Entries by Hayley Bedard

On September 23, 2025, North Carolina lawmakers approved and forwarded to Governor Josh Stein for signature House Bill 307 — also known as “Iryna’s Law” — which proposes sweeping changes to the state’s criminal laws. HB 307 imposes stricter pretrial release conditions, requires involuntary mental health evaluations for defendants under certain circumstances, shortens the timeline for capital case appeals, and provides an alternative to the current method of execution — lethal injection. North…

With just weeks remaining before his scheduled execution, attorneys for 72-year-old Samuel Lee Smithers are appealing the dismissal of their motion filed September 19, 2025, arguing that executing an elderly person violates both Florida and the U.S. Constitutions’ prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and fails to meet any valid penological justification. On September 22, 2025, the Hillsborough County Circuit Court denied Mr. Smithers’ request for an evidentiary hearing to consider…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia established that the Eighth Amendment prohibits executing people with intellectual disability. The Court later clarified that rigid IQ cutoffs were not permissible and also required states to consider meaningful evidence of intellectual disability, including scientifically valid expert testimony and adaptive functioning deficits. Despite this unequivocal constitutional protection, two death-sentenced prisoners — David Pittman and Victor…

In late August 2025, the First District Court of Appeals of Ohio ruled that Hamilton County prosecutors cannot use prior witness testimony in their retrial of Elwood Jones, who was on Ohio’s death row for 27 years until he was granted a new trial in December 2022. Mr. Jones was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Rhoda Nathan in a Blue Ash, Ohio, hotel in 1994, despite consistently maintaining his innocence. In 2022, Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Wende Cross ruled that…

When Chloe Beck was called for jury duty in early 2018, she initially viewed it as a potential break from work. But she did not anticipate that the case — involving a nanny charged with the stabbing deaths of two children — would have lasting effects on her mental health. As an alternate juror in the seven-week trial, Ms. Beck was required to look at crime scene photographs and hear testimony from the victims’ parents. For Ms. Beck, the experience proved difficult to process, particularly given the…

On August 5, 2025, a group of ten Arkansas death-sentenced prisoners filed a lawsuit challenging a new state law that authorizes their execution using nitrogen gas. Act 302, which Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law in March 2025, went into effect on the same day the lawsuit was filed. The prisoners’ lawsuit argues that the new law is unconstitutional because it violates the state constitution’s separation of powers. All ten prisoners included in the lawsuit were sentenced to be…