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.
Read MoreA federal grand jury indicted an Indiana man Wednesday on charges that would make him eligible for the death penalty if he’s convicted in the fatal shooting of a Terre Haute police detective and FBI task force officer.
States and the federal government carried out 11 executions this year, the fewest since 1988, as support for the death penalty has continued to decline.
The Indianapolis man accused of killing a Southport police officer is no longer facing the death penalty after the Marion Superior Court accepted an agreement Friday reached by defense attorneys and the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office, which dropped the potential for capital punishment in exchange for a bench trial that could result in the defendant being sentenced to life in prison.
Conservative Supreme Court justices expressed skepticism Tuesday about a Texas death row inmate’s demand that his pastor be allowed to pray out loud and touch him during his execution.
Oklahoma administered the death penalty Thursday on a man who convulsed and vomited as he was executed for the 1998 slaying of a prison cafeteria worker, ending a six-year execution moratorium brought on by concerns over its execution methods.
An Alabama man who avoided execution in February was put to death Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request for a stay by his lawyers, who had argued the execution should be blocked on grounds that he had an intellectual disability.
Nikolas Cruz pleaded guilty Wednesday to murdering 17 people during a rampage at his former high school in Parkland, Florida, leaving a jury to decide whether he will be executed for one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings.
The gunman who killed 14 students and three staff members at a Parkland, Florida, high school will plead guilty to their murders, his attorneys said Friday, bringing some closure to a South Florida community more than three years after an attack that sparked a nationwide movement for gun control.
A last-minute court hearing is set Friday in Florida for Nikolas Cruz, the man police said has confessed to the 2018 massacre of 17 people at a suburban high school.
Dylann Roof’s chances for a new appellate hearing continue to dwindle, with a court refusing to reconsider recusing itself from his appeal over his death sentence and conviction in the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation.
The Supreme Court sounded ready Wednesday to reinstate the death penalty for convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Dylann Roof has lost the next phase of his appeal, with a federal court turning down his request for a new hearing to challenge his death sentence and conviction in the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation.
Dylann Roof has filed the next step in his federal appeal, challenging a court’s confirmation of his conviction and death sentence for the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation.
A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld Dylann Roof’s conviction and death sentence for the 2015 racist slayings of nine members of a Black South Carolina congregation, saying the legal record cannot even capture the “full horror” of what he did.
A man suspected of fatally shooting a woman and her granddaughter outside a central Indiana automotive seating plant where all three worked was formally charged with murder Friday, and prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty if he’s convicted.
A lawsuit that sought information about the drugs Indiana plans to use in lethal injections and that motivated the Legislature to use a late-night session to keep the veil of secrecy intact has come to a close, with the state paying more than $800,000 in legal fees and disclosing that its supply of lethal injection drugs has long been expired.
An incarcerated man waiting on federal death row has for the third time unsuccessfully sought relief from his capital punishment, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. This time, it rejected his argument under the “savings clause” that recent changes in clinical diagnostic standards show that he is intellectually disabled and ineligible for the death penalty.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against an Alabama inmate whose lawyers argued that his trial counsel should have done more to try to show he is intellectually disabled and therefore he should be spared a death sentence.
The Justice Department is halting federal executions after a historic use of capital punishment by the Trump administration, which carried out 13 executions in six months.
The Indiana Supreme Court has denied a final request for relief sought by a man facing the death penalty for the murder of his wife and stepchildren nearly 15 years ago.