from a federal indictment brought against him in the December assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive.

    In papers filed in Manhattan federal court, the lawyers said prosecutors should also be prevented from using at trial his statements to law enforcement officers and his backpack where a gun and ammunition were found.

    They said Mangione was not read his rights before he was questioned by law enforcement officers, who arrested him after Brian Thompson was fatally shot as he arrived at a Manhattan hotel for an investor conference.

    They added that officers did not obtain a warrant before searching Mangione’s backpack.

    Mangione, 27, has pleaded not guilty to state and federal charges in the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson on Dec. 4 as he arrived at a Manhattan hotel for his company’s annual investor conference.

    The killing set off a multi-state search after the suspected shooter slipped away from the scene and rode a bike to Central Park, before taking a taxi to a bus depot that offers service to several nearby states.

    Five days later, a tip from a McDonald’s about 233 miles (375 kilometers) away in Altoona, Pennsylvania, led police to arrest Mangione. He has been held without bail since then.

    Last month, lawyers for Mangione asked that his federal charges be dismissed and the death penalty be taken off the table as a result of public comments by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. In April, Bondi directed prosecutors in New York to seek the death penalty, calling the killing of Thompson a “premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America.”

    Murder cases are usually tried in state courts, but prosecutors have also charged Mangione under a federal law on murders committed with firearms as part of other “crimes of violence.” It’s the only charge for which Mangione could face the death penalty, since it’s not used in New York state.

    The papers filed early Saturday morning argued that this charge should be dismissed because prosecutors have failed to identify the other offenses that would be required to convict him, saying that the alleged other crime — stalking — is not a crime of violence.

    The assassination and its aftermath has captured the American imagination, setting off a cascade of resentment and online vitriol toward U.S. health insurers while rattling corporate executives concerned about security.

    After the killing, investigators found the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose,” written in permanent marker on ammunition at the scene. The words mimic a phrase used by insurance industry critics.

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  • What to know about Texas court’s decision to pause Roberson’s execution in shaken baby case

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    AUSTIN, Texas — AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas court’s pause of the execution of Robert Roberson just days before he was set to die is likely to raise new arguments and scrutiny over cases that rely on the medical science and evidence in a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

    Roberson would have been the first person in the nation executed in a case tied to shaken baby syndrome. He remains on death row for now, but the pause in his execution — the third since 2016 — not only buys him more time, but also possibly a new trial.

    Thursday’s ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals leaned into a decade-old state law that allows courts to review convictions based on science that has changed or been debunked, and a recent court ruling that overturned a conviction in another shaken baby case.

    Roberson, 58, was convicted in 2003 in the death of his 2-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis. He had been scheduled to receive a lethal injection on Oct. 16. The ruling did not overturn his conviction or immediately reduce his sentence.

    Critical to Roberson’s case was the trial evidence of shaken baby syndrome, which refers to a serious brain injury caused when a child’s head is hurt through shaking or some other violent impact, such as being slammed against a wall or thrown on the floor.

    Shaken baby syndrome has come under scrutiny in recent years; some lawyers and medical experts say the diagnosis has wrongly sent people to prison. Prosecutors and medical societies say it remains valid.

    In 2013, Texas lawmakers passed a measure nicknamed the “junk science law” that allows courts to take a second look at a case if the science anchoring a conviction evolves or is debunked. But that law has not yet led to a new trial for a death-row inmate.

    That law was the basis in part of a delay in execution for Roberson back in 2016, but he was not granted a new trial and he remained on death row.

    Thursday’s ruling cited the court’s own decision last year to overturn the conviction of a Dallas man sent to prison for 35 years based on a similar shaken baby diagnosis. In that case, the court said the medical evidence and expert testimony might have been different if presented under 2024 scientific standards.

    Roberson’s case has drawn a wide variety of support from a coalition that included liberal and ultraconservative lawmakers, bestselling novelist John Grisham and even one of the original detectives on Roberson’s case. They all want him to secure a new trial. Those efforts have been opposed and criticized by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican.

    Roberson’s legal team hailed the court-ordered review of his case as a major victory.

    The case will go back to the county trial court in East Texas to decide if he deserves a new trial. If so, he could be cleared or convicted again.

    Gretchen Sween, one of Roberson’s attorneys, said Thursday there’s no timeline for when the trial court will review his case but she’s “determined to push this as fast as possible.”

