Texas man executed for killing young parents in front of their child

 The 5th Execution of 2025

Florida executed James Dennis Ford on February 13, 2025 for the savage murders of two young parents in front of their toddler daughter in 1997, reported the USA TODAY.

Ford, 64, was executed by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison in Raiford and pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m. ET, becoming the first inmate to be put to death by the state in 2025 and the fourth in the United States this year. His execution came less than an hour before Texas is set to execute Richard Lee Tabler at 7 p.m. ET for the double murder of two men in 2004.

Ford was on death row for more than two decades for the 1997 murders of Gregory and Kimberly Malnory, who were in their mid-20s

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"This is the day for final justice for Kim and Greg," Connie Ankney, Gregory's mother, told reporters after the execution. "I hope he burns in hell."

Deidre Parkinson, Kimberly's stepmother also attended the execution. "We have justice and relief now, even though it was a very peaceful death for him," she said.

Here’s what you need to know about Ford’s execution, including his last words.

Officials said Ford did not say any final words to the people at the execution, but he did issue a final written statement. According to WWSB, his statement said: "Hugs Prayers Love!!! God Bless everyone!!!!"

Ford’s last meal included steak, macaroni and cheese, fried okra, sweet potato, pumpkin pie, and sweet tea. Three family members visited Ford on Thursday morning, according to Ted Veerman, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Corrections.

On April 6, 1997, court records say that Ford invited his co-worker Gregory Malnory and Malnory's wife Kimberly on a fishing trip to the South Florida Sod Farm in Punta Gorda, a southwestern Florida city just north of Fort Myers. The Malnorys brought along their 23-month-old daughter Maranda.

Police believe Ford first attacked Gregory, shooting him in the back of the head, bludgeoning him and slitting his throat. Kimberly, who was injured during the initial attack, managed to save Maranda by strapping her in the backseat of the couple's truck. But court records say Ford returned, then raped and beat her before shooting her dead.

About 18 hours later, an employee of the sod farm found the Malnorys' bodies. Maranda survived but the 23-month-old was dehydrated, full of insect bites and covered in her mother's blood.

Ford told police that he went fishing with the family and that they were alive when he left them to go hunting, records show.

Witnesses told investigators that they had seen Ford with blood on his face, hands, and clothes and that he had large scratches on his body. Prosecutors say Ford's DNA and gun connected him to the crime scene.

Maranda Joellin Malnory spoke to the local news station, Gulf Coast News, about the impact the murder of her parents left on her life.

“I told one of my grandmas the other day you grieve the people you knew,” she told the outlet. “But I grieve what could have been.”

She told the news station that she was 13 years old when she finally learned how her parents died. For her, that was a hard thing to stomach and has been hard to relive.

“Technically, my worst enemy is the person who did this,” she said. “But I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

Maranda dedicated a Facebook post to her parents' lives on Thursday, ending it by saying: "I love you forever mommy and daddy!"

Greg’s co-workers at the South Florida Sod Farm remembered the couple fondly.

“He was an all-American good ol’ boy. He loved to hunt and fish,” Wiley McCall, Greg’s supervisor told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “He was a model employee, always on time.”

Joseph Shackleford, Greg's childhood friend, said he knew the Malnorys well and described Kimberly as a selfless person. “She was the kind of person that would give you the shirt off her back. Everybody loved her,” he said.

During the trial against Ford in 1999, Connie Ankney described her son Greg as a loving husband a loyal friend and a dedicated father. “Greg will never get to walk his daughter down the aisle when she gets married,” she said.

Kimberly Malnory's mother, Linda Griffin, was devastated by her daughter's death.

“She was my life, my laughter and my tears,” she said during Ford's 1999 trial, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Griffin died in a car accident in 2016.

Dee Parkinson, Kimberly’s stepmother since the age of 6, described her stepdaughter as having "a vivacious, bubbly, talkative personality" and that the couple's friends and family would never get over their deaths. "Words cannot express how much we miss them both."

Ford had no significant criminal record before the murders, and friends and family said he never showed signs of violence. Ford had a troubled childhood with an alcoholic father and a mother who left when he was 14, court records say.

Rodney McCray, a close friend of the family, said that the last few years of his life, Ford's father was "drinking just about around the clock,” according to court records.

Still, Ford was close with his dad. He dropped out of school because he preferred to spend time with his dad at his job as a cemetery caretaker in Arcadia. Ford and his father shared a "very close" bond, Ford's first wife said, remarking that they were "closer than any two people she had ever known in her entire life.”

Ford was in his early 20s when his dad died at the age of 52.

“He was devastated that he had lost his best friend,” Ford's defense attorneys wrote in court records. “There were times when Paige Ford [his first wife] would find him missing at night, and she would find him at the cemetery lying on his father’s grave.”

The loss compounded Ford's decline. He had begun drinking in his late teens and eventually worked his way up to 24 beers in a day, records say.

In the leadup to the execution, his lawyers argued that the death penalty should not have been applied to Ford because he has a mental developmental age 20 years younger than his actual age.

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A Texas man executed for killing strip club manager and another man

 The 4th Execution of 2025

A Texas man who killed his strip club manager and another man, then later prompted a massive lockdown of the state prison system when he used a cellphone smuggled onto death row to threaten a lawmaker, was executed on February 13. 2024.

Richard Lee Tabler, 46, was given a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. The time of death was 6:38 p.m. CST, 15 minutes after a lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital was administered in his arms.

“There is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret my actions,” Tabler said, strapped to the death chamber gurney, looking at relatives of his victims who watched through a window a few feet away.

“I had no right to take your loved ones from you, and I ask and pray, hope and pray, that one day you find it in your hearts to forgive me for those actions,” Tabler said. “No amount of my apologies will ever return them to you.”

He expressed to love to his family and friends, lawyers and supporters, and he thanked prison officials for their compassion and “the opportunity to show you that I can change and become a better man and rehabilitate.”

After apologizing several more times and saying this was the beginning of a new life for him in heaven, he told the warden: “I am finished.”

As the drugs began, he mouthed once again, “I’m sorry,” then began breathing quickly. After about a dozen breaths, all movement stopped.

