Titusville is a city in and the county seat of Brevard County, Florida, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 48,789, up from 43,761 at the 2010 census. Titusville is located along the Indian River, west of Merritt Island and the Kennedy Space Center, and south-southwest of the Canaveral National Seashore. It is a principal city of the Palm Bay–Melbourne–Titusville, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area.
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.'"
Bobby Kent was a 20-year-old American man who was murdered by seven people, including his best friend, Martin Joseph "Marty" Puccio Jr in Weston, Florida. The murder was adapted into the 2001 film Bully.
Pedro Luis Medina was a Cuban refugee who was executed in Florida for the murder of a 52-year-old woman in Orlando. The circumstances of his execution elevated objections to the use of electrocution as a means of capital punishment. During his execution, Medina's head burst into flames, filling the death chamber with smoke. An autopsy later revealed that the current had destroyed Medina's brain, killing him instantly.
Dobie Gillis Williams was an American criminal in Louisiana who was convicted of the murder of Sonja Knippers in 1984, and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1999. His case has been controversial.
The Lords of Chaos was a self-styled teen militia formed on April 13, 1996, in Fort Myers, Florida, United States. It was led by Kevin Donald Foster. The group gained notoriety for a crime spree that ended on April 30, 1996, with the murder of one of the boys' teachers, Mark Schwebes, the Riverdale High School's band director.
Morris Odell Mason was an American convicted rapist and murderer who called himself "the killer for the Eastern Shore". He was executed for the murder of Margaret K. Hand, although he was responsible for at least one other murder committed during a killing spree days prior that involved multiple burglaries and sexual assaults. His execution was controversial due to his diagnosis with schizophrenia and developmental disabilities, the latter of which caused activists and even Mason's executioner to worry that Mason was not mentally sound enough to be aware of his impending execution.
Donald David Dillbeck was an American convicted murderer executed by the state of Florida for killing a woman in a Tallahassee mall parking lot in 1990 after escaping from prison, where he was serving a life sentence for killing a deputy sheriff in 1979.
James Lee Clark was an American murderer with an intellectual disability whose controversial execution by the state of Texas sparked international outcry. The controversy involved the argument that his execution violated the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Atkins v. Virginia (2002), which held that executions of intellectually disabled criminals is cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
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.
Andrew Reid Lackey was a prisoner executed for the October 31, 2005 murder of Charles Newman, an eighty-year-old World War II veteran. Lackey became the first person executed by the state of Alabama since October 20, 2011; executions had been partly slowed because of a legal dispute over the drugs being used. No further executions would occur in Alabama until the January 2016 execution of Christopher Brooks.
Marco Allen Chapman was a convicted murderer and the last person executed by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He was executed on November 21, 2008, by lethal injection at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville, Kentucky. Chapman was executed for a series of murders he committed on August 23, 2002, in Warsaw, Kentucky, on Weldon Way, killing two children, Chelbi Sharon, 7, and Cody Sharon, 6, by stabbing after he had raped and stabbed their mother, Carolyn Marksberry, the city clerk of Warsaw at the time, over 15 times. 10-year-old Courtney Sharon played dead after she had also been stabbed by Chapman several times, and escaped.
Hurst v. Florida, 577 U.S. 92 (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court, in an 8–1 ruling, applied the rule of Ring v. Arizona to the Florida capital sentencing scheme, holding that the Sixth Amendment requires a jury to find the aggravating factors necessary for imposing the death penalty. In Florida, under a 2013 statute, the jury made recommendations but the judge decided the facts.
The Columbia Correctional Institution is a state prison for men located in Lake City, Columbia County, Florida. The facility first opened in 1992, has a mix of security levels including community, minimum, medium, and close, and has a capacity of 1427 inmates.
On January 28, 2014, 18-year-old Justin Michael Back was murdered in Waynesville, Warren County, Ohio. Austin Gregory Myers and Timothy E. Mosley were convicted of murdering Back at his family home in order to steal a safe from the house. The case received national media attention because of the discrepancy in the sentencing of the two young offenders.
On April 4, 1989, 22-year-old Charles Lambert "Chip" Flynn was killed by his ex-girlfriend Kim Hallock in Brevard County, Florida. Flynn died from a gunshot wound. Hallock claims that an African-American man named Crosley Alexander Green was responsible for Flynn's death. Green was found guilty of Flynn's murder and placed on death row. He was eventually removed from death row. After having his conviction vacated by federal court in 2018, Green was released from prison on house arrest, pending the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to either retry or overturn his conviction based on the prosecutors withholding evidence in his original trial. Green's conviction was reinstated in March 2022.
Bernard Eugene Giles is an American convicted serial killer and rapist who murdered five girls and women in Titusville, Florida, in late 1973. After his arrest in December of that year, he fully admitted his guilt and was sentenced to serve several life imprisonment terms in 1974.
Robert Wayne Harris was an American mass murderer and serial killer who killed six people in Texas. In 1999, Harris abducted and killed a woman whom he suspected of stealing money from him. The following year, he went on a shooting rampage at his former workplace, a car wash, killing five people. Harris had been fired a few days earlier, after he exposed himself to a customer. He was convicted of capital murder for the car wash shooting, sentenced to death, and executed in 2012.
Leslie Leon Burchart was an American serial killer who killed three homeless men and wounded a fourth in Richmond, Virginia, from 1994 to 1996. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for these crimes, but not long after, he confessed to killing four women as part of the so-called Golden Years Murders.
On 5 August 2018, Veronica Youngblood murdered her daughters Sharon Castro and Brooklynn Youngblood, aged 15 and 5 respectively in their apartment in McLean, Virginia. She was sentenced to 78 years in prison.
