Mumia Abu-Jamal is an American political activist and journalist who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. While on death row, he has written and commented on the criminal justice system in the United States. After numerous appeals, his death penalty sentence was overturned by a federal court. In 2011, the prosecution agreed to a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. He entered the general prison population early the following year.
Christopher J. Scarver Sr. is an American convicted triple-murderer who is best known for the murders of his fellow inmates Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer, as well as Jesse Anderson, a murderer, at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Wisconsin in 1994. Scarver used a 20-inch (51 cm) metal bar which he had removed from a piece of exercise equipment in the prison weight room to beat and fatally wound Dahmer and Anderson. Scarver was sentenced to two further life sentences for the murders of Dahmer and Anderson, after being sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Steve Lohman in 1990.
Gary Michael Heidnik was an American murderer and serial rapist who kidnapped, tortured, and raped six women, murdering two of them, while holding them captive in a self-dug pit in his basement floor, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection in July 1999, currently the last person to be executed in the state. Heidnik was one of the inspirations for the Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb character in The Silence of the Lambs.
The United States Penitentiary, Allenwood is a maximum security United States federal prison in Pennsylvania. It is part of the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex and is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice.
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Mumia Abu-Jamal was a 1982 murder trial in which Mumia Abu-Jamal was tried for the first-degree murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. A jury convicted Abu-Jamal on all counts and sentenced him to death.
Washington Goode was an African-American sailor who was hanged for murder in Boston in May 1849. His case was the subject of considerable attention by those opposed to the death penalty, resulting in over 24,000 signatures on petitions for clemency to Massachusetts governor George N. Briggs.
The United States Penitentiary, Canaan is a high-security United States federal prison for male inmates, with a satellite prison camp for minimum-security male inmates. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice.
The history of violence against LGBT people in the United States is made up of assaults on gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals (LGBT), legal responses to such violence, and hate crime statistics in the United States of America. Those targeted by such violence are believed to violate heteronormative rules and contravene perceived protocols of gender and sexual roles. People who are perceived to be LGBT may also be targeted. Violence can also occur between couples who are of the same sex, with statistics showing that violence among female same-sex couples is more common than among couples of the opposite sex, although male same-sex violence is less common.
Jason Keel Sweeney was a construction worker from Fishtown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who at the age of 16 was murdered by four teenagers for his paycheck on May 30, 2003. The perpetrators included a girl he was dating and his best friend since childhood. Due to the manner in which Sweeney was murdered, the ages of the teens involved, and the seeming indifference of the perpetrators, the crime received national media coverage.
The murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart took place in Pocatello, Idaho on September 22, 2006, when Cassie Jo Stoddart, a student at Pocatello High School, was stabbed to death by classmates Brian Lee Draper and Torey Michael Adamcik. Both perpetrators received sentences of life imprisonment without parole on August 21, 2007.
Paul Michael Stephani was an American serial killer. He was also known as the Weepy-Voiced Killer due to a series of telephone calls he made to police, anonymously reporting his crimes in a remorseful and high-pitched voice. Stephani killed three women in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area.
Travis Victor Alexander was an American salesman who was murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Ann Arias, in his house in Mesa, Arizona. Arias was convicted of first-degree murder on May 8, 2013, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on April 13, 2015.
The Tate–LaBianca murders were a series of murders perpetrated by members of the Manson Family during August 9–10, 1969, in Los Angeles, California, United States, under the direction of Tex Watson and Charles Manson. The perpetrators killed five people on the night of August 8–9: pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her companions Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski, along with Steven Parent. The following evening, the Family also murdered supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, at their home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles.
Williams v. Pennsylvania, 579 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a prosecutor involved in seeking the death penalty for a defendant should recuse himself if asked to judge an appeal in the capital case.
Nicholas James Yarris is an American writer who spent 22 years on death row in Pennsylvania after being wrongfully convicted of murder.
Andrew Urdiales was an American serial killer who was convicted in Illinois in 2002 of killing three women and convicted in California in 2018 of killing five women. He was sentenced to death in California and died by suicide a few months later in California's San Quentin Prison.
Daniel Lee Corwin was an American serial killer who was sentenced to death and executed for murdering three women.
Alexander McClay Williams was an African-American teenager wrongfully convicted and executed for the 1930 murder of 33-year-old Vida Robare, a matron of the Glen Mills reform school he attended, in Pennsylvania. Williams confessed to the murder, although he later recanted his confession. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania wrongfully executed Williams for Robare's murder in 1931 when he was 16 years old, making Williams the youngest person ever executed in Pennsylvania.
James B. Grinder (1945–2010) was an American serial killer and rapist who murdered three teenage girls in Arkansas and a woman in Missouri between 1976 and 1984. Grinder wasn't apprehended until his confession in March 1998. However, authorities still had little evidence tying Grinder to the murders, so they used a technique known as brain fingerprinting to help prove his guilt. In 1999, Grinder was convicted of the four murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. He remained imprisoned until his death in 2010.