Tabler — the second person executed in Texas in a little over a week, with two more scheduled by the end of April — was condemned for the Thanksgiving 2004 shooting deaths of Mohammed-Amine Rahmouni, 28, and Haitham Zayed, 25, in a remote area near Killeen in Central Texas.

Rahmouni was the manager of a strip club where Tabler worked until he was banned from the place. Zayed was a friend of Rahmouni, and police said both men were killed in a late-night meeting to buy some stolen stereo equipment that was actually a planned ambush.

Tabler also confessed to killing two teenage girls who worked at the club, Tiffany Dotson, 18, and Amanda Benefield, 16. He was indicted but never tried in their killings.

Dotson’s father, George, was among the witnesses. He declined to comment on Tabler’s apologies, saying he needed time to process what he had just seen but was glad to have seen it.

“I couldn’t wait,” he said. “It took me 20 years to get here.”

“Today is for Tiffany,” said her godfather, Tom Newton. “And this is justice.”

Tabler had repeatedly asked the courts that his appeals be dropped and that he be put to death. He also has changed his mind on that point several times, and his attorneys have questioned whether he is mentally competent to make that decision. Tabler’s prison record includes at least two instances of attempted suicide, and he was previously granted a stay of execution in 2010.

“Petitioner has spent the last twenty years in the Courts, and see’s no point in wasting this Courts time, nor anyone else’s,” Tabler wrote to the state Court of Criminal Appeals on Dec. 9, 2024 after his current execution date was set.

Tabler’s death row phone calls in 2008 to state Sen. John Whitmire, who is now the mayor of Houston, prompted an unprecedented lockdown of more than 150,000 inmates in the the nation’s second-largest prison system. Some were confined to their cells for weeks while officers swept more than 100 prisons to seize hundreds of items of contraband, including cellphones.

Whitmire led a Senate committee with oversight of state prisons, and said at the time that Tabler warned him that he knew the names of his children and where they lived. Whitmire, through a spokesperson at the mayor’s office, declined to comment on Tabler’s pending execution.

The ACLU appealed Tabler’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court last year, claiming he was denied adequate legal representation during his lower court appeals by attorneys who refused to participate in hearings at what they said was his request.

The ACLU appeal argued that Tabler’s attorneys ignored a psychological exam that determined he had a “deep and severe constellation of mental illnesses ” that had been ignored since childhood. The court refused to halt his execution.

The club Tabler worked at was called TeaZers. Investigators said he had a conflict with his boss, Rahmouni, who allegedly said he could have Tabler’s family “wiped out” for $10.

Tabler recruited a friend, Timothy Payne, a soldier at nearby Fort Cavazos, and lured Rahmouni and Zayed to a meeting under the guise of buying the stolen stereo equipment. Tabler shot them both in their car, then pulled Rahmouni out and had Payne video him shooting Rahmouni again.

Tabler later confessed to the killings. During the sentencing phase of his trial, prosecutors introduced Tabler’s written and videotaped statements saying he also killed Dotson and Benefield days later because he was worried they would tell people he killed the men.

Investigators said that before he was arrested, Tabler called the Bell County Sheriff’s office to taunt deputies about the murders and threatened to kill more employees and undercover law enforcement at the strip club.

Also Thursday, in Florida, a man convicted of killing a husband and wife during a fishing trip at a remote farm while their toddler looked on was put to death by lethal injection in that state’s first execution this year.

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Alabama carries out another execution using nitrogen gas

 The 3rd Execution of 2025

The state of Alabama executed Demetrius Terrence Frazier by nitrogen gas on February 6, 2025 for the rape and murder of Pauline Brown in Birmingham in 1991, reported the Alabama Reflector.

Frazier, 52, the fourth person the state has executed by nitrogen gas, was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m., according to Gov. Kay Ivey’s office.

“First of all, I want to apologize to the friends and family of Pauline Brown, what happened to her should never have happened,” Frazier said when he made his final statement. “I want to apologize to the Black community.”

Frazier also criticized Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for not intervening in his case. Frazier was transferred to Alabama in 2011 while serving a life sentence in Michigan for the 1992 murder of Crystal Kendrick, 14. His legal team had urged Whitmer to take custody of his case and have him transferred back to the state for the crimes he committed in Michigan. Whitmer did not intervene.

A member of the Corrections staff adjusted Frazier’s mask at about 6:10 p.m. and the nitrogen gas began to flow a few minutes afterward. Media witnesses reported that Frazier struggled to breathe for several minutes during the execution.

At one point in the execution, Frazier lifted his legs and his body twitched, according to media witnesses. That is similar to what other witnesses observed from the three other executions that the state carried out using nitrogen gas.

Witnesses said that they observed Frazier take his final breath at about 6:20 p.m.

“It went according to plan like our protocol says,” ADOC Commissioner John Hamm said at a news conference following the execution.

The state executed Kenneth Eugene Smith by nitrogen gas in January 2024. Alan Eugene Miller was put to death under the method in September. Carey Dale Grayson followed in November.

“In Alabama, we enforce the law,” Ivey said in a statement Thursday evening. “You don’t come to our state and mess with our citizens and get away with it.”

The governor said that justice was carried out on behalf of Brown and her loved ones.

“I pray for her family that all these years later, they can continue healing and have assurance that Demetrius Frazier cannot harm anyone else,” Ivey said.

Frazier was convicted of Kendrick’s death in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison. An Alabama  jury convicted Frazier of capital murder in 1996 and recommended he be put to death by a vote of 10-2. While arguing that Frazier should be returned to Michigan, Frazier’s legal team also argued the nitrogen gas protocol violated Frazier’s Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment, citing the distress that media witnesses reported among the men who had previously been subjected to it.

The federal courts rejected both arguments. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said they would not ask for Frazier to be returned to their state.

Frazier’s family and supporters petitioned Whitmer to intervene. Frazier’s mother Carol penned a letter that requested Whitmer get involved, and a petition collected more than 4,000 signatures.

“We are disappointed that Michigan chose to ignore requests to intercede, to ignore its own history, and failed to have Mr. Frazier returned to Michigan to complete his life sentences,” Frazier’s legal team said in a statement after Frazier’s execution Thursday. “We are disappointed that Gov. Ivey has not granted clemency, especially under these uniquely unfair and painful circumstances.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Tonight, we grieve for everyone.”