    Roberson has maintained his innocence. His legal team argues his daughter died not from abuse but from complications related to pneumonia. Paxton, as well as some medical experts and other family members of Nikki, maintain the girl died because of child abuse and that Roberson had a history of hitting his daughter.

    “Robert adored Nikki, whose death was a tragedy,” Sween said. “We are confident that an objective review of the science and medical evidence will show there was no crime.”

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  • Alabama inmate set to be die by nitrogen gas for 1993 murder maintains his innocence: “I didn’t kill anybody”

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    A man who is scheduled to be executed later this month for a 1993 murder continues to maintain his innocence, saying on Wednesday, “I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in any killing.”

    Anthony Boyd, 53, has been on death row in Alabama for the last three decades. He was convicted in 1995 of capital murder and kidnapping in the death of George Huguley, and a jury voted 10-2 to recommend that he receive the death penalty.  

    Boyd spoke via phone Wednesday at a rally in Alabama that was organized by the nonprofit Execution Intervention Project, which advocates for people on death row.

    “This is not just about me,” Boyd said on speaker phone from the Alabama prison where he is being held. “This is about the injustice that’s going on in this state. I’m a prime example of these crooked courts and the way they fight.”

    The rally took place in Talladega, where Boyd’s family and other supporters unveiled a billboard along a highway that read: “Save Anthony Boyd.”  

    “We’re here because we want the people of Alabama to know that the death penalty is more complicated than just this game of calling people monsters, this game of just tossing people away and acting like people don’t matter,” said Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser and the nonprofit’s co-founder, who became a vocal activist against capital punishment after witnessing numerous executions.   

    Boyd was one of four men convicted in Huguley’s murder, according to court filings. Prosecutors said in the filings that the men abducted Huguley and burned him to death after he failed to pay them $200 for cocaine.

    One witness who testified against Boyd as part of a plea deal said at his trial that Boyd taped Huguley’s feet while another man doused him in gasoline and set him on fire. But Boyd’s lawyers insisted their client was innocent, introducing witnesses during the trial who testified that he had attended a birthday party the night Huguley was killed and slept at a hotel with his girlfriend.   

    While incarcerated, Boyd became the chair of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, an anti-death penalty group founded by death row inmates. 

    Boyd is scheduled to die by nitrogen hypoxia, a controversial and relatively new execution method. The lethal injection alternative is designed to cause asphyxiation as inmates are forced to inhale pure nitrogen, instead of breathable air, through a gas mask. Critics believe the procedure constitutes undue suffering, but the state has repeatedly insisted it’s humane. Alabama tested the method for the first time on a condemned inmate last January.

    Another man convicted in Huguley’s murder was also condemned for the crime and is currently on death row.

    Alabama has historically had the highest rate of death sentences per capita in the United States, as well as one of the highest execution rates.

    Emily Mae Czachor

    Emily Mae Czachor is a reporter and news editor at CBSNews.com. She typically covers breaking news, extreme weather and issues involving social justice. Emily Mae previously wrote for outlets like the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed and Newsweek.

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  • Indiana man convicted in 2001 rape and murder of teenager to be executed by lethal injection

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    CHICAGO — CHICAGO (AP) — An Indiana man convicted in the 2001 rape and murder of a teenage girl was set to die by lethal injection early Friday in the state’s third execution since resuming capital punishment last year.

    Roy Lee Ward, 53, was scheduled to be put to death before sunrise at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.

    He was convicted in the rape and murder of 15-year-old Stacy Payne and sentenced to death. The brutal crime, which happened in the family’s home in Dale, rocked the small community of roughly 1,500 people.

    Attorneys said Ward has exhausted his legal options after many court battles.

    “He’s very remorseful about this horrible crime,” said his attorney Joanna Green.

    Ward’s execution comes amid questions about Indiana’s handling of pentobarbital. Last year state officials ended a 15-year pause on executions, saying they’d been able to obtain drugs used in lethal injections but which had been unavailable for years.

    The Indiana Department of Correction said it had obtained “enough pentobarbital to follow the required protocol” for Ward’s execution. Ward’s attorneys though have raised concerns about the use of the drug and how the state stored it, including temperature issues.

    Ward’s expected execution in Indiana on Friday is the first of eight that are set to be carried out in October in seven different U.S. states, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

    Among 27 states with death penalty laws, Indiana is one of two that bar media witnesses. Ward’s witness list includes attorneys and spiritual advisors.

