LAS VEGAS (AP) — Prison officials in Nevada are drawing criticism for proposing to use an untried three-drug combination for the Nov. 14 lethal injection of a death row inmate who says he wants to die.
William Morva was convicted in a 2006 double murder and is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday night. His lawyers and the European Union say he is suffering from severe mental illness.
Executions have been on hold in Florida since the Supreme Court deemed parts of the state's sentencing procedure unconstitutional in January 2016. Mark Asay is scheduled to be executed on Aug. 24.
Orlando's chief prosecutor said she wouldn't seek the death penalty, so the governor reassigned her murder cases. She sued to get them back. On Wednesday, the dispute went to the state's high court.
Justice Anthony Kennedy appears likely to cast the deciding vote in a Supreme Court case involving a death row inmate's right to help from a mental health expert who is independent of the prosecution.
Amnesty estimates China killed more people than all the other countries put together. The U.S. fell off the list of the top five countries to carry out the death penalty for the first time since 2006.
Nationwide, the number and pace of executions are down, but states are looking at alternative, previous methods after restrictions have increased making the drugs for lethal injection hard to obtain.
Gov. Rick Scott is reassigning 21 first-degree murder cases from State Attorney Aramis Ayala, who says seeking capital punishment is not in the best interest of justice.
The state hasn't carried out an execution in more than a decade, but its supply of the sedative midazolam expires at the end of April. So it plans to execute eight men over 11 days.
After saying she wouldn't seek the death penalty, a state attorney was removed from prosecuting a high-profile killing case by Florida Gov. Rick Scott. The state death penalty continues to be debated.
Chief Justice John Roberts calls the case "a perfect storm" of circumstances that culminated in a lower court "making a decision on life or death on the basis of race."
The judge rejected the state's use of midazolam, one of the drugs used in botched executions in Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma and Alabama. The ruling puts Ohio's next three scheduled executions on hold.
The execution of Ricky Gray on Wednesday was the first known instance of a state using midazolam, a sedative, that was not manufactured by a pharmaceutical company.
The white man who murdered nine black people in a church in Charleston, S.C., is the first person to receive the death penalty in a federal trial that included hate crimes charges.
Eighty-one men sit on Death Row in Nevada, and a new chamber was just built at Ely State Prison. But the last execution took place more than a decade ago.
Dylann Roof is facing the death penalty for the 2015 shooting rampage that killed nine black churchgoers. The self-avowed white supremacist also plans to represent himself.
In 2016, 30 people were sentenced to death in America, and 20 people were executed. Both numbers are the lowest in decades, but voters in three states also voted to keep execution on the books.
Ronald Bert Smith Jr. died by lethal injection late Thursday night, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay his execution. A judge sentenced Smith to die for murdering a man in 1994.
The judge in the federal trial of Dylann Roof, who is accused of murdering nine people in the basement of a historically black church, has ruled that the defendant may represent himself in court.
California voters rejected a ballot measure that would have abolished capital punishment, and narrowly approved a competing measure designed to speed up the execution process.
California and Washington passed stricter gun control measures, Nebraska and Oklahoma both passed measures backing the death penalty, and Colorado became the sixth state to legalize assisted suicide.
