In the winter of 2021, two death row prisoners raised claims in habeas corpus proceedings that their trial attorneys were constitutionally ineffective. But the nation’s highest court split in a decision last month ruling that they could not introduce evidence outside of the state court record due to restrictions imposed by a federal law.
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COVID may have seemed like the only thing that happened in 2020, but for Indiana’s legal community, the past year brought watershed developments that will be with us for years to come, many of which were touched directly by the pandemic. Here are the Top 10 non-coronavirus Indiana legal news stories as determined by consensus of the Indiana Lawyer editorial staff.
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Attorney Ashley Eve was one of more than a dozen death penalty protesters who claimed that their First Amendment rights were violated when Indiana State Police set up roadblocks that kept capital punishment protestors almost 2 miles away from the federal prison in Terre Haute while three executions took place there last month. Eve was motivated to a career in law by her opposition to the death penalty.
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With federal death row in its jurisdiction, the Southern Indiana District Court is preparing but does not know what to expect as the U.S. Department of Justice moves forward with the resumption of executions after nearly two decades.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sided with an Alabama death row inmate who had his lethal injection called off at the last minute in November and argues he should be put to death by nitrogen hypoxia when he is ultimately executed.
Prison officials this week moved a former drug dealer convicted of killing a 16-year-old Texas girl off federal death row to serve a life sentence in another prison amid criticism that he should have been moved years ago,
A man charged with killing a former girlfriend and her grandmother outside an Indiana factory in 2021 has pleaded guilty in a deal that takes a possible death penalty off the table, authorities said.
When the U.S. prisons director visited the penitentiary in Terre Haute, this past week, she stopped by the federal death row where Bruce Webster is in a solitary, 12-by-7-foot cell, 23 hours a day. Webster’s not supposed to be there.
A story of a teen girl sentenced to death garnered international headlines and, after extensive interviews and research, is now being told through a new book, “Seventy Times Seven.”
The image of gunmen in a row firing in unison into the chest of a condemned prisoner may conjure up a bygone, less enlightened era. But the idea of using firing squads is making a comeback.
The first federal capital case tried under President Joe Biden ended with a split among jurors that means the life of an Islamic extremist who killed eight people in a New York City will be spared. It came at a rare federal death penalty trial in a state without the death penalty.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled Wednesday for a man on Arizona’s death row who wants a new sentencing hearing because jurors in his case were wrongly told that the only way to ensure he would never walk free was to sentence him to death.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers proposed legislation making it easier to send convicts to death row by eliminating a unanimous jury requirement in capital punishment sentencing.
President Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to work toward abolishing federal capital punishment but has taken no major steps to that end.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to hear the appeals of two brothers who were sentenced to death for four fatal shootings on a Kansas soccer field in December 2000 known as “the Wichita massacre.”
A man facing a death penalty charge in the fatal shooting of an Indiana police officer has asked a judge to represent himself, and his appointed attorney wants to withdraw from the case.
The white gunman who massacred 10 Black shoppers and workers at a Buffalo supermarket pleaded guilty Monday to murder and hate-motivated terrorism charges, guaranteeing he will spend the rest of his life in prison.
A prosecutor wants the death penalty for a man charged with killing a Richmond police officer.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a last-minute appeal filed by Oklahoma death row inmate Benjamin Cole, paving the way for him to receive a lethal injection Thursday.
Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz will be sentenced to life without parole for the 2018 murder of 17 people at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, after the jury said Thursday that it could not unanimously agree that he should be executed.
Dylann Roof’s death sentence and conviction in the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation should be upheld and don’t merit review by the U.S. Supreme Court, attorneys for the federal government wrote in a filing Wednesday.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for a man accused of fatally shooting a young Indiana police officer last month during an early morning traffic stop, officials announced Wednesday.
A federal death row inmate convicted in an Arkansas murder and robbery has secured habeas relief against his robbery conviction and one of his death sentences.
Federal prosecutors will not seek the death penalty against an Indiana man charged in the fatal shooting of a Terre Haute police detective who was also an FBI task force officer.