Geronimo is a town in Comanche County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 1,268 at the 2010 census. It is included in the Lawton, Oklahoma Metropolitan Statistical Area.
A condemned prisoner's last meal is a customary ritual preceding execution. In many countries, the prisoner may, within reason, select what the last meal will be.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton's kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
The Hi-Fi murders were the torture of five people resulting in three deaths during a robbery at the Hi-fi Shop, a home audio store in Ogden, Utah, United States, on the evening of April 22, 1974. Several men entered the Hi-fi Shop shortly before closing time and began taking hostages. They forced their victims to drink corrosive drain cleaner, which the perpetrators believed would fatally poison their hostages, but instead caused burns to their mouths and throats. Further violence included kicking a pen into an ear and the brutal rape of an eighteen-year-old woman, before three of the victims were fatally shot. The two surviving victims were left with life-changing injuries.
Douglas Franklin Wright was an American serial killer who murdered at least seven people in Oregon between 1969 and 1991. He was sentenced to death for three of these murders and was executed in 1996 at the Oregon State Penitentiary, becoming the first person to be executed in Oregon since 1962. He was also the first person executed in Oregon by lethal injection.
James Donald French was an American double murderer who was the last person executed under Oklahoma's death penalty laws prior to Furman v. Georgia, which suspended capital punishment in the United States from 1972 until 1976.
Sean Richard Sellers was an American serial killer, one of 22 persons in the United States since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 to be executed for a crime committed while under the age of 18, and the only one to have been executed for a crime committed under the age of 17. His case drew worldwide attention due to his age as well as his jailhouse conversion to Christianity and his claim that demonic possession made him innocent of his crimes.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Charles Troy Coleman was an American convicted murderer and suspected serial killer who was executed in 1990 by the state of Oklahoma. He was convicted in 1979 of the murder of John Seward, who, along with his wife, was killed by a shotgun blast in rural Muskogee County, when they interrupted a robbery at a relative's house. He also murdered Russell E. Lewis in a fatal carjacking in 1979 and is suspected of murdering the father of his former girlfriend in 1975. Despite being accused of killing at least three people, he was never convicted of the murder of Seward's wife and his sentence for Lewis's murder was overturned.
John David Duty was an American who was executed in Oklahoma for first-degree murder. According to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, he was the first person in the United States to have been put to death with pentobarbital. A nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental led the state to incorporate the substitution into its protocol for lethal injections. Duty's case gained media attention because pentobarbital had typically been used to euthanize animals.
Julius Darius Jones is an American prisoner and former death row inmate from Oklahoma who was convicted of the July 1999 murder of Paul Howell. His case has received international attention due to claims of innocence and controversy surrounding his trial and conviction. Jones was convicted of the crime on the basis of what the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals later characterized as an "overwhelming" body of evidence consisting of "a co-defendant who directly implicated Jones, eyewitness identification, incriminating statements made by Jones after the crime, flight from police, damning physical evidence hidden in Jones's parents' home, and an interlocking web of other physical and testimonial evidence consistent with the State's theory."
Robert Wesley Knighton was an American serial killer and spree killer who, after serving time for kidnapping and manslaughter in Missouri embarked on a four-day, two-state killing spree along with Lawrence Lingle Brittain and Ruth Renee Williams. Brittain and Williams both pleaded guilty and testified against Knighton in exchange for leniency, and have since been released from prison. Knighton was convicted of two murders in Oklahoma and executed in 2003.
Gilbert Ray Postelle was an American mass murderer who was sentenced to death and executed for his involvement in a quadruple murder in Oklahoma. He was executed on February 17, 2022, by lethal injection.
Raymond Eugene Johnson killed his ex-girlfriend and her infant daughter in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2007, shortly after being paroled from a previous manslaughter conviction in 1995. For the latter crimes, Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death, and is currently awaiting execution.
On July 6, 1984, in Elk City, Oklahoma, 7-year-old Layla Cummings was abducted, raped, and murdered by Richard Norman Rojem Jr., who was previously convicted and jailed for sex offenses. Rojem, who was formerly married to Cummings's mother before their divorce, was convicted of murdering Cummings and sentenced to death in 1985. Rojem, who failed in multiple attempts to overturn his death sentence, was incarcerated on death row for close to 40 years before he was executed via lethal injection on June 27, 2024, after the state parole board rejected his appeal for clemency.
On January 24, 1985, in Oklahoma City, 35-year-old schoolteacher Linda Reaves and her boyfriend Douglas Ivens were both shot by Bigler Stouffer, the boyfriend of Ivens' wife who was targeting Ivens for his $2 million life insurance policy. Ivens survived three gunshot wounds to his body, but Reaves was mortally wounded and died from two gunshot wounds to the head.
On June 19, 1992, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, 31-year-old convenience store owner Kenneth Meers was gunned down during a robbery perpetrated by two gunmen. The murderers – Glenn Bethany and Emmanuel Littlejohn – were arrested and charged with robbing and murdering Meers. Littlejohn was sentenced to death, while Bethany received a life sentence in separate trials between 1993 and 1994.
Michael Dewayne Smith, also known as the Hoover Killer, was an American convicted murderer who was given the death penalty for the murders of two people at different locations in Oklahoma City on February 22, 2002. Smith, who was part of the Oak Grove Posse gang, was suspected to have murdered another man in 2001 and was on the run when he committed the double shootings in 2002, first killing Janet Moore, a 41-year-old mother, at her house before he murdered 22-year-old Sarath Pulluru, a student and store clerk from India. Smith was arrested for the double murder, for which he was convicted and sentenced to death in 2003. Smith was incarcerated on death row for 21 years before he was ultimately executed on April 4, 2024 despite his protestations of innocence.
On March 6, 1997, seven days before his 74th birthday, Albert Troy Hale was attacked and murdered by a friend in his house at Oklahoma City over Hale's refusal to give his friend money to buy cocaine. The killer, James Allen Coddington, was charged and convicted of the murder, and sentenced to death in 2003. After exhausting all his appeals and losing his clemency plea, Coddington, whose death sentence was overturned in 2006 before it was restored in 2008, was executed via lethal injection on August 25, 2022.
