“I call the gentleman in the red shirt,” he said, pointing toward a long-haired man in the second row. It took a moment to realize that he was referring to Gamble’s husband, 63-year-old Larry Fletcher.

Gamble’s defense attorney objected. He’d received no advance notice. But Fletcher shrugged and made his way forward.

Fletcher was with his wife when she was arrested at a No Kings protest in October 2025. She was wearing a 7-foot-tall inflatable penis costume and holding a sign that read “No Dick Tator.” Video of the incident went viral, turning Gamble into a minor celebrity and local free speech icon. Most people assumed the city would eventually drop the misdemeanor charges filed against her. Instead, McDowell added more, including giving a false name to law enforcement for identifying herself as “Aunt Tifa.”

Fletcher wore black Levi’s and a collared shirt with a Ferrari logo – a nod to his work rebuilding fuel injection systems for high-end cars. Sitting in the front row, Gamble looked a bit stricken watching the man she’d known since her childhood in Baton Rouge. “I know what she was thinking,” Fletcher later said. “She’s like, ‘Oh man, this could go out of control real easy.’”

McDowell asked Fletcher if he’d gone to bail his wife out of jail after her arrest. Yes, Fletcher said.

Did he make any statements to any of the jailers? Fletcher wasn’t sure. McDowell motioned toward one of the many law enforcement officers standing on the side of the room and asked if he looked familiar. Fletcher said he’d seen him around.

McDowell cut to the chase: Did Fletcher remember telling this man that he had gone to get bail money the day before the protest?

His objective was suddenly clear: The city attorney was suggesting that Gamble had gotten arrested on purpose.

If this was meant as a gotcha, things didn’t go as intended.

“I always make sure I have bail money!” Fletcher replied emphatically, as if this should be the most obvious thing in the world.

Did he have bail money on him now?

“Yeah!” Fletcher exclaimed, then gestured broadly. “With this many cops around? Come on.”

The room erupted with laughter. Moments later, Fletcher was back in his seat. Gamble reached back and held his hand.

The trial took place at the Fairhope Civic Center, home to the city council chamber and — on the first and third Wednesday of every month — municipal court. Outside the building, dozens of people gathered to support Gamble, while a small army of cops stood watch from inside. One woman wore a huge purple eggplant costume. Another held a sign featuring a banana and the words “Free speech shouldn’t be hard to swallow.”

Gamble, 62, had arrived wearing pearls, a soft pink cable-knit sweater, and a matching tulle skirt adorned with delicate butterflies. Her face was concealed behind sunglasses and a white KN95 mask. After a smattering of chants of “Free speech!,” Gamble spoke briefly before going inside. “I’m not on trial,” she said. “What’s on trial is the First Amendment.”

“It was abuse, too!” one woman yelled. “They abused you. We saw it.”

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Grandmother Faces Trial in Alabama for Wearing Penis Costume to No Kings Protest

Indeed, for all the slapstick comedy of the scene — body camera footage showed three different cops wrestling with a giant penis — her arrest was also shocking. Gamble was turning to walk away when the arresting officer grabbed her costume from behind, pulling her backward onto the ground. While officers tried to stuff her into their car, causing the handcuffs to dig into her wrists, she screamed in pain.

But Gamble said she wasn’t speaking as a victim. “I’m standing on the foundation of our democracy. If we don’t have free speech, what do we have?”

Fairhope is a picturesque town on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, 20 miles from Mobile. Its entrance is lined with live oaks and a procession of American flags, while its historic downtown is brimming with galleries and upscale boutiques. Around the corner from a Christmas store, clapboard signs advertised espresso martinis and peanut butter pie.

Fairhope has long been a top destination for retirees from across the country, with its rapid growth an enduring source of anxiety. Although the No Kings rally was organized by Indivisible Baldwin County, whose founder was born and raised in the area, local critics adopted a familiar line: The protesters were outside agitators. Never mind that Fairhope itself was originally founded by outsiders as a “single-tax” utopia, “built by and for artists, writers and other ne’er do-wells,” in the words of local political cartoonist JD Crowe, who attended Gamble’s trial with his sketchpad. Today, some describe Fairhope as “California with a Southern accent” — a compliment or an insult, depending on who you ask.

