death penalty

Attorney General Eric Holder just announced that he will seek the death penalty for the five 9/11 terror suspects. They will be tried in a New York federal court, as reported earlier this morning.

Crimes that occur on military bases are usually heard in the military justice system. But while that may sound harsher than a civilian court, the sentences usually turn out to be more lenient.
The result is that Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who allegedly gunned down 13 people at the military base in Texas last [...]

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, confirmed earlier this month after a bruising battle with Republicans, has cast her first vote on the court in a case that’s sure to leave Republicans saying, “I told you so.”
Sotomayor voted with Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, dissenting from the majority’s denial of a [...]

In a highly unusual decision, a majority of Supreme Court justices yesterday ordered that a federal judge in Georgia must hear new evidence that lawyers for Troy Davis have been saying for years will prove his innocence.
Davis, as I’ve explained before, has been on death row in Georgia since 1989, when he was found guilty [...]

Pro Publica’s Ben Protess does some digging into the past of former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris, who was chosen to fill President-elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Blagojevich was arrested last month for scheming to sell the seat. It seems there is at least one very legitimate reason to [...]

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has agreed to stay the execution of Troy Anthony Davis, the 40-year-old Georgia man convicted of killing a police officer in 1989. After 15 years on death row, Davis was scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection  Monday, [...]

At 7 p.m. Monday, Troy Anthony Davis is scheduled to be executed in Georgia. Even for those who support the death penalty, that’s cause for concern.
Davis was convicted in 1991 of murdering a Savannah, Ga., police officer based on witness testimony that, for the most part, has since been recanted. As I wrote [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday cleared the way for Georgia to execute a man convicted of murdering a police officer in 1989, though seven of nine witnesses in his case have since recanted.
Lawyers for the defendant, Troy Anthony Davis, now 40, had hoped the court would grant certiorari to review whether it is constitutional for [...]