State & Federal Info

On March 21, 2024, the 1^st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the judge who presided over Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s (pic­tured) tri­al to inves­ti­gate his defense attor­neys’ claims of juror bias and deter­mine whether Mr. Tsarnaev’s death sen­tence should be over­turned because of this bias. In a 2 – 1 deci­sion, the 1^st Circuit declined defense attor­ney requests to over­turn Mr. Tsarnaev’s death sen­tence for his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bomb­ing but found that the tri­al judge ​“fell…

This week marks the 15^th anniver­sary of the repeal of the death penal­ty in New Mexico. On March 18^th, 2009, Governor Bill Richardson signed the repeal act (HB2085), end­ing the death penal­ty in the state. The bill came into force on July 1^st, 2009. New Mexico fol­lowed New Jersey to become the sec­ond state in the 21^st Century to end cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment through legislative…

On January 12, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it will seek a death sen­tence for Payton Gendron, the then-18-year-old who killed 10 Black peo­ple at a Tops super­mar­ket in Buffalo, New York in 2022. This is the first cap­i­tal case autho­rized by Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden Administration’s DOJ. The announce­ment came twen­ty months after the mass shoot­ing and eleven months after Mr. Gendron pled guilty to state first degree mur­der charges and was…

According to state­ments from sev­er­al fed­er­al death row pris­on­ers, the new ​“adverse con­di­tions” on death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, con­tributed to the December 1, 2023 death of Nasih Khalil Ra’id. Fellow pris­on­ers say Mr. Ra’id, whose giv­en name at birth was Odell Corley, died by sui­cide. Prison offi­cials have not released the report from Mr. Ra’id’s autop­sy or com­ment­ed on the cause of his…