New Mexico

In a year of declin­ing death-penal­ty usage across the United States, nowhere was the ero­sion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as sus­tained and pro­nounced in 2019 as it was in the west­ern United States. Continuing a wave of momen­tum from Washington​’s judi­cial abo­li­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in October 2018, one state halt­ed exe­cu­tions and dis­man­tled its death cham­ber, anoth­er cleared its death row, two cut back on the cir­cum­stances in which the death penal­ty could be sought and imposed,…

The New Mexico Supreme Court has cleared the state’s death row, vacat­ing the death sen­tences imposed on the state’s final two death-row pris­on­ers, and direct­ing that they be resen­tenced to life in prison. The rul­ings, issued by a divid­ed court on June 28, 2019 in the cas­es of Timothy Allen (pic­tured, left) and Robert Fry (pic­tured, right), came almost ten years to the day after New Mexico’s death-penal­ty abo­li­tion, signed into law by…

As fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors dropped the death penal­ty against a Navajo man accused of killing a police offi­cer on Navajo land, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argu­ment in a sep­a­rate case on the sta­tus of a treaty estab­lish­ing the bor­ders of the Creek Nation reser­va­tion that could deter­mine whether Oklahoma has juris­dic­tion to car­ry out the death penal­ty against a cit­i­zen of the Muscogee (Creek) tribe. The two cas­es high­light issues of Native American…

Nine years after New Mexico prospec­tive­ly abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, lawyers for the state’s two remain­ing death-row pris­on­ers argued to the New Mexico Supreme Court that the death penal­ty was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate pun­ish­ment as applied to Timothy Allen (pic­tured, left) and Robert Fry (pic­tured, right), and that they should not be…