News coverage ranged from practical explainers on California’s death penalty to vulgar punditry casting more heat than light. True crime celebrity Nancy Grace fumed that Reiner showed “no remorse” during his brief courtroom appearance. Megyn Kelly mused, without shame or evidence, that Reiner might deploy the same “sympathy card” as the Menendez brothers, who, after killing their parents, accused their father of sexually abusing them as children.

If there was one thing most people seemed to agree on, however, it was that a death sentence is highly unlikely.

Reiner’s reported mental illness has already raised questions over his competency to stand trial. His lifelong struggle with addiction, which led to homelessness and more than a dozen stints in rehab, is the kind of mitigating evidence that could persuade a jury to show mercy — if not convince prosecutors to take death off the table altogether.

Then there’s the Reiner family, which has barely begun to grieve. The Reiners’ adult children — who have asked “for speculation to be tempered with compassion and humanity” — may likely push back against a decision to seek death, whether out of opposition to the death penalty, a desire to avoid the trauma and spectacle of a capital trial, or because they do not wish to lose another beloved family member to homicide, no matter how devastating his alleged actions.

So why did the Los Angeles County district attorney raise the possibility of a death sentence for Nick Reiner at a press conference just two days after his parents’ bodies were found?

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In a state that has not carried out an execution in 20 years, decisions to seek the death penalty amount to little more than political posturing. While nearly 600 people remain under a death sentence in the Golden State, a return to executions has never seemed more far-fetched. After Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium in 2019, the death chamber at San Quentin was dismantled, and the condemned population transferred to prisons across the state.

While a new governor could conceivably lift the moratorium, any push to restart executions would take years. As one federal judge put it more than a decade ago, California’s death penalty remains a punishment “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

Yet there was District Attorney Nathan Hochman on December 16, standing somberly before the cameras in downtown LA to announce the charges that would make Reiner eligible for the ultimate punishment.

“No decision at this point has been made with respect to the death penalty,” Hochman added gravely, cautioning against speculation or rumor.

His decision would rely on the evidence and, at least in part, on input from the family of the victims.

He said, “We owe it to their memory to pursue justice and accountability for the lives that were taken.”

Reiners’ Activism

It is not overly speculative to say that Rob and Michele Reiner would have recoiled at the thought of the state seeking a death sentence in their name — let alone against their own son.

Their famed support of social justice causes included advocating for people in prison. Friends of Singer Reiner have recalled her recent focus on wrongful convictions and her regular conversations with Nanon Williams, a Texas man who faced the death penalty as a teenager before his sentence was reduced to life. One of Rob Reiner’s last production credits, “Lyrics From Lockdown,” a one-man show by the formerly incarcerated artist Bryonn Bain, centers in part on Williams’s story.

In a 2023 interview discussing the show, Reiner pointed to the racism at the heart of the criminal justice system, a topic he’d grappled with in his film “Ghosts of Mississippi.” He had brainstormed a potential documentary series, “Injustice for All,” he said, which would depict the ugly reality of the system: “It’s prosecutorial misconduct. It’s profiling.”

It was this very kind of systemic critique — rooted in decades of research and data — that had led former LA District Attorney George Gascón to halt death penalty prosecutions in Reiner’s home county a few years earlier. At a time when the death penalty had been on a long, slow decline, Los Angeles remained an outlier in sending people to death row — overwhelmingly people of color.

“The reality is the death penalty does not make us safer, it is racist, it’s morally untenable, it’s irreversible and expensive, and, beginning today, it’s off the table in LA County,” Gascón said at the time.

But electoral politics are quick to punish such attempts at reform — especially when they coincide with any uptick in crime.

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Gascón’s tenure overlapped with a rise in violent crime nationwide, a phenomenon tied to the pandemic but swiftly blamed on reform-minded prosecutors. While Gascón survived two recall attempts, the era of reform he sought to implement was short-lived. A crowded field of challengers lined up to replace him in 2024.

Hochman would win out by running a classic tough-on-crime campaign. Promising to rescue the city from a descent into crime-ridden dystopia, he vowed to revive the death penalty in LA as part of his “blueprint for justice,” a set of priorities primarily aimed at reversing his predecessor’s reforms. Never mind that the death penalty remained a failed public policy that did nothing to stop crime — and which California taxpayers had paid billions of dollars to maintain with little to show for it.

“Effective immediately,” Hochman declared months after taking office, “the prior administration’s extreme and categorical policy forbidding prosecutors from seeking the death penalty in any case is rescinded.”

It is against this backdrop that Hochman will now handle the prosecution of Nick Reiner.

Victims’ Families?

Just two weeks before the Reiners’ horrific murders, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California released a report assessing Hochman’s first year in office, decrying his “pattern of extreme and debunked approaches to crime.” At the top of the list was his decision to bring back the death penalty to LA County.

The report quoted a recent op-ed by veteran anti-death penalty activist and actor Mike Farrell, the board president of the California-based abolitionist group Death Penalty Focus.

“It’s incomprehensible that D.A. Hochman is once again pursuing the death penalty in Los Angeles, the county that has sent more people to California’s now-defunct death row than any other in the state,” Farrell wrote. Although Hochman often pointed to a pair of unsuccessful ballot initiatives that twice failed to repeal California’s death penalty, Angelenos voted in favor of the measures.

“So why,” Farrell asked, “would a responsible district attorney ignore the demonstrated will of the voters in the county he serves?”

Farrell also called out Hochman for refusing to meet with victims’ family members who oppose capital punishment. Although Hochman vowed to give families a voice in matters of crime and punishment, his conduct has left some families feeling betrayed.

Perhaps no family has been more vocal than the relatives of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who filed multiple complaints against Hochman for his conduct while he fought to block the brothers’ recent bid for release. Prior to Hochman’s election, the Menendez case had been reviewed by Gascón’s Resentencing Unit, ultimately persuading the DA to recommend that the brothers be resentenced after 35 years behind bars.

Hochman swiftly intervened, taking aggressive steps to keep the brothers in prison. In one subsequent letter, sent to the U.S. Attorney’s Civil Rights Division, a family member described a meeting between Hochman and more than 20 relatives, who urged the DA to reconsider his stance.

“In a tear-filled meeting, numerous family members shared the ongoing trauma and suffering we have endured for more than 30 years,” it read. “Instead of responding with compassion, acknowledgment, and support, DA Hochman proceeded to verbally and emotionally retraumatize the family by shaming us for allegedly not listening to his public press briefings.”

The Anti-Reformer

The ACLU report also shed light on Hochman’s disturbing attempts to undermine the Racial Justice Act, a landmark piece of criminal justice legislation allowing courts to reexamine death sentences rooted in racial bias. The law explicitly barred prosecutors from using animal imagery against defendants, a dehumanizing practice that has historically served as a racist dog whistle.

Yet Hochman went out of his way to defend a case where the prosecutor compared a defendant to a “Bengal tiger.” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who defeated Hochman for the top statewide office in 2022, had acknowledged that the tiger reference was wrong and that the death sentence should be vacated. Hochman, though, wrote in an amicus brief to the court that Bonta’s “concession was not well taken, and this Court should reject it.”

It would be hard to imagine a more retrograde position than defending racist imagery in capital trials. Hochman not only vowed to uphold the Racial Justice Act upon taking office, but also used its existence as political cover to justify his pro-death penalty stance.

As the ACLU wrote, “D.A. Hochman’s arguments against the RJA attempt to weaken the very law he claims would safeguard his death penalty decisions from racial bias.”

One could argue that none of this is relevant to the case of Nick Reiner. As a white man from a wealthy family who has secured one of the country’s most high-profile defense attorneys, he has had privileges that are unheard of compared to most defendants who end up on death row.

And while mental illness or addiction may ultimately spare Reiner from a death sentence, the same cannot be said for countless people whose crimes were driven by demons like his.

This, of course, is precisely the problem. Reiner is still somebody’s son. The others are the “worst of the worst.”

Given their advocacy, Reiner’s parents would likely have been the first to acknowledge this. Prosecutors like Hochman, however, cannot afford to be so honest.

Whether or not he decides to seek a death sentence against Reiner, Hochman’s narrative about the death penalty is one of the oldest in electoral politics — a story cloaked in the language of justice, told for political gain.

The post Prosecutor Floating Death Penalty for Nick Reiner Knows It’s an Empty Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

The new member was Kim McCoy, previously a victims’ advocate at the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office. As the head of the Victim Witness Unit for 25 years, she offered dedicated support to victims’ family members “in capital cases and select high-profile cases,” according to her official bio.

One of those cases was Humphreys’s.

Humphreys was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for the notorious double murder of 21-year-old Lori Brown and 33-year-old Cyndi Williams. The two women were killed northwest of Atlanta; the shocking crime generated so much pretrial publicity that Humphreys’s trial was moved from Cobb County to Glynn County, nearly 300 miles away.

McCoy provided logistical and moral support to the victims’ families throughout the monthlong trial. Members of Humphreys’s defense team would later recall in affidavits that McCoy was extremely protective of them, blocking the legal team’s efforts to introduce themselves. “She was a pitbull,” one said.

The families were grateful for McCoy’s support. In a profile published in McCoy’s alma mater magazine the year after the trial, they praised her care and compassion. “Sometimes you see people who are tailor-made for a specific job,” one said. McCoy was that person.

But her appointment to the pardon board on December 1 was another matter. Where Humphreys’s case was concerned, McCoy had a glaring conflict of interest. Although parole boards are often stacked with former prosecutors and law enforcement officials, making many clemency decisions little more than a rubber stamp, McCoy was a member of the very team that sent Humphreys to death row — one with an especially deep connection to his victims. As the lawyers would later write in a court filing, “it is hard to imagine a greater conflict of interest in a clemency case.”

McCoy was not the only board member with a connection to Humphreys’s case. Vice Chair Wayne Bennett was the Glynn County sheriff at the time of the trial, tasked with overseeing security and transportation for the sequestered jury — as well as Humphreys himself. To Humphreys’s attorneys, Bennett’s proximity to the victims, jurors, and defendant throughout the trial was too close for comfort. Under the board’s ethics rules, members are obligated to avoid even the appearance of bias. It was obvious to the lawyers that both McCoy and Bennett should recuse themselves from the clemency hearing. Yet there was no sign they planned to to so.

On December 4, Assistant Federal Defender Nathan Potek emailed the board’s legal counsel, La’Quandra Smith. “It has come to our attention that two of the current Board members, Mr. Bennett and Ms. McCoy, have conflicts in Mr Humphreys’ case arising from their respective roles at his trial,” he wrote. “Could you please let me know how the Board plans to address this issue and ensure that Mr. Humphreys has five conflict-free Board members to consider his clemency application?”

Smith wrote back five days later. “Mr. Bennett and Ms. McCoy were duly appointed to the Board by Governor Kemp,” she said. “As it is currently constituted, this Board plans to give due consideration to any clemency request made by Mr. Humphreys.”

In other words, the board planned to move forward with McCoy and Bennett’s participation.

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Georgia’s pardon and parole board is uniquely powerful. While many death penalty states leave it to the governor to be the last word on clemency, in Georgia, the board acts alone. It also has the power to grant stays of execution, something ordinarily done by the courts. And while some states open clemency hearings to the public, Georgia’s board members make decisions behind closed doors, with their votes classified as “confidential state secrets.”

With the execution less than a week away, Humphreys’s legal team filed an emergency motion in Fulton County Superior Court. It asked the court to direct McCoy and Bennett to recuse themselves and to order the board to grant a 90-day stay to allow time for two replacements. They also asked the court to block the Department of Corrections from executing their client until his clemency appeal had been considered by “a five member board free from conflict.” If a judge did not intervene, they wrote, “Mr. Humphreys’s final request for mercy — his last chance to have his case heard — will be ruled upon by two people predisposed to vote against him.”

A judge scheduled a hearing in Atlanta for December 15, the eve of Humphreys’s clemency hearing. That morning, the Georgia Attorney General’s Office filed a response to the emergency motion. McCoy would “abstain” from voting, it said. But it denied that Bennett should do the same. “The allegations concerning him do not come close to constituting a conflict of interest,” the state lawyers wrote.

The hearing was still an hour away when lawyers on both sides learned that the board had temporarily suspended the execution. Its decision was delivered via paper copy, complete with a gold seal. The board did not give a reason for its decision. Nor did anyone — including the judge — know how long the stay of execution would remain in place. “I don’t have any information as to how long the suspension will last,” the board’s legal counsel told the judge. In Georgia, execution warrants are valid for a week. Humphreys could be killed anytime between noon on December 17 and noon on Christmas Eve.

This was not the first time Humphreys’s case had raised concerns about bias.

His death sentence was rooted in an ugly confrontation between jurors at his trial. As members of the jury later told Humphreys’s legal team, jurors had initially decided to vote to impose a sentence of life without parole. But one woman instead voted for death, leaving the jury split 11 to 1. The holdout juror “snapped,” as one person put it, screaming and throwing photos of the victims’ bodies at the others. When the forewoman notified the court that the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision, the judge instructed them to keep deliberating.

According to the forewoman, she and the other jurors got the mistaken impression that they had to unanimously vote on a sentence or Humphreys would walk free. They changed their votes to death. “I cried the entire time,” she said.

The holdout juror had also revealed during the trial deliberations that she’d been a victim of violent crime. A man had broken into her apartment and attacked her — a fact that she withheld during jury selection. While she said during voir dire that she escaped before the man entered, she told fellow jurors that the intruder actually attacked her in her bed. The juror’s actions amounted to “extreme misconduct,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Humphreys’s case. In a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor wrote that the juror “appears to have singlehandedly changed the verdict from life without parole to death.”

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In their motion, Humphreys’s lawyers explained that they planned to discuss the juror misconduct at the clemency hearing. The clash between jurors had escalated to the point where it became violent: One juror punched a wall. This loss of control implicated Bennett, the former sheriff, who had been in charge of security — and whose experience would inevitably color his view of this evidence. At the hearing in Atlanta, where he testified via Zoom, Bennett said he’d only just learned about the episode. “The trial is more important for us to control,” he said. His participation in the trial “was minimal at best.”

McCoy also testified via Zoom. She said that she’d decided to abstain the night before. But it was not exactly clear what this meant. The state’s brief suggested that McCoy would not participate in the hearing apart from voting to abstain. But Smith, the board’s lawyer, said that McCoy would also be able to ask questions — an opportunity to influence the clemency discussion. Neither option fulfilled her ethical and legal obligations, Jessica Cino, a lawyer with the firm Krevolin & Horst who is representing Humphreys, told the judge. “Abstention does not fix the problem.”

In fact, it put Humphreys at a distinct disadvantage, since he needed three votes for clemency to avoid execution. “A vote to abstain is effectively the same exact thing as a vote to deny, from Mr. Humphreys’s perspective, correct?” Cino’s colleague asked Smith when she took the stand. “Correct,” she replied.

Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney clearly grasped the problem with McCoy, whose conflicts “kind of hit you in the face,” as he put it. But the solution to the larger problem was less obvious. While the attorney general’s office argued that the board did not necessarily need five members to preside over a clemency hearing, Georgia law said otherwise. And Smith testified that she’d never seen such a hearing proceed with fewer than five board members.

It was unclear by the end of the hearing how or when McBurney would rule. Humphreys’s attorneys urged him to impose a temporary restraining order to prevent the board from moving forward with a rescheduled clemency hearing and execution date. After all, the board “could unsuspend [the execution] the minute we walk out of this courtroom,” one lawyer said. This would immediately restart the clock.

Although Smith had said that the board “would provide at least 24 hours’ notice” before a new clemency hearing, this was not reassuring. Humphreys’s legal team, who only learned of the warrant on December 1, had already scrambled to get witnesses organized in time for the original clemency hearing. “It is right before Christmas which has made things incredibly difficult,” one lawyer said.

In a statement to The Intercept, Humphreys’s attorneys said that the situation remains tenuous. “While we are grateful that the Parole Board has decided to press pause,” they wrote, the suspension remains temporary. And it does not resolve “the serious ethical and legal deficiencies we raised in court.”

Meanwhile, the board’s director of communications replied to an email from The Intercept. “The board is waiting on a decision by the court,” he wrote. Asked if it was still possible for the execution to happen before Christmas Eve, he did not answer.

The post Secretive Georgia Clemency Board Suspends Execution After Its Conflicts of Interest Are Exposed appeared first on The Intercept.

Never mind the two-day evidentiary hearing years earlier, which convinced a federal district judge that Smith had an intellectual disability — and that executing him would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Never mind the three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that agreed. And never mind the decades of Supreme Court precedent contradicting Alabama’s position. Today’s Supreme Court was no longer bound by its own case law.

“Nothing in the Eighth Amendment bars the sentence Joseph Smith received for murdering Durk Van Dam nearly 30 years ago,” Overing began. Although the landmark 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities, Smith did not qualify. “He didn’t come close to proving an IQ of 70 or below.”

An IQ score of 70 has traditionally been considered a threshold for intellectual disability. Smith’s scores hovered above that, ranging from 72 to 78. But under well-established clinical standards, this makes him a “borderline” case. Experts — and the Supreme Court itself — have long recognized that IQ tests have an inherent margin of error. And they have relied on an array of additional evidence to assess whether a person is intellectually disabled. As now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote over a decade ago in Hall v. Florida, which explicitly struck down a rigid IQ requirement of 70, “intellectual disability is a condition, not a number.”

Under Atkins — and under Alabama law — decision-makers are bound by a three-part test: whether a person has limited intellectual functioning (determined in part by IQ); whether they struggle with “adaptive” functioning (the social and practical skills that make up day-to-day life); and whether those struggles manifested before the age of 18. The federal judges who ruled in Smith’s favor had applied this very test. But Overing discounted this. He had an alternative narrative: The judges had gone rogue.

To help Smith escape execution, he argued, the judges plucked his lowest score and rounded down in his favor, then leaned on lesser evidence as proof of his intellectual limitations. “The sentence ‘Smith’s IQ is below 70’ doesn’t appear in the District Court’s opinion, nor in the Court of Appeals opinion,” he said. The courts “changed the standard.”

“It seems to me that you are actually changing the standard,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cut in. The court opinions didn’t include “IQ is below 70” because that isn’t the law. The first prong of the three-part test requires “a showing of ‘significant subaverage general intellectual functioning,’” she said. “I think what you’ve done is shift this to be all about the IQ test in a way that is not supported by our caselaw.”

“I’m having a really hard time with this case,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. Overing was accusing the lower courts of violating a standard that does not actually exist. The record showed that the federal judges adhered to Supreme Court precedent. Hall invalidated the strict 70 IQ requirement. And a subsequent case, Moore v. Texas, emphasized that states could not rely on outdated medical standards to reject intellectual disability claims.

The lower federal courts followed the law. “It’s exactly what we told people to do in Hall, it’s exactly what we told people to do in Moore,” Sotomayor said.

She then cut to the heart of the matter: “What you’re asking us to do is to undo those cases.”

On paper, the question in Hamm v. Smith is narrow: “Whether and how courts may consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores” in deciding whether a condemned prisoner has an intellectual disability.

This question has never been explicitly answered by the Supreme Court. But while Alabama insisted that judges nationwide are yearning for guidance, its appeal to the court was rooted less in questions of law than in political opportunism. In the Trump era, the court has become a friendly forum for right-wing ideologues, with conservatives eagerly asking its supermajority to dismantle any pesky legal precedents obstructing their agenda.

Before Wednesday’s oral argument, it seemed likely the justices would find a way to give the state of Alabama what it wants. The only question was how far they might go. Some conservatives hoped they might take aim at the Eighth Amendment itself — specifically the long-standing principle that criminal punishments must be guided by “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” One amicus brief, submitted on behalf of 18 Republican attorneys general, insisted that this framework must be dismantled. “The Court should never have told judges to chase after the country’s ‘evolving standards of decency,’” they wrote.

It is no secret that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito agree with this sentiment. But the scene at the court suggested that Hamm may not be the case where they tear it all down. The two-hour oral argument was mired in confusion over what, exactly, Alabama was talking about. “I’m confused,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett told Overing at one point, echoing Sotomayor. “It doesn’t seem like Alabama prohibits” what the district court did in Smith’s case.

When it came to the supposed question at hand — how to reconcile multiple IQ scores — Overing’s proposed solutions were not exactly subtle. One option, he said, was to simply adopt the highest IQ score, “because there are many ways that an IQ test can underestimate IQ if the offender is distracted, fatigued, ill or because of the incentive to avoid the death penalty.”

“You can see why that might be regarded as a little results-oriented,” Chief Justice John Roberts replied.

With a ruling not expected until next summer, Smith’s life hangs in the balance. After decades facing execution, his journey to Washington shows how case law that evolved to reflect scientific understandings is now under siege at the court. It is also emblematic of the way in which conservatives are exploiting the high court’s growing disregard for its own precedents and for federal courts trying to follow the law.

Joseph Clifton Smith had just gotten out of prison in November 1997 when he met a man named Larry Reid at a highway motel outside Mobile. The pair encountered a third man, Michigan carpenter Durk Van Dam, and decided to rob him. They lured him to a secluded spot and fatally beat him with his carpentry tools, some of which Smith later tried to sell at a pawn shop.

Smith was quickly arrested and gave two tape-recorded statements to police. At first he denied participating in the attack. But in a second interview, Smith implicated himself in the murder.

His 1998 trial was swift and stacked against him. The presiding judge was Chris Galanos, a former Mobile County prosecutor who had prosecuted Smith for burglary just a few years earlier. Smith’s defense lawyers called no witnesses during the guilt phase and largely conceded the version of events presented by the state. This was due, at least in part, to the paltry pay and meager investigative resources provided to court-appointed lawyers.

The jury convicted Smith in less than an hour.

At the time of Smith’s trial, there was no prohibition on executing people with intellectual disabilities. The Supreme Court had refused to impose such a ban in its 1987 ruling in Penry v. Lynaugh. But it ruled that a diagnosed intellectual disability could be used as mitigating evidence to persuade a jury to spare a defendant’s life.

Smith’s lawyers called Dr. James Chudy to testify at the sentencing phase. The psychologist traced Smith’s struggles to the first grade, when Smith was described as a “slow learner.” In seventh grade, he was labeled “educable mentally retarded.” Soon thereafter, Smith dropped out of school.

Chudy gave Smith an IQ test, which yielded a result of 72. According to Chudy, this placed Smith in the bottom 3 percent of the population intellectually. But he also explained that he had to consider “a standard error of measurement of about three or four points.” Thus, Smith’s true IQ “could be as high as maybe a 75,” Chudy testified. “On the other hand he could be as low as a 69.”

Smith’s disability was exacerbated by his harrowing family life, which was marked by severe poverty and abuse. The environment denied him the extra care he needed. As his trial lawyers later argued in a plea for mercy, “He came into the world with a very, very limited IQ. … He had no family support in that respect and that’s how he came to be where he is.”

But prosecutors urged jurors to apply “common sense.” “There are folks out there with marginal IQs who are street wise,” one prosecutor said. “This man’s been in prison, this man’s been around.” If jurors did not sentence Smith to die, he argued, they were saying the victim did not matter. “There was no value in his life and there was no meaning in his death.”

Jurors recommended a death sentence by a vote of 11 to 1.

Smith had been on death row for three years when the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would reconsider its decision in Penry. In the intervening years, numerous states had passed bans on executing people with intellectual disabilities. As the oral argument in Atkins approached, the Birmingham News ran a special report declaring that Alabama led the nation in the “shameful practice.” Defendants with intellectual disabilities were not only less culpable for their actions, they could be “easily misled and eager to win investigators’ approval.”

The following year, the Supreme Court handed down Atkins, officially prohibiting the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Reacting to the decision, Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor said he would follow the law. “But we will also be vigilant against those who would deceive the courts by claiming they are [intellectually disabled] when they’re not.”

The protections of Atkins have never been guaranteed. The court left it to the states to decide how to enforce its ruling, prompting efforts to circumvent the decision altogether.

While to date Atkins has led some 144 people to be removed from death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, others have been put to death despite evidence that their executions were unconstitutional. In 2025 alone, three men have been executed despite diagnoses of intellectual disability. One, Byron Black, was executed in Tennessee, even after the current district attorney acknowledged that killing him would violate the law.

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Since Atkins, Alabama has executed at least four people despite evidence of intellectual disability. All of them were represented by court-appointed attorneys who were denied the resources to properly defend their clients — and whose decisions sometimes made matters worse. In the case of Michael Brandon Samra, who was executed in 2019, trial lawyers did not hire an expert to evaluate him. Instead, they told jurors the murder was rooted in his membership in a Satan-worshipping gang.

Smith spent years trying to challenge his death sentence under Atkins. After losing in state court, he was appointed lawyers with the Federal Defenders for the Middle District of Alabama, who filed a challenge in federal court arguing that Smith “suffers from significant intellectual and adaptive limitations,” only some of which were presented at trial. But they were up against onerous procedural barriers. Alabama’s Criminal Court of Appeals had rejected the evidence of Smith’s intellectual disability — and a federal judge could only reverse the decision if it clearly violated the law. In 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Callie Granade ruled against Smith.

But that same year, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hall v. Florida, which would strengthen the ruling in Atkins. The case centered on a man whose IQ scores ranged from 71 to 80. Because Florida law required a strict cutoff of 70, his appeals were rejected.

Famed Supreme Court litigator Seth Waxman delivered the oral argument in Hall. He began by reiterating the three-part definition of intellectual disability used by experts and established in Atkins: a “significantly subaverage intellectual function concurrent with deficits in adaptive behavior with an onset before the age of 18.” Because of the “standard error of measurement” inherent in IQ tests, he said, “it is universally accepted that persons with obtained scores of 71 to 75 can and often do have [an intellectual disability].”

The argument grappled with the challenge of multiple IQ scores. There were no easy answers. When Florida’s solicitor general argued that “the best measure of your true IQ is your obtained IQ test score,” Justice Elena Kagan pushed back. “The ultimate determination here is whether somebody is [intellectually disabled],” she said. IQ tests were not even a full piece of the three-part puzzle. “What your cutoff does is it essentially says the inquiry has to stop there.”

In 2014, the court struck down Florida’s law by a vote of 5 to 4.

The next year, the 11th Circuit reversed the District Court’s decision in Smith’s case. The judges found that Alabama’s Court of Criminal Appeals had improperly relied on Smith’s unadjusted IQ scores to conclude that there was no evidence of intellectual disability. The court sent the case back to Granade, who granted an evidentiary hearing.

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Two months before the hearing, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down yet another decision bolstering Smith’s case. The ruling in Moore v. Texas struck down Texas’s peculiar method for determining intellectual disability, which was rooted more in stereotypes than science. “In line with Hall,” it read, “we require that courts … consider other evidence of intellectual disability where an individual’s IQ score, adjusted for the test’s standard error, falls within the clinically established range for intellectual-functioning deficits.”

