John Allen Muhammad was an American convicted spree killer who, along with his partner and accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, carried out the D.C. sniper attacks of October 2002, killing seventeen people. Muhammad and Malvo were arrested in connection with the attacks on October 24, 2002, following tips from alert citizens.
Lee Boyd Malvo, also known as John Lee Malvo, is a Jamaican convicted murderer who, along with John Allen Muhammad, committed a series of murders dubbed the D.C. sniper attacks over a three-week period in October 2002. Malvo was aged 17 during the span of the shootings. He is serving multiple life sentences at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, a supermax prison. Muhammad was executed in 2009.
In the United States, capital punishment is a legal penalty throughout the country at the federal level, in 27 states, and in American Samoa. It is also a legal penalty for some military offenses. Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 states and in the federal capital, Washington, D.C. It is usually applied for only the most serious crimes, such as aggravated murder. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, 19 states currently have the ability to execute death sentences, with the other 7, as well as the federal government and military, being subject to different types of moratoriums.
Capital punishment is a legal punishment under the criminal justice system of the United States federal government. It is the most serious punishment that could be imposed under federal law. The serious crimes that warrant this punishment include treason, espionage, murder, large-scale drug trafficking, or attempted murder of a witness, juror, or court officer in certain cases.
In the U.S. state of California, capital punishment is not allowed to be carried out as of March 2019, because executions were halted by an official moratorium ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom. Before the moratorium, executions had been frozen by a federal court order since 2006, and the litigation resulting in the court order has been on hold since the promulgation of the moratorium. Thus, there will be a court-ordered moratorium on executions after the termination of Newsom's moratorium if capital punishment remains a legal penalty in California by then.
San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Gregg v. Georgia, Proffitt v. Florida, Jurek v. Texas, Woodson v. North Carolina, and Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. It reaffirmed the Court's acceptance of the use of the death penalty in the United States, upholding, in particular, the death sentence imposed on Troy Leon Gregg. The set of cases is referred to by a leading scholar as the July 2 Cases, and elsewhere referred to by the lead case Gregg. The court set forth the two main features that capital sentencing procedures must employ in order to comply with the Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual punishments". The decision essentially ended the de facto moratorium on the death penalty imposed by the Court in its 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia (1972). Justice Brennan's dissent famously argued that "The calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person's humanity ... An executed person has indeed 'lost the right to have rights.'"
A stay of execution is a court order to temporarily suspend the execution of a court judgment or other court order. The word "execution" refers to the imposition of whatever judgment is being stayed and is similar to an injunction.
John William Byrd Jr. was an American murderer who was executed by lethal injection for killing convenience store clerk Monte Tewksbury. Byrd, who protested his innocence until his execution, spent 18 years and 6 months on Ohio's death row. Byrd was the third person to be put to death since Ohio reintroduced the death penalty in 1981. His execution remains controversial.
Gunner Jay Lindberg is an American convicted murderer on death row in California. Lindberg, a Neo-Nazi, was convicted of the 1996 murder of 24-year-old Vietnamese American Thien Minh Ly in Tustin, California.
Christa Gail Pike is an American convicted murderer, and the youngest woman to be sentenced to death in the United States during the post-Furman period. She was 20 when convicted of the torture murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, which she committed at age 18.
The Supreme Court of the United States handed down nineteen per curiam opinions during its 2009 term, which began on October 5, 2009, and concluded October 3, 2010.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Kentucky.
Capital punishment in Malawi is a legal punishment for certain crimes. The country abolished the death penalty following a Malawian Supreme Court ruling in 2021, but it was soon reinstated. However, the country is currently under a death penalty moratorium, which has been in place since the latest execution in 1992.
Charles Arnett Stevens, known as The I-580 Killer, is an American serial killer who shot eight people along California Interstate-580 in 1989, killing four of them. He was sentenced to death and currently resides in San Quentin State Prison.
Robert Lee Massie was an American convicted murderer who was executed by the state of California for the 1979 murder of a liquor store owner in San Francisco. Massie's case was notable because he had previously been sentenced to death for another murder he committed in 1965, but that death sentence was overturned following Furman v. Georgia. He was resentenced to life in prison and then paroled in 1978, committing the second murder months after his release. Following his death sentence for the 1979 murder, it was overturned by the Supreme Court of California because his lawyer had not consented to a guilty plea. He was sentenced to death a third and final time in 1989 and was executed in 2001 at San Quentin State Prison via lethal injection.
Quisi Bryan is an American man convicted of murdering Cleveland police officer Wayne Leon during a traffic stop in 2000. Bryan is on death row in Ohio and is scheduled to be executed on January 7, 2026.
Richard Gerald Jordan is an American man on death row in Mississippi for the 1976 murder of 34-year-old Edwina Marter, the wife of a bank executive. As of 2022, Jordan is the state's oldest and longest-serving death row inmate. Though he admitted to the crime and his guilt has never been seriously called into question, Jordan has filed multiple successful legal challenges to his sentence, and because of this, he has been sentenced to death four times.
