In chapter 4, Stevenson and Ansley form the EJI and begin taking on cases even though they are understaffed and financially unstable. Two inmates beg Stevenson and Ansley to take on the cases of Michael Lindsey and Horace Dunkins. They try to get Lindsey’s case appealed but in the end he ends up getting executed in May of 1989. They also try to get Dunkins case appealed but it is denied. Dunkin was intellectually disabled and it wasn’t for 13 years later that the executing a mentally disabled person became illegal.…
In the Baze v. Rees case, two inmates named Ralph Baze and Thomas Bowling were convicted for murder and sentenced with the death penalty. In 1992, Ralph Baze killed a Kentucky County Sheriff with three shots fired in his back, and also killed a deputy sheriff with two shots in the back and one in the back of his head (Rushford). The other inmate, Thomas Bowling rammed into a car in the dry cleaning parking lot; he got out of the car and shot the couple and the two-year-old child in the car and drove away in 1990 (Rushford). Baze and Bowling had claimed that Kentucky’s lethal injections is cruel and unusual punishment which is a violation of his Eighth Amendment rights. The lethal injections is a process that includes a dose of Diazepam which…
Claude Jones was executed in 2000 for the murder of a liquor store owner Allen Hilzendager. On November 14, 1989, Jones and another man were seen pulling into a liquor store in Point Blank, Texas. One person stayed in the car while another went inside. The witnesses were standing across the road and were unable to see which man went inside. Although Jones testified that he never entered the store, Dixon and Jordan, the two other men who were with Jones at the liquor store, testified that Jones was the shooter.…
Decided: Jun 28, 1972 The Furman case solidified requests from three indicted killers serving out sentences on death line. The lead case was that of William Henry Furman, a 26-year-old African American from Georgia, who had broken into a home with the purpose to commit robbery. The house owner amazed Furman, be that as it may, and attempted to catch him.…
Robert Dewey is an example of a wrongful conviction. He was sentenced to life for rape and murder after a young woman was found dead in her own apartment. The woman, who was 19- year old Jacie Taylor, was found dead June 1994, she had been strangled to death and left for dead in a half-filled bathtub with a dog leash wrapped tightly around her neck. Sadly, she had been abused and sexually assaulted prior to her murder. A year later Dewey was put on trial for Taylor’s murder.…
Alejandrina Carreno Mrs. Kemp Civics May 3, 2015 Gregg v. Georgia The case of Gregg v. Georgia involved the case of Troy Gregg versus the state of Georgia. The case was decided by the United States Supreme Court in July of 1976 in which involved the sentencing of the death penalty. Troy Leon Gregg, was arrested in 1973 due to armed robbery and murder convictions, it was believed that Gregg was involved in the robbery and murder of two men in Georgia.…
He was sentenced to four life terms without the possibility of…
Rees, Commissioner, Kentucky Department of Corrections. This supreme court case has raised several concerns regarding capital punishment. This case began on January 7, 2008 and was decided on April 16, 2008. This case came about because petitioners filed a suit asserting that the lethal injection protocol was unethical and violated the eight amendment’ ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The state trail held several extensive court proceedings and entered detail facts pertaining to the issue, however, came to the conclusion that there was minimal risk in the lethal injection and that it did not break and constitutional rights.…
Georgia court case that took place in 1972, the Gregg v. Georgia case circulated during 1976 and completely discredited the Furman v. Georgia court proceedings. According to The Harvard Journal on Legislation, “ Under Georgia’s new statute, an offender became death-eligible only if the offender was found guilty of a capital offense and then met at least one of the statutory ‘aggravating circumstances’” (Wang 514). In other words, the Gregg v. Georgia court proceedings reinstated the death penalty on the basis that it “does not invariably violate the Constitution (“The Death Penalty…”). As a result of this case, several states followed in Georgia’s footsteps, reclaiming the death penalty as a constitutional right.…
Georgia William Henry Furman was convicted of murder in Georgia in 1972. Furman faced death under Georgia’s laws. Petitioner had testified that what he did was accidental, so Georgia Supreme Court affirmed Furman’s conviction. After sifting through the situation, the Georgia Supreme Court declared the death penalty was unfair and unconstitutional.…
Aside from protecting racially-motivated policing, the Supreme Court has also made it so that claims of racial bias cannot be made in the sentencing process. An example of this can be found in McClesky v. Kemp, where the Supreme Court illustrated that they would tolerate discrimination in the criminal justice system so long as no one explicitly claimed their racial biases (Alexander, 109). In 1987, an African American man named Warren McCleskey was facing the death penalty after being convicted for the murder of a Georgia police officer. Represented by lawyers from the NAACP, McCleskey challenged his sentence by presenting the high court with the Baldus study, an in-depth statistical analysis of Georgia’s death sentencing patterns conducted…
A state will not be required to guarantee eventual freedom, but it must provide an opportunity of release that is based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation (Miller v. Alabama, 2012). The question in this case is whether the imposition of life-without-parole of a fourteen-year-old violates the Eight and Fourteenth Amendments’ prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment (Miller v. Alabama, n.d.). The Eight Amendment forbids the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court areas of cruel and unusual punishment; in proportional sentencing and in individual sentencing (Rhodes, 2015).…
Now, Clayton Lockett is not the first to die from a botched lethal injection. Since “1985…over twenty-five botched executions have been reported, mostly based on direct observation” (Groner, Hippocratic, 2008, 896). Not only that, but lethal injections are supposed to be a humane way to die. In Lockett’s case and in others it was not. The physician could do nothing for him to try to save him so that the execution could take place another day.…
In July 1992, Jack Greene was on trial for the murder of Sidney Bennett whom he beat, tied up, and stabbed all before shooting her prior to fleeing the scene from Arkansas to Oklahoma. He was then found guilty and sentenced to be put to death by capital punishment. Greene, aged 62, faces his execution date of November 9, 2017, about 25 years after the origin of his crime. His lawyers justify that his execution would be unconstitutional since Greene’s profound mental illness was not a determinantal factor aiding his exoneration and preventing any capital punishments. In earlier years, Greene did have a history of mental diseased relatives, and did experience a somewhat traumatic childhood.…
As John Morrison exclaimed,“It should be clear that the death penalty does just the opposite of promoting decency and respect for life... It can never be applied fairly.” Since the mid nineteenth century, inmates on death row have been murdered by a plethora of gruesome methods, such as venomous lethal injections, gas chambers, and electrocution. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there have been 1,413 executions in the United States from 1976 to the present. Although the number of death penalty verdicts are decreasing, flaws in the American judicial system have caused an increase in the amount of punishing wrongfully accused suspects to the death penalty.…