In May 2017, Granade presided over an evidentiary hearing in Montgomery. Over two days of testimony, experts shed light on modern understandings of intellectual disability and how it was reflected in Smith’s life. Because he’d spent much of his adult life incarcerated, it was hard to evaluate his ability to live independently. But he’d struggled in the outside world, living in hotels, following others, and behaving recklessly and impulsively.

The hearing also highlighted the very stereotypes that often prevent lay people from recognizing intellectual disabilities. A state lawyer asked one of Smith’s experts if he was aware that Smith had been paid to mow lawns at 14 and later worked as a roofer and painter. None of these jobs were inconsistent with a mild intellectual disability, the expert replied. Was he aware that Smith claimed he “always had money in his pocket and he always worked full time?” the lawyer asked. The expert replied that, while this may have been true, people with intellectual disabilities often try to downplay their struggles; some “exaggerate their competencies and what they can do.”

Granade ultimately vacated his death sentence. “This is a close case,” she wrote. “At best Smith’s intelligence falls at the low end of the borderline range of intelligence and at worst at the high end of the required significantly subaverage intellectual functioning.” Given the ambiguity as to the first of Atkins’s three-prong test, she turned to the second and third prongs. “Whether Smith is intellectually disabled will fall largely on whether Smith suffers from significant or substantial deficits in adaptive behavior, as well as whether his problems occurred during Smith’s developmental years,” she wrote. The evidence showed that the answer to both questions were yes.

After 23 years on death row, Smith was no longer facing execution.

It would not take long for Alabama to fight back. In February 2023, the case landed back at the 11th Circuit for an oral argument. Speaking before a three-judge panel, a lawyer for the state attorney general’s office disregarded Granade’s careful consideration of the evidence, accusing her of simply cherry-picking “the lowest, least reliable score” in order to vacate Smith’s death sentence.

The judges were skeptical. The state’s briefs ignored the Supreme Court’s rulings in Hall and Moore. “It seems to me like they are the controlling precedent here,” one judge said. Yet the only time the state acknowledged the rulings was to cite the dissents.

Another judge had been on the panel that sent the case back to the district court in 2015. “What we concluded in that opinion was that other pieces of evidence should be considered, together with the IQ scores, to determine whether or not Smith is intellectually disabled,” he said. Granade did precisely this. In fact, he pointed out, not doing so would have violated the law.

The 11th Circuit ruled in Smith’s favor.

By then, the U.S. Supreme Court was a vastly different court from the one that decided Hall and Moore. The power was now firmly entrenched in a conservative supermajority that was dramatically reshaping — and in many cases, eviscerating — the rule of law. In a petition to the justices, Alabama accused the lower federal courts of “placing a thumb on the scale in favor of capital offenders.”

Lawyers for Smith countered that the state was distorting the facts and the law. Alabama continued to insist that the lower courts had manipulated a single IQ score to reach its conclusions. In reality, Smith’s attorneys argued, their opinions were rooted in expert testimony, Supreme Court precedent, and a “thorough review of the evidence.”

Nevertheless, in 2024, the Supreme Court vacated the 11th Circuit’s ruling. Before agreeing to hear the case, however, it sent the case back for an explanation. The 11th Circuit’s decision could “be read in two ways,” the justices said. Either it gave “conclusive weight” to Smith’s lowest IQ score, or it took “a more holistic approach to multiple IQ scores that considers the relevant evidence.”

The 11th Circuit replied that it had done the latter, firmly rejecting Alabama’s claim that it relied on a single score. But the narrative had already opened the door for Alabama, teeing up the case for argument. The Supreme Court put Hamm v. Smith on its 2025 docket.

By the time Overing stepped down from the podium on Wednesday, Sotomayor was fed up. “Show me one case in Alabama that has followed your rule,” she demanded to no avail. She pointed out that the state expert who testified at Smith’s evidentiary hearing had himself relied on information beyond his IQ scores. “Your own expert did exactly what you say is wrong.”

She also pushed back on the claim that states were confused about how to handle Atkins claims. “Although you try to reap some confusion,” she said, “they all seem to be following the method the district court here followed.” A rigid new rule was bound to create new complications.

Even the lawyer representing the Trump administration, who argued in support of Alabama, didn’t quite align with Overing’s argument. A judge was free to consider evidence apart from IQ, he conceded. But “you still need to circle back” and decide whether the other evidence is “strong enough to drag down the collective weight of IQ.” The problem remained how, exactly, to calculate this.

The conservatives seemed open to trying. Justice Brett Kavanaugh went through Alabama’s proposals, from identifying the median score to an “overlap approach” considering each score’s error range, to simply calculating the average. They all seemed to favor the state.

But as Jackson pointed out, none of these methods have been adopted by Alabama. She still did not see how the justices could reverse the District Court. “I’m trying — trying — to understand how and to what extent the District Court erred in this case given the law as it existed at the time … as opposed to the law Alabama wishes it had enacted.”

Alito, too, seemed frustrated, albeit for different reasons. Shouldn’t there be “some concrete standard” for a person claiming to be intellectually disabled as opposed to a situation where “everything is up for grabs”? But the same question had been raised in Hall more than a decade earlier, only for the court to conclude that the matter was too complex for hard rules. At the end of the day, the science still mattered. IQ was not enough. And where the death penalty is concerned, courts still have a unique obligation to consider people’s cases individually.

The third and last lawyer to face the justices was Seth Waxman — the same litigator who successfully argued Hall. Forced to relitigate issues that had been decided more than 10 years earlier, he found some common ground with his adversaries. Replying to a dubious theoretical from Alito — What if the IQ scores were five 100s and one 71? — Waxman said a judge could probably safely decide that such a person was not intellectually disabled without too much attention to additional factors.

But by the end, they were going in circles. “So in just about every case then, IQs and testimony about IQs can never be sufficient?” Alito asked.

“I don’t know how to —” Waxman began, before interrupting himself. “I have given you every possible answer that I have.”

The post Alabama Begs Supreme Court to Make It Easier to Execute People With Intellectual Disabilities appeared first on The Intercept.

Growing up in a respected, church-going, middle-class family in the South, her parents were dismayed when she told them she was pregnant. This was the early 1960s. “To get pregnant out of wedlock and while you were still that young was a stigma,” Sandra said. A baby also threatened her future ambitions: She was an outstanding student, a top basketball player, and lead clarinetist in her school band. Her parents were firm; the child should be given up for adoption. “I wasn’t going to fight it,” she said.

The family kept the baby a secret, sending Sandra to New York City to give birth. She stayed at a home for unwed mothers and on January 3, 1963, delivered a boy at the municipal hospital in Queens. He weighed 7 pounds, 13 ounces, according to the birth records, an “alert” and “responsive” baby with “curly black hair, dark brown eyes, and a medium complexion.” She named him Barry. Then he was gone.

For the next several years, Sandra didn’t dwell on the child she gave up. “Or maybe I purposely put it out of my mind so that I could move on,” she said. She graduated high school, went to college and got married, choosing her career over raising children. At a time when few women were working on Wall Street, let alone Black women, she found success in international banking. “I was good at it,” she said. And it gave her a chance to travel the world.

Nevertheless, as she approached her 30th birthday in 1975, Sandra found herself yearning to know what had happened to her child. The adoption remained a closely guarded secret even within her own family. (She agreed to be interviewed on the condition that she would not be identified by her real name.) But she did tell her husband. “And he asked me, would I like to find him?”

Sandra called the group home and the hospital in Queens. But New York’s stringent adoption record laws blocked her at every turn. It was not until decades later, in 2019, that the state would amend its adoption regulations, giving adoptees a right to obtain a copy of their birth certificate upon turning 18. By then, Sandra had long left the city and moved back south.

On October 26, 2022, she heard a knock at her front door. As she recalls, she was in the process of booking a vacation — her first big trip since losing her husband of 45 years. “I had just started to get myself together,” she said. But her world was about to turn upside down again.

The visitor was an investigator from Florida’s Capital Collateral Regional Counsel – South, a legal office based in Ft. Lauderdale. She carried a copy of her son’s birth certificate, along with a handful of other records. She told Sandra that her son wished to be in touch with her. Was she open to that?

Elated, Sandra said yes. It was only when they sat down at her breakfast nook that the woman told her that her son was in prison. His name was Richard Barry Randolph, and he was on Florida’s death row.

Three years later, Sandra still struggles to find words to describe that moment. Her excitement turned to shock, then disbelief, then horror. Before leaving her house, the investigator warned that if Sandra planned to read news coverage of the crime, she should keep in mind that it did not reflect the whole story. Her son was no longer the same person he’d been. Sandra went online soon afterward. “That’s when I lost it,” she said.

The news stories said that he raped and murdered a 62-year-old woman at a Florida convenience store in 1988. The more she read about his case, she confessed, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to know him.”

“I’ve never had anyone in my family do anything like this. Never had anyone in my family incarcerated — definitely not on death row,” she said. The violence of his crime made her want to disavow him. “For me to say, ‘That’s my child’ was like, ‘Oh no.’ And that’s just the way I felt at the time. I’ve since changed my mind.”

A few weeks later, Sandra got a letter from her son in the mail. It was handwritten and read like he had carefully planned what to say. He wanted her to know that he wasn’t angry at her for giving him up — but he did want to know why. His childhood had been painful. Case records described his adoptive parents as ill-equipped to raise him; his mother drank heavily and his father was physically abusive. But he wanted to make clear that he didn’t blame Sandra. “He said that he didn’t hold it against me,” she said.

“The idea of giving him up for adoption was so that he would get a better home,” Sandra said. Instead, he’d been traumatized. According to the lawyers, her son had developed a serious problem with crack cocaine, which helped pave the way to his crime. But the explanation felt inadequate. Plenty of people struggled with addiction without committing such violence, she thought. “I don’t know what caused him to do that,” she said. Yet she found herself thinking, “What can I do to help you?”

In October 2025, a few days before her 80th birthday, Sandra answered a call from her son. By then, they had been talking for nearly three years. “They just signed the warrant,” he said — and she knew from their previous conversations what this meant. Florida’s governor had set an execution date. He was scheduled to die by lethal injection on November 20.

“‘I want you to stay strong,’” Sandra recalled him saying. “And then he apologized for it being my birthday week.”

Today, Richard Randolph is 63 years old and has been on death row for nearly 37 years. He converted to Islam decades ago and took the name Malik Abdul-Sajjad. Barring last-minute intervention, he will die by lethal injection on Thursday night at Florida State Prison in Raiford — the 17th person killed in the state’s execution chamber this year.

Florida has led a resurgence of executions across the country in 2025. Since May, it has averaged about two executions per month, far outpacing any state in the country. Although Florida has always been a leading death penalty state — it has the second largest death row in the U.S. — the current execution spree is unprecedented. “We had one last week and then this week and then there’s another one in December,” said capital defense attorney Maria DeLiberato, former executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, in a phone call on Monday. On Tuesday night, Florida announced yet another execution date for December. If all the executions go through, the state will end the year having killed 19 people — more than the previous 10 years combined.

Related

The Florida Supreme Court Is Radically Reshaping Death Penalty Law

The execution spree is the handiwork of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has presided over a systemic dismantling of the legal framework that once governed Florida’s death penalty. He has transformed the state Supreme Court, handpicking judges willing to discard long-standing precedents, including critical guardrails to prevent wrongful executions. Meanwhile, DeSantis’s position gives him more power than most to carry out death sentences. While other states require courts to schedule execution dates at the request of a state attorney general or local district attorney, in Florida the governor can do it himself. “He just picks somebody,” DeLiberato says, “and then 30 days later they’re dead.”

The executions have been driven by politics. DeSantis reactivated Florida’s death chamber in 2023 — just a few months before announcing his run for president. It was part of a broader death penalty push triggered in part by the long-awaited conviction of Nikolas Cruz, who slaughtered 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Prosecutors had refused to allow Cruz to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty, insisting on a costly, protracted capital trial, only for jurors to reject a death sentence, opting instead for life without parole.

DeSantis seized on the backlash. Florida had only recently reformed its death penalty law to require juries to unanimously agree on a death sentence. For much of its history, a defendant could be sent to death row by a vote of just 7 to 5. But in 2016, the state Supreme Court declared the statute unconstitutional, and lawmakers reformed the law to bring Florida in line with other states, requiring all 12 jurors to agree. After learning that three jurors held out against a death sentence in Cruz’s case, conservative lawmakers accused the holdouts of “derailing the full administration of justice” — and DeSantis vowed to change the law back to the way it was before. In 2023, he signed legislation to lower the threshold. Today, Florida only requires eight jurors to send a defendant to die.

Donald Trump’s reelection has since generated what DeLiberato describes as a “perfect storm.” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has spent the year carrying out orders to aggressively pursue the death penalty on all fronts, with her home state quick to comply. Florida is now making a name for itself as “the deadliest state in the country,” DeLiberato said. “And that’s just something they’ve decided to own.”

Florida’s capital defense lawyers have been unable to hold back the tide of DeSantis’s execution spree. For Malik’s attorney, Marie-Louise Samuels Parmer, a veteran lawyer at the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel – South, his death warrant came just weeks after the execution of her longtime client Victor Jones, the 13th man put to death this year. Notice of the warrant arrived at 4:59 p.m. on October 21. The Florida Supreme Court set an expedited scheduling order to fast-track any final litigation. Whereas other states provide months or even years from a death warrant to execution, Florida gives 30 days.

Samuels Parmer was comparatively new to Malik’s case when her client learned the identity of his biological parents in 2022. She hoped the discovery might give him a shot at getting back into court based on new evidence. The adoption records unlocked a story that his jury never heard. Although the sole witness at his sentencing trial testified that Malik had been adopted, the witness erroneously said his birth parents were college students — “and that’s as far as we know about his early life.” To Samuels Parmer, it was clear that her client’s traumatic childhood set him on a tragic path. She firmly believed that if he’d been raised in a family more like Sandra’s, “he never would have ended up on death row,” she said.

There was a lot that Malik’s trial attorney could have learned about his client’s upbringing if he’d had the time or motivation to investigate it. If Malik’s case were to be tried today, it would likely take at least two years to go to trial — and his defense team would include at least two lawyers and a mitigation specialist, who would investigate his early life for any signs of trauma, neglect, abuse, or mental illness. But that’s not how things worked in 1989. Malik was tried five months after the murder and represented by a court-appointed attorney who insisted on working alone. At a post-conviction hearing years later, the lawyer conceded that he presented “not much of a defense at all.”

Yet the jury was split on his punishment, voting 8 to 4 in favor of the death penalty. The jury was majority white, with four Black jurors, although it is unclear from the available record whether this included alternates. In their challenges to Malik’s death sentence, his attorneys have pointed to the divided vote as proof that his life could have been spared if not for his defense attorney’s failures. But Florida courts have disagreed.

As Malik’s execution nears, there is no remaining venue to ask for mercy. Any decision to spare his life would have to come from DeSantis: the same man who set his execution date in the first place. While other states give the condemned a chance to file a clemency petition close to their execution date — with some clemency hearings open to the public — this is not the case in Florida. In fact, many of the people now facing execution had their clemency review years, even decades, ago.

Malik’s clemency application was submitted in 2014. Since then, his attorneys argue, the case for mercy has only become stronger. “Mr. Randolph is not the same person who was sentenced to death in 1989,” Samuels Parmer wrote in a legal filing last month. He is a “model inmate,” with no rule infractions over more than 14 years. He is also a mentor among the younger men on death row. And he has family who supports him, including his newfound relatives. In addition to his birth mother, he recently connected with a younger brother on his biological father’s side. That brother was willing to travel from California to meet Malik this week. But the prison denied his visit.

Florida’s execution assembly line has left little opportunity for the public to learn about the individuals being killed in its death chamber. But the cases are emblematic of the death penalty as a whole. While Malik’s story is unique in some ways, the problems in his case are all-too familiar, hallmarks of a “modern” death penalty that remains stuck in the past.

The city of Palatka sits on the St. Johns River, some 60 miles south of Jacksonville, a “rural band of the state that is reminiscent of the South of the 1950s,” as one news article put it in 1994. Once known for its paper mill, a 55-acre facility that provided critical jobs while filling the river and air with pollutants, the population in 1988 was roughly 11,000 people, about half of them Black. A 20-foot Confederate monument stood on the lawn of the county courthouse, with an inscription on its base: “The principles for which they fought will live eternally.”

In August of that year, 62-year-old Minnie Ruth McCollum arrived at the Handy Way convenience store in East Palatka, across the river from downtown. She usually arrived at 5:30 a.m. to open the store at 6, going out to prepare the gas pumps before customers started to arrive. But when employees got to the store just past 7 that morning, they found the doors locked. Police would force their way in to find McCollum in a pool of blood and undressed from the waist down. She was alive but had been badly beaten and was unable to speak beyond a moan. She died at the hospital several days later.

A suspect was identified almost immediately: 26-year-old Richard Randolph, known as Barry. He once worked at the store, and was seen by three witnesses leaving that morning. His girlfriend, who later testified for the state, said he had shown up at her house later that morning driving McCollum’s car.

According to the case records, Malik gave two statements confessing to police that same day. The interviews were not recorded. Instead, officers took notes on what he said. Investigators said he rode there on a bike that morning with a plastic water pistol and a plan to rob the store. He waited until he thought McCollum was at the gas pumps to dash inside but ran into her unexpectedly. He beat, stabbed, and strangled her, then sexually assaulted her, giving a nonsensical explanation for the latter: No one would believe he was capable of such a thing. “I’m not sure what to say. I’m ashamed,” he reportedly told police.

McCollum’s murder took place amid a contentious election season in Palatka, the seat of Putnam County. The local sheriff, who had been in office since the 1950s, was running for reelection while mired in a sexual harassment scandal. According to media stories at the time, he gave a press conference after McCollum’s murder that would raise the ire of the NAACP. He said he had been asked whether the murder in Palakta might be linked to a convenience store robbery elsewhere in the county. Claiming to quote a Black man, the sheriff answered, “It don’t make no difference; those Puerto Ricans and n-ggers is all alike anyhow.”

As the trial approached in February 1989, newly elected Florida State Attorney John Tanner announced that he would “personally prosecute” Malik, calling the murder “a case of significant impact on the county.” Tanner, a former defense lawyer and bombastic born-again Christian, had been elected the previous fall on a vow to go after drug dealers and pornography, while pledging that his office “will not be used for political purposes.” But he immediately came under fire for his unlikely relationship with Ted Bundy, whom Tanner had visited on death row dozens of times as part of a prison ministry program. As Bundy’s January 1989 execution approached, Tanner was accused of trying to delay the execution, leading to rumors of a recall. Some questioned his commitment to the death penalty itself.

Malik’s case became a shield against the political attacks. “We’re putting the thugs on notice, if they harm or rape a convenience store clerk or any other citizen, we’re going to seek the maximum punishment,” Tanner announced at the trial. “If they kill their victims, we’re going to put them in the electric chair.”

Like many death penalty defendants in that era, Malik was represented by a lawyer who would become notorious in his own right: assistant public defender Howard Pearl. Pearl presented no witnesses during the guilt phase of the trial; when it came time for his closing statement, he repeatedly conceded his client’s guilt, prefacing his remarks by expressing admiration for Tanner. “We’ve been friends for years,” he said, “and he has certainly acted in this case in a gentlemanly and professional manner.”

Post-conviction attorneys would later find evidence that Pearl enjoyed an uncomfortably cozy relationship with law enforcement agencies. At the time of the trial, Pearl had been designated as a “special sheriff’s deputy” in a nearby county — a position he’d held since 1970. Although Pearl explained that the sole purpose was to be allowed to carry a concealed weapon, he did not disclose his position to his clients.

But most devastating for Pearl’s clients was his approach to defending them in the courtrooms where they went on trial for their lives. At a 1997 post-conviction hearing in Malik’s case, Pearl said that he deliberately chose to work alone, rejecting any need for a second lawyer, which is standard in today’s capital cases. “I was sole counsel,” he said. “No one ever sat with me. I did not permit it.”

Pearl did not investigate Malik’s case for mitigating evidence. Instead he followed his usual modus operandi: Rather than put witnesses on the stand who might do a poor job on cross-examination, he relied on a psychologist to interview his client, get names of people who might be important, and incorporate any information they might provide into his own testimony. “He selects those things which he feels are relevant to the testimony he wants to give,” Pearl explained.

Such an approach is shockingly inadequate compared to the mitigation investigations in most modern death penalty trials. Asked at the post-conviction hearing if he considered sending an investigator to learn more about his client’s life with his adoptive family in New York, Pearl said no. “I have never done that. And I would not. If I thought it was that important, I would have gone myself.”

Yet his assessment of what counted as important evidence in the case was dismissive. There were questions surrounding the sexual assault — a major factor in the case, especially in a prosecution of a Black man charged with killing a white woman. But Pearl didn’t seem to agree. Given the violence of the rest of the crime, “whether or not he raped her was not really all that important.”

As Sandra got to know her son over the past few years, she realized there were times when they lived within a few short miles of one another in New York City. “He could have seen me and I could have seen him and not known,” she said.

Malik’s adoptive father worked as a cab driver in the city, while his mother worked at an insurance company. Although they’d been thrilled to bring a baby home, it was an unhappy household. “There was chaos, there was confusion, there was abuse,” one expert witness testified at Malik’s 1997 post-conviction hearing. Case records show that Malik struggled emotionally from the start, having trouble sleeping, throwing “temper tantrums,” and biting his fingers and hands.

The trauma that stems from adoption was not as well understood as it is today. According to Malik’s adoptive father, who testified at the hearing, he and his wife told Malik that he was adopted at the direction of a book recommended by the adoption agency. But the revelation was devastating — and his parents struggled to handle the fallout. They divorced when Malik was 10. After living with his mother for a time, he moved in with his father, who is described in case records as demanding and brutal in his discipline: “tying him and beating him with his hands, a broomstick, and a belt.”

A bright spot in Malik’s life was his brother, Jermaine, who was born after his father remarried. Despite their age difference, the two formed a tight bond. Jermaine remembers looking up to his brother; in a phone call, he said Malik instilled in him a love of music, which inspired him to become a DJ for awhile. And while Jermaine remembers Malik starting to get in trouble as he got older, he also tried to set a good example. “He always did that away from me,” he said. “Always taught me the right and wrong things to do.”

Malik eventually left New York for North Carolina, where he met the girlfriend who would later testify against him at trial. As she would tell the jury, he was “a nice young man” when they met. But things changed when they moved to Florida, where he “started hanging out with the wrong crew,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to him.” He became quick to anger, “wanting to fight.”

Addiction was a big part of the problem. Although his trial expert testified that Malik struggled with crack cocaine, post-conviction attorneys unearthed further evidence showing that he had been on the drug the morning of the murder. His adoptive father, who also moved his family to Florida upon retiring in 1985, recalled finding Malik asleep in his car one morning and knowing something was wrong. He testified that he would have been willing to take the stand at the trial “in a heartbeat.” But Malik’s lawyer never contacted him.

Jermaine concedes that their father was harsh with Malik. But he also remembers him being devastated by the death sentence. Jermaine was 12 years old when he attended the sentencing in 1989 with his father and uncle, a New York police officer. “We drove up to Palatka and heard the verdict,” he said. “And that was the first time I ever seen my dad cry.”

Jermaine has visited and kept in touch with Malik over his years on death row. They talk about their families and follow sports. After the New York Knicks were eliminated from the NBA playoffs last year, he recalled, laughing, “I got an email with nothing but sad emojis on it.”

Jermaine’s last visits with his brother have taken place behind glass. He could not attend the execution if he wanted to: Florida does not allow family of the condemned to witness. In the hours leading up to the execution, he’ll be at the country club in Lakeland, Florida, where he works as a chef — the same place he was where he heard about the warrant.

Meanwhile, Malik will never have a chance to meet his other brother, the son of his biological father, Hayves Streeter Sr. As with Sandra, Malik’s lawyers tracked down Streeter in California, but he fell out of touch. His son, Hayves Streeter Jr., was at work in San Diego last month, preparing for an all-hands meeting with his staff, when he got a phone call from a member of Malik’s legal team, asking about his father. And that’s how he learned he had a brother on death row.

“Whatever I was doing,” he said, “I was stuck in that spot.” His father, a nuclear engineer who married three times, had never said anything about having another son. It was not until he was in the throes of an aggressive form of dementia that he made a comment that struck Hayves as bizarre. “He made mention that, ‘Hey, you might have a brother,’” he said. “I kind of laughed it off.” His father said that the man was in jail, which made Hayves worry that he might be getting scammed for money. But then, he said, his father was saying a lot of things that didn’t make sense at the time.

On the phone with the legal team, Hayves realized what his father was saying had been real. In the weeks that followed, he received phone calls from Malik. They asked each other questions and shared whatever they could. He tried to get permission to visit Malik before his execution but was denied. In one of their last phone calls, they were allowed to talk longer than usual — 20 minutes — and covered as much ground as possible. “We’ve got to get years of information to each other in this short amount of time,” he said. “So we’re just shooting questions off left and right, trying to make the most of it, because neither one of us knew when the guard was gonna say, ‘All right, it’s time.’”

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The Death Penalty’s Other Victims

Sandra once hoped to meet her son in person too. As his execution approached, she was still grappling with the question of why his life turned out the way it did. It is especially painful when she looks at her nieces and nephews. “They’re successful, happy, married with their own families,” she said. She doesn’t expect to find an answer. But it will be harder once the state takes her son’s life.

Malik’s lawyers arranged for Sandra to visit him before his execution. She planned to fly out this week. But she canceled the visit days before, saying she was having health issues. In our phone call, she said she did not want to see him on the day he was scheduled to die — and he did not want her to see him like that either. Last night, on the eve of the execution, Sandra was at home instead.

“I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “But I know I’m going to have to.” She knows it will affect her, but she’s afraid to find out how. “I really don’t want to think about it.”

Update: November 23, 2025
Malik Abdul-Sajjad was executed by lethal injection on Thursday, November 20 at 6 p.m ET. His time of death was 6:12 p.m. He was the 44th person executed in the United States in 2025 and the 17th in Florida — exceeding the state’s record of execution in a single year. In a statement, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty wrote, “Malik was determined to make the best of the time that he had left.” He “spent more than three decades studying his faith, mentoring younger men on death row, mediating conflicts, and maintaining a spotless disciplinary record” and “formed and maintained loving relationships with his families — both biological and adopted. … In its prideful quest to be the deadliest state in the nation, Florida has created more victims.”

The post At 17, She Gave Up Her Son. Sixty Years Later, She Found Him on Death Row. appeared first on The Intercept.

“You’re here under a subpoena, correct?” defense attorney Corbin Brewster began. It was October 30, 2025. Smith was the last witness at an evidentiary hearing that started at 10 a.m. The U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Glossip’s conviction eight months earlier, only for Oklahoma’s attorney general to announce he would retry Glossip for murder. But two criminal court judges had since recused themselves from the case, both on the grounds that, as former Oklahoma County prosecutors, they might appear too close to the office that sent Glossip to death row. Now Glossip’s attorneys were seeking the recusal of a third judge, Susan Stallings for the same reason — and in particular, due to her links to Smith, the original prosecutor in the case.

