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.
A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the adversarial system, which is adopted in common law, or inquisitorial system, which is adopted in civil law. The prosecution is the legal party responsible for presenting the case in a criminal trial against the defendant, an individual accused of breaking the law. Typically, the prosecutor represents the state or the government in the case brought against the accused person.
The United States District Court for the District of Oregon is the federal district court whose jurisdiction comprises the state of Oregon. It was created in 1859 when the state was admitted to the Union. Appellate jurisdiction belongs to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Matthew P. Deady served as its first judge.
Gerald Leonard Spence is a semi-retired American trial lawyer and author. He is a member of the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame, and is the founder of the Trial Lawyers College. Spence has never lost a criminal case before a jury either as a prosecutor or a defense attorney, and did not lose a civil case between 1969 and 2010. He is considered one of the greatest lawyers of the 20th century, and one of the best trial lawyers ever. He has been described by legal scholar Richard Falk as a "lawyer par excellence".
Oregon v. Guzek, 546 U.S. 517 (2006), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution does not grant criminal defendants facing the death penalty the right to introduce new evidence of their innocence during sentencing that was not introduced during trial. Accordingly, states could constitutionally exclude such evidence from the sentencing phase of a capital trial.
Hardy Myers was an American lawyer and Democratic politician who served three terms as the 15th attorney general of the state of Oregon, United States. Prior to taking office in 1997, he served from 1975 to 1985 in the Oregon House of Representatives, the last four of those years as its speaker, and was also a Metro councilor and chaired the Oregon Criminal Justice Council.
Paul J. De Muniz is a retired American judge in the state of Oregon. He is the first Hispanic Chief Justice in the history of the Oregon Supreme Court. He was elected to the court in 2000, and elected as chief justice in 2006. He won re-election in May 2006 for another six-year term on the state's highest court. De Muniz previously served on the Oregon Court of Appeals for ten years.
Richard William Riggs was an American attorney and jurist who served as the 94th justice of the Oregon Supreme Court from 1998 to 2006.
Thomas Allen McBride was an American attorney and judge in Oregon. He was the 20th Chief Justice on the Oregon Supreme Court serving three times as chief between 1913 and 1927. Overall he served on Oregon’s highest court from 1909 till his death in 1930.
George Henry Burnett was an American attorney and judge in the state of Oregon. He was the 21st chief justice of the Oregon Supreme Court serving twice as chief first in 1921 to 1923, and then in 1927 when he died in office. Overall he served on Oregon’s highest court from 1911 until 1927.
Robert Eakin was an American judge and attorney in the state of Oregon. He served as the 19th Chief Justice on the Oregon Supreme Court. Eakin was the head judge of the court from 1911 to 1913, and was on the court overall from 1907 until 1917.
The Oregon Judicial Department (OJD) is the judicial branch of government of the state of Oregon in the United States. The chief executive of the branch is the Chief Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court. Oregon’s judiciary consists primarily of four different courts: the Oregon Supreme Court, the Oregon Tax Court, the Oregon Court of Appeals, and the Oregon circuit courts. Additionally, the OJD includes the Council on Court Procedures, the Oregon State Bar, Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability, and the Public Defense Services Commission. Employees of the court are the largest non-union group among state workers.
The Peggy Hettrick murder case concerns the unsolved 1987 death of Peggy Hettrick in Fort Collins, Colorado. Timothy Lee "Tim" Masters enlisted in the United States Navy following a high school career plagued by police accusation of murder when he was a sophomore at Fort Collins High School. After eight years in the Navy, he was honorably discharged. Masters worked for Learjet as an aviation mechanic until 1997, when he was arrested for the murder of Peggy Hettrick. He was charged and convicted of the Hettrick murder in 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. His sentence was vacated in January 2008 when DNA evidence from the original crime scene indicated that he was not the responsible party. Three years after his release from prison, Masters was exonerated by the Colorado Attorney General on June 28, 2011. As of 2023, no one else has been charged with Hettrick's murder.
Oregon's circuit courts are general jurisdiction trial courts of the U.S. state of Oregon. These courts hear civil and criminal court cases.
Oregon Ballot Measure 57 (2008) or Senate Bill (SB) 1087 was a legislatively referred state statute that increased term of imprisonment for persons convicted of specified drug and property crimes under certain circumstances. The measure enacted law which prohibits courts from imposing less than a presumptive sentence for persons convicted of specified drug and property crimes under certain circumstances, and requires the Department of Corrections to provide treatment to certain offenders and to administer grant program to provide supplemental funding to local governments for certain purposes.
Ernest D. Preate, Jr. is a former Republican Pennsylvania Attorney General. As Attorney General, he argued before the United States Supreme Court in the landmark case, Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania v. Casey on behalf of Robert P. Casey, then governor of Pennsylvania. Preate also successfully argued another landmark case, Blystone v. Pennsylvania in the United States Supreme Court addressing the death penalty.
Curtis Giovanni Flowers is an American man who was tried for the same murders six times by the same prosecutor in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Four of the trials resulted in convictions, all of which were overturned on appeal. Flowers was alleged to have committed the July 16, 1996, shooting deaths of four people inside Tardy Furniture store in Winona, seat of Montgomery County. Flowers was first convicted in 1997; in five of the six trials, the prosecutor, Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans, sought the death penalty against Flowers. As a result, Flowers was held on death row at the Parchman division of Mississippi State Penitentiary for over 20 years.
Harl H. Haas Jr. was an American politician and jurist in Oregon. A native of Missouri, he served in both chambers of the Oregon Legislative Assembly as a Democrat before serving as a district attorney and Oregon Circuit Courts judge.
Michael D. Schrunk was an American attorney who served as district attorney of Multnomah County, Oregon, United States from 1981 until 2012. He is believed to have been the longest-serving district attorney in the state of Oregon.
Michael Schmidt is an American attorney and a progressive prosecutor. He has served as the Multnomah County District Attorney since August 2020. Originally set to begin his term on January 1, 2021, Governor Kate Brown appointed him to the job early, in August 2020, to replace Rod Underhill, who retired in July. Schmidt will be succeeded by Nathan Vasquez on January 1, 2025 at the end of his term after conceding loss in the primary election in May 2024.