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Texas executes man who murdered pastor during church robbery

 The 2nd Execution of 2025

Steven Lawayne Nelson, of Texas, convicted of beating and suffocating a Dallas area pastor in his church during a robbery was put to death on February 5, 2025, the second execution in the U.S. this year and the first of four scheduled in Texas over the next three months, reported The Associated Press.

Steven Lawayne Nelson, 37, received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. CST at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He was convicted of the 2011 killing of the Rev. Clint Dobson, a 28-year-old pastor who was beaten, strangled and suffocated with a plastic bag inside NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington. The church’s secretary, Judy Elliott, 67, was severely beaten but survived.

Shortly before the injection began, the inmate repeatedly told his wife, who watched through a window a short distance from him, that he loved her and that he was thankful and grateful.

 “It is what it is,” Nelson said. When he added that she should “enjoy life,” the woman, Helene Noa Dubois, held up to the window a white service dog that she was allowed to bring into the witness area.

“I’m not scared. I’m at peace,” Nelson added. “Let’s ride, Warden.”

As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began to be administered, he told Dubois, who married him recently while he was in prison, “Let me go to sleep.” The drug appeared to take effect as he said the word, “Love,” the he gasped twice and appeared to try to hold his breath. His head, shoulders and arms trembled for a few seconds before all movement stopped. He was pronounced dead 24 minutes later.

Nelson was the first Texas death row inmate executed since Robert Roberson’s Oct. 17, 2024, execution date was delayed in what would have been the first in the U.S. tied to a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome.

South Carolina carried out the nation’s first execution of 2025 on Friday. Marion Bowman Jr. received a lethal injection for his murder conviction in the shooting death of a friend whose burned body was found in a car in 2001.

Relatives of the victims declined to speak with reporters and released statements earlier Wednesday.

“As a family, we have chosen to take this day to focus on the great memories we have of Clint rather than giving time to his killer,” Dobson’s family said in its statement. “Steven Nelson forever changed our lives, but he has never occupied our minds. ... We miss Clint every day. We miss his laughter and his wit, his advice and his love for us.”

Bradley Elliott, whose mother Judy survived the attack, said: “I hope that today as Mr. Nelson took his last breath that he was greeted by the same loving and gracious Savior that has stood by us through all we have been a part of.” The statement added: “Mr. Nelson, we forgive you and hope to see you when we are called home from here.”

Nelson was a laborer and high school dropout with a long history of legal trouble and arrests that started as early as age 6. Nelson had pleaded for mercy, claiming that he had only served as a robbery lookout and blamed two other men for killing Dobson.

Nelson testified at trial and has maintained that he waited outside the church for about 25 minutes before going in and seeing that Dobson and the secretary had been beaten, and he insisted Dobson was still alive. Nelson said he took Dobson’s laptop and that one of the other men gave him Elliott’s car keys and credit cards.

The victims were later found by Elliott’s husband, the church’s part-time music minister, who didn’t immediately recognize her because she had been so severely beaten.

Trial evidence showed Nelson’s fingerprints and pieces of his broken belt at the crime scene, drops of the victims’ blood on his sneakers, and surveillance video showing him driving Elliott’s car and using her credit cards. Investigators also said the two men Nelson blamed for the attack had detailed alibis.

Nelson’s attorneys appealed on claims of bad legal representation at his trial and sentencing, saying this lawyers did little to challenge the alibis of the other men, or present mitigating evidence of a troubled childhood in Oklahoma and Texas.

While awaiting trial, Nelson was indicted in the killing of another jail inmate. He was never tried on that charge after his guilty verdict and death sentence.

Nelson’s appeals had been denied by state and federal courts. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied a stay of execution on Jan. 28, and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request for a stay hours before the execution.

Three more executions are scheduled in Texas before the end of April. The first is scheduled for Feb. 13. Richard Lee Tabler was condemned for gunning down a strip club manager and the manager’s friend in 2004.

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South Carolina carries out first execution of 2025

 The 1st Execution of 2025

South Carolina executed Marion Bowman Jr. by lethal injection on January 31, 2025 in the first execution in the United States this year, according to USA TODAY.

Bowman, who was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m., was on Death Row for the 2001 murder of 21-year-old Kandee Martin, a young mother who was killed five days before her son's second birthday. Police found Martin's bullet-ridden body in the trunk of her own car, which had been set on fire.

Bowman described Martin as a longtime friend and sometimes sexual partner, and while he admitted to selling crack cocaine to her, he always maintained he was innocent of her murder.

“I did not kill Kandee Martin. I’m innocent of the crimes I’m here to die for," Bowman said in his final words released through his legal team. Still, he said that Martin's family is in pain and "justifiably angry."

"If my death brings them some relief and ability to focus on the good times and funny stories, then I guess it will have served a purpose," he said. "I hope they find peace."

Martin's family, meanwhile, told USA TODAY ahead of the execution that they have been counting down the minutes until the execution and hoping it would bring them closure.

"He's had 24 years to find God and tie up his loose ends," Martin said. "We never got that opportunity. What was left of Kandee is in a coffin in the ground."

Bowman used some of his last words to draw attention to the death penalty and how society views people on Death Row, saying they're "labeled as the worst of the worst."

"None of these guys that I have gotten to know and grown to love are the people that they were when they had their moment that cost them everything," he said. "If the world could see us in our day to day, they would have a different view of the death penalty. We all pray for grace and forgiveness, but the outside world is stuck with images of monsters perpetrated by the State, while our real voices are silenced."

He concluded by saying: "We are not what the State labels us to be. We are kind, caring, loving people, and it’s a shame the world can’t see that.” 

Bowman's last meal was fried shrimp, fish, and oysters, chicken wings, chicken tenders, onion rings, banana pudding, German chocolate cake. He drank pineapple juice and cranberry juice.

A jury convicted Bowman of murdering Martin, whom Bowman described as a longtime friend and sometimes sexual partner who bought crack cocaine from him. Prosecutors argued that Martin owed Bowman money for drugs and cited several witnesses who said they heard him swearing to kill the young woman.

On Feb. 17, 2001, police found Martin's body. She had been shot once in the chest and once in the head on a dark country road. Her killer put her body in the trunk of her car and lit the car on fire, court records show.