Stallings had already conceded that she worked under Smith in the early 1990s and credited her as a formative influence. She’d also reluctantly volunteered that she traveled with Smith on a group trip to Spain in 1997 — the same year Glossip was charged with a murder he swore he did not commit. But Stallings insisted that this was the extent of her relationship with Smith. And she maintained that she did not need to step down from the case.

Glossip’s lawyers were unconvinced. Although Stallings said she hadn’t spoken to her old mentor in decades, the two had seen each other as recently as April 2025, at a court hearing to investigate alleged misconduct in the case of a different man Smith sent to death row, 46-year-old Tremane Wood. Testifying at that hearing, Smith denied she’d done anything wrong — and Stallings, the presiding judge, found her testimony persuasive, ruling against Wood and setting him up for execution. He is scheduled to die on November 13.

To Glossip’s attorneys, the Wood hearing was a cautionary tale. To probe whether Stallings had disclosed the full details of her relationship with Smith, they sent Smith a subpoena in advance of Glossip’s October hearing that included a request for emails, text messages, and any other documented communications between the two women since Stallings was elected to the bench in 2018. “Did you bring any documents with you?” Brewster asked.

No, Smith replied. “I don’t have any of the documents that you requested.” In fact, she didn’t bother to look. “I don’t have to,” she told Brewster matter-of-factly. “I know I didn’t have any.”

Smith’s casual disregard of the subpoena was startling. But then, it had already been a strange, tense day in court. Stallings was both the subject of the recusal hearing and the presiding judge, which made for an uneasy — sometimes bizarre — dynamic. Although the hearing primarily concerned her own judicial obligations, the discussion repeatedly returned to the question of Smith’s ethical lapses. It was Smith, after all, who “originated the State’s theory, decided to pursue the death penalty, oversaw key early investigative decisions, and controlled the flow of evidence to the defense” in Glossip’s case, defense lawyers wrote in their recusal motion. The result was a prosecution that had been flimsy and corrupted from the start.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally murdered at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City in January 1997. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese with a baseball bat but insisted that Glossip bullied him into doing it. His account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip – and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. At Glossip’s 1998 trial, Smith told jurors that he’d taken advantage of the younger, more vulnerable Sneed, offering him money to kill their boss so that Glossip could take over the motel. “Glossip encouraged, aided and abetted and sent Mr. Sneed off to do his dirty work,” she said.

But this story began falling apart not long after Glossip arrived on death row. A video of Sneed’s police interrogation cast serious doubt on the state’s version of events, revealing coercive questioning by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed into implicating Glossip. At the recusal hearing, one of Glossip’s previous appellate attorneys recalled the significance of the discovery, which debunked Smith’s claim at trial that Sneed’s account “has remained consistent from day one.” In reality, the lawyer testified, “the tape revealed this to be false.”

The defense’s failure to present the tape to the jury would lead an Oklahoma court to overturn Glossip’s first conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel. Although a second jury convicted him and sent him to die in 2004, doubts over Glossip’s guilt continued to grow. Some of the most explosive revelations pointing to his innocence came in after Glossip’s near-execution in 2015, among them, evidence that Sneed had tried to recant his testimony and that Oklahoma County prosecutors ordered the destruction of key evidence in Glossip’s case between the first and second trial. Glossip’s attorneys were certain that the order to destroy evidence came directly from Smith. (Smith did not respond to emails from The Intercept.)

Throughout the hearing, both Stallings and lawyers for the state questioned why the defense kept invoking Smith’s alleged misconduct rather than focusing on her own capacity to be impartial. But the issues were inextricable. Prosecutorial misconduct had indelibly shaped Glossip’s case — it was the reason the high court finally threw out Glossip’s conviction — and the details of Smith’s alleged misconduct would be used by Glossip’s defense to challenge the evidence against him. “You will be the gatekeeper for this,” Glossip’s longtime attorney, Don Knight, told Stallings in his opening statement.

Brewster was prepared to ask Smith about her alleged misconduct. But first, he needed to address the trip to Spain. Smith had been asked to provide records of any travel she’d done with Stallings. Did she take any photos during their vacation? “I didn’t take photographs then, I don’t take photographs now,” Smith replied.

Brewster pressed on. “Other than that trip to Spain, what other trips have you been on with her?”

Suddenly, Smith was a lot more forthcoming. “We went to Las Vegas,” she said. That was in October 1996, which she only remembered because her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died that same year, she explained. The trip included Stallings and “several other ladies from the DA’s office.”

“OK,” Brewster said. “Other than the Vegas trip and the trip to Spain with Judge Stallings,” were there any more trips?

“I believe there was one more trip to England. And I believe we went to London and Paris,” Smith said. That was a larger group of people, she went on, including several members of her own family: her mother and sister, along with Smith’s late husband and mother-in-law. Stallings was there too, Smith said. But “it was a group trip and I didn’t see her very much.”

Among the spectators in the gallery, all eyes turned to Stallings. The judge had apparently been caught in a lie of omission. Stallings only disclosed one vacation with Smith to Glossip’s attorneys. Now there were three. As Brewster would later tell the judge, “any person might reasonably question whether you can be impartial going forward in this case given the evolving disclosures about trips with Fern Smith.”

Deputy Attorney General Jimmy Harmon would try to soften the impact of the revelations. “It sounds like that was kind of a common theme during that era of the DA’s office, that a group of co-workers may have traveled together,” he told Smith on cross-examination. “Did that mean you were best friends with that person?” No, Smith replied.

“Were you ever close personal friends with Susan Stallings?”

“No,” Smith said. “I considered her a friend but not a close personal friend.”

Smith went on, stammering a bit. “I mean, I don’t know, but I consider her like I would any other person that I worked with in the DA’s office, as a friend.” This included Harmon. “I consider you a friend,” she told him. She scanned the room and spotted a different veteran prosecutor she recognized, who had nothing to do with the case, but was watching from the jury box. “I hope I’m his friend. I hope he’s my friend,” Smith said. The prosecutor smiled, stood up, and interjected without hesitation. “I’ll stipulate that we are, Your Honor.”

In his opening statement that morning, Knight, Glossip’s longtime attorney, made clear that the hearing was about much more than Stallings or Smith — or even Glossip himself. The case was the product of an entrenched prosecutorial culture that had never been reckoned with in Oklahoma City. “It’s not a great culture,” Knight said bluntly. “Honestly, Your Honor, it’s got a bad reputation around the country. There’s a lot of death sentences here, a lot of death sentences that were overturned here.” What they were asking for, Knight said, was a judge not steeped in this culture.

The prosecutor who pledged his friendship with Smith in open court only underscored the problem. Although Glossip’s legal team included some of the most seasoned defense attorneys in the country — including legendary capital defense attorney Judy Clarke — they were outsiders in Oklahoma City. “You guys are all friends,” Knight told Stallings.

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The state, meanwhile, sought to cast Glossip’s attorneys as “judge shopping” while trampling over judicial rules and norms. Harmon objected at every turn, including to the delivery of an opening statement, during which Stallings and Knight had engaged in a back-and-forth. “It is unlike any opening statement I have ever seen,” he complained.

Much of the day was spent on Glossip’s first witness, Georgetown University law professor Abbe Smith, who explained that the question of recusal was based on the appearance of bias, rather than bias itself — and opined that, based on the evidence, Stallings should disqualify herself from Glossip’s case. In an aggressive cross-examination, Harmon led Professor Smith on a performative parsing of Oklahoma’s Code of Judicial Conduct to determine where, exactly, it said that a judge in Stallings’s position was required to disqualify herself from a trial.

At times, Harmon’s questions served as an awkward reminder that his boss, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, spent years lambasting Glossip’s conviction and death sentence — joining Glossip’s attorneys in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in his favor — before reversing himself to retry him for murder. Noting that former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement argued on behalf of the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office at the high court — and that Clement once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia — Harmon demanded to know whether Glossip’s lawyers had requested that Scalia recuse himself from the case. “Your honor, I’m not sure that Justice Scalia was alive at the time,” Clarke interjected. “Good point,” Harmon said.

Throughout the hearing, Glossip sat in the courtroom in an orange jumpsuit, a blue shawl laying awkwardly over his chest to keep him warm. He’d lost weight since his last court appearance, and he had dark circles under his eyes. Over the last decades, he had survived nine execution dates and seen more than 100 of his neighbors put to death. He was 35 years old when he’d arrived on death row. Now he was 62.

Although he was no longer living under a death sentence, Glossip’s daily life was in many ways worse than before. The Oklahoma County jail, where he’d been transferred to await trial, was a site of endless chaos: loud, filthy, and often deadly. His health had deteriorated, and he was struggling to get medical attention for his symptoms. And while his weekly contact visits with his wife had sustained him over his last few years on death row, Glossip could not see her in person at the jail.

Still, compared to his old neighbors, Glossip was lucky. While he watched his powerhouse legal team fight for an unbiased judge to preside over his third trial, Tremane Wood was back at the state penitentiary in McAlester staring down an execution date. His case, too, was a product of the culture Knight described, along with a disastrous legal defense by a court-appointed attorney who later admitted he had failed his client while struggling with addiction.

Convicted under Oklahoma’s felony murder statute in 2004, Wood was sentenced to die despite his brother’s insistence that he, not Wood, was responsible for fatally stabbing the victim in the case. An in-depth HuffPost investigation of Wood’s case recounted how the brothers were tried back to back, with the state offering shifting theories of the crime. At Wood’s trial, then-Assistant District Attorney Fern Smith pushed back on the claim. “Isn’t it true that you are only testifying here to save your brother’s life?” she asked Wood’s brother, Jake. But when it came time for Jake’s trial, Smith and her co-counsel flipped the script, arguing that he indeed had stabbed the victim. His admission of guilt had come straight “from the defendant’s mouth,” Smith said.

Concerns over the prosecution’s conduct were enough to prompt the notoriously conservative Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to grant an evidentiary hearing, which took place in April 2025. Although it did nothing in the short term to stop Wood’s execution, it did produce evidence that would prove to be decisive for Glossip at his hearing six months later.

Glossip’s attorneys cited Wood’s hearing in their argument for recusal. At the hearing, they called Wood’s attorney, Assistant Federal Public Defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves, who described the proceeding in her client’s case. “I would characterize Ms. Smith’s demeanor as hostile,” she testified. Stallings, on the other hand, had described it as “resolute” and credible upon ruling against Wood.

It was getting late in the day when Brewster finally broached the question of Smith’s alleged misconduct; it did not go smoothly. Presented with her own handwritten notes from a hearing in 2001, Smith said they did not refresh her memory about being the lead prosecutor at the time. Brewster asked if she was suggesting it might be possible that another prosecutor was in charge then. “Anything is possible,” Smith said.

“Do you understand that while you were lead attorney there were several items of material evidence from the crime scene of this homicide in your possession in the DA’s office that were ordered to be destroyed?” Brewster asked, interrupted by another objection. Brewster eventually grew exasperated. “We’re at a point, Judge, where the last, probably, 10 questions I’ve asked, you’ve sustained objections to,” he told Stallings. “I wouldn’t have to object if he would ask relevant questions,” Harmon shot back.

Brewster said he was trying to lay a foundation for his argument. “Whoever is presiding over this case is going to be either granting or denying relief on these issues,” he said. Stallings interrupted. “This is not an evidentiary hearing as to how the court is going to rule in the future,” she said. “And I promise you I am scratching the surface of this issue,” Brewster replied. “If I was going to get into the misconduct of Fern Smith, we’d need another day.”

Stallings remained unmoved. “That’s not why we’re here today,” she said.

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Brewster returned to something Smith said at the start of her testimony. Despite denying any correspondence with Stallings, Smith did recall receiving one email from the judge. “She sent me a copy of the findings of fact and conclusions of law in the Tremane Wood case,” Smith said. She could not pull up the email, Smith said, since it was on her computer at work. And she demurred when asked if the email included any kind of greeting. “I might have said thank you,” she said.

Now Brewster had one last question — not for Smith but for Stallings. “Judge, at this time I’d ask the court to produce the email and Ms. Smith’s response to the email that was referenced in her testimony,” he said.

“I can check,” Stallings said, and called for a recess.

Stallings returned carrying copies of the email, which had included the ruling in Wood’s case as an attachment. Brewster read the response from Smith to Stallings out loud. “Thank you so much!! Amazing!! I don’t know when I’ve seen a more thorough analysis and well reasoned opinion,” it said.

Brewster began to read Stallings’s response but was interrupted. “I think the exhibit speaks for itself,” Smith said. “It probably does, Brewster replied. “But if you’ll indulge me.” He read the reply. “Which I can’t take credit for,” Stallings had written. “It’s the proposed findings from the AG’s Office. They did do an outstanding job.”

The words seemed to hang in the air. Wood’s execution was fast approaching. And it had just been revealed that the judge in his case had emailed a witness — the original prosecutor and her own mentor — lavishing praise on the lawyers who were seeking to kill him.

It would not take long for Stallings to announce her decision from the bench. She did not bother to hide her indignation. “It’s obvious from today’s long hearing that the defense wishes to make the court a distraction in this case to get what they want,” she said. “In order to move this case along, in order to stop this dog and pony show so that they can continue on their journey to get the judge they want, the court is going to recuse.”

A few days after the hearing, Wood’s lawyers sought a stay of execution based on the revelations in court. “The new evidence reveals that Judge Stallings concealed the full extent of her relationship with Fern Smith from Mr. Wood’s counsel,” they wrote. Stallings had emailed Smith “to celebrate absolving Ms. Smith” of the misconduct allegations. On November 6, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3–2 to recommend clemency for Wood.

Wood’s life now lies in the hands of the governor. If he does not intervene, Wood will soon die by lethal injection. In the meantime, a new judge has been assigned to Glossip’s case. She, too, is a former Oklahoma County prosecutor.

Update: November 13, 2025
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt granted clemency to Tremane Wood on November 13, shortly before his scheduled execution. “After a thorough review of the facts and prayerful consideration, I have chosen to accept the Pardon and Parole Board’s recommendation to commute Tremane Wood’s sentence to life without parole,” Stitt said. “This action reflects the same punishment his brother received for their murder of an innocent young man and ensures a severe punishment that keeps a violent offender off the streets forever.” In a statement, Wood’s attorney, Amanda Bass Castro Alves, reiterated the myriad problems with Wood’s conviction, including the bias and misconduct exposed at Richard Glossip’s evidentiary hearing on October 30. “We are profoundly grateful for the moral courage and leadership Governor Stitt has shown in granting mercy to Tremane,” she wrote.

The post Judge Failed to Disclose Personal Ties to Prosecutor in Two Death Row Cases appeared first on The Intercept.

“Thanks to all and any supporters out there,” Bushart said. “And very happy to be going home.”

“I didn’t seek to be a media sensation,” he added. “But here we are. Yeah, that’s about all I can say right now.”

Bushart’s case raised a firestorm of controversy after he was arrested, jailed, and slapped with a $2 million bail for a social media post. His supposed crime: making a threat of mass violence against a school in a neighboring county. In reality, all he had done was repost a meme. On Saturday, September 20, he had visited a community page, “What’s Happening in Perry County, TN,” and trolled a thread about an upcoming vigil honoring Charlie Kirk.

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One of his posts was a photo of President Donald Trump, along with the quote “We have to get over it,” drawing from his response to a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in 2024. The post caught the attention of Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems, who had publicly mourned Kirk and shared information about the vigil. Armed with a Tennessee law that was aimed at preventing school shootings but which has ensnared numerous people for their social media activity, the sheriff got a warrant for Bushart’s arrest. According to Weems, the words “Perry High School” in the meme were interpreted by locals as a threat to a high school in Perry County. In statements to the press, Weems claimed Bushart had caused “mass hysteria.”

Yet there was no evidence of any hysteria. The local school district had not received any communications from the sheriff’s department warning them of a threat, nor had it sent any warnings to the school community. Although the sheriff insisted that parents and teachers had been gripped with fear by the meme, he has shown zero evidence to support his claims.

Bushart’s case attracted several rounds of media attention, from the days immediately following his September arrest to this past week, when Weems sat down for a TV interview to defend his actions. But the Intercept was instrumental in publicizing his case; it was the first to provide a detailed account of the response to the meme within the closed Facebook group — which showed no reaction to the meme in question, let alone panic or fear — and to report that the local school district had no records of any communications with the sheriff over an alleged threat. The Intercept was also the first to obtain body camera footage undermining the sheriff’s claims, in which officers from the Lexington Police Department appeared to distance themselves from the prosecution in the neighboring county.

The tipping point came less than a week later, after Nashville’s CBS affiliate NewsChannel 5 aired a sit-down interview with Weems, conducted by veteran investigative reporter Phil Williams. Sitting at his desk in front of a huge “thin blue line” American flag painted on his office wall, Weems defended the arrest, insisting that there were people “scared to send their kids to school” as a result of Bushart’s post. But he also put a new spin on the case, casting Bushart as a callous man who had rebuffed reasonable attempts by the police to deescalate the situation.

“We tried to take a different approach and go and speak to this guy and say, ‘Hey, look, this is what you’re doing,’” Weems told Williams, apparently referring to an initial visit by Lexington police. According to the sheriff, the officers asked him to take down the offending post. “Whenever we sent Lexington Police Department out to speak to him and he refused to do that, I mean, what kind of person does that?” Weems asked Williams. “What kind of person just says he don’t care?”

Weems repeated the claim to Nashville’s ABC affiliate, WKRN, saying that he “coordinated” with the Lexington Police Department to offer Bushart a chance to “clarify his public messages and calm the situation that was causing multiple, reasonable citizens to be in fear of their children’s safety at school.” But when the news outlet asked the Lexington Police chief whether his department had been involved in this way, “the chief responded, ‘No.’”

To Chris Eargle, who launched a Facebook group called “Free Larry Bushart” in early October, the sheriff’s account made no sense. By Weems’s logic, the supposed threat would have been somehow nullified if Bushart had just taken down the post. “If you think it was a threat, why would removing it make any difference?” he told Williams.

“Nick Weems basically threw out any semblance of a case,” Eargle told The Intercept. The sheriff’s account amounted to: “If you say something I don’t like, and you don’t take it down, now you’re going to be in trouble,” he said. “I mean, it’s just control over people’s speech.”

It isn’t clear why the office dropped the charge against Bushart when it did. The prosecutor in charge of the case, 32nd Judicial District Attorney Hans Schwendimann, did not respond to messages from The Intercept. But the media attention and Facebook group undoubtedly played a role by generating public pressure to abandon the case. Eargle galvanized members of the group to contact the sheriff’s department as well as Schwendimann’s office. He posted the DA’s phone number, urging followers to “Tell him (politely!) to drop this farce of a case. … No threats. No abuse. Just truth. Let’s make noise the right way.”

On Wednesday morning, before the charge was dropped, Weems posted an update on his personal Facebook page. “I was elected to serve and protect Perry County. Not a biased, one sided news outlet and definitely not people that’s not even from this community.” He insisted he is “100% for protecting the 1st amendment. However, freedom of speech does not allow anyone to put someone else in fear of their well being.”

But as Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told The Intercept, “People’s performative overreaction is not a sufficient basis to limit someone else’s free speech rights.” FIRE closely monitored the case and filed open records requests, including the ones that revealed there was no communication with the school district about the supposed threat. In a statement following Bushart’s release, Steinbaugh said, “We are relieved that Larry Bushart has been freed after nearly 40 days in jail, and subject to a $2 million bond, over a Facebook post clearly protected by the First Amendment. A free country does not dispatch police in the dead of night to pull people from their homes because a sheriff objects to their social media posts.”

Reached by The Intercept on Tuesday afternoon, Bushart’s wife declined to comment on her husband’s release. But Eargle said she called him earlier that day just before 2 p.m. “She was beyond ecstatic.”

“I got a message from Larry’s wife — it seemed really urgent — saying ‘Call me,’” he said. “I was worried something had happened, and I called her. And she told me she’s on her way to pick up Larry.”

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Bushart’s incarceration has already taken a toll. Although he retired from a decadeslong career in law enforcement last year, he was working as a medical driver before his arrest — a job that he has since lost. In Perry County, meanwhile, the sheriff’s actions have put residents on notice that they may be targeted for their speech. According to Eargle, who does not live in Tennessee, the Free Larry Bushart Facebook group includes numerous members who have been posting anonymously: “There’s a lot of people that are actually afraid of speaking out because of retribution.”

Back home, Bushart is back to posting again. By early Thursday morning, he had posted nearly a dozen times. His first two posts were not political. He shared a celebratory post about his new grandchild, who was born while Bushart was in jail. Then he posted a live Elton John video from 1985: “I’m Still Standing.”

The post Man Jailed for Facebook Meme Is Freed in Tennessee appeared first on The Intercept.

It was September 4, 2025, and Glossip’s legal team had just persuaded a different judge to recuse herself from the case — the second Oklahoma City judge to do so since August. Like Stallings, both judges were former prosecutors. Both had stepped down due to their ties to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office. Now Stallings was explaining why she believed that she could be impartial in presiding over the high-profile trial.

To do so, however, Stallings needed to address her relationship with Fern Smith, the former Oklahoma City prosecutor who first sent Glossip to death row. Glossip’s lawyers already knew that Stallings had worked for Smith during her own time at the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office in the early 1990s. And they knew that Stallings had gone on to praise Smith as a formative influence. “When I started in the DA’s office right out of law school, Fern Smith taught me that we were to seek justice — not just convictions,” Stallings told Briefcase, a publication of the Oklahoma County Bar Association, upon taking the bench in 2019. “I’ve never forgotten that.”

But now Stallings was volunteering a new bit of information about her connection to Smith. 

“We took a trip,” Stallings told the lawyers. “There was a group of us that took a trip.” The year was 1997, and Glossip had recently been charged with masterminding the brutal killing of his boss, Barry Van Treese, at an Oklahoma City motel. The evidence against Glossip was thin; prosecutors were relying on the word of a 19-year-old motel employee named Justin Sneed, who admitted to beating Van Treese to death with a baseball bat but claimed that Glossip had coerced him into doing it. As Glossip sat in the county jail insisting he was innocent, Stallings was apparently vacationing in Spain with Smith, the lead prosecutor in the case.

If the judge’s revelation supported the case for her recusal, Stallings seemed intent on downplaying its significance. The vacation had included a bunch of people from the DA’s office, she explained. “We got a really good deal on the airfare.” The colleagues landed in Madrid and rented cars to drive to Costa del Sol and Gibraltar. During the ride to Gibraltar, Stallings said, Smith “wasn’t even in the same car with me.”

Defense attorney Corbin Brewster asked Stallings if she had discussed any of the cases Smith was handling at the DA’s office while they were in Spain. “Good Lord no,” Stallings replied. “That’s not the point of a vacation.”

The exchange between Stallings and Glossip’s attorneys took place during a closed-door proceeding known as a Rule 15 hearing, whose purpose is to ask a judge to recuse themselves from a case. A transcript is attached to a subsequent defense motion reiterating the recusal request and arguing that “there is an objectively and constitutionally intolerable risk that Judge Stallings cannot impartially judge issues that must be addressed before this case can proceed.” Under Oklahoma’s Code of Judicial Conduct, judges are supposed to be disqualified from cases “whenever the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But the decision to recuse is up to the judge.

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All trials are supposed to be overseen by an independent arbiter who can be fair to both sides. This would seem especially urgent in Glossip’s case, which has famously laid bare disturbing misconduct in the Oklahoma County DA’s office. Twice convicted and sentenced to die for a crime he swore he did not commit, Glossip spent 27 years facing execution before finally seeing his conviction vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that his case was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. Not only did prosecutors fail to correct false testimony by Sneed, the justices also found that “additional conduct by the prosecution further undermines confidence in the verdict.”

This conduct includes the destruction of evidence between Glossip’s 1998 trial and his 2004 retrial that defense lawyers trace back to Smith. Smith “originated the State’s theory, decided to pursue the death penalty, oversaw key early investigative decisions, and controlled the flow of evidence to the defense,” they wrote in the recusal motion. At the Rule 15 hearing, Brewster told Stallings that Glossip’s legal team planned to challenge the state’s case through pretrial hearings — and that the defense would argue that Smith told Oklahoma City detectives to destroy the evidence. “Do you have any concerns about being impartial with respect to Fern Smith’s credibility or whether she engaged in misconduct?” he asked.

No, Stallings said. “I went from being an advocate at the District Attorney’s Office to being an impartial arbiter on this bench,” she told Brewster. “And I take that very seriously in the very marrow of my bones.”

The question of Stallings’s impartiality will be at the heart of an evidentiary hearing on October 30 in Oklahoma County District Court, where Glossip’s attorneys plan to probe the judge’s connections to the Oklahoma County DA’s office. “The extent of Judge Stallings’s true relationship with Fern Smith is unclear,” they wrote in a filing on October 20. The hearing is necessary “to discern the extent of this relationship.”

The hearing is peculiar in that Stallings will be considering testimony about her own ability to be impartial — and ultimately rule on whether or not to recuse herself from Glossip’s case. Under Oklahoma law, if she again refuses to step down, Glossip’s legal team can turn to the “chief judge of the county where the case is pending,” followed by the state Supreme Court.

Although the court docket shows several subpoenas sent to unnamed witnesses, it is not entirely clear who will take the stand at the hearing. Among the most significant potential witnesses is Smith herself, as well as her former boss, former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater, who once called Glossip’s innocence claim a “bullshit PR campaign.” Prater, who served as elected DA from 2007 until 2022, hired Stallings as a prosecutor in 2010 — the second time she was employed at the office. Stallings worked under Prater until 2018, the year she won her election to Oklahoma County’s criminal court.

It was during these same years that Prater went to extreme lengths to keep Glossip’s conviction intact. The case dates back to a notorious era in Oklahoma City, when the DA’s office was under the leadership of Robert “Cowboy Bob” Macy, who won 54 death sentences during his tenure and became known for his overzealous prosecutions. Prater, who worked under Macy, took it upon himself as DA to defend Glossip’s conviction at all costs, using the same kinds of tactics that made his predecessor so controversial. As Glossip faced execution in 2015, Prater was accused of intimidating witnesses who came forward with new information.

Glossip’s defense team does not claim that Stallings had anything to do with Prater’s actions at the time. But they argue that her broader relationship with Prater is cause for concern. Although Stallings insisted at the Rule 15 hearing that she would treat Prater “like I do anybody else,” Glossip’s lawyers argue that, as with Smith, Stallings cannot be impartial in determining Prater’s credibility if and when he is called to answer for his conduct in the case.

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The evidentiary hearing comes nearly five months after Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, stunned Glossip’s advocates by announcing that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder. After spending years fighting to prevent Glossip’s execution — testifying on his behalf at a 2023 clemency hearing, then joining his attorneys in challenging the case before the Supreme Court — Drummond’s decision came despite a lack of reliable evidence to prove the state’s case. It was also an apparent betrayal of a secret deal the attorney general had previously made with Glossip’s attorney Don Knight to swiftly resolve the case and let his client walk free.

