Entries by Hayley Bedard

An analy­sis from The Appeal of more than two dozen cas­es in which LGBTQ+ defen­dants faced the death penal­ty found evi­dence that anti-LGBTQ+ bias affect­ed case out­comes. After an exam­i­na­tion of media reports, aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals, and legal doc­u­ments, The Appeal deter­mined that these cas­es are like­ly a sig­nif­i­cant under­count of the num­ber of LGBTQ+ peo­ple sen­tenced to death.​“These cap­i­tal cas­es illus­trate the ingrained anti-LGBTQ+ bias endemic to…

Photo cour­tesy of friends…

A July 2024 report from the Texas Defender Service (TDS), An Unfulfilled Promise: Assessing the Efficacy of 11.073, the first-ever com­pre­hen­sive review of Texas’ junk sci­ence writ, revealed that the​“law sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly fails to pro­vide relief to inno­cent peo­ple con­vict­ed based on false foren­sic evi­dence.” In 2013, the Texas Legislature passed a first-of-its-kind law, Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 11.073, cre­at­ing a pro­ce­dur­al path­way for convicted…

On July 26, 2024, the Missouri Supreme Court denied Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s request to block an evi­den­tiary hear­ing sched­uled for August 21^st, 2024, where the St. Louis County Circuit Court is set to hear evi­dence of Marcellus Williams’ (pic­tured) inno­cence. The cir­cuit court set the August 21^st hear­ing in response to a motion to vacate Mr. Williams’ con­vic­tion and death sen­tence filed by Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell in January 2024. In his motion, DA Bell wrote that…

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A July 10, 2024, National Public Radio (NPR) inves­ti­ga­tion has revealed that Rite Away, a small chain of phar­ma­cies locat­ed around San Antonio and Austin, Texas, com­pound­ed and pro­vid­ed pen­to­bar­bi­tal for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) between 2019 and late 2023 to car­ry out lethal injec­tion exe­cu­tions. During the same time peri­od, records at the Texas Board of Pharmacy and fed­er­al Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) indi­cate the phar­ma­cy was cited for…

George…