The day she was killed, Bowman − who was 20 years old − said that he sold Martin drugs several times throughout the day but that later on she was "buying on credit." He said the two had sex and that afterward he saw her drive off in her car with his cousin, also a dealer.

That cousin became the star witness in Bowman's murder trial as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors for a reduced sentence. Bowman argues that jurors never heard that his cousin had confessed to killing Martin to a cellmate and that prosecutors ignored evidence that pointed to his cousin's and another man's guilt.

"I have done some things in life I regret," Bowman wrote. "I regret the role I had in dealing to Kandee and know that her addiction probably led to her death. But I did not do this."

The daughter of a rebar contractor and a stay-at-home mom, Kandee grew up in the tiny town of Branchville in rural South Carolina, about halfway between Charleston and Columbia. The town had limited employment options and was so small, Martin recalls that her graduating high school had just 21 students.

Kandee wanted something more and talked often of making it to Charleston and starting a career.

"She was a small town girl whose dream was to get out of the small town and just make something of her life," Martin said.

Before Kandee could get out of Branchville, she got pregnant with a baby boy who was both unexpected and a welcome blessing. "She went from being just a young single girl to being someone's mom, and to her, that was the coolest thing ever," Martin said.

"When I close my I eyes, I can still hear those two giggling with each other," Martin said. 

Bowman was killed by a lethal injection of pentobarbital.

Bowman's attorneys had been arguing that there was a "veil of secrecy" surrounding the drug, saying in court documents that the state has refused to turn over basic details, like the pentobarbital's expiration date and how it's stored. They also raised questions about the drug's purity and quality after a second dose was given to South Carolina inmate Richard Moore 11 minutes after his execution began in November.

In court filings, the state argued that Bowman could have chosen a firing squad or electric chair for his execution, but he opted to die by lethal injection for Martin's "gruesome murder."

Lindsey Vann, one of Bowman's attorneys, said he chose lethal injection despite the unanswered questions because the firing squad and electric chair are "barbaric and unconstitutional." If Bowman hadn't chosen from among the three, the default method would have been the electric chair.

Bowman grew up in a rural area in Orangeburg County, South Carolina, about halfway between Charleston and Columbia.

He had an absent father and his mother became ill when Bowman was a teenager, making him the man of the house, Vann told USA TODAY. "He's just a really loyal person from his earliest years, and unfortunately, that got him into the drug trade in the area," she said.

"My family was poor, but we got by," Bowman recently wrote in his online testimonial. "I didn’t finish high school. I worked at some manual labor jobs but could never make ends meet."

So, he turned to selling crack cocaine, at first to support his mother and sister, and eventually his wife and stepchildren, Vann said.

After he was imprisoned, Bowman's wife gave birth to the couple's baby daughter, who has since had a baby daughter of her own and made Bowman a grandfather. He also has three step-grandchildren he considers his own. Despite the circumstances, he says they're all close.

Vann said that Bowman matured while in prison, developed a deep faith in God and became a bit of a writer, penning poems including one titled ""While I Breathe I Hope," and a new one released Friday after his death called "Last Breath or Sigh." Among the lines in the new poem: "Let there be no mistaking − I've felt love with every breath I've taken ... Know that I'm in God's grasp, and it's in His bosom I'll rest in."

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Texas. the country's most prolific user of the death penalty, is looking to set some guide rails on executions

Texas has removed 32 people from death row based on evidence of intellectual disability since Atkins v. Virginia. Yet despite the rulings making those executions unconstitutional, no case or federal law outlines the standards states should use to determine which defendants qualify as intellectually disabled, leaving that process to state courts and appeals, reported The Texas Tribune.

Several states already have codified the exemption from death sentences for intellectually disabled inmates and created standards for determining who is eligible. Texas, however, has not codified the exemption or a process to discern who is exempt. The lack of guidance is not for a lack of trying: Texas House Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, has been trying to push the state toward a framework for years, especially as the new administration potentially eyes rollbacks.

In multiple sessions, Thompson has filed a bill that would codify the exemption, as well as create a separate, pretrial jury hearing for those charged in capital cases to discern whether they legally qualify as intellectually disabled. After the Supreme Court ruled against Texas in 2019, the bill briefly picked up some Republican backing before failing in the Senate.

“We're not plowing new ground, because other states have done this, are doing this, and have been doing it for a while,” Thompson said. “We're trying to eliminate a patchwork situation.”

Now called House Bill 688 in the 2025 legislative session, Thompson said her team estimates the cost of the pretrial hearing would be about $250,000. While the cost may seem expensive initially, Thompson stressed it could circumvent the more expensive death penalty trials, which counties would have to pay millions of dollars through the trial and appeal process.

Currently, a ruling determining a defendant is intellectually disabled is done on an “ad-hoc basis,” said Burke Butler, executive director of the Texas Defender Services. The nonprofit organization provides legal representation for death penalty defendants, having won five Supreme Court cases in its 30-year history and removing 44 defendants from death row since 2018.

Butler said HB 688 provides a streamlined process to determine a defendant's eligibility at a single point in the trial.

“This is an issue that really requires and deserves a separate hearing to determine whether someone has intellectual disability,” Butler said.

Thompson clarified HB 688 is not a statement on the ethical or financial responsibility the state has for death sentences, but a guardrail it needs to ensure it’s being constitutionally applied.

“We're not saying that because it costs X number of dollars we shouldn't do this,” Thompson said. “We're saying that if we're going to do this and that issue is raised, there should be a pre-trial hearing helped by a jury utilizing the current medical data.”

Boosting the use of lethal injections

Donald Trump’s executive order directs the attorney general to take “all necessary and lawful action” to ensure states that use lethal injection for death sentences have a sufficient supply. Many states, including Texas, that use lethal injection as a means of execution have laws in place shielding public knowledge of who supplies the drugs to states.

In the past decade, Texas has struggled to acquire and maintain adequate amounts of pentobarbital, the drug used for lethal injections, as pharmaceutical companies have stopped providing it to governments for use in executions. Officials from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice declined requests for comment on the executive order or its ability to secure lethal injection drugs.

For Texas to maintain its stock of the drug, officials turned to a variety of means, including retesting current supply for its potency to push back expiration dates. The practice resulted in multiple lawsuits from Texas inmates because of the risk of painful executions.

