A death row inmate who was convicted of fatally shooting a U.S. airman and his girlfriend and later confessed to three other killings is now scheduled to die by lethal injection next month in Florida, under the terms of a death warrant signed Tuesday by Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeSantis has authorized a record number of…
A death row inmate in Oklahoma was preparing for his scheduled execution Thursday when Gov. Kevin Sitt spared his life and announced his decision to commute Wood’s sentence from death to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Tremane Wood, 46, is the sixth condemned person to receive clemency in the state in the…
Executions are on the rise in the United States. After creeping upward since the coronavirus pandemic, when the country’s use of the death penalty reached a historic low, the numbers have skyrocketed this year. Forty-one executions have been carried out so far in 2025, and, without intervention from government officials or the courts, another six…
Tennessee death row inmate Harold Wayne Nichols on Monday declined to choose between the electric chair and lethal injection for his Dec. 11 execution, meaning the state will default to lethal injection. Nichols was sentenced to death in 1990 after he was convicted of raping and murdering Karen Pulley, a 21-year-old student at Chattanooga State…
A voting board in Oklahoma decided Wednesday to recommend clemency for Tremane Wood, a death row inmate who is scheduled to receive a lethal injection next week at the state penitentiary in McAlester. Wood, 46, faces execution for his conviction in the 2001 murder of Ronnie Wipf, a migrant farmworker, at an Oklahoma City hotel…
A man who is scheduled to be executed later this month for a 1993 murder continues to maintain his innocence, saying on Wednesday, “I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in any killing.” Anthony Boyd, 53, has been on death row in Alabama for the last three decades. He was convicted in 1995 of capital…
If Christa Gail Pike’s execution proceeds as planned next year, she will become the first woman put to death in Tennessee since the state began to formally document capital punishment more than a century ago. After attempted appeals by Pike’s attorneys repeatedly failed, the Tennessee Supreme Court on Tuesday set a date for her to…
The Utah Supreme Court has blocked a death row inmate’s upcoming execution, after the inmate’s attorneys argued in an extensive legal back-and-forth with the state that their client’s worsening dementia should spare him from capital punishment. Ralph Leroy Menzies, 67, was set to be executed Sept. 5 for abducting and killing Utah mother of three…
Federal prosecutors said Thursday they would seek the death penalty against a Washington state woman accused of fatally shooting a U.S. Border Patrol agent during a traffic stop in January after she was indicted by a grand jury on a murder charge. Teresa Youngblut, 21, is accused of fatally shooting David Maland on Jan. 20…
Tennessee executed an inmate Tuesday without deactivating his implanted defibrillator, despite uncertainty about whether the device would shock his heart when the lethal chemicals took effect. Experts say it marked the first time a man has been put to death with a working heart device in his chest. Byron Black was executed after a back-and-forth…