Hours before Daniel Lewis Lee was scheduled to go to the lethal injection chamber, a federal judge on Monday stopped the Trump administration from carrying out the first federal execution in 17 years.
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The Seventh Circuit ruled Sunday that the first federal execution in nearly two decades may proceed as scheduled on Monday.
Read moreA Buddhist priest who says he’s the spiritual adviser of a federal death row inmate facing execution this month sued the Justice Department on Thursday, claiming the execution should be stayed because the Covid pandemic makes it impossible to tend to the inmate’s spiritual needs in person.
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to hear a challenge by environmentalists over rule waivers issued by the Trump administration to speed up the construction of the wall along the border with Mexico.
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Four men scheduled to be among the first federal prisoners executed in 17 years have asked the Supreme Court to resolve whether the new national protocols trample the law.
Read moreThe repeal of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act — which allowed defendants to challenge their death sentences if they could prove that race was the basis of the decision to seek or impose the penalty — cannot be applied retroactively, the state’s Supreme Court ruled. Individuals who filed claims under the act before it was repealed in 2013 are entitled to its full protections.
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An Ohio man convicted of murder in 1986 is intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be executed based on Supreme Court precedent, a unanimous Sixth Circuit panel ruled Wednesday.
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The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled Friday that corrections officials in the state must share documents related to the state’s half-decade effort to acquire and use new lethal injection drugs.
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Secrecy surrounding executions could hinder efforts by a group of medical professionals who are asking the nation’s death penalty states for medications used in lethal injections so they can go to coronavirus patients who are on ventilators, according to a death penalty expert and a doctor who’s behind the request.
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Five months after a federal judge blocked the government from reinstituting capital punishment, the D.C. Circuit cleared the way for federal executions Tuesday with an unusual 2-1 reversal.
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European Union member states must make sure countries outside the bloc that ask to extradite someone will not torture or kill that person, the EU’s highest court ruled Thursday.
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Based on the Trump administration’s refusal to put the death penalty off the table, the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked sharing information with U.S. authorities about two suspected members of the Islamic State group cell tied to the beheading of reporter James Foley.
Read moreColorado Governor Jared Polis signed a bill Monday repealing the state’s death penalty and commuting sentences for the last three men on death row to life in prison without parole.
Read moreA Colorado district attorney said Thursday his office will not seek the death penalty against one of the two suspects in a deadly shooting at a STEM school in 2019.
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France’s highest constitutional body on Friday rejected a man’s attempt to have his father pardoned following his 1957 execution for killing a policeman in an armed robbery.
Read moreThe Colorado House of Representatives voted 38-27 to repeal the death penalty Wednesday, potentially becoming the 22nd state to remove the sentence from the books.
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The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday against a man convicted of murder who argued that he might have avoided death row if allowed to tell jurors about the difficult circumstances of his childhood.
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Shedding light on a death-row case turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Rodney Reed has presented compelling evidence that he was railroaded for the death of a white police officer’s young fiancée.
Read moreThe California Supreme Court granted a habeas petition for a potential retrial of a man convicted of murdering a police officer, finding that his counsel committed serious errors during his trial. The man’s death sentence has already been vacated because of counsel’s deficient assistance during the penalty phase.
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