Glossip’s attorneys have repeatedly argued that their client cannot receive a fair trial — let alone in a courtroom where the presiding judge once worked for the very same office behind his discredited conviction. The corruption at the root of Glossip’s case was part of a “longstanding culture of misconduct in the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office,” they write. During the Rule 15 hearing, Brewster said the defense team is “seeking to recuse any judge who served in the Oklahoma County DA’s Office.”

In their reply to Glossip’s recusal motion, prosecutors argue that his legal team vastly overstates Stallings’s connection to Prater. Glossip’s attorneys invoke Stallings’s “friendship and admiration” for her former boss, they write, but such a description is a “leap.” As for Stallings’s connection to Smith, the prosecutors write that “the defendant has conjured an enduring friendship” that is “simply incompatible with reality.” Putting aside a court appearance in a different case earlier this year, they write, Stallings and Smith were last in contact 28 years ago, “when both happened to be members of a group trip abroad.”

Yet the court appearance cited by prosecutors is a good example of the potential conflict Glossip’s lawyers describe. Before Stallings was assigned to preside over Glossip’s retrial, she handled the case of Tremane Wood, who was also sentenced to death in Oklahoma City in 2004 — and who faces execution on November 13. Wood won an evidentiary hearing earlier this year to determine whether prosecutors committed misconduct in his case. The prosecutor in question was Fern Smith. Stallings was assigned to preside over the hearing.

In an affidavit subsequently attached to Glossip’s recusal motion, federal public defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves described a scene with striking parallels to the Rule 15 hearing in Glossip’s case. During an “in-chambers discussion, Judge Stallings stated that she had been on a trip with Fern Smith,” Bass Castro Alves said. “I don’t specifically recall where they traveled to or the timeframe of the trip. However, I do recall that Judge Stallings referred to the trip as a ‘hen do.’”

It’s not clear whether the trip was the same international vacation Stallings disclosed to Glossip’s attorneys. A “hen do” is akin to a bachelorette party — a gathering of the closest friends of a bride-to-be — which is not at all how Stallings described the trip to Spain. “The contrast in two descriptions suggests that either the nature of the trip to Spain was different than what Judge Stallings disclosed, or that there have been multiple trips with different purposes and tone,” Glossip’s attorneys argue. “Under either circumstance, it is reasonable to conclude that Judge Stallings could not fairly and impartially rule on the credibility of Ms. Smith.”

Wood’s evidentiary hearing took place in April 2025. Stallings ultimately ruled against him. Glossip’s lawyers argue that Stallings’s opinion in the case evinces loyalty toward Smith, a position supported by attorney and scholar Abbe Smith, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in legal ethics. In a report attached as an exhibit to the latest defense filing, Professor Smith notes that Stallings “devotes more pages to Fern Smith’s testimony than anyone else’s … and does not merely find her testimony ‘credible,’ the terse description she uses for others, she ‘finds credible Ms. Smith’s resolute testimony,’ adding a flourish that suggests Ms. Smith was somehow more than credible.”

Whether Stallings was persuaded to rule against Wood because she was secretly biased in Fern Smith’s favor is ultimately not the point. As the legal ethics professor notes, the question of recusal is not based on whether a judge is too biased to preside over a case, but whether a judge might look biased to an outside observer. “Appearances matter,” Abbe Smith writes. “The very first Canon in Oklahoma’s judicial code requires judges to avoid not only ‘impropriety,’ but the appearance of impropriety.”

This standard is rooted in the need to preserve the legal system’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public, Abbe Smith explains. But it serves a practical purpose too. “Lawyers are often reluctant to make recusal motions for fear of antagonizing judges,” she writes. “It is helpful for a lawyer to be able to point out that a recusal motion is not personal.” The standard also “relieves a judge from feeling that they are admitting to shameful prejudice and bias. Instead, it is a matter of appearances.”

In Oklahoma City, concerns over appearances have not traditionally proven to be much of a deterrent. The contentious fight over Glossip’s case — and the state’s death penalty in general — has frequently spilled into public view, particularly where the DA’s office has been involved. Among Prater’s final moves as DA was the targeting of Oklahoma’s board of pardon and parole for showing mercy to people facing execution; Prater repeatedly sought to disqualify individual board members from considering death penalty cases. In Glossip’s case, a newly retired Prater showed up at his 2023 clemency hearing to telegraph his anger over Drummond’s decision to testify on Glossip’s behalf.

With Drummond’s decision to retry Glossip, the attorney general has found common ground with the Macy-era prosecutors who sent Glossip to death row. The attorney general has insisted he “will make sure Mr. Glossip receives a fair trial.” But allowing Stallings to preside clearly undermines this commitment, defense lawyers argue. Both sides should want a presiding judge who can be seen as unbiased. Fighting for Stallings to stay on sends the message that “the game is already rigged.”

The post Her Mentor Sent Richard Glossip to Death Row. Can She Give Him a Fair Trial? appeared first on The Intercept.

It was past 11 p.m. on September 21, and Bushart, 61, was still up with his wife at their home in Lexington, Tennessee, a small city halfway between Nashville and Memphis. It had been a normal weekend. On Saturday, they went to see a community theater performance of “Arsenic and Old Lace.” The next day, they moved furniture to prepare for a new carpet delivery. And, as he did almost every day, Bushart spent hours on his phone, posting on Facebook a torrent of liberal memes.

Born and raised in West Tennessee, Bushart worked as a police officer and sheriff’s deputy for 24 years, then spent another nine with the Tennessee Department of Correction before retiring from law enforcement last year. His politics made him an outlier among his neighbors. Like many people, he reserved his most strident opinions for the internet. On Facebook, Bushart slammed President Donald Trump and his followers, whom he likened to a cult. He quarreled with vaccine skeptics and fought with election deniers. As things took a darker turn during Trump’s second term, Bushart posted memes decrying the president’s increasingly authoritarian moves. After Kirk’s killing on September 10, Bushart posted furiously, repeatedly, about why the right-wing activist did not deserve to be lionized — and warning about the escalating assault on free speech.

His posts were not limited to his own feed. That Saturday morning, in a Facebook group called “What’s Happening in Perry County,” Bushart spotted a thread about an upcoming candlelight vigil honoring Kirk in the county seat of Linden, a small town some 45 minutes away. He fired off a rapid series of trollish memes. One showed a scene from “The Sopranos.” “Tony, Charlie Kirk died,” Carmela Soprano says. “Who gives a shit,” Tony replies. Another quoted Kash Patel’s press conference after Kirk’s murder, where he said, “I’ll see you at Valhalla,” depicting the FBI director in a Viking costume and holding a rubber chicken. The most vulgar meme appeared to capture the moment Kirk was shot, accompanied by the words, “Release the Epstein Files.”

But it was a more innocuous post that would soon send Bushart’s life spiraling out of control. It was an image he had previously posted to his own feed to little response: a photo of Trump alongside a quote, “We have to get over it.” The meme, which had been circulating for more than a year, drew from remarks Trump made after a January 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa. Beneath the quote was a line providing context: “Donald Trump, on the Perry High School mass shooting, one day after.” Above the image were the words “Seems relevant today.”

If Bushart shared the posts to taunt those mourning Kirk, the reactions on the forum remained relatively mild. “Jeez Larry, take a stress pill or something,” one man commented. “Mow the lawn, get off the computer. A simple, concise statement like ‘I HATE Charlie’ would be sufficient.” Some of Bushart’s posts were received more positively; a meme arguing that “Billionaires fund the class war. Charlie Kirk sold it as a race war” got several likes. The Trump meme, meanwhile, was ignored.

By Sunday evening, however, the posts had gotten the attention of Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems. An avid Facebook user himself, Weems had shared the information about the Kirk vigil on his own page a few days earlier. He had also posted his own emotional response to the news of Kirk’s murder in September, warning ominously about the “evil” in our midst. “Evil could be your neighbor,” he wrote. “Evil could be standing right beside you in the grocery store. It could be your own family member and you never even know it.”

Weems contacted his investigator. Just under an hour later, in Lexington, Bushart wrote a two-line post on Facebook at 7:53 p.m. “Received a visit from Lexington PD regarding my posted memes on ‘What’s Happening in Perry County,’” he wrote. The police had come at the behest of Perry County, he said, but did not elaborate.

If he was concerned, Bushart didn’t show it. He went back to posting. At 9:48 p.m., Bushart shared a meme from a page called Blue Wave 2026, featuring an unhinged-looking Roseanne Barr. “Many maga are claiming that Obama used the pressure of his office and the FCC to get Rosanne cancelled just like Trump did to Kimmel,” it read. “Except Obama wasn’t president in 2018. Care to guess who was?”

It would be his last post that night. At 11:15 p.m., police knocked on his door again. This time there were four officers, one of whom was holding a warrant for his arrest, which had been sent from Perry County. Body camera footage obtained by The Intercept shows police following Bushart inside his house and waiting while he slips on his shoes. Then they handcuff him on his front porch and lead him away.

Arriving at the local jail, the officer with the warrant unfolded the piece of paper. “Just to clarify, this is what they charged you with,” he told Bushart, pointing and reading aloud: “Threatening Mass Violence at a School.”

“At a school?” Bushart said, sounding confused.

But the officer had no further explanation. “I ain’t got a clue,” he said, chuckling. “I just gotta do what I have to do.”

Bushart laughed too. “I’ve been in Facebook jail but now I’m really in it,” he said. He hadn’t committed a crime, he said. “I may have been an asshole but…”

“That’s not illegal,” the officer said.

Bushart was booked at the Perry County Jail in Linden on September 22, just before 2 a.m. He has been there ever since. His bail was set at $2 million — a shocking amount, wildly beyond his financial capacity. Under Tennessee law, Bushart would have to pay at least $210,000 to get out of jail, under onerous conditions. Although his defense attorney has filed a motion asking General Sessions Judge Katerina Moore to reduce his bail on the grounds that he is not a flight risk and does not pose a threat to the community, a hearing on the motion was reset at prosecutors’ request. Bushart’s next court date is not scheduled to take place until December 4.

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Bushart is one of countless people whose lives have been upended due to social media posts shared after Kirk’s death. The murder triggered an extraordinary crackdown on speech, wielded against Americans from every level of government, with the White House and its allies targeting those whose public reactions they considered offensive. Vice President J.D. Vance urged Americans to report people to their employers. At the Pentagon, nearly 300 employees were investigated. And more recently, the State Department revoked the visas of people who spoke ill of Kirk.

In Tennessee, a wave of firings and suspensions took place across the state, with numerous public employees and college and university staffers punished for their posts. A high school science teacher was suspended after being targeted by the right-wing website The Federalist for an Instagram story calling Kirk a “POS” and quoting his reaction to the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, which left seven dead, including three 9-year-old students. “It’s worth to have, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights,” Kirk had said. And, under pressure from Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is running for Tennessee governor, a university fired a theater professor for posting an old article about Kirk’s comments, issuing a statement explaining that the professor had “reshared a post on social media that was insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death.”

But Bushart’s case is in a class of its own. He is almost certainly the only person who was arrested and held on a serious criminal charge for a Facebook post in the wake of Kirk’s death — a charge that seems clearly divorced from reality. Among those who have heard of it, the case has been met with shock, outrage, and considerable confusion. On TikTok, Reddit, and a “Justice for Larry Bushart” page on Facebook, many see the case as a form of government overreach that puts all Americans in danger. And though the case is undeniably part of the broader assault on free speech sparked by the Kirk assassination, it is also locally rooted: a perfect storm of bad law, overzealous policing, and a political climate that has emboldened law enforcement officials to punish perceived enemies.

At the heart of the controversy is elected Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems. In office since 2015, his previous claim to fame in Tennessee was his response to the 2018 shooting at Parkland High School in Florida, which killed 17 people. In an impassioned open letter, he criticized politicians who failed to protect students, pledging $500 of his own money to install barricade locks on school doors in Perry County. His rallying cry: “Not Our Children!”

More recently, Weems has availed himself of a Tennessee law passed after the Covenant School shooting, which sought harsh new punishments for “recklessly making a threat of mass violence.” The American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech experts cautioned at the time that the language was so broad, “it could potentially criminalize a wide range of adults and children who do not have any intent of actually causing harm or making a threat” — and this is precisely what has happened. The law has ensnared numerous students for social media activity that, by all rational interpretations, are not actually threatening actual violence. Earlier this year, ProPublica and WPLN/Nashville Public Radio reported on a group of middle school cheerleaders who were slapped with criminal charges by the local sheriff for filming a TikTok video in which one girl said, “Put your hands up,” while other girls dropped to the floor.

In Bushart’s case, the warrant affidavit contains a short narrative summarizing the ostensible evidence against him. “At approximately 1900 hours,” writes Perry County Sheriff’s Investigator Jason Morrow, “I … received a message from Sheriff Nick Weems regarding a Facebook post Larry Bushart made on the What’s Happening in Perry County, TN Facebook page stating ‘This seems relevant today…’ with an image of Donald Trump and the words ‘We have to get over it.’” Morrow quotes the rest of the meme and notes that it was posted “on a message thread regarding the Charlie Kirk vigil.” He then writes: “This was a means of communication, via picture, posted to a Perry County, TN Facebook page in which a reasonable person would conclude could lead to serious bodily injury, or death of multiple people.”

It’s possible, perhaps, to imagine how the Trump meme might have set some members of the Facebook group on edge — at least upon first glance. The post invoked a school shooting at a “Perry High School.” The local high school in Linden is called Perry County High School. Moreover, just one month earlier, Weems had reported an alleged threat against the school, prompting administrators to cancel all classes “for the safety of our students and staff.” Still, it was easy to discern that, apart from the name “Perry,” there was nothing connecting the meme to Linden.

Chris Eargle, who created the “Justice for Larry Bushart” Facebook page, first heard about the case from news reports posted on social media. Like many online commenters, he figured there had to be more to the story. “I was very skeptical when I first saw it,” he said. “He couldn’t have just been thrown in jail with a $2 million bond just for posting a Trump meme.” But the closer he looked at the case, the more it seemed clear that’s exactly what happened. “I was like, ‘Oh, wow, they actually did charge him for posting a meme.’”

Eargle requested to join the “What’s Happening In Perry County” group and was granted access. He also started commenting on different Facebook pages linked to the sheriff. “Unwise persecution of people for their political views will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars,” he wrote in a review on the “Re-Elect Weems for Sheriff” page. “He should never be allowed near public office again.” Before long, the page was taken down. So was the Perry County Sheriff’s Office page.

Weems had been happy to publicize Bushart’s arrest at first. In the earliest news story on September 22, local radio station WOPC published Bushart’s mugshot along with a statement from the sheriff, who said that Bushart’s meme had alluded to “a hypothetical shooting at a place called Perry High School.” According to Weems, “That message caused considerable concern within the community and we were asked to investigate.”

Readers found this perplexing. “I’m confused,” one woman wrote on Facebook after the story was posted on the station page. “He was talking about shooting up the school or shooting up a vigil. How are the two things connected?” Another reader speculated that Weems hadn’t heard of the Iowa shooting and misinterpreted the post as a threat. “A man is in jail because the sheriff didn’t use google.”

In a comment that has since been deleted, Weems personally replied to correct the record. “We were very much aware of the meme being from an Iowa shooting,” he wrote later that afternoon. The meme “created mass hysteria to parents and teachers … that led the normal person to conclude that he was talking about our Perry County High School.”

This did not go over well. Most people would not read the meme as a threat, several commenters pointed out. But even if the meme had caused some people to panic, one man wrote, “your department arrested a man for expressing free speech because you listened to public hysteria rather than doing an investigation?”

Others didn’t buy the notion that there had been panic at all. “Mass hysteria is a lie,” another man wrote. “I hope he sues you.”

As the story spread, confusion persisted over the basic facts. Because the Facebook thread was only visible to members of the Perry County group, it was unclear to most people when, exactly, Bushart posted the memes or how people reacted — let alone whether the response could be described as “mass hysteria.” But Weems insisted that Bushart wanted to sow panic, telling The Tennessean that “investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community.”

Yet there were no public signs of this hysteria. Nor was there much evidence of an investigation — or any efforts to warn county schools. Although the Perry County Schools District did not respond to messages from The Intercept, attorneys with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a series of open records requests with the school district asking for any communications to or from staff pertaining to the case — including terms like “shooting,” “threat,” and “meme.” In response, the director of schools wrote that there were no records related to Bushart’s case. “The Perry County Sheriff’s Department handled this situation,” he wrote.

“You would think that if a school district or a school was the target of a serious threat, they would have an email or a text message or something to students, to parents, to the safety officer, to the community, saying, ‘Here’s what has happened. Don’t worry. Everything is all right,’” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with FIRE who has been monitoring the case. “They have nothing.”

Meanwhile, the Perry County Sheriff’s Office has not responded to records requests by FIRE. In a phone call with The Intercept, a sheriff’s deputy told The Intercept that any records related to the case would have to be subpoenaed. “I’m not releasing anything due to the scrutiny and the harassing phone calls we’ve had,” he said, then hung up. But Weems himself responded to an email earlier this week. He said that the Perry County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page “has been in the process” of being deleted since July but declined to comment further. “There is a lot of false quotes being made in regard to this case,” he wrote. “Therefore, I’m not gonna continue to discuss the case until it’s settled in court.”

Bushart’s lawyer has not responded to messages about the case. Bushart’s wife declined to speak on the record on the advice of the attorney. But Bushart’s son defended his dad on social media, calling the prosecution “an egregious violation of his 1st Amendment rights” and spelling out what has been clear from the start: The meme he shared was meant to show “the hypocrisy in honoring Charlie Kirk while ignoring other tragic incidents of mass violence.”

For now, Bushart faces the prospect of spending Thanksgiving in jail. On Tuesday, a member of the Justice for Larry Bushart page created a GiveSendGo account to raise money for his legal defense. “This isn’t just for Larry; this is a stand against overzealous law enforcement acting on skewed interpretations of free speech,” it reads. “Remember: today it’s someone else; tomorrow it could be you or me.”

To Steinbaugh, who has litigated First Amendment violations all over the country, Bushart’s case stands out. “One thing that’s unique about it is that nobody has done a course correction here,” he said. “It would be one thing to have law enforcement overreacting and detaining someone … and then the next day, saying, ‘OK, message received, we’ve done our due diligence. That’s all we need to do here.’ This guy’s been incarcerated since this happened over quoting the president. Cooler heads should have prevailed by now.”

The post The Absurd Prosecution of a Man Who Posted a Charlie Kirk Meme appeared first on The Intercept.

She broke down when she got inside the car. Tahina’s 30-year-old son Justin, who also witnessed the execution, tried to comfort her. Then they started the two-hour trip back home. They didn’t discuss what they had seen. “I just kept thinking, ‘I gotta get me home, I gotta get me and my son home.’”

The following days were a blur. She was in shock and felt numb. She’d had the foresight to finish all her holiday preparations long before the execution. “Everything was wrapped, all the decorations were up, all the food was bought for Christmas dinner,” she recalled. So she focused on retrieving her husband’s remains, picking them up just before New Year’s. “And as I was carrying his box of ashes, I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Wow, this is our first actual car ride together.’”

Tahina, 48, had known Joseph Corcoran since middle school. Over his 26 years on death row, she actually married him twice: first about five years after he was sentenced to die, and again two months before his execution. Her two kids, now grown, had been raised to know Corcoran and why he was on death row. “They knew that, you know, Joe was sick and that he was in prison,” Tahina said. “And they just knew that their mommy was very happy with Joe, and Joe was always a part of our family.”

Corcoran was 22 years old when he shot his brother, James, and three other men in Fort Wayne. His lawyers would argue that his actions were driven by undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. From the start of his incarceration, Corcoran was convinced that prison guards were using an ultrasound machine to force him to speak. He repeatedly said he wished to drop his appeals and volunteer for execution. Although prosecutors accused him of faking his delusions, Tahina saw them firsthand. “He was very mentally ill,” she said. “And Joe believed that the only way that he could escape this torment and torture was by dying.”

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Corcoran was the first person executed by the state of Indiana in 15 years. As in many places, the state’s execution chamber had remained dormant due to a lack of available drugs used to carry out lethal injection. But in June 2024, then-Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb made an announcement. “After years of effort, the Indiana Department of Correction has acquired a drug — pentobarbital — which can be used to carry out executions,” he said. Within months, at the state attorney general’s request, the Indiana Supreme Court had scheduled two execution dates: Corcoran on December 18, and Benjamin Ritchie on May 20, 2025.

Indiana’s new drug protocol — a single, massive dose of pentobarbital — was the same formula used by the federal government, which carried out 13 executions at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute during President Donald Trump’s first term. Death penalty states had adopted the one-drug method despite doubts over its efficacy and turned to compounding pharmacies to obtain it. But the results could be disturbing. Some people executed with the pentobarbital appeared to suffer on the gurney, and autopsies consistently showed pulmonary edema — fluid in the lungs that, according to experts, would feel like drowning.

“Joe knew that he was kind of a guinea pig,” Tahina said. He wanted an autopsy to be carried out after his death, she said, because he knew something could go wrong. He also allowed a journalist with the Indiana Capital Chronicle to be added to his personal witness list — a way to circumvent a state ban on media witnesses. But in the end, things seemed to go mostly according to plan. The curtains went up at 12:34 a.m. Corcoran was declared dead 10 minutes later. “After a brief movement of his left hand and fingers at about 12:37 a.m.,” the journalist reported, “Corcoran did not move again.”

But the execution of Benjamin Ritchie five months later did not go smoothly. Tahina was watching the livestream of a vigil outside the prison hosted by Death Penalty Action that night, when viewers received word that Ritchie had moved unexpectedly on the gurney. “He violently sat up — raised his shoulders — and twitched violently for about three seconds,” one defense attorney told reporters.

Tahina was horrified. But it wasn’t until she read additional coverage weeks later that she began to question what she had seen at her husband’s execution. One expert said that pentobarbital “should be really, really effective — really fast. No one should move.” This had not been the case with Corcoran. “You could see his hands twitching,” Tahina said. This echoed the initial news reports. But she also saw something other witnesses did not: “Joe tried to raise his head up.” Justin, who was sitting behind her, described the same thing. “To me, he tried to sit up, or at least it looked like it,” he said.

Tahina felt sick, then angry. “How was I supposed to know that wasn’t normal?”

She grew even more alarmed when she heard comments in the news from Indiana’s newly inaugurated Republican Gov. Mike Braun. His predecessor, Holcomb, had announced the state’s procurement of pentobarbital in June 2024 — six months before Corcoran’s execution. But Braun had since told reporters that the drugs only had “a 90-day shelf life” — and that the state had previously gotten “in a pickle” by purchasing pentobarbital that expired before it could be used.

Braun insisted that neither of the executions were carried out with expired pentobarbital. But Tahina didn’t believe him. His claims were confusing and contradictory. Shortly after Ritchie’s execution, Braun told reporters that the state had no more pentobarbital — and no plans to buy more. “We’ve got to address the broad issue of, what are other methods, the discussion of capital punishment in general,” he said. But just a few weeks later, his attorney general requested to schedule a third execution.

Today, Tahina has more questions than answers. “I want to know what happened,” she said. As Indiana prepares to kill again this week, she is furious at the lack of transparency and accountability surrounding executions — as well as the apathy of the public toward the people executed in their name.

But she is especially enraged at the thought that her husband’s execution will be swept under the rug. “All of those people — the governor, everybody — have moved on. No big deal. But it’s a big deal to me. And it’s a big deal to my family. And I want the public to know what really goes on.”

Just after midnight on Friday, October 10, barring any last-minute intervention, Indiana will execute 53-year-old Roy Ward by lethal injection. Despite the questions still swirling around the last two executions, the method will be the same as the one used to kill Corcoran and Ritchie. “No changes have been made to the execution protocol since Mr. Ritchie’s execution,” the Indiana attorney general’s office wrote in a federal court filing last month. Although there was a debrief and “verbal review” among members of the execution team, “a formal investigation or post-execution review was not conducted.”

Indiana’s revival of capital punishment is part of a wider resurgence across the country. The midnight execution will be the first of six executions in seven days, with death sentences subsequently set to be carried out in Florida, Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, and Arizona. To date, 34 people have been executed in the U.S. this year alone, with 10 more executions scheduled before the end of 2025. While the vast majority have been killed by lethal injection, two have been killed using nitrogen gas and another two by firing squad.

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Designed to resemble a medical procedure, lethal injection is still widely perceived as the most humane form of execution. But states have spent the past two decades retooling their formulas due to key drug shortages. As states have experimented with different drug combinations, manufacturers have been increasingly reluctant to supply products for lethal injection, prompting officials to seek out less reputable sources. To escape scrutiny, states have also passed legislation to make their drug sources secret — ostensibly to protect drug suppliers from anti-death penalty activists.

Today, all death penalty states hide the sources of their lethal injection drugs. But Indiana stands apart for its secrecy. It is the only active death penalty state that prohibits media witnesses from attending executions. While other states offer a designated media area on prison grounds, along with a chance to hear from witnesses, the Indiana Department of Correction provides a parking lot across the street and a brief statement delivered by email.

Until recently, there was almost no publicly available information about the drugs used by the Indiana Department of Correction. This changed in late September with a series of state disclosures to Ward’s attorneys as part of federal litigation challenging his execution. Death penalty attorneys had spent months asking for records pertaining to the acquisition, storage, and destruction of the drugs. According to the state, “the pentobarbital arrived in a sealed cardboard box with a Styrofoam container inside.” The package contained the drug vials along with “inventory slips and certificates of analysis.” At the prison, the pentobarbital is put in “a safe behind three levels of locks,” the state wrote. “Three Indiana State Prison employees have the ability to unlock the safe.”

But the biggest revelation was that, according to the state, the Indiana Department of Correction does not rely on compounded pentobarbital as previously suspected but instead uses manufactured pentobarbital, procured from an unnamed pharmacy, to carry out executions. Although the source of the drugs remains secret, the presiding judge privately reviewed photographs, labeled “Highly Sensitive Documents,” and concluded that the evidence supported the state’s claims.

This was especially surprising in light of the 90-day shelf life invoked by the governor earlier this year, which strongly hinted at compounded pentobarbital, since compounded drugs are known to degrade faster than manufactured drugs. And it only deepened confusion over why Indiana has apparently destroyed at least three unused doses of pentobarbital, as revealed in records previously released through separate litigation. The heavily redacted documents include Drug Enforcement Administration forms documenting the destruction of the drugs through dubious means. One dose was destroyed by fire in June at a penitentiary three hours south of Michigan City. Another two doses were destroyed in July at the Indiana State Prison. The method of destruction reads “Poured in kitty litter.”