In 2023, an Austin judge went as far as to issue a temporary injunction hours before an execution, stating TDCJ’s use of its pentobarbital “is probably illegal to possess or administer because it is more likely than not expired.” That ruling was overturned by the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals.

Texas also has looked to local compounding pharmacies — where drugs are created on-site using necessary ingredients — to make up for the shortage. A 2024 NPR investigation found one compounding facility in San Antonio provided pentobarbital to the state from 2019 to 2023 while receiving several citations from the Texas State Board of Pharmacy for failing to maintain sterile compounding environments.

Yet even with enough of the unexpired drug available, using it may also clash with recent federal findings. Days before Trump’s inauguration, former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum suspending the federal single-drug lethal injections alongside a Department of Justice report that concluded the method likely caused painful pulmonary edema in executed individuals. Texas is one of seven states listed using the same method described in the report, which likened the sensation of induced pulmonary edema to waterboarding.

Because the memorandum affects only federal executions, states that use the single-drug protocol can still execute inmates with that method. On Feb. 5, Texas is scheduled to be the first state in the U.S. since the DOJ’s advisory was issued to execute an inmate with a single-dose lethal injection.

“Doubling down”

The only element of the executive order that directs the attorney general toward specific charges for potential defendants outlines two cases in which the death penalty should especially be sought: noncitizens illegally present in the country who commit capital crimes and anyone who kills law enforcement officials.

In Texas, capital murder is currently the only crime eligible for the death penalty, which includes the killing of police officers or firemen. Whether or not the death penalty is sought, however, is at the discretion of district attorneys, and the executive order does not require state attorneys to follow the new guidance.

A short section of the order also instructs the attorney general to accept or deny pending requests for certifications for the State Capital Counsel Mechanism Certification, for which Texas is currently the only applicant.

The certification allows states to fast-track habeas corpus petitions — which challenge the legality of an inmate’s incarceration — in capital cases, but states can only be certified if they prove they have a robust state-provided process for post-conviction representation. No state has ever received the opt-in certification, and Butler said Texas simply lacks the infrastructure to qualify.

“There are a couple of stages of proceedings in state habeas where people aren't entitled to counsel at all in Texas, and that has dire consequences for defendants in those proceedings,” Butler said.

With the state legislative session underway alongside the start of the new federal administration, much is still uncertain as to how the executive order will be received by Texas officials, but the current gaps in the state’s provisions have some worried how the two will mix.

“All of these things really point to the fact that you need a careful and comprehensive system for ensuring robust representation and ensuring that people's legal claims are addressed,” Butler said. “It's just very concerning that the administration is doubling down on the system that we know is so unjust.”

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Creators: Trump's Death Penalty Order a Challenge to the 8th Amendment

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators
January 28, 2025

The first Trump administration carried out more executions than any president in at least a century. Shortly after being sworn in for a second time, President Donald Trump signed an order to expand the death penalty.

It should come as no surprise that a second Trump Department of Justice will seek capital punishment more often under his administration. That would be a clear break from the prior administration.

Former President Joe Biden declared a moratorium on executions when he took office. He campaigned in 2020 on ending the federal death penalty. Legislation proposing to end state-sponsored death failed to gain any traction in Congress during the Biden administration.

During his final days in office, Biden thwarted Trump's plan to resume executions by commuting the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row.

Biden knew what was coming. Under the first Trump administration, the federal government carried out 13 executions in a little more than six months following a 17-year pause.

The federal executions of 2020 included: the first federal execution in 57 years for a crime committed in a state that had abolished the death penalty; executions carried out against the wishes of the victims' families; and the first lame-duck executions in more than a century.

After losing his bid for reelection, Trump oversaw six executions during the presidential transition period, more than any other administration in the history of the United States. Prior to 2020, the federal government carried out only three executions in the modern era of the death penalty. This time around, Trump will have only three inmates to choose from on death row, and it is unlikely that any federal death sentence imposed during his tenure will be eligible for execution before he leaves office.

In the past, the U.S. attorney general had wide latitude in deciding whether to seek the death penalty in individual cases. Trump's order instructs the office to pursue federal jurisdiction and seek the death penalty, "regardless of other factors," for people who murder a law enforcement officer or who are in the country illegally and commit a capital crime.

More troubling is the portion of Trump's order that addresses the 37 men whose death sentences were commuted to life without parole. The order provides, "[T]he Attorney General shall take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders [commuted persons] are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose."

Is Trump suggesting torture or something akin to it — like feeding inmates bread and water and locking them in tiny, unsanitary cells without interaction with others; no exercise; no contact with the outside world?

Miriam Gohara, a clinical professor of law at Yale Law School, told The Marshall Project the president's order raises legal concerns. "The punishment is being incarcerated. The punishment is not the condition of confinement. That's not legal," she said.

"The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment," Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told NPR. "There are limitations, both under the Constitution and international standards, that prohibit keeping people in torturous conditions."

"Are they going to intentionally put some sort of atmosphere in place that is intolerable?" added Gohara. "I can't imagine that is actually something that they could carry out. On the other hand, I don't want to underestimate them either."

Professor Gohara is right. Don't underestimate Trump. The U.S. Constitution may not be enough to constrain the new Department of Justice. On Day 1, Trump also declared that he wants to eliminate "birthright citizenship," a sacrosanct constitutional right adopted more than 150 years ago and delineated in the 14th Amendment.

How about the 22nd Amendment's limitation on presidential terms? With President Trump, everything is on the table.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on X @MatthewTMangino.

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Idaho legislator wants firing squad state's only form of execution

 A Nampa legislator wants to make death by firing squad the primary way of administering the death penalty in Idaho, reported the Idaho Capital-Sun. 

Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, introduced the legislation to the Idaho House Judiciary, Rules and Administration Committee on Tuesday. The committee voted to introduce the legislation, clearing the way for a public hearing before the committee at a later date. 

Lethal injection is the primary way of administering the death penalty in Idaho. Death by firing squad became legal in Idaho in 2022, when Skaug successfully sponsored House Bill 186 and Gov. Brad Little signed it into law, citing challenges in obtaining lethal injection drugs. 

