On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the sentencing of a Florida man to death was unconstitutional. The next day, the state’s supreme court ordered officials to figure out how that ruling affected the case of another man, set to be executed in under a month.
On Tuesday, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said he would not be surprised if the death penalty was abolished in the United States in the near future.
On Monday, October 19, the state of Ohio deferred its execution schedule until January 2017 due to problems acquiring the appropriate drugs for lethal injection. A dozen inmates have had their dates of execution accordingly postponed.
Kelly Gissendaner, the sole female inmate on Georgia’s death row, will be executed Tuesday evening, 18 years after she plotted the murder of her husband.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate ordered all executions to temporarily halt, calling lethal injection a cruel and unusual method. Wingate is expected to give a more thorough explanation behind the decision in the next few days.
A few weeks ago I spent a morning at the Norman Mailer archives at the University of Texas looking through the research materials for The Executioner's Song, Mailer's 1979 account of the life and death of Utah murderer Gary Gilmore. Around me, students in white gloves turned the pages of leather-bound books so…
There was lots of punching up at Rick Perry at last night's Republican debate, the first time the candidates had a chance to confront him. And they were all pretty peeved about his executive order to have girls vaccinated against HPV.
Yesterday Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in his state. Now the families of victims are angry — and Republicans vow to reinstate executions.
The Supreme Court has rejected Virginia death-row inmate Teresa Lewis's bid for a stay of execution, but Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg voted in favor of the stay. So is this a gender issue?
For the first time in a hundred years, a woman is on death row in Virginia. Now Iran is calling the US hypocritical for its objection to the execution of Sakineh Ashtiani. Are they right?
Catherine Hakim argues that "erotic capital" — a "combination of physical and social attractiveness" — is more important for women than a college degree. Arguments for women's "soft" (read: sexual) power aren't new — but here's why they suck.
As the news of Phillip Garrido's twisted crimes continues to unfold, I'm seeing a lot of people — including Jez commenters and Katherine Callaway Hall, whom Garrido abducted and raped in 1976 — wishing he could be put to death.
Moe is on the (supposedly) WiFi-enabled bus from Virginia, taking in the greatness of America (or at least that section between D.C. and New York City) while I'm stuck in upstate New York, so it's another episode of reverse-polarity Crappy Hour! We talk oil, what the GOP is doing wrong, what is wrong about what the…
Patrick Kennedy is a bad man. He was convicted in 2003 of the brutal rape of his 8-year-old stepdaughter in 1998 — a rape so brutal that it required the services of a cleaning company to remove the blood from the carpets and extensive surgery to repair the little girl's internal injuries. For his crime, the state of…
A Saudi Arabian woman has been sentenced to 200 lashes for being gang raped by six men; this was her sentence after a retrial! The original trial had sentenced her to 90 lashes, but her own lawyer found that punishment too lenient, since she could have been given the death penalty according to Saudi law. The woman…