Gamble’s case struck a nerve in part because of an ongoing free speech battle that made national news. Right-wing activists had targeted Fairhope’s beloved public library, convincing the state to pull funding over books they deemed obscene. Among the people gathered outside the civic center, several said they could not understand why city officials, including the mayor, stood up for the library only to express support for Gamble’s arrest.

Others were driven by national politics. A man dressed in a taco suit was a member of Mobile’s Indivisible chapter. “This is all about Trump,” he said. The fact that people were protesting in this part of the state spoke volumes about the destruction Trump has wrought, he said. “This is deep-red Alabama — as red as it can get.”

Presiding over the trial was Magistrate Judge Haymes Snedeker, best known as the older brother of champion pro golfer Brandt Snedeker and a noted amateur golfer himself. Snedeker sought to defuse the tension in the room, reassuring attendees at the start that, while Gamble technically faced the possibility of six months in prison, “that’s not gonna happen.”

It was the city’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, Snedeker went on. “I’m just an umpire calling balls and strikes.” He had just asked people to silence their cellphones when a ringtone broke out, apparently from one of the police officers lining the room.

“Bad start for the city,” Snedeker quipped.

If Snedeker was trying to keep things light, McDowell, the city attorney, was not in a joking mood. It was no secret that Gamble was considering suing the city — and any potential lawsuit would be on him to defend. The threat of legal action helped explain why McDowell might have refused to drop the charges. If Gamble was convicted, after all, she would have no grounds to sue.

McDowell insisted that, while there is no constitutional right to dress as a giant “erect penis,” this case had nothing to do with the First Amendment. Gamble’s case was about public safety.

He called the man who arrested Gamble: Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb. A 15-year veteran of the force, he testified that he’d been called to the scene due to reports of a disturbance at the busy intersection. When he pulled up, he spotted a “7-foot inflatable penis.” It was impossible to tell the identity of the person inside the costume, Babb said. He assumed it must be a teenager.

Did you know it was an old woman?” McDowell asked him.

“She’s not that old,” someone muttered in the audience.

“No,” Babb said.

Babb said he ordered Gamble to remove the penis suit. When she refused to comply, “she was put to the ground.”

Babb denied that he’d been personally offended by Gamble’s costume. Rather, he was concerned that Gamble, who could neither see nor walk very well while wearing it, posed a risk to herself and others. “You saw her as an obstruction and a safety risk?” McDowell asked. Yes, Babb said.

This was laughable. In his body camera footage, Babb repeatedly scolds Gamble for the costume, demanding to know how she would explain it to his kids. “I’m not trying to violate your freedom of speech,” he says as he unzips the penis suit. “I’m trying to preserve a town that has values.” Now McDowell was conjuring an alternate reality in which Gamble had teetered precariously at the edge of the road, endangering motorists, while the protest itself was veering close to a riot.

“It was a brushfire,” Babb claimed at one point. “We were trying to stop it from spreading.”

Gamble was represented by David Gespass, a veteran civil rights attorney who wore a Constitution-themed tie reading “We the People.” He asked Babb why he’d zeroed in on Gamble if his concern was traffic safety.

“She was a distraction,” Babb said. “A distraction can be a hazard.” Gespass pointed out that Babb’s incident report invoked the legal definitions of obscenity: Why did he write that the penis costume was devoid of any “artistic value”? Babb replied that the protest took place at noon on a Saturday, in the midst of Little League baseball season, and on the same day as a funeral for a former mayor. “In that setting, it would be obscene,” he said.

Much of Babb’s testimony was easily refuted by the body camera footage. Babb claimed that Gamble resisted arrest, and that he only called for backup once she was on the ground. In reality, he called for backup almost immediately. Babb claimed that he told Gamble she was “not free to go.” In fact, she repeatedly asked, “Am I being detained?” but he ignored her, continuing to scold her instead. When Gespass asked why Babb grabbed his client from behind, Babb claimed that he would not have been able to get in front of her — there were too many people in the way.