During the 2022 legislative session, the Idaho Legislature passed House Bill 658, which gives the suppliers and manufacturers of lethal injection chemicals confidentiality. That law, which Little signed in March 2022, also prevents that confidential information from being disclosed in court filings, the Sun previously reported.

Skaug said his new bill would not take effect until July 2026 to give the Idaho Department of Correction time to refurbish a facility for firing squad purposes. It would have no fiscal impact to the state’s budget, Skaug said, because the 2022 legislation already appropriated $750,000 to the Department of Correction to refurbish the facility. 

“This bill is not about whether the death penalty is good or bad …” Skaug told the committee. “Our job is to make sure to carry out the most efficient manner under the bounds of the Constitution.”

There are nine people on death row in Idaho, according to the Idaho Department of Correction’s website.

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Trump's view of those federal prisoners with commuted death sentences is alarming

Shortly after being sworn in, President Donald Trump signed an order to expand the death penalty, confirming a widespread expectation that the Department of Justice may seek capital punishment more often under his administration, reported The Marshall Project. The first Trump administration carried out more executions than any president in at least a century. But legal experts say the order is short on details about how the administration will carry out its plans in the face of legal and bureaucratic barriers.

“This executive order is lacking in so many important details that it’s hard to know exactly what’s intended by some of these statements. Much of it sounds more like campaign rhetoric than policy statements,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that researches and analyzes the issue.

Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, fought to maintain death sentences when she was attorney general in Florida.

In the past, the U.S. attorney general has had wide latitude in deciding whether to seek the death penalty in individual cases. Trump’s order instructs the office to pursue federal jurisdiction and seek the death penalty, “regardless of other factors,” for people who murder a law enforcement officer or who are in the country illegally and commit a capital crime.

But Maher said it would be “unprecedented and contrary to established law” for prosecutors to seek a federal death sentence for every capital crime where the defendant is an undocumented immigrant.

Stories about Trump administration policies affecting criminal justice and immigration, and the president’s own criminal cases.

Republicans in Congress and state legislatures have long sought to expand use of the death penalty for people who kill police. Under federal law, jurors can consider the targeting of law enforcement as an “aggravating factor” in deliberating over the death penalty when the victim is a federal agent, judge or corrections officer. Several U.S. senators recently introduced the Thin Blue Line Act, which would add local and state police officers, firefighters and other first responders to the law.

Miriam Gohara, a clinical professor of law at the Yale Law School, said the most striking piece of Trump’s order regarded the people who had their sentence commuted from death to life in prison. Before leaving office, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 people. Trump’s order said the attorney general should ensure that those people are “imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”

Gohara said that raises legal concerns. “The punishment is being incarcerated. The punishment is not the condition of confinement. That's not legal,” she said.

People in maximum-security facilities already face harsh conditions, like the use of solitary confinement. “Are they going to intentionally put some sort of atmosphere in place that is intolerable?” said Gohara. “I can't imagine that is actually something that they could carry out. On the other hand, I don't want to underestimate them either.”

Trump’s order also said officials will explore whether some of the people whose sentences were commuted can be charged in state courts and receive new death sentences that way. But Gohara was skeptical that prosecutors would spend precious resources on decades-old cases where the person was already in a federal prison for life.

While the Trump administration has no jurisdiction over state cases, the president’s order says the federal government will work to ensure that states can keep killing people on death row by helping local governments obtain drugs for lethal injection.

Pharmaceutical companies have been refusing to supply corrections agencies with the deadly drugs, citing moral and business concerns. Some states have abandoned executions, while others have explored alternative ways to kill people, including firing squads and gas chambers.

​The order also instructs the attorney general to work to overthrow Supreme Court precedents that “lim­it the authority of state and fed­er­al gov­ern­ments to impose capital punishment.” The order does not reference specific cases, but this could be an allusion to Supreme Court rulings that limit the death penalty when the person convicted was under 18 at the time of the crime or has an intellectual disability. It could also refer to Supreme Court rulings that death sentences are inappropriate in cases where the victim does not lose their life. There have recently been efforts in states like Florida to allow capital punishment for the rape of a child.

While the order directs federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty more often, there is no guarantee that they will succeed in any individual case. Roughly half of Americans still support the death penalty in various polls, but a growing number reject it in individual cases when serving as jurors. The decline in support owes to a mix of interrelated factors: changing societal views on mental illness and intellectual disability, aggressive efforts by defense lawyers to present defendants’ childhoods as mitigating factors and reluctance by prosecutors to seek the punishment in the first place. Last year, 26 people were sentenced to death in state and federal courts across the country, compared with a peak of more than 300 a year in the mid-1990s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

In Texas 'tough on crime' impacts the guilty as well as the innocent

Politicians like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton project an image of being tough on crime, but they’re also tough on those who are innocent, per a year-end report from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, as reported by The Austin Chronicle.

The annual report tells the stories of several individuals who faced execution in 2024 despite evidence that they were not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted. Three of the eight people the state planned to execute this year tried to present evidence of innocence. The state killed Ivan Cantu on Feb. 28, despite evidence not heard by his trial jury – or any court – which demonstrated that the main witness against him lied on the stand about important details of the case. In July, Ruben Gutierrez received a last-minute stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to decide whether he should be allowed to sue the state of Texas to compel them to conduct DNA testing on items involved in his conviction. Gutierrez has said for years that such testing will show he is innocent. The state of Texas has fought the testing every step of the way.

The most glaring example of that kind of intransigence was the case of Robert Roberson. Roberson was convicted in 2003 of killing his chronically ill 2-year-old daughter Nikki on the basis of the dubious medical hypothesis known as “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” now regarded in many circles as junk science. Roberson’s advocates have tried for years to get Texas’ criminal justice system to consider evidence showing that Nikki died of undiagnosed pneumonia, not being shaken. The courts have refused to grant him a new trial. Gov. Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles have supported his execution.

The Texas Supreme Court stayed the execution on Oct. 17 at 9:45pm, four hours after it was to have begun, to allow the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence to bring Roberson to the Capitol to testify on his innocence. Paxton stopped the testimony last month, allowing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to ignore a subpoena from the committee. Roberson’s supporters expect another execution to be set for him in the coming year.