“Our biggest concern was that compounded pentobarbital was going to be used,” said Indiana defense attorney Joanna Green, who represents Ward. “We know now that it’s not.” Ward’s legal team has since dropped their remaining federal challenges, filing a joint motion requiring the state to show that it complied with its own protocol when executing Ward. “There are still a lot of questions about how Indiana obtains manufactured pentobarbital,” Green said. “And there are still significant questions about what happened in the previous two executions.”

Not long after Ritchie’s execution, Tahina got a message via Facebook from a woman in Canada named Colleen Villeneuve. Tahina had been responding to cruel comments about Ritchie and the woman wanted to say thank you. She introduced herself as Ritchie’s girlfriend.

“Nobody wants to be connected with somebody through these circumstances,” Villeneuve told me. But the two women quickly bonded. For people whose loved ones are executed by the state, the experience can be crushingly isolating. “It’s not the same as when anyone else dies,” Villeneuve said. “You have to deal with not only them being killed, but you have a whole army of people who talk bad about the person.”

Villeneuve had not witnessed Ritchie’s execution. She was at her hotel a few miles away when she heard the first reports from outside the prison about his violent movement on the gurney. Another lawyer sent her a text message saying the execution had gone quickly — “and that’s what I focused on.”

Villeneuve had first written to Richie six years earlier. Before that, “I’d never been to a prison, I’d never talked to anyone that was in prison.” But she stumbled upon a documentary on YouTube starring famed British journalist Trevor McDonald, who gained rare access to the penitentiary in Michigan City. Among those interviewed was Ritchie, a tattooed 30-something who talked bluntly about his life and his crime with a mix of self-reflection and bravado.

Ritchie was 20 years old when he shot a police officer during a botched robbery. Although he disputed the state’s version of events — prosecutors said he ambushed his victim, while Ritchie said he fired while running away — he did not deny his guilt. He was a “stupid kid,” he said. “I would do things without thinking about ’em.”

Villeneuve was struck by Ritchie. “He just didn’t fit, you know, the Ted Bundy type” she imagined to be on death row. Instead, she saw a man acting “full of himself,” trying to be tough for the cameras. On a whim, she wrote to Ritchie, who replied with “the most ridiculous letter,” trying to “make himself sound cool and available.” Nevertheless, the two kept writing. A year later, Villeneuve went to visit Ritchie for the first time.

The closer Villeneuve became to Ritchie, the less he resembled the swaggering convict he tried to portray in the documentary. She found him to be a funny, compassionate man who would do anything for his cat, Cletus, a black and white shorthair whom he’d raised as part of the prison’s cat therapy program. She was also confronted with his painful family history. As his lawyers would explain in his clemency petition, Ritchie’s childhood was filled with trauma and neglect that shaped his early life. When he was 10 years old, Ritchie was sent to a psychiatric facility, where he “attempted suicide and told hospital staff he felt like ‘everyone would be better off if I were dead.’”

Ritchie seemed determined to help Villeneuve raise her own daughter, Shiloh, with the love he’d lacked growing up. In a letter asking for clemency, Villeneuve wrote that he had been “instrumental with her growth. … Shiloh enjoys nothing more than to tell Benjamin about a test she aced or a new move she learned in kick-boxing.” In the days leading up to his execution, Shiloh shared videos he sent via a contraband cellphone on TikTok.

Ritchie had never really dwelled on the state’s plan to kill him. “He didn’t think they were ever going to,” Villeneuve said. In the documentary, he pointed out that “a lot of us are getting off death row” — and the odds were indeed in his favor. Until Corcoran’s execution last December, only 20 of the 97 people sentenced to die in Indiana’s “modern” death penalty era had died at the hands of the state. The majority have been removed from death row due to reversals by appellate courts, commutations, or deals reached with prosecutors.

Villeneuve was less optimistic about Ritchie’s chances of surviving death row. Still, in retrospect, she said she was in denial too. She and Ritchie did not discuss any end-of-life preparations “I honestly didn’t think we were going to get to that,” she said.

The last time she saw him was on video, right before they came to take him away, she said. What came next is contained in affidavits later filed in court. Witnesses were led into the small room. The curtains went up at 12:35 a.m. A couple minutes in, Ritchie suddenly raised up his torso from the gurney, pushing hard against the restraints before collapsing back down. One witness gasped and grabbed one of the attorneys by the arm. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said, bowing her head. When she looked back up, he was gone.

In August I went to see Tahina at her home in a rural suburb about an hour from Fort Wayne. Corcoran’s paintings hung throughout the house; on her refrigerator was a handwritten letter from Corcoran listing songs he liked. “Remember me when you listen,” it said. In the living room, a blue urn holding Corcoran’s ashes were displayed in a large wooden cabinet.

Tahina had shared Corcoran’s private autopsy report, giving me permission to send it to two different experts. But both said that the reports did not contain sufficient detail to draw any firm conclusions about whether his execution had been botched. Although it noted congestion in Corcoran’s organs — one potential sign of pulmonary edema — his lungs were not as heavy as those seen in other autopsies of people killed by lethal injection.

Tahina found the lack of clarity frustrating. She was still trying to make sense of her husband’s death. Yet much of the visit centered on his life. She showed me the top she wore to his execution — a gray sweatshirt stamped with a pink palmprint reading “Joseph Corcoran touched this heart” — along with a scrapbook stuffed with photos, handmade greeting cards, and newspaper clippings. There were pages of wedding pictures; she had the request Corcoran submitted seeking permission to marry her in 2004 and the index cards with the handwritten script from their ceremony 20 years later.

Tahina had asked her son Justin to join us, along with Corcoran’s spiritual adviser, Rev. David Leitzel, who knew Corcoran’s family from his church. Whereas Tahina’s early recollections of Corcoran were of a school crush on a boy who dressed like Wally Cleaver from “Leave It to Beaver,” Leitzel remembered a child who seemed slightly out of step with his peers. “If I pull up pictures, you’ll be hard pressed to find one of Joe smiling,” he said. 

Conversations about Corcoran were haunted by the death of his parents. They were murdered in 1992, five years before Corcoran committed the killings that sent him to death row. Corcoran was tried as a juvenile for his parents’ murders but acquitted. Many believed he did it. Although Tahina didn’t, she also questioned why he never received the help he clearly needed afterward. If he’d been properly diagnosed and medicated, she said, he might have been able to live a normal life outside prison.

Instead, like many condemned people with mental illness, Corcoran’s delusions worsened during his decades on death row. Tahina read one of his later letters aloud, in which he chronicled a “typical day.” It began with a harrowing account of trying to sleep, which he could only do by conjuring violent images of killing prison officers. “That is the nonsense the people who man the ultrasound surveillance devices put me through whenever I try to sleep,” he wrote. The mind control technology dictated his thoughts, speech, and muscles, he wrote, causing pain and involuntary movement throughout his body. “That is why people around me think I have Tourettes.”

Leitzel was disturbed by the letter. He had never heard Corcoran talk that way. Tahina said Corcoran probably hid his delusions from Leitzel because he felt ashamed. But the two also shared many of the same positive impressions of Corcoran. He was highly intelligent, had a sense of humor, and was deeply devout. To Tahina, he was the closest thing there was to a soulmate. “He could always make me smile.”

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Throughout my visit to their home, Justin had mostly listened. He had not wanted to attend the execution. But he had gone to support his mother. When it came time to describe what he saw, he spoke quietly and deliberately. “It’s been almost a year and I’m still having nightmares,” he said.

The days before were a blur. He remembered sharing Corcoran’s last meal with him, which was served several days before the execution. The warden brought several pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which they ate as a family. It was then that the warden ran down the logistics of what would happen on the night of the execution.

The vans had picked them up from their hotel around 10 p.m. They arrived at the prison, went through security, and were taken to a building toward the back of the sprawling penitentiary. It was after 12:30 a.m. when they were led to the witness chamber, a cramped room with two rows of chairs facing a small window. The lights were lowered. At 12:34 a.m. the blinds were raised. Corcoran was strapped down to the gurney, with Leitzel by his side.

Tahina stood in front of a living room window to recreate the scene. “I had a full view of my husband’s body,” she said. But she could not hear anything in the chamber. Nor could she tell when the drugs were actually delivered. But she was firm that Corcoran moved. “He went like this,” she said, straining her head forward. “And tried to raise up.”

“Yeah,” Justin said. “He looked like he was trying to look,” he said, turning his own head to the side.

“And then he literally tried to raise the top part of his body,” Tahina said. She went over to the couch and laid down with her arms out, acting out what she had seen.

Although he was sitting beside him in the death chamber, Leitzel did not see Corcoran move. But he conceded that his eyes were closed in prayer the whole time. He also said something startling. Looking out from the death chamber, he could not see the witnesses at all. He realized that the window between the rooms was made up of one-way glass. Corcoran had always told Tahina that her face was the last thing he wanted to see before he died. But in the end, he could not see her at all. 

Tahina, meanwhile, cannot escape the images from that night. “Once you see it you can’t unsee it,” she said. “So I try to keep my mind scrambled, I try to keep everything busy, busy, busy in my head all the time.” If she doesn’t, she said, taking a deep breath, “All I can see is my husband strapped down on that gurney.”

Update: October 10, 2025
Roy Ward was executed by lethal injection on Friday, October 10, at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. According to the Indiana Department of Correction, the execution began “shortly after” midnight. He was pronounced dead at 12:33 a.m. 

The post Indiana Killed Their Partners Under Cover Of Darkness. They Want Answers. appeared first on The Intercept.

“No more deaths by denial!” he yelled.

“Put the system on trial!” the protesters yelled back.

“Corporate greed we must fight!”

“Health care is a human right!”

The man in the Luigi hat was Jonni Gartrelle, a New Yorker who moved back to the city from Miami last fall. At 36, he’d been involved in numerous activist causes, spending much of 2024 fighting alongside Planned Parenthood on a campaign to end Florida’s six-week abortion ban. But this was his first protest in support of Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The crime had struck a nerve. “He could be any of us,” Gartrelle later told me. “Each of us has a reason why this could be us.”

It was Tuesday, September 16, and Mangione was soon due to appear at the courthouse across the street. The 27-year-old faced first-degree murder charges in New York’s state and federal courts. In the former, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had charged Mangione under the state’s terrorism law, which carried a life sentence. In the Southern District of New York, the Trump administration was seeking the death penalty.

Prosecutors cast Mangione as a cold-blooded killer who stalked and murdered Thompson in a brazen act of violence, shooting him outside the Midtown hotel where he was attending a shareholders conference last December. Surveillance footage of the killing circulated online, captivating and horrifying people across the country. But by the time Mangione was apprehended five days later, he had become a folk hero to countless Americans, who viewed the act of vigilante justice as a necessary wake-up call about the greed and cruelty of the U.S. health insurance industry.

He was also something of a heartthrob. On the sidewalk outside the courthouse, where people had been camped out since the night before, one protester wore a T-shirt that said “Cougars for Luigi.” A younger woman, clad in a floral tiara and a pink top reading “I Heart Italian Boys,” eagerly told reporters that she was in an AI relationship with Mangione. She showed me messages exchanged with a chatbot engineered in his likeness. “Just made my case for appeal,” the AI had written to her. “And my case for marrying you.”

Among pundits and commentators, the outpouring of support for Mangione has been with a mix of fascination, bemusement, and disgust. Many argue that Mangione would never have attracted so much attention if not for his good looks. But to protesters like Gartrelle, this is both short-sighted and misogynistic. “Whenever there is a social justice movement, they are overwhelmingly supported by women because it’s women who are being victimized by the system,” he said.

Gartrelle joined the protest “because of my background in human rights advocacy and health care.” But it was also personal: “My brother passed away about five years ago. He had epilepsy.” His chronic illness made it hard to hold a job, which in turn prevented him from securing the health insurance he needed for treatment. “My brother was never able to get the care that would have worked for him,” Gartrelle said. “But the point is that no one — not the healthy, not the unhealthy — should have trouble finding a doctor. It should be the easiest thing in the world.”

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Criticisms of the protesters had recently taken a darker turn. The murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah less than a week earlier was triggering new crackdowns on free speech — and a declaration of war on the left by the Trump administration. On the eve of Mangione’s court date, senior White House officials vowed to destroy “terrorist networks” of left-wing extremists, a label already attached to Mangione’s supporters by the right-wing press. “There’s a clear ideological continuum between those who rationalize the shooting of a CEO and rationalize the murder and rape of Jews by Palestinian terrorists and rationalize the burning down of cities for ‘social justice,’” a New York Post column argued in the days after Thompson’s murder. The White House would later link to that article in Trump’s executive order designating “antifa” as a domestic terrorism organization.

In reality, the scene outside the courthouse reflected a range of motivations and causes. But none was more central than the failures of the American health care system and the rapacious power of corporations that doom sick people to die. “I feel like a lot of people look at protesters and they’re like, ‘Ugh, God, why are they here for a murderer?’” said a young cancer survivor named Nicole, who declined to give her last name. “I feel like a lot of those people live in bubbles. …Yes, killing is wrong. But did anyone tell Brian Thompson that?”

The protest was organized by People Over Profit NYC, which had set up a table with an array of literature. There were flyers with QR codes to donate to Mangione’s legal defense fund and a trifold brochure titled “Getting Away With Murder,” which juxtaposed the billions made by insurance companies alongside profiles of patients who died after being denied care. A stack of postcards addressed to Mangione at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center advertised a reading list compiled by the abolitionist group Death Penalty Action. And there was a surprisingly comprehensive newsletter called “The Plot”: 23 stapled pages filled with case updates, articles about the health care industry, and warnings about social media censorship of Mangione-related content.

Standing in front of the table was 43-year-old Ico Ahyicodae, a Minnesota-based sign language translator and one of POPNYC’s primary spokespeople. Although the group was committed to defending Mangione’s right to a fair trial, its ultimate goal was “to spotlight what we feel should really be on trial, which is the predatory insurance industry,” Ahyicodae said. They were especially intent on sharing the myriad stories of human suffering due to denied medical claims. Through fundraising, the activists had paid for an LED billboard truck to circle the block outside the hearing, displaying testimonials from people who supported their work. “It’s for my son, who committed suicide at the age of 23 last year because Cigna denied coverage for him on a treatment which had been proven effective,” one anonymous donor said.

Ahyicodae was constantly brainstorming new ways to engage the public. That morning they had arrived with a huge, homemade prize wheel, available for anyone who wanted to give it a spin. There were two possible outcomes: “DENIED” or “APPROVED BUT…” Participants received a “scenario card” that informed them of their medical diagnosis and the cost of treating it. If a person had cancer, for example, and landed on “APPROVED BUT…” Ahyicodae told them that hopefully the first round of treatment would be effective — but if it wasn’t, “you get to come back and give the wheel another spin.” If the person landed on “Denied,” Ahyicodae handed them a small flyer in the shape of a tombstone reading “RIP.”

The point was to drive home the arbitrariness and human cost of the for-profit health insurance industry. Ahyicodae pointed to people like Forrest VanPatten, who died of cancer at age 50 after his health insurance company denied his treatment, in violation of Michigan law. “You would think that if you break the law and someone dies as a result, that that is murder or manslaughter or something,” Ahyicodae said. But laws designed to punish people like Mangione did not apply to powerful corporations.

Previous protests for Mangione had also attracted health reform activists like Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates single-payer health care. But no one from the group had come out that day. Members had been previously split about whether to attend the demonstrations. “Many of our members were really against it,” one PNHP activist told Courthouse News Service earlier this year, emphasizing that they did not condone Mangione’s actions. Yet the courthouse protests provided a critical organizing space — a chance to cultivate support for health care reform and legislation like the New York Health Act, which aims to establish a universal health care system in the state. “I think people have been really excited to hear that there is somewhere they can channel their anger.”

Indeed, most of the protesters I met were not affiliated with any specific group but had been spurred to come downtown by a sense of rage and frustration. Several were health care workers themselves. “I’ve been on both sides,” said a woman named Kay, a nurse of 10 years who said she was charged $15,000 by UnitedHealthcare after undergoing an appendectomy that the company had deemed not “medically necessary.” At work, she cared for patients who were newly diagnosed with diabetes, only to be cut off from the supplies required to manage it. “You need emergency kits, you need basic supplies — and their health insurance won’t cover it,” she said. “They don’t see us as patients. We’re dollar signs.”

Inside the courthouse, the hearing got underway around 9:30 a.m. Mangione appeared at the defense table wearing handcuffs and a tan prison uniform. There were a number of defense motions pending before the judge. Mangione’s legal team had argued for months that his right to a fair trial had been repeatedly trampled, from the moment of his arrest in Pennsylvania — where police failed to read him his Miranda rights before questioning him — to the now-infamous perp walk in lower Manhattan, where an orange-jumpsuit-clad Mangione was escorted by a swarm of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers, as well as New York City Mayor Eric Adams himself.

In their zeal to convict Mangione, the defense argued, prosecutors had repeatedly committed misconduct. In an explosive motion filed over the summer, lawyers accused the DA’s office of using underhanded tactics to obtain Mangione’s private health records under false pretenses. “The District Attorney falsely made up a court date,” the lawyers wrote, “and drafted a fraudulent subpoena that if Aetna did not provide documents on that date, it would be in contempt of Court.” The date in question — May 23, 2025 — had been completely made up, the lawyers said. “There was never a court proceeding scheduled for May 23, 2025, nor was there ever a court appearance scheduled for the entire month of May.” The subpoena had not been signed by the judge, as is required by law. Prosecutors “were plainly lying to get the materials as soon as possible.”

The most pressing defense challenge was aimed at the indictment itself. The DA’s office had charged Mangione with first- and second-degree murder under New York’s terrorism law, which applied, in part, to actions “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” But this stretched the statute “well beyond its legislative intent,” the lawyers wrote. New York’s Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, which was passed in a special session after the September 11 attacks, “only intended to apply to a very narrow category of the most serious offenses.” In fact, the New York Court of Appeals “has cautioned against the improper use of this powerful tool, warning that ‘the concept of terrorism has a unique meaning and its implications risk being trivialized if the terminology is applied loosely in situations that do not match our collective understanding of what constitutes a terrorist act.’” By charging Mangione as a terrorist, New York prosecutors had “ignored” this warning.

In a major victory for Mangione, Judge Gregory Carro agreed. In a 12-page order, he threw out the terrorism charges, writing that he did not believe that lawmakers “intended the employees of a company, however large, to constitute a ‘civilian population.’” The Trump administration had not charged Mangione with terrorism, the judge pointed out, “even though the federal terrorism statute served as a model” for New York’s terrorism law. Although state prosecutors had submitted journal entries allegedly written by Mangione “as evidence of terroristic intent,” Carro wrote, the pages did not support their case. “The defendant’s apparent objective, as stated in his writings, was not to threaten, intimidate, or coerce, but rather, to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed of the insurance industry,” he wrote. While prosecutors may have sufficient evidence to prove that Mangione “murdered Brian Thompson in a premeditated and calculated execution,” this did not make him a terrorist.

Outside the courthouse, word immediately spread that the judge had dropped the terrorism charges. A cheer went up among the crowd. Ahyicodae called it “a step in the right direction.” At a time when the terror label was being recklessly weaponized to stifle dissent and free speech, the judge’s decision was a welcome intervention.

Nevertheless, the rhetoric from the White House and its allies has been taking its toll. Ahyicodae, who is nonbinary, admitted that they had been nervous in the days leading up to the hearing. Kirk’s murder had poured fuel on the already incendiary rhetoric on the right. “A lot of the targeting of transgender folks and talking about how trans people are inherently violent, or whatever … I mean, it’s terrifying.”

This echoed what others had told me about coming to the protest that day. One woman who works as a home health care aide said she was worried about her words being manipulated and used against her. Another, holding a sign that said “Health Over Wealth,” concealed her identity behind a black hoodie, a face mask, and large sunglasses.

Ironically, the Trump administration’s fearmongering may end up threatening its own legal case against Mangione. In the days after the protest, the White House continued its propaganda campaign linking Kirk’s murder to Thompson’s — along with a slew of unrelated acts of violence. In violation of a federal court order to stop publicly discussing the case, multiple Department of Justice employees amplified a clip of Trump telling Fox News that Mangione “shot someone in the back as clear as you’re looking at me,” posted on X by an account deriding Mangione’s “deranged fans.” And on the same day Trump declared “antifa” a terrorist organization, a senior White House staffer told Fox that Mangione was “another self-described so-called anti-fascist that was then celebrated by other self-described anti-fascists, so of course, really communist revolutionaries.”

“The attempts to connect Mr. Mangione with these incidents and paint him as a ‘left wing’ violent extremist are false, prejudicial, and part of a greater political narrative that has no place in any criminal case, especially one where the death penalty is at stake,” defense lawyers wrote to the judge presiding over Mangione’s federal case. The next day, the judge rebuked the Trump administration for its public statements, ordering prosecutors to explain themselves.

Whether they bother to comply is an open question. Under the Trump administration, the narrative is all that matters — and the law is whatever he says it is.

The post The Persistent Push to Depict Luigi Mangione and His Supporters as Terrorists appeared first on The Intercept.

The imperative to execute the killer had been firmly entrenched from the start. No sooner was Kirk declared dead than conservative pundits and politicians began calling for blood, with the Utah governor issuing a swift warning to the then-unidentified gunman: “I just want to remind people that we still have the death penalty here in the state of Utah,” Gov. Spencer Cox said in a press conference within hours of the shooting. The next night, Cox confirmed he was “working with our attorneys getting everything that we need … so that we can pursue the death penalty.”

At the press conference unveiling the state’s case against Robinson, Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray insisted that the decision to seek death was one he “made independently as county attorney based solely on the available evidence and circumstances and nature of the crime.” But as with any capital prosecution, politics were unquestionably a driving force — and in Robinson’s case, the pressure came from the top. President Donald Trump, an ardent death penalty enthusiast, was blunt in expressing his desire to see Kirk’s murderer sentenced to die. “In Utah, you have the death penalty, and a good governor there, I have gotten to know him,” Trump told Fox & Friends on Friday, adding that Cox was “intent” on seeking death — “and he should be.”

Utah is far from the first state to feel such pressure to seek executions. In his executive order weaponizing the death penalty, Trump demanded that states step up their use of capital punishment, going so far as to push state attorneys general to seek new death sentences for the 37 men whose federal death sentences were commuted by Joe Biden at the end of his term.

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Such political pressure has contributed to a renewed embrace of capital punishment on the right, including a dramatic spike in executions during Trump’s second term. In 2025 alone, 31 executions have been carried out across 10 U.S. states, with 12 more executions scheduled through the end of the year. Although the death penalty is still animated by state politics, MAGA-aligned governors and attorneys general have recently revived and ramped up the death penalty in states such as Indiana and Louisiana, which both recently restarted executions after a 15-year pause. In non-death penalty states like New York and Colorado, federal prosecutors have sought the death penalty in high-profile and little-known cases alike.

Cox, who has been largely silent on the death penalty during his tenure, spent years developing a reputation as a moderate Republican. He only recently refashioned himself as a Trump loyalist, surprising supporters by endorsing Trump last fall, in advance of his own reelection. Once a critic of Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection, Cox wrote a letter to Trump following the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “You probably don’t like me much,” Cox wrote. “But I want you to know that I pledge my support.”

The Utah governor has also abandoned his previous image as a conservative who had distanced himself from his party’s dehumanizing rhetoric and politics targeting transgender people. In 2022, Cox vetoed a bill seeking to prevent trans athletes from participating in youth sports, writing in a lengthy statement that while he was “learning so much from our transgender community,” he was still struggling to understand the science. “When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion.” But the state legislature voted to override Cox’s decision, and the following year Cox signed a ban on gender affirming care for trans youth.

With right-wing Republicans already bent on linking mass shootings to so-called “transgender ideology,” Robinson’s alleged relationship with his roommate — who Cox described as “transitioning from male to female” — is now being treated by conservative media as a central component of the crime. Although Gray, the Utah County attorney, said he did not wish to speculate about Robinson’s motive, the theory laid out by prosecutors is largely aligned with the narrative peddled by the right: the story of a young man from a good conservative family radicalized by pro-LGBTQ+ forces, who sought to silence a warrior for free speech and traditional values. “Charlie Kirk was murdered while engaging in one of our most sacred and cherished American rights, the bedrock of our democratic republic, the free exchange of ideas and a search for truth, understanding, and a more perfect union,” Gray told reporters before announcing the charges against Robinson.

According to the state’s theory, which is based on interviews with family members and Robinson’s roommate, Robinson shot Kirk with a rifle that once belonged to his grandfather, which he wrapped in a towel and hid in a wooded area near the college campus. He later allegedly texted his roommate, “Drop what you’re doing. Look under my keyboard.” The roommate found a note reading, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.” Asked why he did it, Robinson wrote, “I’ve had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

Whether the state’s evidence against Robinson ultimately withstands scrutiny remains to be seen. Whatever Robinson’s motive, a death sentence will rely on proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he “intentionally or knowingly” killed Kirk “under circumstances that created a great risk of death to others.” Perhaps more difficult, it will also require a unanimous vote by a jury willing to take the life of a young, white man with a Mormon upbringing who is likely to remind many Utahns of their own family. The story of his parents’ decision to turn in their own son may well generate compassion among jurors who may be reluctant to further punish a family whose life has been ripped apart. And while the current outrage over Kirk’s murder makes it easy to imagine Robinson being sent to death row in a red state like Utah, the reality on the ground is more complicated.

It was not that long ago that Utah was making headlines as an unlikely leader in the death penalty abolition movement. In 2021, the Utah County attorney — Gray’s predecessor and electoral rival — announced that he would no longer seek death sentences, part of a larger turn against capital punishment among conservatives in the state. The following year, a high-profile push to abolish the state’s death penalty failed in committee by just one vote.

Among those leading the charge at the time were politicians like Utah state Sen. Dan McCay, who told local news outlets that the death penalty “sets a false expectation for society, sets a false expectation for the vic­tims and their families, and increases the cost to the state of Utah.” Multiple studies of Utah’s death penalty system have found its price tag to be shockingly high, especially when set against a life sentence.

If Kirk’s murder has not shifted the views of previously outspoken conservatives, it has certainly provided a disincentive from reminding anyone of their abolitionist stance. McCay, who did not respond to repeated messages about his position on the death penalty, has spent the past week vocally raising money to install a statue of Kirk on the UVU campus.

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But behind the scenes, the cost of death penalty prosecutions has made Utah prosecutors less and less willing to seek new death sentences — a trend that is familiar across death penalty states. Juries have also proven less inclined to send defendants to death row. Indeed, Utah prosecutors have not won a new death sentence since 2008. Today, there are four people on Utah’s death row.

Conservative opposition to the death penalty has also been rooted in frustration over the decades it takes to carry out executions. Utah went 14 years without carrying out an execution until 2024, when a Native American man named Taberon Honie was executed for a murder committed in 1998. Last month, the state Supreme Court stopped the planned execution of Ralph Menzies, sent to death row for a murder that took place in 1986. Lawyers for Menzies have described their client as having “progressively worsening dementia,” which should exempt him from execution: “He’s tethered to an oxygen tank, uses a wheelchair, is confused and disoriented, and no longer understands why Utah is trying to kill him.”