But perhaps most preposterous was the claim that Babb’s actions were necessary to contain a situation that threatened to spiral out of control. “He made a clear professional effort to deescalate,” McDowell said. “She decided to escalate,” he said, “poking and prodding” in a deliberate attempt to get arrested.

Listening to this, Gamble seemed to have a hard time containing her emotions. Even in her face mask, she looked stunned, indignant, and increasingly agitated. Her bright blue eyes widened. Her eyebrows raised upward. Once or twice, she threw her arms up in exasperation and disbelief. On her wrist, a warning flashed across the screen of her Snoopy-themed smartwatch: Her heart rate was spiking.

For all the hilarity surrounding Fairhope’s “penis lady,” the arrest and its aftermath had taken a toll. Gamble’s adult daughter Adeana sat behind her mother at the trial, reading a library book during breaks in the testimony and occasionally communicating with her in sign language. She told me that Gamble had hit the back of her head when she fell to the ground, which was hard to see in the tape, and raised concerns about a possible concussion. She also worried about injury to Gamble’s wrists, especially because Gamble has long lived with rheumatoid arthritis. As a longtime ASL interpreter, “she’s always protected her hands,” Adeana explained.

But the real cost had been psychological. For about two months, Adeana said, Gamble was afraid to leave the house. When threatening mail arrived at the family’s home, Adeana suggested calling the police. “And she said, ‘What police?’” How could she expect law enforcement to protect her? 

The story behind the penis suit further undermined the case against Gamble. According to Adeana, Gamble purchased it at the last minute as a backup. “She had ordered a sea turtle costume,” Adeana said. She’d planned to wear it while holding a sign that said “I love the Gulf of Mexico.” But the costume didn’t arrive on time. “So she had to scramble to find another one and a message to go with it.”

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This context didn’t make it into the trial. Instead, Gespass called a slew of defense witnesses who attended the No Kings protest. One after another, they reiterated what was already clear: The rally had been peaceful. There was no threat to anyone’s safety. The only escalation came from the police.

It was after 5 p.m. when Snedeker made clear he’d seen enough. He had already tossed the charge of providing a false name to police. Now he was ready to rule on the rest.

Snedeker said that while he believed that police had probable cause to arrest Gamble, the city’s evidence was not strong enough to convict; Gamble was not guilty. The room broke into applause.

Snedeker tried to put a positive spin on things, speculating that some good might come of the episode. For instance, police now knew to place barricades between the streets and a protest — a common-sense precaution. But the judge’s no-harm, no-foul sentiments fell flat. Fairhope police had made the town a laughingstock. Now the city was about to be sued.

In fact, much of the trial seemed aimed at inoculating the city from a lawsuit. McDowell repeatedly emphasized that Babb’s actions were “reasonable” given the circumstances — the legal standard that judges use when dismissing claims of police abuse. Gespass also revealed that McDowell had offered a hasty plea deal just moments before the trial began. Gamble rejected it.

“As Alabamians, we dare defend our rights, and this fight is not over,” she announced after her acquittal. On Friday, she served notice of a lawsuit with the city clerk.

Whatever comes next, Adeana made clear that her mother was luckier than most. “What would have happened if she was a young Black man?” she asked. “What would have happened if she was a middle-aged Latina woman?” In Baldwin County, where Indivisible activists are focused on supporting immigrants targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Gamble’s prosecution has been a lesson unto itself. “If we don’t stand up and support our neighbors, who will?”

Adeana understood why Gamble was so widely described as a “grandmother” in the headlines following her arrest. But the label didn’t capture the full picture. “If anything, we’re getting more explosive in our older age,” Adeana said. “Because we’re tired of being pushed down.”

The post The Short and Ridiculous Trial of a Protester Arrested in an Inflatable Penis Costume appeared first on The Intercept.

The alleged crime? Unclear. There’s no sound at first, only the silent spectacle of a person in a penis suit turning toward a cop with a stance that says, “Who, me?” A handmade sign comes into view in the person’s right hand. It reads “No Dick Tator.”