In two other death penalty cases, courts decided that Melissa Lucio and Kerry Max Cook were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is considering whether to accept the recommendation of Lucio’s trial court and overturn her death sentence. She remains locked up as she awaits the decision. Cook was officially exonerated by the TCCA nearly 50 years after his conviction and is now free.

The TCADP’s report shows that Texas juries are continuing to sentence fewer and fewer people to death. Only six new people were sent to death row this year. However, as death sentences decline, they continue to be applied disproportionately to people of color. Five of the six men sentenced to death this year are people of color: three are Black, one is Hispanic, one is Native American. According to the report, nearly 70% of death sentences over the last five years have been imposed on people of color. More than 40% were imposed on Black defendants. This disparity hasn’t changed over the years. Although Black people constitute about 13% of Texas’ population, they represent 47% of death row.

But the total number of people awaiting execution is down. As of Dec. 16, TDCJ lists 174 people on the row, the lowest number since 1985.

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Professor files legal brief challenging lethal injection for condemned man who wants executed

Death by lethal injection looks like the condemned person just went to sleep. But looks can be deceiving, reported the AZMirror.

Anesthesiologists know that an overdose of pentobarbital, the barbiturate used for executions by lethal injection in Arizona and other states, renders the prisoner unresponsive — but not necessarily fully anesthetized — before it kills by “flash pulmonary edema.”  

The drug causes part of the heart to fail, makes the brain obstruct breathing and floods the lungs with fluid. Autopsies show that the lungs of prisoners executed with pentobarbital are two to three times heavier than normal. 

In short, the prisoner drowns in his or her own body fluids, which one expert told the federal courts in a 2019 deposition is “one of the most powerful, excruciating feelings known to man.”

Lethal injection was once thought to be the least painful, most humane form of execution. Now, experts liken it to waterboarding, a form of torture considered too cruel to use in wartime.

To be specific, eight of the 27 autopsies cited in that 2019 deposition were of men executed in Arizona. Aside from problems inserting IV catheters in some of the executions, there were no apparent signs reported of what the anesthesiologist called “outward calm, inner terror.”

Virginia law professor Corinna Barrett Lain filed an amicus curiae, or “friend of the court” brief, advocating for condemned Arizona prisoner Aaron Gunches, who doesn’t want anyone advocating for him.

Gunches is on Death Row for the 2002 murder of Ted Price, his girlfriend’s ex-husband, and he has repeatedly petitioned the courts to go forward with his execution, saying he would rather be dead than rot in prison.  

the Arizona Supreme Court is supposed to set a briefing schedule that will likely lead to a death warrant so that Gunches’ execution can go forward.  

On Dec. 30, Gunches, who is representing himself in the case, filed a handwritten motion asking the court to forgo the formality of briefing and just set an execution date to “have his Long Overdue Sentence carried out.”

“Gunches asks this court why is AG (Kris) Mayes’ motion necessary?” he wrote. “It is pointless and just more ‘foot dragging’ by the state.”  

In a response filed Monday, Mayes’ office held firm on the formality of briefing.

But Lain argues in her brief that Gunches may not know what he is in for.

“Arizona is asking for a death warrant, and Mr. Gunches apparently agrees,” she said in an interview with the Arizona Mirror. “But the interests at stake when a state kills its citizens — in your name, and mine — are larger than those of the parties. One might very well support the death penalty and oppose executions in the name of expediency that inflict a torturous death.”

Lain is a former prosecutor and a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.  She spent seven years researching lethal injection for her book, “Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection,” which will be published in April.

Her amicus brief covers the pain likely inflicted by pentobarbital overdose (a subject that has not yet been litigated in Arizona), the history of troublesome and botched executions in the state and Gov. Katie Hobbs’ sudden dismissal of an independent investigation into the state’s execution processes in favor of a report the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry conducted on itself.

Whether Lain’s argument will sway the justices — or Gunches— remains to be seen.

Gunches is adamant that he would rather die, and he almost succeeded once. In 2022, then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who had already overseen the executions of three prisoners in the last year of his tenure while running for U.S. Senate, obtained a death warrant for Gunches. But he didn’t have enough time in his term for the execution to take place.

When Hobbs became governor and Mayes became attorney general in January 2023, they let the warrant run out and appointed David Duncan, a retired federal magistrate judge, to evaluate the state’s troubled lethal injection protocol.

Lain starts her brief with Mayes’ remarks at the time.

“I don’t think it’s a secret that we inherited one of the worst, most incompetent and most ill-funded Department of Corrections in the country,” as Mayes told the media. “I don’t think it takes a leap to suggest that we should understand whether they are capable of carrying out the death penalty before we do it.”

Indeed, there had been botched executions, repeated difficulties in setting IV lines, instances in which the Corrections department tried or succeeded in importing drugs illegally from other countries and failures to be transparent.

In that brave new administration, executions were put on hold, indefinitely. Or so it seemed.

But Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell intervened, asking the Arizona Supreme Court to let her carry out the death warrant, so that justice could go forward, even though the state constitution reserves that job for the AG.  Nonetheless, after two years of back and forth, the high court was willing to entertain arguments on the matter.

In December, Duncan, the independent investigator, sent a summary of his preliminary findings to Hobbs — and was summarily fired.

In a preamble of sorts to his unfinished draft report, he listed all the reasons the death penalty is impractical  — expense, long waits, exonerations — but then gets to the matter at hand: the disaster that is lethal injection. 

Among the findings, as Lain points out, were “‘Corrections officials seeking to learn on the eve of an execution what doses of lethal drugs to administer from Wikipedia.’ That’s outrageous.”

Pharmaceutical companies will not supply drugs for executions, so corrections departments have to have them custom-made or “compounded.”

Lain adds, “In 2023, (Corrections Director Ryan) Thornell went on record saying he had ‘serious concerns about the qualification and competency of the compounding pharmacist and the process used to compound the current supply of lethal injection drugs.’ Today, the State tells Arizona’s highest court not that it changed compounders, but that it changed its mind. The very same compounder that it had ‘serious concerns’ about two years ago is now just fine.”

A completed report promised to be scathing, and Duncan even suggested that death by firing squad, as barbaric as it is, was less likely to be botched than lethal injection.

“The ending of a life and overcoming that person’s will and biological command to live is by nature a violent act in every case — even lethal injection,” he wrote in a parenthetical aside.