For families on both sides of such cases, a death sentence only serves to drag out a traumatic ordeal. In Menzies’s case, the son of the victim compared it to a miserable “merry-go-round,” telling the press last year that he was getting close to giving up. If the judge in the case were to decide Menzies is not competent to be executed, he said at the time, “We’re done, game over. I don’t have any more fight in me.” Other victims’ family members have turned against the death penalty completely. Sharon Wright-Weeks, whose sister and niece were murdered in 1984, became one of the most vocal supporters of Utah’s previous abolition efforts, calling capital punishment “a counterfeit promise.”

For relatives of the condemned, like Randy Gardner, an anti-death penalty activist whose brother was executed by a Utah firing squad in 2010, Kirk’s assassination is a devastating setback to years of progress against capital punishment, which had already been rolled back by conservatives “blinded by Trump and MAGA,” as he wrote in a text message. But Kirk’s killing, Gardner said, has “opened up a Pandora’s box.”

This is not just true in Utah. On the same day that prosecutors announced the death penalty against Robinson, lawmakers introduced legislation to expand the death penalty in Ohio, a state that has not executed anyone since 2018. The bill would make politically motivated killings punishable by death. “We must honor Charlie’s memory not with silence, but with action,” said one of the sponsors, Republican state Rep. Josh Williams, who also happens to be running for Congress.

Politicians in other states will undoubtedly follow suit. Meanwhile, Robinson faces a long road to trial, let alone execution. With so much heated rhetoric and publicity surrounding the assassination — including incendiary statements by the governor, FBI director, and president himself — the case may well become bogged down by defense challenges arguing, with good reason, that Robinson’s right to a fair trial has been violated again and again.

As the most visceral reactions to Kirk’s murder subside, the reality of the death penalty will emerge sooner or later. In Utah, it may simply be a matter of time before conservatives are forced to remember why they began turning against capital punishment in the first place.

The post Utah Was Shifting Away From the Death Penalty. Then Came Trump and Tyler Robinson. appeared first on The Intercept.

The recusal came as a surprise — not only because trial judges rarely willingly step away from a case, but also because there was no recusal request on the official court docket. Coyle was previously a prosecutor in the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office under the former DA who sent Glossip to death row, and the recusal was likely rooted in concern about those ties. It was the latest twist in Glossip’s case since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction at the urging of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond — only for Drummond to announce that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder.

Glossip was twice convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside room 102 of the rundown motel his family owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted Glossip put him up to it. Sneed, who is currently serving a life sentence, escaped the death penalty by becoming the star witness against Glossip.

Glossip, who has always maintained his innocence, faced execution nine times as the Oklahoma courts repeatedly denied his appeals. He may well have been executed if Drummond hadn’t intervened. In early 2023, Drummond ordered an independent investigation into the case, which concluded that rampant prosecutorial misconduct had infected Glossip’s conviction. Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the case, and, when that failed, joined Glossip in asking the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that Sneed — that the state has described as its “indispensable witness” — had lied on the witness stand.

Drummond’s concessions about the flaws in the state’s case and his unprecedented advocacy in support of overturning Glossip’s conviction made his announcement in June that he would seek to retry Glossip for murder all the more shocking. According to Glossip’s lawyers, the decision also betrayed a long-standing agreement with Drummond to resolve the case and set Glossip free.

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The alleged agreement, first reported by The Intercept, was at the heart of an explosive court filing last month, which included a 2023 email exchange between Drummond and Knight laying out the deal. According to the email, Glossip would agree to plead guilty to a lesser charge and would be immediately released in exchange for a promise that Glossip would not sue the state for anything related to his “arrest and incarceration.”

“We are in agreement,” Drummond replied.

The state has since denied that any deal was ever reached, writing in a court filing that the first anyone in the AG’s office had heard about it was just before Glossip’s team filed their brief that included the email exchange. “Needless to say, the defendant is not entitled to enforcement of a non-existent plea agreement,” prosecutors wrote.

Thursday’s court hearing was meant to figure out how to proceed with the matter.

In anticipation of the hearing, Glossip’s attorneys on August 11 filed a lengthy affidavit from Knight that outlined his ongoing communications with Drummond and members of his staff regarding the deal. The filing shed new light on the negotiations, including that Drummond, who is currently running for governor, told Knight that the timing for carrying out the deal “was based on his own political calculus.”

In fact, it was Drummond who initially approached Knight in the spring of 2023 asking if they could strike a deal, Knight recalled. Drummond was preparing to admit that Glossip’s trial had been tainted by prosecutorial misconduct and to ask the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the conviction.

Drummond’s “big fear was that the court would grant it,” Knight told The Intercept, and that Glossip would walk free and would sue the state. “So Drummond did what a good lawyer does for his client and looked for an insurance policy. This agreement was that insurance policy.” Knight noted that if Glossip had been released as planned and then had gone on to sue the state, “the shoe would be on the other foot, and Drummond would be asking for this agreement to be enforced now, instead of me.”

In his affidavit, Knight lays out how after the Supreme Court ruled in Glossip’s favor in February, Drummond was quick to lay out a plan to follow through with the deal in a way that would avoid too much publicity — by releasing Glossip on the Friday before Easter. “I was informed that AG Drummond planned to effectuate the agreement on April 18, 2025,” Knight wrote. Knight recalled that he told Drummond’s solicitor general that he had shoulder replacement surgery scheduled in March, which would preclude him from traveling. Knight said he’d be willing to put off the surgery if Glossip’s release date was firm and was told that it was. “Having been assured that it was a firm plan, I rescheduled my surgery to May 13, 2025,” Knight wrote.

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During a phone call in early April, however, Drummond told Knight that he would need additional time, but assured him the deal was still on. Just days before Knight’s surgery, the two talked again, and Drummond “reaffirmed he was still working on timing,” Knight wrote. Instead, a few weeks later, Drummond put out a press release announcing he would be retrying Glossip for first-degree murder.

Drummond’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In their most recent brief, Glossip’s legal team argues that prosecutors’ characterization of the deal merely reveals their own ignorance about what was happening behind the scenes.

“The thing that makes me kind of chuckle about the situation,” Knight told The Intercept, “is that I believe the people in Drummond’s office who are writing these petitions are learning about the truth of this matter from us … rather than from Gentner Drummond.”

The post Court Filings Reveal New Details About Oklahoma AG Flip-Flopping on Freeing Richard Glossip appeared first on The Intercept.

The lethal injection had been scheduled for 10 a.m. The curtain to the death chamber opened a half hour later, revealing Black strapped down tight to the gurney and covered with a white sheet. Minutes after the massive dose of pentobarbital started to flow, “he began breathing loudly and sighing,” said a reporter from the local NPR station WPLN. Black raised his head and looked around, then said, “It’s hurting so bad.”

“I’m so sorry,” his spiritual adviser replied. 

Another reporter said she saw Black lift his head multiple times. “I can’t do this,” he said. After that, he “audibly gasped.”

Of the seven media witnesses, several had also attended Tennessee’s last execution, carried out in May. This one was different. “It was unanimous among all of us that we saw him in distress,” said Steve Cavendish, editor-in-chief of the Nashville Banner. “We heard him in distress.”

Lawyers for Black had repeatedly warned about the risks of executing their client, a man whose physical and mental health had significantly deteriorated over the years. In addition to a diagnosed intellectual disability, Black had dementia, brain damage, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure. For much of July, Supervisory Assistant Federal Public Defender Kelley Henry had fought to require the state to deactivate Black’s implanted defibrillator/pacemaker. A judge held a hearing in Davidson County Chancery Court and ultimately ruled in Black’s favor, concluding after two days of expert testimony that the lawyers had proved their case: There was a risk that the device would attempt to restart Black’s heart during his execution, sending painful shocks through his body. “This risk can be completely avoided by deactivating [the device],” the judge wrote.

But the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office appealed to the state Supreme Court, which invalidated the ruling. As the execution approached, a Nashville hospital put out a statement saying that it had never agreed to deactivate the device and emphasizing that its staff “has no role in State executions.” On the eve of the execution, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, and Gov. Bill Lee rejected a plea for clemency.

Ultimately, Black’s death appeared to have fulfilled the very fears of his attorneys and advocates.

Black spent 36 years on death row for the murder of his girlfriend, Angela Clay, and her two young daughters, Latoya and Lakeisha. The family was found shot to death in their South Nashville home in 1988. Although Black maintained he was innocent, investigators quickly seized on him. Clay’s relatives said he had been angry at Clay after she told him she planned to reconcile with her ex.

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Tennessee Is About to Execute Byron Black — Despite His Intellectual Disability

Questions of Black’s competence had been raised since before his 1989 trial and both the U.S. Supreme Court and Tennessee Supreme Court would eventually rule that people with intellectual disabilities were exempted from execution. But Black’s legal challenges were blocked at every turn. In 2022, the same office that sent Black to death row acknowledged that he was intellectually disabled and, under a new state law, filed a motion with a Nashville judge saying that he should be resentenced to life. But the judge rejected the motion, finding that because Black had been previously given a chance to prove his intellectual disability in court, he was not entitled to do so again.

Henry, who represented Black for 25 years, was emotional as she approached the mic. She filled in gaps in the reporters’ accounts, describing the moment Black was removed from his death watch cell at 10 a.m. Although her view was obstructed, “we could hear the cuffs being placed on his arms and legs,” she said. “And then we saw him being led from the cell.” Guards had to hold him up from both arms since Black could not walk unassisted. Then “they lifted him onto the gurney.”

At 10:15, the IV team entered. They found a vein on his right side relatively quickly, although “there was a lot of blood,” she said. But on the left side, they struggled, eventually bringing out medical equipment to assist in the process.

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In an email after the execution, Ohio surgeon Jonathan Groner, a critic of lethal injection and author of a forthcoming book “The Hippocratic Paradox: How the Healing Profession Kept the Death Penalty Alive Over the Past Two Centuries,” said he suspected the execution “was possibly botched.” Watching the press conference, he found numerous red flags. “Pentobarbital should cause rapid unconsciousness,” he said. “It sounds like this did not occur.”

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At the podium, Henry did not mince words. “My client was tortured today,” she said. The pentobarbital itself is painful, she said, and autopsies have shown that people executed using the drug consistently show evidence of pulmonary edema, in which lungs become filled with fluid, causing a sensation akin to drowning. Whether the pentobarbital had not worked as intended or the implanted heart device repeatedly shocked Black as predicted was not clear. The lawyers would know more after an autopsy and after extracting data from the heart device. “But this is a classic case of a person who was put through extreme pain through a process of lethal injection. And it’s what we’ve been saying in court for years,” said Henry. She read a statement from the podium, decrying the execution as an act of “unbridled bloodlust and cowardice.”

“Today, the State of Tennessee killed a gentle, kind, fragile, intellectually disabled man in violation of the laws of our country simply because they could,” Henry said. “No one in a position of power, certainly not the courts, was willing to stop them. And if you think that what happened is just about one man, you are wrong. We are witnessing the erosion of the rule of law and every principle of human decency on which this country was founded. Today, it is Byron. Tomorrow, it will be someone you care about.”

Black’s execution was the ninth carried out in Tennessee since the state resumed executions in 2018. On previous occasions, demonstrators had gathered in a field on prison grounds while the executions were carried out. But following a pause in executions, the state had toughened its security protocols. On Tuesday morning, additional checkpoints were in place; a K-9 handler circled vehicles with his German shepherd, and people were patted down before being allowed into the fenced-in area. Phones were now forbidden. Even credentialed reporters had been barred from bringing pens into the area.

Activists had demonstrated against the planned executions over the previous days. On Sunday, a group marched from Riverbend to the state Capitol, joined by one of Black’s sisters as well as his adult son, Samson Childs. The next morning, Childs visited the governor’s office alongside local death row advocates and activists with the abolitionist group Death Penalty Action. They delivered petitions along with a letter to Lee inviting him to pray with the men on death row, an invitation they have extended before every execution. They have yet to receive a response.

Introduced as Black’s son, Childs shook hands with an aide to the governor. “We’re hoping and praying for a callused heart to be uncalloused,” Childs told him. The aide said he would deliver the message. Lee denied clemency later that day.

At the vigil during the execution, participants stood in a circle and prayed for everyone connected to the case and to the execution. “We pray for Angela Clay and her daughters Latoya and Lakeisha Clay, who died violent deaths,” they said. After the execution, members of Clay’s family stood under the media tent, where two large photographs of Clay and her daughters had been set up behind the podium. A victims liaison from the Tennessee Department of Correction delivered statements on their behalf.

“I am thankful and grateful to see this day, Clay’s sister Linette Bell said. Black’s family “is going through the same thing now that we went through 37 years ago. I can’t say I’m sorry because we never got an apology. He never apologized and he never admitted it.”

Shortly after noon, Carolyn Weaver, who had participated in the Sunday march from Riverbend to the Capitol, got a text message from her loved one Gary Sutton, one of Black’s most devoted neighbors and caretakers on death row. “Well I just seen the van go out with Byron’s body,” he wrote. Before the execution that morning, a prison staffer had delivered a message from Black. “He said to tell me that he loved me because I was his brother,” Sutton wrote to Weaver. “He said to tell you that he seen you on TV walking for him.”

The post “My Client Was Tortured Today” — The Painful Execution of Byron Black appeared first on The Intercept.

Black was born and raised in Nashville, less than 20 minutes from the prison. In 1988, when he was 33 years old, he was arrested for murdering his girlfriend and her two young daughters. Though he maintained his innocence, Black was swiftly convicted and sentenced to die. By the time Weaver met him at Riverbend, he had been on death row for over 30 years.

Weaver started visiting the prison in 2021 after reconnecting with an old boyfriend, Gary Wayne Sutton, who has been on death row since 1996. Almost immediately, she learned about Black. “I’ve known about Byron since I started talking to Gary,” she said. “He would call me, and he’d say, ‘I just fixed Byron something for dinner.’ Or he would say, ‘I gotta go get Byron something to eat.’ He was always taking care of Byron.”

Among his neighbors, Black was known as someone who needed help with basic tasks, including bathing and getting dressed. Weaver remembers being taken aback when she first saw him at visitation. “When he first came out, he didn’t have a wheelchair,” she recalled. “They had to put him in one of those office roller chairs and roll him down to visitation. And another inmate did that.”

It was obvious to her that Black’s disabilities were not just physical. “Gary will tell you he’s like a kid,” Weaver said. “He doesn’t even understand how to put a sandwich together.” Interacting with Black, she learned what he meant. “I feel like when I do talk to him, I am talking to a child.” While she found it hard to imagine he could have committed such a heinous crime in his younger days, it was clear to Weaver that he did not pose a threat to anyone now.

Weaver didn’t want to interrupt Black’s visit with his relatives. But she briefly got permission to approach their room to say goodbye. “He feels like a family member that we’re gonna lose,” she said. She hugged him and “told him how much we loved him and that we’re still praying that this is not gonna happen.” Two days later, on July 22, Black was taken away. That night, Weaver got a call from Sutton. “He goes, ‘It doesn’t seem right. He’s not here. And I’m not fixing his supper.’”

A Relic Of Another Age

Black is 69 years old and in increasingly poor health. Along with psychological exams that have repeatedly found him to have an intellectual disability, medical records show brain damage, dementia, diabetes, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure. Death row advocate Dan Mann echoes what Weaver described, saying that Black’s neighbors treat him with care. “They protect him,” he said. Those who know Black say he is a “people-pleaser”: “He’ll tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear, whether or not that thing is grounded in reality.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has held for more than 20 years that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In its landmark 2002 decision Atkins v. Virginia, the court ruled that “because of their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment, and control of their impulses,” people with intellectual disabilities “do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct. Moreover, their impairments can jeopardize the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings.”

But the protections of Atkins have been far from a guarantee. The justices left it to individual states to decide how to apply the ruling, leaving lower courts free to make life and death decisions based on arbitrary, often unscientific standards. This problem has been compounded by the onerous procedural barriers that routinely prevent people on death row from getting back into court. While our understandings of intellectual disability have continued to evolve in the past few decades, death sentences rooted in flawed and discriminatory ideas have remained intact. Although 144 people have seen their death sentences vacated under Atkins, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, dozens have been executed in spite of it.

Lawyers for Black have spent decades fighting to prove his intellectual disability in court. Just a few years ago, they had good reason to believe his life might be spared. Propelled by the high-profile case of Pervis Payne — whose death sentence was eventually reduced to life amid concerns about his intellectual disability and alleged innocence — Tennessee lawmakers passed legislation in 2021 to amend existing law prohibiting the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. The provision offered access to a hearing before a trial court to decide, under prevailing legal standards, whether a person should be barred from execution due to an intellectual disability.

In 2022, the Davidson County district attorney general filed a motion acknowledging that Black “does, in fact, meet the criteria for a diagnosis of intellectual disability,” and arguing that his death sentence should be reduced to life. But a Nashville judge — the same judge who presided over Black’s 1989 trial — rejected the motion on procedural grounds, concluding that because he’d already received a hearing on the matter years earlier, he was not entitled to one now. Black is now on the verge of being executed on a technicality, his advocates argue. “Mr. Black finds himself in a constitutional Catch-22,” Kelley Henry, chief of the Capital Habeas Unit in Nashville, wrote in a clemency petition to the governor. “If he had simply delayed in filing his claim, without a doubt, he would obtain relief under the 2021 statute.”

“If the execution is allowed to move forward, Byron Black would be the first intellectually disabled person executed by Tennessee in the modern era of the death penalty,” Henry wrote. She also warned that his execution will be a “grotesque spectacle.” Not only will prison staff “have to pick him out of his bed to place him on the gurney,” the heart defibrillator/pacemaker device implanted in his chest to regulate cardiac function will “cause his heart to restart multiple times during the execution, causing him extreme pain and distress.”

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To his advocates and attorneys, executing Black would be gratuitous cruelty. “Every day his brain and body continue to deteriorate at a rapid rate,” Henry wrote. “He is absolutely no threat to anyone. The fact that the courts have slammed their doors shut to his righteous intellectual disability claim is not only unconstitutional, it is inhumane.”

Nevertheless, absent intervention from the governor or U.S. Supreme Court, Black will die in the execution chamber shortly after 10 a.m. on Tuesday. He will be the second man executed in Tennessee this year. In May, the state killed the oldest man on death row, 75-year-old Oscar Smith, who was sentenced to die in Nashville in 1990.

Like Smith’s case, Black’s conviction and death sentence are, in many ways, a relic of another age. Prosecutors at the time were seeking death sentences at an unprecedented rate; in Nashville, Black’s 1989 trial made headlines for being the fifth death penalty prosecution in six months. Although Davidson County District Attorney General Torry Johnson cited a “rash” of terrible crimes at the time, the trend was largely driven by the tough-on-crime politics of the era.

Johnson, who retired in 2014 after 27 years as Nashville’s top prosecutor, has supported death penalty reforms since leaving office. But he did not wish to comment on the litigation in Black’s case. “While I did approve seeking of the death penalty against Byron Black, I did not handle the case personally and was not involved in the trial,” he wrote in an email. At the time, his office was “seeking to focus on the worst of the worst,” he added, and “most of those cases involved multiple victims and often child victims like in the case of Mr. Black.”

The crime that sent Black to death row was unquestionably heinous.

Angela Clay and her two young daughters were found dead in their home on Monday, March 28, 1988. The 29-year-old single mom lived with her children in a modest two-story apartment building in South Nashville. Nine-year-old Latoya was found with her mother in one bedroom, while her six-year-old sister Lakeisha was found in a separate bedroom. All three had been shot to death.

Black became an immediate suspect. That weekend, he had been out on furlough from the Metropolitan Workhouse, where he had been sentenced to work-release for shooting Clay’s estranged ex-husband. On Sunday, he had picked Clay up from her job at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, then picked up her children at her mother’s home. Relatives who spoke to Clay later that night said she had told Black she planned to return to her husband.

Although there was significant circumstantial evidence against Black, the physical evidence was questionable. The key forensic evidence was provided by a firearm analyst who examined a bullet removed from the shoulder of Clay’s estranged husband and concluded that it had been fired by the same gun used to kill Clay and her daughters. (Although such claims remain ubiquitous among firearm analysts who testify in criminal trials, such forensic analysis is increasingly considered unscientific and unreliable.) Pivotal testimony would also come from now-infamous Davidson County medical examiner Charles Harlan, whose botched autopsies and record of misconduct have been linked to wrongful convictions.

Questions about Black’s competency were raised almost immediately. At a pretrial hearing, experts were divided about his mental functioning, with Davidson County Circuit Court Judge Walter Kurtz ordering additional psychological evaluations. But Assistant District Attorney Cheryl Blackburn successfully argued that Black “doesn’t have to be very sophisticated” to stand trial for capital murder. He may not be “a very bright guy,” she conceded, but “he is not psychotic and he is not delusional.”

But Black’s trial attorney, Ross Alderman, would later say in a sworn declaration that “Byron couldn’t understand how anything in the courtroom affected him, and he didn’t understand the implications of the witnesses’ testimony.” After the jury found him guilty, he leaned toward his attorney and asked, “Do I get to testify now?”

Today, a death penalty trial involves heavy preparation for the sentencing phase. One of the signatures of modern capital defense is a mitigation investigation, in which a legal team compiles deep research on a defendant’s background, including any evidence of poverty, abuse, mental illness, and generational trauma, to uncover information that may be used to persuade jurors to spare a defendant’s life. Black, who descended from enslaved people in Tennessee, attended segregated schools and grew up in an environment shaped by systemic racism. “As a toddler, he was exposed to toxic lead,” according to the clemency petition. There were also indications that his mother drank alcohol while she was pregnant with Black.

But, according to his trial lawyers, there was little time to probe such mitigating evidence. “Our ability to investigate the case was a function of the fast-track that we were on,” Alderman said in his declaration. “Ultimately, the case was tried about a year from the homicide in question, and approximately seven months after arraignment.”

Black’s sentencing hearing took place in just one day. A defense psychologist described Black as having “delusions of grandeur” as one reporter put it. Although his IQ was “not quite up into the normal range,” the psychologist said, it was clear he knew the difference between right and wrong. Prosecutors urged jurors to send him to the electric chair. “If you don’t give him the death penalty for what he did to those two little girls,” one argued, “then I submit that you’re rewarding him.” Jurors at first remained split about Black’s sentence; after the first five hours of deliberations, the foreman sent a note to the judge asking for more information. Jurors wanted to know how much time Black would spend in prison if they did not sentence him to die. But under Tennessee law at the time, the judge could not answer such questions. Kurtz instructed them to keep deliberating. The jury ultimately sentenced Black to death.

A National Consensus

A few months after Black was sent to death row, the U.S Supreme Court handed down a ruling in a Texas case, Penry v. Lynaugh, which would raise controversy over the death penalty and people with intellectual disabilities. Although the justices held that such evidence could be used to argue against a death sentence at trial, it should not forbid a death sentence. “While a national consensus against execution of the mentally retarded may someday emerge reflecting the ‘evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,’” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote using the parlance of the time, “there is insufficient evidence of such a consensus today.”

It was true that only one state at the time had passed a bill to prevent the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. In Georgia, the case of Jerome Bowden had sparked a firestorm of controversy. Bowden, a Black man convicted of killing a 55-year-old white woman, was given a last-minute IQ test before his 1986 execution. He scored a 65, which was considered good enough. “I would like to thank the people of this institution for taking such good care of me as they have,” he said, before he was killed in the electric chair.

Bowden’s execution, followed by the Supreme Court ruling in Penry, became a call to action for death penalty opponents. Activists urged legislators across death penalty states to make exemptions for people with intellectual disabilities. Even as executions and new death sentences ramped up throughout the 1990s, lawmakers began passing legislation to forbid such executions.

One of the first to do so was Tennessee, in 1990. “I favor the death penalty,” one Republican said during the legislative debate. “But in my view it is just not proper in a civilized society for the state to execute children and the [intellectually disabled].” The law ultimately laid out three factors to determine intellectual disability: an IQ of 70 or below, “deficits in adaptive behavior,” and evidence that the intellectual disability manifested before the age of 18.

The law did not help Black, since it was not made retroactive. But it helped turn the tide of public opinion. By the time Atkins was decided in 2002, 18 states had passed laws banning the execution of people with intellectual disabilities, a fact that led O’Connor to revisit her previous position and side with the majority opinion delivered by Justice John Paul Stevens. “In the light of the dramatic shift in the state legislative landscape that has occurred in the past 13 years, it is fair to say that a national consensus has developed,” he wrote.

By then, the Tennessee Supreme Court had already ruled in 2001 that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the state and federal constitutions. Months after Atkins, Black filed a new challenge to his case based on both rulings. At a 2004 evidentiary hearing before Black’s trial judge, multiple experts testified that he was clearly intellectually disabled, while also explaining that it is not uncommon for people to try to hide signs of his disability. One expert report described Black as “exceptionally polite and friendly” during his evaluation, as well as “concerned that he might have come across as less intelligent than he really is.”

But state experts testified that there was little evidence that Black’s intellectual disability had manifested before age 18. Nor had he shown sufficient deficits in adaptive behavior. He had played high school football, found a job as a courier, gotten married, and fathered a child. Although he had never lived independently of his family, including during his five-year marriage, this did not mean he was incapable of doing so.

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Kurtz ruled against Black. But the decision would not age well. The notion that people with intellectual disabilities do not get married or hold jobs is rooted in old stereotypes rather than science. Over the years, additional relatives and family friends told Black’s lawyers that, while they had not previously thought of Black as having an intellectual disability, he had been “different” and dependent on his family. “Looking back on it … everyone sort of recognized and compensated for Byron’s inabilities,” one childhood friend wrote in a sworn declaration. “Byron needed his family to prop him up.”

In 2022, one of the state’s key experts, who had not examined Black before testifying for the state, told Black’s legal team that she had changed her mind. Under current diagnostic standards and Tennessee law, she wrote in a new report, Black “does meet the criteria for the diagnosis of intellectual disability.”

The report would help form the basis of a new motion to Kurtz, from the same office that sent him to death row in 1989. Davidson County District Attorney General Glenn Funk wrote, “the State stipulates that [Black] would be found intellectually disabled were a hearing to be conducted.” He had even met with Clay’s family to explain the change in the law. “These family members still want Mr. Black executed,” he wrote. “However, under current law and the medical reports before the Court, the State concedes that the [Black’s] capital sentence should be commuted to one of life in prison.”

But Kurtz rejected the motion, concluding that, because Black had already had a chance to present the evidence of his intellectual disability, he was barred from presenting it again. Today, Henry, the Capital Habeas Unit chief, argues, “every single expert who has actually evaluated Mr. Black has concluded that he is intellectually disabled.” But Tennessee is prepared to execute him anyway.