    His case has trailed through the courts for more than 20 years.

    Ward was found guilty of the crimes in 2002 and sentenced to death. But after the Indiana Supreme Court overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial, he pleaded guilty in 2007. A decade later, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. In 2019, he sued Indiana seeking to stop all pending executions.

    Last month, the Indiana Supreme Court declined to stay the execution and Gov. Mike Braun rejected Ward’s clemency bid.

    The victim’s family members said they were ready for justice to be carried out, remembering Payne as an honor student and cheerleader with an influence beyond her short life.

    “Now our family gatherings are no longer whole, holidays still empty. Birthdays are sad reminders of what we lost,” her mother Julie Wininger told the parole board last month. “Our family has endured emotional devastation.”

    Ward, who declined interview requests through his attorneys, has said little publicly. He skipped a parole board interview for his clemency bid, saying he didn’t want to force the victim’s family travel to the prison and he can’t always say what he means.

    Attorneys say Ward was recently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, which affects his ability to communicate.

    One of his spiritual advisers, Deacon Brian Nosbusch, said Ward has thought deeply about his actions.

    “He knows he did it,” Nosbusch said. “He knows it was horrendous.”

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  • Tennessee set to execute only woman on state’s death row. Here’s what to know.

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    If Christa Gail Pike’s execution proceeds as planned next year, she will become the first woman put to death in Tennessee since the state began to formally document capital punishment more than a century ago. After attempted appeals by Pike’s attorneys repeatedly failed, the Tennessee Supreme Court on Tuesday set a date for her to be executed.

    The order granted a scheduling request from the state for the death warrant to be carried out Sept. 30, 2026, at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, which houses a majority of Tennessee’s death row inmates. Under the terms of this week’s state Supreme Court order, the prison warden is obligated to notify Pike of the method that the Department of Correction will use to execute her by Aug. 28. 

    Condemned inmates in Tennessee usually die by lethal injection, the state’s default execution method. But electrocution, while outdated, is technically also authorized as an alternative that inmates can “choose” as long as they committed a capital crime before Jan. 1, 1999. As reports increased of botched executions using lethal drugs in Tennessee and elsewhere around the United States, the Tennessee Correction Department said five inmates between 2018 and 2019 selected electrocution as their preferred execution method.

    Pike’s death sentence

    Now 49, Pike was convicted in the horrific 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Both were students at a career training program for troubled teenagers in Knoxville when Slemmer was tortured and brutally killed, according to court documents. Prosecutors argued in their case against Pike, then 18, that she had believed Slemmer, then 19, had wanted to steal Pike’s boyfriend.

    The boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and Pike’s friend Shadolla Peterson helped her carry out the murder, according to court records, which say Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and carved a pentagram onto her chest over the course of 30 minutes or an hour, in a wooded part of the University of Tennessee’s campus. The slain teenager’s body was discovered by a groundskeeper who “testified that the body was so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal,” the court records say.

    Shipp, who was 17 at the time of Slemmer’s murder and not eligible for the death penalty, received a lifetime prison sentence and will be up for parole in November. Peterson testified against Pike during the trial and received probation.

    Pike was the youngest person on death row when she received her sentence in 1996, at 20. She has also been the only woman on Tennessee’s death row for most of her three decades behind bars — circumstances that her attorneys likened to solitary confinement in a lawsuit that argued the punishment was unconstitutional. The suit led to a settlement in September 2024 allowing Pike more opportunities for social interaction.

    Fewer than 50 women on death row

    The U.S. has executed 18 women since the modern application of death penalty began in 1976, with the most recent being Amber McLaughlin’s lethal injection in Missouri in January 2023, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that shares data on capital punishment but doesn’t take a position on it. 

    While the Tennessee Department of Correction says no definitive records exist of executions that took place in the state before 1900, a collection of widely cited independent research on capital punishment in early America shows that Tennessee hasn’t put a woman to death since 1820.

    Among roughly 2,100 inmates currently awaiting execution nationwide, just 48 are women, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which published the results of an academic study that found most of them experienced gender-based violence prior to their convictions and that gender bias impacted nearly all of their cases. The organization says public perspectives appear to have changed in recent decades, as only three women have been sentenced to death anywhere in the U.S. since 2020. 