Duncan suggested to reporters that he was fired after he asked about witnessing execution rehearsals conducted by Corrections staff, and after discovering that the executioners were paid tens of thousands of dollars in cash that the state was not reporting with proper tax documentation.

“Arizona has a long history of execution failures,” Lain said. “Against that backdrop, in 2023, the state promised to bring transparency and accountability to the execution process by conducting an independent review of its entire lethal injection process, but that review was terminated before the judge could complete it.”

But there had also been a political shift since the beginning of the Hobbs administration.  Mayes settled with Mitchell and said executions would go forward under the aegis of her office.  And Donald Trump, who had 13 federal prisoners executed during the last year of his first term, was coming back into office, already enraged about outgoing President Joe Biden commuting the death sentences of most of the prisoners on federal Death Row. Executions, after all, are one way that politicians prove to voters that they are tough on crime. It might have been awkward for Arizona to go forward with them after a particularly damning report commissioned during an earlier, more enlightened political moment.

Instead, Hobbs offered up an assessment by Thornell, who assured her that the department he leads had improved its team and its control over the drugs it procures to carry out executions.

“This is a new team, a team that wasn’t here in the past where we had botched executions,” Hobbs told the media. “And the whole point of doing the thorough review that has been done is to avoid that.”

Lain is not convinced.

“The initial draft summary prepared by the judge identified seriously problematic processes,” Lain said.

“Instead, the state relies on a review it conducted of itself, and says “trust us,” everything is fine.”

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North Carolina governor commutes 15 death sentences to LWOP

 Across the country, death sentences began a steep and steady decline twenty-five years ago. Today, just a relic of the prior practice remains in a handful of scattered counties, which maintain the practice at great public expense. North Carolina is no exception to this national trend, reported the Raleigh News & Observer. 

The death penalty is at the end of its rope. There are good reasons why. As a law professor who works to promote effective policy, it is clear to me that many of our responses to crime are based on inertia and emotion rather than solid evidence. That is especially true for the death penalty, which has no deterrent effect, costs taxpayers dearly and is riddled with errors and biases. 

That is why Gov. Roy Cooper’s commutation of 15 death sentences to life without parole sentences bears great significance. Cooper is the first governor in the history of North Carolina’s modern death penalty to grant more than two such commutations. With his action, Cooper acknowledged, in detailing a series of factors these cases implicated, the death penalty’s flaws and the responsibility of elected leaders to move away from this failed policy. 

Before these 15 commutations, it housed 136 people, nearly all of whom were sentenced more than 20 years ago. Today, capital trials are rare and juries almost never choose death sentences. In 2024, just three death penalty trials occurred with no new death sentences. A new Gallup poll found death penalty support continuing to erode among all groups, but especially among young people.

The death row commutations, alongside other commutations and pardons, are part of a larger effort to move toward smarter approaches to public safety. In 2020, Cooper created the Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, a huge step towards addressing racial inequities embedded in our criminal system. In 2021, he created the Juvenile Sentence Review Board to begin to ameliorate excessive sentences imposed on children. In 2023, he formed the Office of Violence Prevention, which takes a public health approach to preventing violence by strengthening communities. 

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Mangino quoted in Fox News article

 Great to contribute to this Fox News article by Audrey Conklin on President Biden's death row commutations.

"While generally, Biden revealed his disdain for the death penalty, he does believe — and his actions prove it — that there needs to be a death penalty for some."

--Matthew Mangino

To read CLICK HERE

Creators: Biden's Death Row Clemency Proves Need for Death Penalty

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators
December 23, 2024

Why did President Joe Biden commute the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates?

To start with, the president campaigned in 2020 on ending the federal death penalty. Although he directed the Justice Department to issue a moratorium on federal executions, legislation proposing to end state-sponsored death failed to gain any traction in Congress during his administration.

Additionally, President-elect Donald Trump vowed to carry out executions once in office. His track record reveals he isn't kidding. During the last six months of his prior term, the federal government carried out 13 executions. Contrast that with state executions in 2020, Trump's last year in office. There were seven executions in five states. In 2021, there were eight executions in the same number of states — all below the Mason-Dixon line.

The Trump administration conducted more executions in five months than any other presidency since the turn of the 20th century and carried out six executions during a presidential transition period, more than any other administration in the history of the United States. Prior to 2020, the federal government carried out only three executions in the modern era of the death penalty, most notably Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

Whether it was a ploy to bolster his tough-guy bona fides or a lowbrow pitch to his "law and order" constituency, then-President Trump's bloodlust saw no boundary.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, those executed by the federal government included the first Native American ever executed by the federal government for the murder of a member of his own tribe on tribal lands.

The Trump administration oversaw the first federal execution in 68 years of an offender who was a teenager at the time the crime was committed.

The federal executions of 2020 included: the first federal execution in 57 years for a crime committed in a state that had abolished the death penalty; executions carried out against the wishes of the victims' families; and the first lame-duck executions in more than a century.

As of December 2024, here were 40 men on federal death row. Biden commuted the sentences of 37. All of the offenders were convicted of murder. They will now serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.

According to The New York Times, of the 37 men whose sentences were commuted, 15 are white, 15 are Black, six are Latino and one is Asian. They were sentenced in 16 states, including three that had abolished the death penalty. Nine are on death row because they were convicted of killing fellow federal prisoners.

The three men who did not receive commutations are notorious mass killers. According to Newsweek, they include Dylann Roof, who carried out the racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and injured more than 260 in 2013; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 congregants after storming the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.

Prior to these commutations, Biden had already begun to deploy his clemency power aggressively — commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people earlier this month, as well as his controversial pardon of his son Hunter Biden.

In a strange sort of way, President Biden's bold use of his clemency power to prevent the systematic execution of federal death row inmates strengthens the argument in support of the death penalty. He left three men on death row to most assuredly face death. While generally, Biden revealed his disdain for the death penalty, he does believe — and his actions prove it — that there needs to be a death penalty for some.

You are either for the death penalty or you're against it. Like the old saying goes, you can't be a little bit pregnant. One can't be an opponent of the death penalty only until something really bad happens.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on X @MatthewTMangino.

To visit Creators CLICK HERE