This past Saturday, Weaver drove to Nashville from her home in East Tennessee for her usual weekend visit. On Sunday morning, Black was moved to his death watch cell, which is adjacent to the execution chamber. At Riverbend, Weaver spotted prison guards carrying Black’s shower chair and his meal tray. Among advocates, there was mounting concern that Black did not fully comprehend what was about to happen to him. There was growing fear about what he might experience in the execution chamber. Weaver worried about Black’s neighbors, who have seen eight men taken to die since 2018.

Most of all, she felt anguish for Black’s family, especially his sisters, who have stayed devoted to him for 36 years. “This is their baby brother,” she said. “And that’s what a lot of people forget. Yes, we feel bad for the victims. But their family are victims as well. … They’re hurting, too.”

The post Tennessee Is About to Execute Byron Black — Despite His Intellectual Disability appeared first on The Intercept.

In the 18-page document, District Judge Heather Coyle underplays the significance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s February ruling that overturned Glossip’s most recent conviction. The ruling instead largely adopts the state’s theory of the crime that sent Glossip to death row — while ignoring volumes of evidence that have been discovered in the intervening years.

“Having considered the record, arguments of all parties, and the exhibits submitted by the parties, the court finds that the state has sufficiently shown by clear and convincing evidence that the presumption of the defendant’s guilt of a capital offense is great,” Coyle wrote. “Accordingly, the court finds Mr. Glossip’s request for bond should be, and is hereby, denied.”

The order comes despite last week’s revelation that, in a 2023 email exchange, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond agreed to a tentative plea deal that would have allowed Glossip to walk free.

The correspondence, first reported by The Intercept, is at the heart of a motion filed by Glossip’s defense attorneys who have asked Coyle to enforce what they describe as a legally binding agreement. The state has responded by denying that the deal was ever reached, but the judge has yet to rule on the matter.

Glossip was twice convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside room 102 of the rundown motel his family owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death, but insisted Glossip put him up to it. Sneed, who is currently serving a life sentence, escaped the death penalty by becoming the star witness against Glossip.

Until recently, it was clear that Sneed had been discredited as a witness — including by Drummond. After taking office in 2023, Drummond ordered an independent investigation into Glossip’s case, concluding that he had lost confidence in Glossip’s conviction.

Drummond took unprecedented steps to block Glossip’s execution and to overturn his conviction, successfully arguing to the U.S. Supreme Court that Sneed — the state’s once “indispensable witness” — had lied on the witness stand.

Drummond now seems determined to go forward with trying Glossip for murder a third time using the same evidence previously used to convict him. During a June bond hearing, prosecutors offered nothing new, instead asking the judge to review the transcripts from Glossip’s 1997 preliminary hearing and his 2004 trial.

That appears to have been enough for Coyle. In her order denying Glossip bond, the judge relies heavily on Sneed’s prior testimony while suggesting there are other witnesses who could bolster the state’s case against Glossip. But for the most part, these other witnesses offered nothing more than circumstantial evidence that called into question Glossip’s behavior after Van Treese’s murder.

“Discredited Testimony”

Glossip was originally charged as an accessory after the fact for initially failing to give police information about the murder. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed had woken him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he had chased off some drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms.

According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed flippantly replied, “I killed Barry.” It wasn’t until the next morning, when no one could find Van Treese, that Glossip realized Sneed might have been serious. Still, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on.

In her order, Coyle relies on witnesses who describe things Glossip did that suggest he covered up his knowledge of the crime — including that Glossip had helped Sneed put plexiglass over the broken window of the room where Van Treese was killed.

Coyle cited in particular the notion that Glossip was trying to steer people away from Room 102, in an apparent attempt to ensure that Van Treese’s body would not be discovered. “Multiple witnesses support that Mr. Glossip followed through with this plan,” Coyle wrote, emphasizing her point in bold.

The fact remains, however, that these accounts only look damning through the lens of Sneed’s story about Glossip being in on the murder itself. Aside from Sneed’s already discredited testimony, there is still no evidence to support this.

While prosecutors have offered nothing new to support the position that Glossip is a murderer, his defense team has spent more than a decade uncovering new evidence and new witnesses that not only point to Sneed as the sole perpetrator of the crime, but also reveal that the state hid and destroyed evidence before Glossip’s 2004 retrial.

At the bond hearing and in court briefs, Glossip’s attorneys tried to offer Coyle much of this evidence — including letters Sneed wrote expressing his desire to recant his testimony against Glossip. They also said several of the witnesses the state relied on have since died — meaning the defense would have no opportunity to cross-examine them about new and previously undisclosed evidence.

While Coyle said she would consider some of the defense’s new information, her ultimate order reflects that she didn’t consider any of it — save for a single paragraph noting that the Supreme Court had overturned Glossip’s conviction.

As for the prosecution’s star witness, “if the state had wanted the court to actually consider the testimony of Mr. Sneed in making this bond determination, it could have called him as a witness at the hearing,” Glossip’s lawyers wrote. “Its failure to do [so], and to instead ask the court to rely on thoroughly discredited testimony, speaks volumes as to their confidence in Sneed’s credibility today.”

The post Judge Swallows Prosecutors’ Discredited Arguments to Keep Richard Glossip in Jail appeared first on The Intercept.

“Once the conviction is vacated,” Glossip’s attorney Don Knight wrote to Drummond on April 1, 2023, the state would bring a new charge against his client: “a single count of being an Accessory After the Fact.” Glossip “will plead guilty to this charge” and be given credit for time served. Under the terms, Glossip would be entitled to immediate release.

“We are in agreement,” Drummond replied.

Instead of following through with the agreement, Drummond, a Republican who is currently running for governor, reversed course and announced in June that Oklahoma would again prosecute Glossip for first degree murder in the 1997 death of motel owner Barry Van Treese.

The email exchange was filed as part of an unusual motion by Glossip’s defense team in Oklahoma County District Court on Wednesday. The filing asks the court to enforce the previous agreement, which the lawyers describe as a binding contract.

“As Mr. Glossip remains in custody despite the Attorney General’s agreement that he should have been released at least two years ago, this matter is of the utmost importance and needs to be heard before any other matters are determined,” Glossip’s lawyers wrote.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for murdering Van Treese inside Room 102 of the rundown motel his family owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death, but insisted Glossip put him up to it. Sneed, who is currently serving a life sentence, escaped the death penalty by becoming the star witness against Glossip.

Glossip had originally been charged as an accessory after the fact for initially failing to give police information about the murder. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed had woken him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he had chased off some drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms. According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed flippantly replied, “I killed Barry.” It wasn’t until the next morning, when no one could find Van Treese, that Glossip realized Sneed might have been serious. Still, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on.

The 2023 email exchange between Drummond and Knight is extraordinary not only because of its content, but also because of its timing. The agreement came less than a week before Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, or OCCA, to overturn Glossip’s conviction.

Drummond had assumed office that January and almost immediately appointed a special investigator to review Glossip’s case. The review found numerous flaws — including that prosecutors had hidden key evidence from Glossip’s defense and that Sneed had lied on the stand — and prompted Drummond’s filing with the OCCA.

The email exchange reveals that Drummond and Knight had discussed Drummond’s plan and strongly suggests that the attorneys believed the OCCA would grant Drummond’s motion. Knight’s email lays out a step-by-step process for what would happen next. Once the conviction was overturned and sent back to Oklahoma County, Drummond would retain control over the case rather than returning it to the local district attorney; he would effectuate the plea deal.

“The parties agree that Mr. Glossip will receive a sentence of 45 years,” Knight wrote, noting that this was the maximum sentence for accessory after the fact at the time of the murder. “The State agrees to give Mr. Glossip credit for all time he has served” since 1997. He would also get credit for good behavior. “The parties stipulate and agree that, with this credit being applied, Mr. Glossip is eligible for immediate release as his sentence was completed in 2016.” In exchange, Glossip would agree not to sue the state for anything related to his “arrest and incarceration.”

Knight told Drummond that he would send a document memorializing the full terms of their deal. “If I have misstated anything, or left anything out of this agreement, please let me know so I can be sure to include it,” Knight wrote. Drummond offered no notes, simply replying that the two were in agreement.

But in a shocking move, the OCCA rejected Drummond’s motion, setting Glossip up for yet another execution date. Drummond then took the unprecedented step of urging the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board to intervene, writing in a letter that, while he believed that Glossip is guilty of being an accessory, the record “does not support that he is guilty of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt.” Testifying at Glossip’s clemency hearing in April 2023, Drummond said, “I’m not aware of any time in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency. I’m also not aware of any time in the history of Oklahoma when justice would require it.”

Despite Drummond’s pleas, the Board rejected Glossip’s clemency bid. With Glossip’s execution just weeks away, Drummond joined the defense attorneys in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. The court halted Glossip’s execution and agreed to review his conviction. In February, the justices ruled in Glossip’s favor, agreeing that prosecutorial misconduct had tainted the case and that Sneed was not credible.

In the wake of the ruling, Drummond made the rounds, boasting about his success before the high court. Asked at a press conference how he might resolve the case, Drummond said, “everything is on the table; a jury trial, all the way down,” but noted it “would be difficult” to retry Glossip after so many years.

Given his public posture, there was every reason to expect that once the case returned to Oklahoma County, Drummond would seek to resolve it — even without a previous agreement. But instead, he did an about-face, announcing in June that the state would seek another first-degree murder conviction for Glossip. At a bond hearing on June 17, the state presented no new evidence to support such a prosecution.

Related

Oklahoma Seeks New Conviction of Richard Glossip Using Old Evidence

In the new motion, Glossip’s attorneys emphasize the lack of new evidence, saying that nothing has changed about the state’s case that would invalidate the 2023 agreement between Drummond and Knight. The conditions necessary to fulfill the contract have been met, the lawyers note — Glossip’s conviction was overturned and sent back to Oklahoma County. Still, they wrote, “General Drummond has refused to complete his end of the bargain.”

Drummond’s office did not have an immediate response to The Intercept’s request for comment.

This isn’t the first time Drummond has been accused in court filings of reneging on an agreement to resolve a criminal case. On June 30, Stephen Jones, a powerhouse and politically connected Oklahoma attorney, filed a scathing motion in an unrelated case, complaining that Drummond had weaseled out on a deal to defer prosecution of his client, a former judge suffering from dementia. According to Jones, on two separate occasions Drummond told him they had a deal, then ceased communications and instead assigned an underling to move forward with the case in violation of their agreement.

Jones, who describes himself as a “strong supporter of the Attorney General’s political ambitions,” accuses Drummond of playing politics and asks the court to enforce their agreement. Ultimately, Jones contends that whatever happens, forcing his client to go to trial would end up being a public embarrassment for Drummond and his office. “No jury … is going to convict a terminally ill man with dementia in the middle to final stages of his disease and it will not be well-taken by the jury or the public if the Defendant is actually put to trial,” Jones wrote.

Glossip’s lawyers have long argued that the same outcome is inevitable if Drummond persists in retrying Glossip for first-degree murder. Drummond has conceded that the state destroyed key evidence in the case and that Sneed’s credibility has been unalterably damaged.

It’s hard to predict how District Judge Heather Coyle will rule on the motion. But the 2023 emails are explosive on their own — and could have a decisive impact on the case regardless of her decision. Under the terms of the deal, Glossip would have been eligible for immediate release. It’s hard to imagine how Drummond’s office can proceed with a murder trial after agreeing that Glossip should already be free.

“General Drummond has publicly stated that ‘a handshake is my word, and my word is my bond,’” Glossip’s lawyers wrote in their motion. “On more than just a handshake — in fact by written acceptance — General Drummond promised to resolve this case.”

Update: July 16, 2025, 4:25 p.m. ET

The Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office filed a response to Glossip’s motion on Wednesday. “Contrary to defense counsel’s abrupt, new theory, the parties have never reached a plea agreement in this matter,” prosecutors wrote. A status hearing is set for July 21.

The post Emails Reveal Oklahoma Attorney General Agreed to Release Richard Glossip appeared first on The Intercept.

It was the last Friday in May, and the St. Johns County courthouse was mostly empty.

The expert witnesses each testified via Zoom, their faces appearing on a pair of large monitors inside the wood-paneled courtroom. None of the experts knew Taylor personally. But they knew chemistry. And each made clear that the case against Taylor had been based on junk science: faulty analysis by a state lab worker who detected gasoline in fire debris samples where there was none.

The testimony was vindicating for Taylor. But it also came too late to prevent what she insisted was a wrongful conviction. More than six years after the fire, she had reluctantly accepted a plea deal at the urging of her defense attorney. It allowed her to maintain her innocence — and avoid a mandatory life sentence had she gone to trial and lost. But it had not cleared her name. Now Taylor hoped the hearing might.

Taylor’s home caught fire on the night of October 23, 2018. She and her 18-year-old daughter Bailey escaped through a window. But her 11-year-old son David went back for the family dog and died. Investigators became immediately suspicious of Taylor after a dog trained to detect accelerants alerted in several spots throughout the home. At the state fire marshal lab outside Tallahassee, fire debris analyst Dee Ann Turner examined samples collected from the scene and repeatedly found gasoline, a telltale sign of arson.

But Turner was disastrously wrong, the witnesses said. According to the experts, she had misidentified gasoline in 12 different samples taken from Taylor’s home. The samples were “very clearly not gasoline,” testified John Lentini, a renowned fire scientist who first reviewed the data and submitted his findings in a defense report in January 2024. Turner’s erroneous analysis had gone undetected for so long because investigators had little reason to suspect such sweeping mistakes — “nor did they have the expertise to question it,” he testified.

The faulty forensics became the basis for the entire case against Taylor, Lentini said. “Every time another possibility was considered, the [lead investigator] said, ‘Yeah but we’ve got gasoline here.’”

Related

The Arson Evidence Doesn’t Hold Up. Florida Is About to Convict Her for Murder Anyway.

Prosecutors had long known that their forensic evidence was fatally flawed. Lentini’s report had been reviewed by a pair of chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who agreed that the data did not show gasoline. Yet Seventh Judicial Circuit State Attorney R.J. Larizza had refused to drop the charges against Taylor, instead seizing on financial improprieties in her bank records as proof that she committed arson for profit. Taylor and her husband were behind in their mortgage at the time of the fire. Despite having money to pay for it, there was evidence that Taylor had defrauded area churches to cover the payments instead.

Such circumstantial evidence did not prove anything on its own. But Taylor’s attorney, John Rockwell, worried it may be enough for a jury to convict his client anyway. He worked out a plea deal with prosecutors, who agreed to drop the arson charge if Taylor pleaded no contest to manslaughter. Rockwell, a former prosecutor, began to prepare for the sentencing hearing the way he would for a criminal trial. If he could prove that the scientific evidence did not hold up, he could convince the judge to impose the lowest possible sentence.

The stakes remained high. Under the plea deal, Seventh Judicial Circuit Judge Lee Smith could still sentence her to as many as 13 years in prison. And while the scientific evidence was certainly on Taylor’s side, there was no guarantee Smith would be moved by it. At the start of the hearing, Lee asked Taylor: “And you still want to proceed today with the sentencing knowing the possible range of possible sentences that you’re facing?”

“Yes, sir,” Taylor said.

No Gray Area

I first wrote about Taylor in March, delving into the fire investigation in her case as well as the Florida lab, which had a record of faulty fire debris analysis. At that time, Taylor was scheduled to go to trial over the summer — and prosecutors had asked the judge to limit what Lentini would be allowed to say to the jury about the lab, arguing that its history was irrelevant.

Lentini had been raising alarm over the lab for years. The lab’s flawed gasoline findings had led numerous people to be wrongly accused of arson — including in a death penalty case. In 2016, he filed an ethics complaint against the lab, which led to an audit by a team of independent experts. The results were abysmal: Of 26 cases they selected for reanalysis, lab analysts had wrongly reported gasoline in 14 of them. The lab temporarily lost its professional accreditation but regained it after agreeing to a remedial plan, which included a self-review of work dating back to 2009. But the review was never completed, leaving some 8,000 cases unexamined.

At the heart of the problem, Lentini argued, was that state lab analysts were not following the professional standards for fire debris analysis that had been in place for decades. Rules for identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris were developed in the 1990s by the American Society for Testing and Materials. A standard known as ASTM E1618 laid out specific parameters for identifying gasoline. The auditors had previously found that lab analysts were not following the standard, instead using an “unvalidated protocol that is not generally accepted in the scientific community.” Although the lab claimed to abide by ASTM E1618, Turner’s work showed that, in Taylor’s case, this was not true.

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Florida Division of Criminal Investigations’ Bureau of Forensic Services said: “BFS adheres to industry standards, including ASTM E1618, to detect trace levels of ignitable liquids and ensure reliable, science-based conclusions. Moreover, the lab maintains a culture of continuous improvement, regularly evaluating its procedures, investing in advanced training, and participating in proficiency testing to uphold the highest integrity of its work.”

The evidence taken from Taylor’s home in the fall of 2018 had gone through a common procedure for testing fire debris. Samples were collected in metal cans, which were brought to the lab and heated in an oven. The resulting vapors were captured on charcoal strips suspended from the top of each can, which were then rinsed with a solvent, producing a solution to be injected into a machine called a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. The GCMS, as it is commonly known, produced a chromatogram: an electronic signature made of up peaks and valleys.

This process is straightforward until it comes to interpreting the data. The peaks on a chromatogram that indicate gasoline can easily be mistaken for peaks indicating other petroleum-based products. For this reason, ASTM E1618 dictates that lab analysts start their examination by ensuring there are five specific peaks on a chromatogram, which must appear at certain ratios in order to be labeled positive for gasoline.

According to Reta Newman, a veteran chemist and one of the independent auditors who uncovered problems at the state lab in 2016, the samples in Taylor’s case had not passed this first step. Testifying at the sentencing hearing that afternoon, she agreed with Lentini’s blunt assessment. “There is no gasoline in these samples,” she testified.

Newman, the director of the Pinellas County Forensic Lab, gave a quick chemistry lesson. “Gasoline is a blended product,” she explained, full of components that are added to improve performance in internal combustion engines. These include a class of hydrocarbons known as aromatic compounds, which are ubiquitous in petroleum-based products, including materials used to furnish modern homes. Newman motioned toward the green courtroom carpet as an example. When such synthetic materials burn in a fire, they “unfortunately break down into aromatic products — the same compounds that we see in gasoline.”

On a chromatogram from a gasoline sample, aromatic compounds form a specific pattern that can be hard to differentiate from those produced by aromatics in burned synthetic materials. “Fortunately for us,” Newman said, there is another kind of hydrocarbon that analysts use to identify gasoline in a fire debris sample. “I apologize for being so nerdy. But isoalkanes are also added to gasoline,” she said. And unlike aromatics, isoalkanes generally do not turn up in burned synthetic material.

Turner had correctly identified aromatic compounds in the fire debris taken from Taylor’s home, Newman said, although the peak patterns “were much more consistent” with the burning of synthetic material rather than gasoline. But the data showed an absence of isoalkanes. Under ASTM E1618, this should have been disqualifying. Yet Turner had reported the samples positive.

Rockwell, Taylor’s attorney, asked whether this was a plain fact or a subjective opinion. “If two different scientists look at this, is it very easy to tell that this is either gasoline or not gasoline?” he asked. Newman acknowledged that many cases present samples where there are gray areas. But not here. “There is no gray area.”

The third and last expert witness for the defense was Laurel Mason, a veteran chemist and director of a Georgia lab called Analytical Forensic Associates. Unlike Lentini or Newman, who had only reviewed Turner’s reports and chromatographic data, Mason had actually reexamined the carbon strips used to test the fire debris from Taylor’s home. She found no proof of gasoline or any other ignitable liquid.

There was a haunting irony to Mason’s testimony. She had actually first encountered Taylor’s case in 2018, when one of her lab analysts had examined fire debris samples taken from the home on behalf of Taylor’s homeowner’s insurance company. That analyst found no evidence of an ignitable liquid. The insurance investigator concluded that the cause of the fire was undetermined — and Taylor’s insurance company paid the claim in full. Had Mason been the analyst first assigned to examine the evidence on behalf of the state rather than the insurance company, Taylor would almost certainly have never been arrested for arson.

Mason had found a number of things alarming about Turner’s work. There was the analysis itself, which was clearly flawed. But she was also concerned about the lab’s handling of evidence. Rockwell had asked for permission to retest the carbon strips after discovering that the fire debris samples themselves had been destroyed by the lab. But the lab resisted providing the strips, offering instead to cut them in two and allow the defense to test one half of each. Posting on a listserv for fire debris analysts in late January, Turner had solicited recommendations for any scientific literature that might support this plan. She was not successful, perhaps because, according to Mason, altering the carbon strips went against best practices for preserving evidence.

Rockwell asked Mason about a strange turn of events that followed her examination of the carbon strips. Shortly after Mason submitted her defense report in February 2025, Turner herself issued an amended report on behalf of the state lab, suddenly altering four of her original findings without explanation. Of the samples she had originally determined to be positive for gasoline, four were now negative. “The curious thing to me was the documentation,” Mason testified. On the data sheet accompanying the report, where Turner had crossed out four of the original findings, she had written her initials, along with the date: February 26, 2025. Yet the report itself was dated January 2025.

To Rockwell, it seemed clear that the amended report had been deliberately backdated to make it appear as if it had preceded Mason’s report — a stealth correction designed to circumvent any accountability for the lab’s mistakes.

The lab did not respond to specific questions about the backdated report, but said in a statement its “technicians are extensively trained and conduct rigorous reviews of their findings, often re-examining evidence in preparation for depositions or expert testimony.”

Whatever the truth of the timing, it was clearly unusual for an expert to go back and change their conclusions six and a half years later. “I have never seen that before,” Mason said.

“I Hope This Can Be Corrected”

In a teal blouse and freshly colored hair, 41-year-old Taylor listened to the expert testimony without expression. She’d lost weight since her last court date, the effect of stress, according to her most vocal advocate Megan Wallace, who Taylor had met at the county jail, and who wept in the back of the courtroom for much of the hearing.

Taylor’s arrest had made her a villain in the press. Yet almost no local media had shown up at the hearing. Though a TV reporter sat in the jury box alongside a cameraman, her subsequent report would make no mention of the flawed forensics at the center of the case.

Taylor’s husband Dennis and their daughter Bailey sat in the front of the gallery. The fire and its aftermath had torn their family apart. Dennis’s mother Lillian had blamed Taylor for David’s death, telling a police detective in an interview that she believed her daughter-in-law had set the fire for insurance money. But she had since disavowed her statements. In an email to the judge, she wrote, “I strongly disagree and contradict anything I said,” adding that she was “heavily medicated” at the time. “I hope this can be corrected and we can have a satisfactory outcome and closure to all parties involved.”

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Facing Life in Prison Based on Shoddy Evidence, a Florida Mother Makes a Deal 

Other family members had written character letters on Taylor’s behalf, along with friends, neighbors, and co-workers who described Taylor as generous, hardworking, and completely committed to her children. David’s football coach described Taylor as “the most supportive and involved parent,” sharing an anecdote about David I had previously heard in my interviews. “I vividly remember moments in the middle of games when he’d run over to give her a kiss, not caring if his teammates saw,” he wrote. “Their bond was pure and inspiring.”

Several of the letters begged the judge to let Taylor go free. Although her supporters understood the plea deal in theory, they could not comprehend why she should serve any more time behind bars for a crime she did not commit.

Representing the state was Assistant State Attorney Sarah Thomas, who flatly rejected the notion that Taylor was innocent, telling the judge at the start of the hearing that prosecutors had agreed to the plea deal because they did not believe she had meant to kill her son. Thomas called a series of witnesses whose brief testimony seemed mainly aimed at casting Taylor in a suspicious light, from a uniformed sheriff’s deputy who said that Taylor had told Bailey not to speak to investigators at the hospital on the night of the fire, to a fraud expert who described the scam Taylor appeared to have been running against local churches — including, it turned out, his own.

With no witness to discredit the scientific testimony of the defense experts, Thomas instead sought to reframe the problem. It wasn’t that the lab had reported gasoline where there was none, she suggested. Rather, the necessary components in the contested samples were simply too low to fulfill the “threshold” necessary to report it as gasoline. This was highly misleading; as the experts had testified, the fire debris samples were actually missing the necessary components to be accurately classified as gasoline. And the whole purpose of a standard is to ensure accurate interpretation of forensic evidence. If the indicators were too low to report gasoline, a sample had to be classified as negative.

Nevertheless, Thomas cast this as a mere technicality. She called the former K-9 handler whose accelerant detection dog had alerted at the site of the fire — and who explained that just because a dog’s alerts are not always confirmed by a lab analyst, it does not mean that there is nothing there. “The lab has a level that they have to meet,” he said. “The experts will tell you that what the dog is picking up is below what they can call by their standards. It is gasoline. Everyone at the lab people kept telling us, ‘It is gasoline but it does not meet our level to be able to call it that for court.’”

Thousands of Samples

The last person to testify for the state was Dee Ann Turner herself. Her name had been visible on the TV monitors since the start of the hearing, suggesting that she’d heard the defense experts’ critiques of her work and would be well-positioned to respond. But this was not the case. “I’ve been sitting waiting to be let in,” she chuckled.

Turner had worked at the lab for a decade. She was hired in 2015, the year before the lab temporarily lost its accreditation. As the state’s sole scientific expert, she was the only witness who could conceivably rehabilitate the state’s case against Taylor. Instead, her testimony was unpersuasive and off-putting. She was awkward and halting, fumbling basic questions and laughing at uncomfortable moments. When Thomas asked when she submitted her amended lab report — a critical chance to clear up any suspicions that it had been purposefully backdated as Rockwell claimed — Turner shuffled clumsily through her paperwork for more than two minutes. She finally answered that she submitted the report in January 2025, explaining that her notes were dated February 2025 because she’d forgotten to date and initial them.

Thomas asked Turner why she had gone back to revise her 2018 findings to begin with. “After reading Mr. Lentini’s deposition I went back and looked at the data,” Turner replied. “I decided, you know, this data really isn’t sufficient for a positive call.”

The answer seemed to catch the prosecutor off guard. Thomas had cast Lentini as hopelessly biased — a man with a “vendetta” against the state lab. Now her own expert was saying that Lentini’s opinion had prompted her to reexamine her own work. In her closing argument, Thomas would go on to insist that, in fact, Turner had changed her findings on the basis of the other experts, who were more worthy of respect — never mind what Turner herself said on the stand.

On cross-examination, Rockwell probed further into the question of what had prompted Turner to revisit her analysis from 2018. Did anything change about her approach to fire debris analysis between 2018 and 2025? Turner said that the lab’s reporting requirements had become stricter after its accreditation was temporarily suspended. “We’re being more conservative in our calls,” she said. But Rockwell pointed out that the accreditation had been suspended and restored in 2016. Turner’s analysis in the case had taken place two years later. Turner was forced to concede that, in fact, nothing had changed.