    Appeals, clemency petition

    In petitions seeking clemency or a commuted sentence, Pike’s attorneys have consistently pointed to the unlikelihood of her receiving a death sentence for the same crime had she committed it as a teenager in the present day. Their filings cite her history of mental illnesses, including PTSD and bipolar disorder, congenital brain damage, childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, noting that evidence of those issues wasn’t presented at Pike’s trial. 

    “Society’s view of who is truly deserving of a death sentence has changed in the years since Christa Pike was sentenced,” Robin Maher, the Death Penalty Information Center’s executive director, told CBS News. “Her young age, mental illness, and the physical and mental abuse she suffered at the time of her crime would likely persuade a jury today she is not someone who should receive a death sentence.”

    Juries are currently sentencing fewer young people to death than they once did, according to the center, which says only three states that still practice the death penalty have imposed new death sentences on a person between 18 and 20 in the last five years.

    Emily Mae Czachor

    Emily Mae Czachor is a reporter and news editor at CBSNews.com. She typically covers breaking news, extreme weather and issues involving social justice. Emily Mae previously wrote for outlets like the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed and Newsweek.

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  • South Carolina prosecutor seeks death penalty in murder case after Biden reduced sentence to life

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. — A local prosecutor in South Carolina said Tuesday he will seek the death penalty against a man whose federal death sentence for killing two bank employees in a robbery was commuted to life in prison by President Joe Biden at the end of his term.

    Brandon Council, 40, did not appear in state court in Horry County as prosecutors formally let the court know that if he is convicted of murder they will ask a jury to sentence him to death.

    State murder, armed robbery and other state charges against Council were dropped in 2019 after a federal jury found him guilty of similar charges and sentenced him to death.

    But in December, Biden reduced the death sentences of 37 federal inmates, including Council, to life in prison, saying he felt the federal use of the death penalty had to stop and he did not want the next administration to resume executions he had halted.

    That led Solicitor Jimmy Richardson to obtain new indictments against Council in Horry County in August which open the door to a state death penalty trial.

    Council walked into the CresCom Bank in Conway in August 2017, waiting for a minute before shooting Donna Major as the stunned teller held papers in front of her face trying to protect herself. He then followed manager Katie Skeen into her office and shot her in the forehead as she hid under her desk, authorities said.

    Council left the bank with $15,000. He was arrested in North Carolina several days later after buying a Mercedes with the stolen money, according to his confession read in court.

    Families and law enforcement angry at Biden’s decision urged local officials to review cases. In Louisiana, prosecutors in Catahoula Parish were able to get a first-degree murder charge refiled against Thomas Steven Sanders in the 2010 death of a 12-year-old girl. That would allow the state to seek the death penalty against him.

    Richardson said prosecutors had dropped the state charges in case anything ever happened to change the outcome of the federal case, including commuting his sentence.

    “If there was a bump, we could always come in and try our case. And that’s why we dismissed them. So our powder could be dry,” Richardson told reporters after the hearing.

    The other inmates who had their sentences reduced are being moved to Supermax prisons “where they will spend the rest of their lives in conditions that match their egregious crimes,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on social media last week.

    Bondi called the commutations a betrayal of the families of victims and a stain on the justice system, comments that Richardson echoed when Biden’s decision was announced.

    The bank teller’s daughter, Heather Turner, said the victims of the crimes weren’t considered.

    “The pain and trauma we have endured over the last 7 years has been indescribable,” Turner wrote on Facebook, describing weeks spent in court in search of justice as “now just a waste of time.”

    “Our judicial system is broken. Our government is a joke,” she said. “Joe Biden’s decision is a clear gross abuse of power. He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”

    Attorneys for Council argued at his federal trial his life should be spared because of a troubled childhood, especially after the grandmother who raised him died. They said he showed remorse and cooperated with investigators.

    After his arrest, Council asked investigators if the women at the bank were still alive and cried when he found out they were dead, investigators said.

    “I’m a doofus. I’m an idiot,” Council told police. “I don’t deserve to live.”

    Horry County had a second inmate have a federal death sentence commuted. Chadrick Fulks was convicted of kidnapping a woman from the parking lot of a Conway Walmart and killing her during a series of crimes across several states. His state charges were dismissed and court records indicate they have not been reinstated.

    Biden did leave three men on federal death row.

    They are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist killings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.

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