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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. Capital punishment is, in practice, only applied for aggravated murder. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, only 20 states have the ability to execute death sentences, with the other seven, as well as the federal government, being subject to different types of moratoriums. The existence of capital punishment in the United States can be traced to early colonial Virginia. Along with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, the United States is one of five advanced democracies and the only Western nation that applies the death penalty regularly. It is one of 54 countries worldwide applying it, and was the first to develop lethal injection as a method of execution, which has since been adopted by five other countries. The Philippines has since abolished executions, and Guatemala has done so for civil offenses, leaving the United States as one of four countries to still use this method. It is common practice for the condemned to be administered sedatives prior to execution, regardless of the method used.
In the U.S. state of California, capital punishment is a legal penalty. However it is not allowed to be carried out as of March 2019, because executions were halted by an official moratorium ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom. Prior to the moratorium, executions were 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.
Frances Elaine McLemore Newton was executed by lethal injection in the state of Texas for the April 7, 1987 murder of her husband, Adrian, 23, her son, Alton, 7, and daughter, Farrah, 21 months.
Robert Dale Rowell was a murderer executed by lethal injection by the U.S. state of Texas. He was convicted of the May 10, 1993 murder of Raymond Davey Mata in a Houston, Texas crack house.
Shannon Charles Thomas was a murderer executed by lethal injection by the U.S. state of Texas. He was convicted of the Christmas Eve, 1993 murder of 10-year-old Maria Rios and her 11-year-old brother, Victor Rios, in their Baytown, Texas home.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Texas for murder, and participation in a felony resulting in death if committed by an individual who has attained or is over the age of 18.
Brandon Wade Hein was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole for his involvement in the 1995 stabbing murder of 16-year-old Jimmy Farris, the son of a Los Angeles Police Department officer. Hein and two other youths who were present when the murder took place, as well as the actual killer, and were convicted under the felony murder rule because the murder was committed during the course of a felony – the attempted robbery of marijuana kept for sale by Farris's friend, Michael McLoren. Under the felony murder rule, any participant in a felony is criminally responsible for any death that occurs during its commission. In 2009, Hein's life sentence was commuted to 29 years to life.
Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930 (2007), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, ruling that criminal defendants sentenced to death may not be executed if they do not understand the reason for their imminent execution, and that once the state has set an execution date death-row inmates may litigate their competency to be executed in habeas corpus proceedings. This decision reaffirmed the Court's prior holdings in Ford v. Wainwright, and Stewart v. Martinez-Villareal.
Uttecht v. Brown, 551 U.S. 1 (2007), was a case dealing with jury selection in capital cases in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that appeals courts must defer to a trial judge’s decision on whether a potential juror would be able to overcome demur about capital punishment and be open to voting to impose a death sentence.
Bigby v. Dretke 402 F.3d 551, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard a case appealed from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas on the issue of the instructions given to a jury in death penalty sentencing. The decision took into account the recent United States Supreme Court decisions concerning the relevance of mitigating evidence in sentencing, as in Penry v. Lynaugh.
Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U.S. 880 (1983), is a United States Supreme Court case. The Court ruled on the admissibility of clinical opinions given by two psychiatrists hired by the prosecution in answer to hypothetical questions regarding the defendant's future dangerousness and the likelihood that he would present a continuing threat to society in this Texas death penalty case. The American Psychiatric Association submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of the defendant's position that such testimony should be inadmissible and urging curtailment of psychiatric testimony regarding future dangerousness and a prohibition of such testimony based on hypothetical data.
Capital punishment was abolished in Colorado in 2020. It was legal from 1974 until 2020 prior to it being abolished. All valid death sentences as of 2020 have since been commuted to life sentences by governor Jared Polis.
Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808 (1991), was a United States Supreme Court case which held that testimony in the form of a victim impact statement is admissible during the sentencing phase of a trial and, in death penalty cases, does not violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Payne narrowed two of the Courts' precedents: Booth v. Maryland (1987) and South Carolina v. Gathers (1989).
Death row, also known as condemned row, is a place in a prison that houses inmates awaiting execution after being convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death. The term is also used figuratively to describe the state of awaiting execution, even in places where no special facility or separate unit for condemned inmates exists.
Whitmore v. Arkansas, 495 U.S. 149 (1990), is a U.S. Supreme Court Case that held that the Eighth and the Fourteenth Amendments do not require mandatory appellate review of death penalty cases and that individuals cannot file cases as a next friend without a prior relationship to the appellant.
A jailhouse confession is a confession to a crime given by a prisoner to another inmates while in custody. Legal regimes have developed with respect to the use of jailhouse confessions in the prosecution of crimes.
Raymond George Riles is an American convicted murderer who was on death row in Texas from 1976 until he was resentenced to life imprisonment in June 2021. At the time of his resentencing, Riles had been on death row longer than anyone else in the United States. He was convicted of the December 1974 capital murder of John Henry, a Houston used car salesman. Riles was ruled competent to stand trial in the 1970s, but while on death row he was repeatedly found to be too mentally ill to execute.
Rodney Rodell Reed is an American death row inmate who was convicted on May 18, 1998 by a Bastrop County District Court jury for the April 23, 1996 abduction, rape, and murder of Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old resident of Giddings, Texas.
Carl Wayne Buntion was an American man convicted of capital murder in Texas and sentenced to death. On April 21, 2022, at the age of 78, he became the oldest inmate to be executed in Texas and the state's first execution of 2022.
On April 26, 1987, Kerrick Majors, a 14-year-old African-American boy, was tortured and murdered during a racially-motivated hate crime by three white drifters in East Nashville, Tennessee. Majors was attacked by the trio after he and his friends accidentally broke a $2 vase at a flea market. Majors was kidnapped, tortured, beaten, and stabbed to death, while his attackers yelled racial slurs at him. His body was found the following day.
References
- ↑ "Michael Dean Gonzales". Texas Department of Criminal Justice . Retrieved November 13, 2021.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "365 DAYS OF TEXAS TRUE CRIME: SPIDER". KBAT. Retrieved November 13, 2021.
- 1 2 3 4 5 "Execution date set for Michael 'Spider' Gonzales". CBS 7. September 1, 2021. Retrieved November 13, 2021.
- 1 2 3 "Condemned killer of 2 in West Texas in 1994 loses appeal". KHUO 11. June 3, 2015. Retrieved November 14, 2021.
- 1 2 3 "Judge signs 'Spider' Gonzales' execution order". Odessa American. September 1, 2021. Retrieved November 14, 2021.
- ↑ Polasek, Jonathan (September 1, 2021). "Michael 'Spider' Gonzales set to be executed in 2022". NewsWest 9. Retrieved November 13, 2021.
- ↑ Lozano, Juan A. (March 4, 2022). "Man facing death in couple's fatal stabbing gets reprieve". Associated Press . Retrieved March 4, 2022.