Rockwell asked Turner if she was aware of Laurel Mason’s retesting of the carbon strips. Did it surprise her that Mason found no proof of an ignitable liquid in the fire debris samples? Yes, “I’m actually quite surprised,” Turner said. Would it surprise her to know that Reta Newman, “one of the preeminent authorities in the fire debris chemistry field also has the same opinion as Mr. Lentini and Ms. Mason?” Yes, Turner said. “I’m surprised by that as well.”

Rockwell pointed out that, in a total of 22 samples she’d examined in the case, Turner had reversed her determinations in four. This came out to 18 percent. Wasn’t this an unacceptable error rate for an expert like her? Turner hesitated. “It’s not wrong,” she said. “I still think that there’s gasoline in those samples that I changed. It’s just — the data’s just not sufficient for me to report it.”

Rockwell asked the question again, over the objection of the state. When her lab analysis is used by investigators “to arrest somebody for first-degree murder and arson, when that can change the course of someone’s life forever, do you think that’s an appropriate standard of error?” he asked.

“No,” Turner finally said.

Still, she objected to the characterization of her work. “This is one case,” she said. Over the course of her career, “I’ve analyzed thousands of samples.”

The Most Important Evidence

The last round of testimony came from Taylor’s family. Her mother tried to read a letter to the court but left the stand after becoming too emotional, leaving Rockwell’s co-counsel to read it instead. Bailey and her father, Dennis, both spoke briefly, holding their emotions at bay. But the trauma of the fire and its aftermath was written on their faces.

When Taylor stood to address the court, her words quickly gave way to anguished sobs. She talked about her three children, one of whom had died in a tragic accident just a few years before David. In the months leading to the fire, she said, her grandmother had died of cancer, which had led to Taylor’s financial problems. “When she didn’t have the money, I used my money,” she said. “I would’ve gave her every last dime I had to save her life.” Above all, she wanted the judge to know that she did everything she could to save David from the fire. “I lived for my son.”

Before delivering his closing argument, Rockwell flagged one last piece of evidence for the judge: a polygraph test given to Taylor in early May. Taylor had been asked three variations of a single question: Did she set a fire in her home in October 2018? Taylor had passed every time.

Polygraphs have long been known to be unreliable and thus inadmissible in criminal trials. Although the rules of evidence governing the sentencing hearing were different, Thomas was suddenly concerned about junk science, objecting to the polygraph, and arguing that the judge had to find “some reliability of the evidence” before it could be introduced. But Smith said that the polygraph results had been included in the binder he’d received prior to the hearing. She had not objected then. Besides, he said, “I’ve already reviewed it.”

In his closing, Rockwell called the case “the most difficult case I think I’ve ever worked on in my career.” He decried Turner’s laughter and “cavalier attitude” upon being confronted with her errors. Thomas countered that Turner’s laughter had been due to nerves, blaming Rockwell for pummeling her with the same question over and over again. She reiterated that Lentini was too biased to be believed. But when Smith asked Thomas whether she had any response to the other experts — or to the ATF chemists who had agreed with Lentini more than a year earlier — the prosecutor had little to say.

Smith was quiet for a few moments, then cleared his throat. “The most important piece of evidence, I think, in any arson case is the science,” the judge said. He was not an expert himself, he added, and declined to say which side was correct. But he was going to impose the lowest sentence: three years in prison, with credit for time served.

Taylor was taken into custody moments later. She embraced her lawyers, thanking Rockwell profusely, then hastily took off her watch to give to her family with the rest of her belongings before being handcuffed. Her mother asked a sheriff’s deputy permission to give her a hug but was denied.

On June 11, Taylor was transferred to the Florida Women’s Reception Center in Ocala. In an email this week, she said she would discuss her case after she gets out of prison, which should be in a matter of weeks given the nearly three years she spent in jail. She is scheduled for release in August.

The post Top Scientists Debunked the Arson Case Against Michelle Taylor. She’s in Prison Anyway. appeared first on The Intercept.

The announcement was unexpected; the state hadn’t notified Glossip’s attorneys that they planned to put anyone on the stand. When Harmon said his first witness’s name — Malissa West — the confusion appeared to deepen. No one, not Glossip, his attorneys, or supporters in the gallery, seemed to know who this woman was.

After West introduced herself as the “resident communications specialist” at the Oklahoma County Detention Center, in charge of monitoring outgoing phone calls placed from the jail, it became clear that Harmon intended to introduce into evidence a recording of a call between Glossip and someone on the outside. Glossip glanced at his wife Lea, sitting in the front row. He looked confused and a bit nervous and shrugged, signaling he had no idea what this was about.

Corbin Brewster, one of Glossip’s defense attorneys, objected. They hadn’t heard the recording in question and wanted a chance to listen to it. Judge Heather Coyle agreed, and the lawyers filed out of the courtroom.

It was the second time in as many weeks that Glossip was back in Coyle’s Oklahoma County courtroom after the U.S. Supreme overturned his conviction for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, who was killed at the rundown motel he owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted Glossip had put him up to it. Prosecutors said that Glossip orchestrated the killing to cover up the fact that he’d been embezzling money from the motel, offering to split with Sneed any cash Van Treese had on him at the time of his death. Although the evidence to support the theory was thin, two different juries found Glossip guilty and sentenced him to death.

Glossip faced nine execution dates and was served three last meals before the court ruled in February that his case had been tainted by false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. The hard-won victory was due in no small part to Harmon’s own boss, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who took unprecedented steps to prevent Glossip’s execution and fought alongside his attorneys to have the conviction tossed — only to announce in early June that he intended to try Glossip for murder a third time.

Among the spectators in the eighth-floor courtroom were members of the Van Treese family, who sat in the front row. Until Harmon sought to introduce the recorded call, the hearing had been going as expected. Brewster had laid out the reasons why Coyle should release Glossip from jail pending a third trial for first-degree murder: Glossip didn’t have any meaningful criminal history before being sent to death row, is not a flight risk, and has a wealth of individuals ready to support him after release — including Lea, friends, and religious leaders, and at least one current Republican state lawmaker.

But the most important reason why Coyle should grant bond, Brewster said, was that there is no reliable evidence that Glossip is guilty of murder. In order to keep Glossip in jail, Brewster pointed out, Coyle would have to find that the state was likely to win a third conviction — something Drummond had repeatedly acknowledged would be hard to do.

In the decades since Glossip was sent to death row, explosive revelations have cast serious doubt on the state’s theory of the case — including the revelation that the state destroyed a key box of evidence prior to Glossip’s 2004 retrial. A slew of new witnesses have also come forward to challenge the state’s portrayal of Sneed as wholly under Glossip’s control, describing Sneed as violent, unpredictable, and entirely capable of killing on his own. Many of these revelations are contained in a series of reports by the private law firm Reed Smith, which investigated the case at the behest of a bipartisan group of Oklahoma lawmakers. The investigation revealed that Sneed repeatedly tried to recant his testimony implicating Glossip and unearthed records debunking Glossip’s supposed financial motive for wanting to kill Van Treese. The new evidence largely dismantled the state’s case and thoroughly discredited Sneed — the state’s “one indispensable witness,” as Drummond himself had previously argued.

If there was any anticipation that the mysterious phone call might introduce some new evidence against Glossip, it was quickly dispelled when the lawyers returned to the courtroom. Harmon’s co-counsel, Senior Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Hinsperger, placed a laptop on the witness stand. Coyle leaned forward and craned her neck to listen to the recording, which was almost impossible to hear from the gallery. It was a clip of a conversation between Glossip and a woman identified as an anti-death penalty activist. “I haven’t seen my family in a long time,” Glossip told her.

As it turned out, this was the point of playing the call — an attempted “gotcha” moment to challenge Brewster’s assertion that Glossip had a support structure outside prison. It didn’t appear to land as Harmon intended. “Would it be a surprise to anyone that Richard Glossip may be estranged from family members after serving 28 years incarcerated?” Brewster asked.

Harmon moved on to his second witness: “The state calls Richard Glossip,” he announced. Glossip’s lawyers immediately asked to approach the bench. Glossip looked confused. “Wait, what — me?” he asked, looking at Lea. Before the judge, Brewster and co-counsel Andrea Miller argued that calling Glossip to testify was improper for a variety of legal reasons. Coyle agreed.

With that, Harmon moved to the podium to argue his case for keeping Glossip in jail.

Harmon questioned Glossip’s roots in Oklahoma, saying he had hoped to ask Glossip about this on the stand. “I think the evidence, as the court could hopefully hear through that phone call, is that Mr. Glossip has no ties to his biological family,” Harmon said. “All of Mr. Glossip’s family ties center around one person. And that’s his current spouse. And I don’t mean to diminish that,” he said, before questioning the sincerity of their bond. He suggested that Glossip was engaged in flirtatious conversations with other women and brought up allegations by Glossip’s ex-wife that he had used her over the course of their relationship. In fact, Harmon spent much of his time at the podium summarizing old affidavits by her and another woman who claimed Glossip manipulated them into giving him money.

“I do have a couple questions,” Coyle told Harmon. In order to deny bond, she had to have “clear and convincing evidence” that Glossip was likely to be found guilty. “If you would please expand on the facts that support that for my consideration.” In other words, she was asking Harmon for some concrete proof that Glossip is a murderer.

When it comes to Glossip’s case, the question on the minds of many in Oklahoma City these days — and certainly inside Coyle’s courtroom on Tuesday — is: What on earth is Genter Drummond doing?

Until recently, there was every reason to believe that Glossip’s case would be resolved sooner rather than later. One potential scenario was that Glossip would agree to plead guilty to a lesser crime — specifically, of being an accessory to Van Treese’s murder. This is what Glossip was originally charged with in 1997, and arguably the only charge that ever had any basis in fact. On the night that he bludgeoned Van Treese, Sneed told Glossip that he’d killed the motel owner. Glossip didn’t immediately share this information with the police, he later told them, because he didn’t believe Sneed. In a 2023 letter asking the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board to spare Glossip’s life, Drummond wrote, “as supported by unimpeachable evidence, I believe that Mr. Glossip is guilty of accessory after the fact.”

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Over the last two years, Drummond had gone out of his way to spare Glossip’s life. Upon assuming office in 2023, after the release of the Reed Smith report, he announced that he was launching his own independent investigation into Glossip’s case. Several months later, Drummond concluded that Glossip’s conviction was rooted in prosecutorial misconduct and false testimony by Sneed and asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn it. When the court refused, Drummond, alongside Glossip’s defense team, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, emphasizing the myriad problems with the case and arguing that “no evidence outside of Sneed’s saying so tied Glossip to the murder’s commission.” After oral arguments last fall, the justices ultimately sided with Drummond.

Drummond, who is running for governor, made the rounds in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, boasting about his victory and publicly acknowledging that Glossip “didn’t murder the victim” in the case. This month, however, Drummond suddenly changed his tune. “My office thoroughly reviewed the merits of the case against Richard Glossip and concluded that sufficient evidence exists to secure a murder conviction,” he said in a press release announcing the decision to retry Glossip.

But in a written motion and in front of Coyle, the state offered little more than old talking points about Glossip’s behavior after the crime, while pointing out that Sneed has never actually taken back his testimony. “Contrary to the defendant’s insinuations, Sneed has never recanted his testimony recounting how the defendant solicited him to murder Barry Van Treese, split the nearly $4,000 in case they stole from the victim’s vehicle, and then attempted to conceal the fact of the murder,” Drummond wrote in the motion. “In fact, to this day Sneed stands by his testimony.”

In truth, Sneed’s own daughter told the state in 2014 that her dad wanted to recant his testimony. In a letter addressed to the pardon and parole board, she wrote that “for a couple of years now my father has been talking to me about recanting his original testimony,” but that he feared the consequences if he did so. Eight years later, the Reed Smith investigation found corroborating evidence. In a pair of letters Sneed wrote to his attorney about recanting his testimony; the attorney discouraged him, however, suggesting that if he did he would face the death penalty. Sneed, who is now 47, remains in prison serving a life sentence.

Drummond also relies on a piece of circumstantial evidence that has long been used against Glossip: At the time of his arrest, Glossip was carrying about $1,700 — which was roughly half of the cash the state alleged that Van Treese had on the night he was killed. “Homicide detectives took note of the defendant’s possession of a large sum of cash not only because it appeared to correspond to half the value of the stolen cash, but also because the defendant was not known to have large quantities of money on him,” Drummond wrote.

Glossip has repeatedly explained that this money was a combination of funds from his paycheck, savings, and the proceeds from several items he’d sold. He planned to use the money to hire a lawyer. (Glossip was arrested as he exited the office of an Oklahoma City attorney.)

More importantly, recent investigations have discredited the state’s theory that Glossip had a financial motive to want Van Treese dead. Forensic accountants who reviewed the case determined not only that there was no evidence of embezzlement, but also that the motel funds on hand the night Van Treese was murdered would have been closer to $2,000 — roughly the amount of money in Sneed’s possession. Notably, the cash Sneed had was covered in blood; Glossip’s money was not.

As the hearing came to a close, it seemed increasingly clear that Coyle would not be issuing an immediate ruling. In light of Drummond’s previous stance, she wanted Harmon to lay out exactly what evidence would support a first-degree murder charge and justify keeping Glossip in jail.

“We have a plethora of evidence, actually,” he said. But rather than present anything new, Harmon urged Coyle to look at the transcripts of Glossip’s 1997 preliminary hearing and his two trials for the proof she needed.

In his closing argument, Brewster reemphasized Drummond’s many statements arguing that the case against Glossip was fatally flawed. “I don’t know how the state can come in this courtroom and say, ‘The evidence is great,’” he said, “when they’re [on] the record before the U.S. Supreme Court saying the exact opposite.”

The state had “completely failed” to show that it was likely to win a new murder conviction against Glossip, Brewster said. While it isn’t unusual for judges to deny bond in first-degree murder cases, Brewster pointed out that this was not a typical case. “It would be an absolute travesty not to grant this man a bond.”

Nevertheless, Coyle told the lawyers that she needed time to read the trial transcripts. Glossip sat at the defense table shackled at the waist and ankles as the lawyers conferred at the bench with Coyle to compare schedules and work out next steps. Coyle said she would make a decision about Glossip’s bond request by July 23. Surrounded by armed sheriff’s deputies, Glossip was led out of the courtroom, loaded into an elevator, and taken back to jail.

The post Oklahoma Seeks New Conviction of Richard Glossip Using Old Evidence appeared first on The Intercept.

It was the first time in years that Glossip had been in a courtroom, and it was the first hearing in his case since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in late February that prosecutorial misconduct had so tainted Glossip’s case that his death penalty conviction should be overturned. It was a victory not only for Glossip but also for Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who had taken unprecedented steps to block Glossip’s execution — and fought alongside him to secure the high court’s decision. 

“The high court has validated my grave concerns with how this prosecution was handled,” Drummond said shortly after the ruling. “I am thankful we now have a fresh opportunity to see that justice is done.”

Drummond wasn’t in court on Monday morning. But his proxy Jimmy Harmon, chief of the AG’s criminal division was — and signaled that the office is ready to prosecute Glossip for a third time. While Harmon did not publicly announce what the charge would be, Judge Heather Coyle noted that the state has said it would not be seeking the death penalty — suggesting that the state will try Glossip for murder yet again.

The state’s plans were confirmed in a statement released by Drummond’s office shortly after the hearing. “While it was clear to me and to the U.S. Supreme Court that Mr. Glossip did not receive a fair trial, I have never proclaimed his innocence,” Drummond said. “After the high court remanded the matter back to district court, my office thoroughly reviewed the merits of the case against Richard Glossip and concluded that sufficient evidence exists to secure a murder conviction. … Unlike past prosecutors who allowed a key witness to lie on the stand, my office will make sure Mr. Glossip receives a fair trial based on hard facts, solid evidence and truthful testimony.”

Drummond’s announcement that the state would retry Glossip for first-degree murder was a shocking reversal of his recent public statements about the case. Drummond, who is running for governor, made the rounds in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, boasting about his success at the high court. Asked at a press conference how he might resolve the case, Drummond said “everything is on the table; a jury trial, all the way down.” But he noted that it “would be difficult” to retry Glossip after so many years. 

More recently, in an April interview on the CBS Evening News, Drummond reemphasized his support of the state’s death penalty, reminding viewers that he has witnessed every execution carried out during his tenure, while making clear that Glossip’s case had jumped out as problematic from the start. Glossip “didn’t murder the victim,” Drummond said. 

In court, Andrea Miller, legal director of the Innocence Project at the Oklahoma City University School of Law and one of several lawyers now representing Glossip, was blunt with the judge.

“Frankly, given the history of this case, we don’t think there can be a fair trial,” she said. Nevertheless, the defense team is preparing for another high-profile murder trial. Miller told the judge that famed death penalty lawyer Judy Clarke would be joining Glossip’s team.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to die for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s live-in manager, to the crime. The case against him was based almost entirely on the testimony of a 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed, who admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted it was Glossip’s idea. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole.

At issue before the Supreme Court was Glossip’s and Drummond’s contention that prosecutors knew that Sneed, the key witness against Glossip, had lied on the witness stand but had failed to correct his testimony as the state was constitutionally required to do. This failure had violated Glossip’s rights and fundamentally altered the case, the justices found. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the majority opinion. Sneed’s credibility was central to the case and would have been undermined if the jury had learned the truth. “A prosecutor’s midtrial revelation that Sneed lied on the stand would have significantly undercut” his account, Sotomayor wrote.

Since being sentenced to death, Glossip has faced execution nine times. In 2015, he came within moments of lethal injection but was spared after officials realized they had the wrong drugs on hand. A moratorium on executions followed, pushing any new execution date well into the future and giving Glossip’s attorney Don Knight, who had already uncovered compelling evidence of Glossip’s innocence, crucial time to investigate further. 

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The decade since has brought a steady series of explosive revelations, including that the state destroyed key evidence before Glossip’s 2004 retrial and also hid evidence that Sneed had attempted to recant his testimony implicating Glossip. A slew of new witnesses also came forward to challenge the state’s depiction of Sneed as a meek follower who was under Glossip’s control when he violently murdered Van Treese. They instead described Sneed as dangerous and unpredictable — and entirely capable of killing on his own. Another said that while Sneed was locked up in the Oklahoma County jail, he had bragged about setting up Glossip to take the fall. 

The new witnesses offered accounts of the night Van Treese died that flipped the script on the state’s case. According to these witnesses, Sneed often worked in concert with a girlfriend, one of the many sex workers who occasioned the Van Treese’s motel, luring targets into a room to rob them. The woman in question was also said to be in a relationship with Van Treese. Instead of submitting on the night in question, Van Treese fought back, ultimately prompting Sneed to kill him. 

A persistent problem for Glossip has been his documented behavior and statements in the wake of Van Treese’s death. Oklahoma City cops became suspicious of Glossip in part because he’d failed to give them information that tied Sneed to the murder. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed had woken him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he had chased off some drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms. According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed flippantly replied, “I killed Barry.” It wasn’t until the next morning, when no one could find Van Treese, that Glossip realized Sneed might have been serious. 

Still, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on. After Glossip finally confessed this to police, he was charged as an accessory after the fact to Van Treese’s murder — an acknowledgment that Glossip had nothing to do with the killing, but had withheld material information about it. That charge was escalated to capital murder after Sneed told detectives that Glossip had masterminded the crime.

There was good reason to be skeptical of this story. Not only was there no evidence to support it, Sneed implicated Glossip after a highly coercive interview by Oklahoma City homicide detectives, who repeatedly named Glossip as a possible conspirator before asking Sneed for his version of events.

Nearly 30 years after the murder — and with the credibility of their star witness irrevocably destroyed — the most logical course of action would have been for the state to offer Glossip a plea to a lesser charge, and finally end his legal ordeal once and for all. Sneed, who is now 47 and remains incarcerated on a life sentence, has changed his story numerous times over the years, making him a terrible witness if prosecutors were to put him on the stand. In an ordinary case, the Supreme Court’s ruling would leave the question of a new trial to the elected district attorney in Oklahoma City, Vicki Behenna, who would decide how to proceed. But Drummond’s announcement on Monday made it clear that the ultimate decision is his to make. 

For now, Glossip is being held in isolation at the Oklahoma County Detention Center, where he was moved in April. The jail is notoriously chaotic and violent: Seven people have died inside since the beginning of the year alone. On Monday morning, Judge Coyle scheduled a hearing to consider the defense’s request that Glossip be released from jail on bond pending a new trial.

In an email to Drummond’s office, The Intercept asked how Drummond reconciled the new murder charge with his previous statements and with his various legal briefs which conceded that the case against Glossip “hinged almost entirely” on Sneed, whose credibility had been fatally compromised. The Intercept also asked if the state had uncovered new evidence implicating Glossip in the crime.

AG spokesperson Phil Bacharach did not answer the questions. “Because it is an active case, we are unable to comment beyond the news release.”

The post In Shocking Move, Oklahoma AG Decides to Retry Richard Glossip for Murder appeared first on The Intercept.

But prosecutors refused to drop the charges, instead giving Taylor’s lawyer a deadline. According to defense attorney John Rockwell, if she did not take a plea deal by her next court hearing, all future offers were off the table. After several sleepless nights, Taylor walked into the St. Johns County Courthouse on April 2 and entered a plea: no contest to manslaughter.

“She was up there for maybe three minutes,” said Megan Wallace, Taylor’s fiercest advocate, who watched in the gallery alongside Taylor’s mother. Six-and-a-half years after the fire destroyed Taylor’s home and upended her life, the conviction happened in the blink of an eye.

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I examined Taylor’s case in an in-depth story published by The Intercept last month. It described how she was accused of arson after escaping a nighttime fire that broke out in her St. Augustine home on October 23, 2018. Witnesses described her panic as she screamed that her son was inside, trying repeatedly to reenter the house. Taylor swore she had no idea how the fire started or why David did not make it out. The two had been watching TV in her bedroom that night, Taylor told investigators, when she heard smoke detectors go off and encountered thick black smoke outside her door. She and her 18-year-old daughter Bailey escaped through a window, Taylor said, but David turned to look for the family dog and never emerged.

Authorities became suspicious after an accelerant-detecting canine alerted in different parts of the house, prompting investigators to collect five fire debris samples from the scene. The samples were sent to the State Fire Marshal’s Bureau of Forensic Services lab, which reported three of them positive for gasoline. Subsequent samples also revealed gasoline, according to the lab — proof positive of arson. Detectives also found red flags in Taylor’s financial history, pointing to a possible motive, including evidence that she and her husband were behind in their mortgage and that she had fraudulently solicited donations from area churches.

But the gasoline was the only direct evidence of arson — and eventually that evidence began to fall apart. Veteran fire scientist John Lentini first raised alarm in January 2024, writing in a defense report that the gasoline findings were based on a misinterpretation of chromatographic data from a state lab that “routinely identified gasoline where it does not exist.” Lentini, who had filed a complaint against the lab nearly a decade earlier, leading to a temporary suspension of its professional accreditation, said it was the sixth case he had seen in which a person was falsely accused of arson based on the lab’s faulty gasoline analysis.

Lentini’s report was shared with the state’s lead fire investigator, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who immediately emailed it to two ATF chemists. During depositions in April 2024, those experts agreed that the data shown in his report did not show evidence of gasoline. As the case approached trial, two more forensic chemists reexamined the evidence. One looked at the lab data; another, veteran chemist Laurel Mason of Analytical Forensic Associates, examined the carbon strips used to test the fire debris samples in 2018. Like Lentini, those experts concluded that there was no evidence of gasoline.

Rockwell, a private defense attorney in Jacksonville who started representing Taylor last year, had just disclosed Mason’s analysis of the carbon strips in February when prosecutors revealed a new report of their own. The chemist who tested the fire debris samples in 2018 issued an amended lab report in the case, backtracking on her earlier findings. Of the three positive samples that first set the case into motion, only one actually contained gasoline, she wrote. In total, four fire debris samples she first said contained gasoline were changed to report no evidence of an accelerant.

Rockwell, a former prosecutor, described the amended report as “mind-blowing.” As he wrote in a subsequent court filing, the state’s report “appears to have been suspiciously back-dated” to January, to make it look like it was submitted before Mason’s expert report — a hasty attempt to rehabilitate the state’s forensic evidence in the face of his experts’ findings. “I’ve never seen that in any case in my life,” he told me.

But Rockwell also knew the danger Taylor faced if she went to trial. Although the discredited evidence severely undermined the case the state hoped to present to the jury, prosecutors did not actually have to prove how the fire started in order to win a conviction. They only had to convince jurors that Taylor had committed arson in order to collect insurance money, which they planned to do by relying on circumstantial evidence of fraud. In Florida, a guilty verdict on a first-degree felony murder charge means a mandatory life sentence. Rockwell pursued what he believed to be the least risky option for his client, negotiating the best deal possible, then convincing her to take it.

On the morning of the hearing, Rockwell met Taylor, her mother, and Wallace at the courthouse in St. Augustine, where he went over the plea deal one more time. In exchange for the no-contest plea, the state had agreed to drop the arson charge at Taylor’s sentencing, which was scheduled for May 30. Seventh Judicial Circuit Court Judge Lee Smith would then have a range of sentencing options, from three to 13 years. With credit for the nearly three years Taylor spent in the local jail, Taylor could serve as little as a few months in prison.

“I think she made the right decision,” Rockwell told me, reemphasizing that Taylor maintains her innocence. Now he plans to present his experts’ opinions at the sentencing hearing, where he will address the flawed forensics, the amended report, and the disturbing history of the state fire marshal’s lab. “They’re still doing the exact same thing,” he said. “Without any punishment or sanctions or anything. And that’s horrifying. Because that can affect somebody for the rest of their life.”

In an email, Bryan Shorstein, executive director of the Seventh Judicial Circuit state attorney’s office, declined to comment about the plea deal “since it is still an active case.”

A spokesperson representing the fire marshal’s office declined to comment.

A week after the court hearing, Wallace accompanied Taylor to the local Dollar Tree to buy Easter supplies for Taylor’s nieces and for Wallace’s daughter. In a text, Wallace sent a photo: a neat row of pastel baskets placed high on a closet shelf, with candy and bunny ears peeking over the side.

The holidays have been painful for Taylor, who has been out on bond for almost a year. As the sentencing approaches, she worries about her mother and one of her sisters, both of whom have terminal cancer, according to Wallace. Even a short prison sentence could keep her away from them when they need her most. Meanwhile, on Facebook, a local news story about the plea deal put Taylor’s mugshot back in circulation, along with outraged comments calling her a murderer who is getting off easy.

But for now Taylor can’t worry about what other people think, only about her sentencing, where she will finally speak for herself. She is trying to hold onto hope that the judge, who has presided over her case for years, will see the case clearly, Wallace said, and believe what she has said all along: “That she’s innocent.”

The post Facing Life in Prison Based on Shoddy Evidence, a Florida Mother Makes a Deal  appeared first on The Intercept.