Updated: May 08, 2023
Capital Case Round Up
The latest developments in capital cases around the U.S. This page includes brief updates about grants of relief, resentencings, and other important case developments.
Updated: May 08, 2023
The latest developments in capital cases around the U.S. This page includes brief updates about grants of relief, resentencings, and other important case developments.
Dec 26, 2021
James Coddington, the last of the seven death-row prisoners scheduled to be put to death in Oklahoma’s five-month execution spree, has received a stay of execution.
On December 23, 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Friot, who is presiding over a challenge brought by Oklahoma death-row prisoners to the constitutionality of the state’s lethal-injection protocol, stayed Coddington’s March 10, 2022 execution date “until a final judgment on Mr. Coddington’s claims in this case has been entered by this Court.” The Oklahoma Attorney General’s office consented to the stay.
On August 11, 2021, Judge Friot ordered a trial in the prisoner’s lawsuit, scheduled to begin in late February 2022. At the same time, he dismissed six prisoners — including Coddington — from the lawsuit, saying they could not prevail on their constitutional challenges because they had not designated an alternative method by which they could be executed. Although then-Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter had assured the court the state would not seek execution dates while the lawsuit remained unresolved, his successor, John O’Connor, disregarded that representation and sought death warrants against the six and a seventh prisoner who was not a party to the lethal-injection challenge.
Later, on October 12, 2021, Friot reinstated Coddington as a party to the lawsuit, finding “credible corroboration from an independent evidentiary source” that Coddington mistakenly believed that “he had already effectively communicated his choice of a firing squad” as his “alternative method of execution.”
Citing “the unique circumstances of this situation,” Coddington’s lawyers and the Oklahoma attorney general’s office stipulated that Coddington’s execution should be stayed.
Dec 12, 2021
Florida death-row prisoner Paul Durousseau was re-sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole December 10, 2021, when a second capital sentencing jury reached a non-unanimous sentencing verdict.
Durousseau was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 on charges that he had raped and murdered a 24-year-old woman in Jacksonville in 1999. The trial court imposed the death penalty in that case after the jury split 10 – 2 in favor of death. At the time, Florida was one of three states that permitted judges to impose death sentences based upon non-unanimous jury recommendations for death.
The Florida Supreme Court overturned Durousseau’s death sentence in January 2017 following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the state’s sentencing procedures, which reserved for the trial judge the final finding of facts necessary to impose a death sentence, violated capital defendants’ rights to a jury trial. Citing the non-unanimous jury sentencing recommendation in that trial — also a 10 – 2 vote — the Florida court ruled that the constitutional violation in Durousseau’s case could not be considered harmless error.
Oct 22, 2021
A second Ohio death-row prisoner has been resentenced to life without parole under a new state law that makes individuals who were seriously mentally ill at the time of their crime ineligible for the death penalty.
Donald Ketterer, who was sentenced to death in Butler County in February 2004, was transferred from death row in Ohio’s Chillicothe Correctional Institution on October 6, 2021 to a state prison in Warren County after a Butler County Court of Common Pleas ruling in September that vacated his death sentence. “Ketterer suffered from bipolar disorder on Feb. 24, 2003, when Lawrence Sanders was murdered,” visiting Judge James Brogan wrote, “and because of his bipolar disorder, lacked substantial capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.”
The Ohio legislature voted in December 2020 to exempt individuals whose serious mental illness “significantly impaired the person’s capacity to exercise rational judgment” at the time of the murder in either “conforming [his] conduct to the requirements of law” or “appreciating the nature, consequences, or wrongfulness of [his] conduct.” The proposal designated certain illness as serious mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, and delusional disorder.
Governor Mike DeWine signed the bill on January 9, 2021 and it became law on April 12. Ketterer’s lawyers then filed a post-conviction motion in July seeking to overturn his death sentence, detailing his long history of mental illness. On June 23, 2021, David Braden became the first Ohio death-row prisoner to have his death sentence vacated because of serious mental illness.
Oct 19, 2021
The Ohio Supreme Court has upheld the state’s execution process against a procedural challenge by two of the state’s death-row prisoners that sought to invalidate Ohio’s lethal-injection protocol. A unanimous Ohio Supreme Court ruled on October 19, 2021 that the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) did not violate state law when it adopted a lethal-injection protocol without going through the state’s formal rulemaking process.
In their suit, death-row prisoners Cleveland Jackson and James D. O’Neal had argued that ODRC’s failure to comply with Ohio’s formal procedures for administrative rulemaking, including provisions for public notice and comment and filing the protocol with an appropriate state entity, invalidated the execution protocol. Without a valid protocol, Ohio would have had no legal means to carry out executions.
Oct 06, 2021
An Oregon appellate court has granted a new trial to death-row prisoner Jesse Johnson, finding his trial counsel ineffective for failing to interview a neighbor of the homicide victim whose eyewitness testimony could potentially exonerate him of the murder.
On October 6, 2021, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled that Johnson’s trial lawyers deficiently investigated the murder, failing to speak with Patricia Hubbard, a neighbor who lived directly across the street from the victim, Harriet Thompson. Hubbard, the court said, heard and saw events that contradicted the prosecution’s version of Thompson’s murder and exposed racial bias in the Salem police’s investigation of the killing. The court also found that trial counsel had unreasonably failed to speak with another neighbor who had alerted police — and later Johnson’s post-conviction investigators — that Hubbard had important information about the murder.
Hubbard, who worked late at night, told Johnson’s appeal lawyers that she had been sitting on her porch at 3:45 a.m. on the night of the murder. At that time, she said, she saw a white man whom she recognized as a frequent visitor of the victim park his van in the victim’s driveway and go inside. “Seconds later,” the court wrote, “Hubbard heard screaming coming from [the victim’s] house, a thud and then silence” and then saw the white man exit the back door, leap off the back steps, and run “flying” away from the house. About a half-hour later, she saw a Black man, whom she later said did not look like Johnson, walking down the victim’s driveway. Hubbard was at work when the victim’s body was discovered, and her neighbor later brought a Salem police detective to Hubbard’s house to assist in the investigation. According to Hubbard, the detective refused to take a statement from her, telling her, “A n***r got murdered, and a n***r’s going to pay for it.”
The court wrote, “[a] reasonable investigation would likely have led to finding and interviewing Hubbard, which in turn would have led to evidence and testimony that could have tended to affect the outcome of the trial.”
“This was a case where there were a series of mistakes that led to this injustice,” Johnson’s post-conviction lawyer, Ryan O’Connor, told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Systemically, it’s a recognition of the way police misconduct and racism cause wrongful convictions and injustice.” Marion County prosecutors have 35 days to decide whether to appeal the ruling to the Oregon Supreme Court. If they do not, they must decide whether to retry Johnson for the murder.