The scene in the video unfolded last fall, on a busy road just off a strip mall in South Alabama. The protester was Renea Gamble, an ASL interpreter who bought the penis suit at a nearby Spirit Halloween store.

“Featuring armholes, a sheer face panel, and an internal fan that keeps things erect,” a description on its website reads, “this costume is a guaranteed hit.”

Gamble was just shy of her 62nd birthday when she joined the October 18 No Kings rally in Fairhope, a small city on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. Organized by the local Indivisible chapter, which launched in 2025, the rally attracted some 1,000 people in deep-red Baldwin County, a mostly white, largely rural stretch of the state and one of President Donald Trump’s most stalwart bases of support.

The turnout exceeded organizers’ expectations. It also flew in the face of neighbors and critics who might dismiss protesters as paid agitators. “When you show your face to people that probably see you around town and know you live here, it combats the narrative of, like, [George] Soros busing us in,” said Kayleigh Rae, who founded Indivisible Baldwin County.

Inspired by Portland’s anti-ICE “Frog Brigade” — which turned animal costumes into emblems of resistance — the protest included a couple of unicorns and a blow-up chicken. But the penis was new.

“Everybody was cracking up,” Rae recalled. “They just thought it was hilarious.”

“A Freakin’ Weiner”

Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb was less amused.

“I’m serious as a heart attack,” he tells Gamble when the audio begins to play on the 14-minute body camera video. “I’m not gonna sit here and argue with you.”

He demands to know how she could possibly justify such an obscene display: “I would like to hear how you would explain to my children what you’re supposed to be.”

Talking to a colleague over his two-way radio after the encounter, Babb described what happened. Gamble was dressed “like a freakin’ weiner,” he says on the tape, so he ordered her to remove the costume. She refused, invoking her First Amendment rights.

“I said, ‘That’s not freedom of speech,’” Babb continues. “‘This is a family town and being dressed like that is not going to be tolerated.’”

When she started to leave, “I said, ‘No, ma’am,’” Babb says on the tape. “‘Come here, I need to talk to you.’ She pulled away from me, so I grabbed her and put her on the ground.”

The body camera footage tells a different story.

“Am I being detained?” Gamble repeatedly asks Babb, who ignores the question and continues to scold her. “If I’m not being detained, I’m gonna go ahead and leave.”

When she turns to walk away, Babb steps forward and grabs her costume from behind, throwing her on her back. Angry protesters shout at Babb as he forces her to turn over. Two more cops help him pin Gamble on the grass and handcuff her.

“By the time I got there, the cops were stuffing an inflatable penis in the back of their car,” Rae said.

It was, on one hand, hilarious — a slapstick comedy bit brought to life. In the body camera footage, Babb tries and fails to fit Gamble into his own backseat, then hands her off to another officer, who escorts her to a different vehicle. Police wrestle with the oversized costume, ultimately failing to fit the unwieldy polyester penis into the car.

It was also disturbing. Gamble screams in pain in the video as the cops try to push her into the backseat, the handcuffs digging into her wrists. Babb asks where the zipper is and, as he peels off the penis suit, asks Gamble for her name.

She replies, “Aunt Tifa.”

Doubling Down

Gamble was one of only a small handful of people arrested at the nationwide No Kings protests last fall. She was briefly jailed and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, then released on a $500 bond.

Videos of her arrest went viral, taking off on TikTok and airing on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” A progressive Fairhope-based political cartoonist held a caption contest for his rendering of the arrest. In December, a Mobile-based talk radio station held a listener poll to choose its annual Alabamian of the Year, with “Inflatable Fairhope Protest Penis” receiving the most votes.

In Fairhope and around the country, many people were outraged at the cops’ manhandling of a grandmother in her 60s. But it also seemed obvious that the case would go away once cooler heads prevailed.

Instead, the city of Fairhope doubled down. Rather than dropping the case, the city attorney slapped Gamble with additional charges earlier this year: disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement. Her trial, first set to take place months ago, has been delayed multiple times. It is now set for April 15.

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At a time when Trump and his allies have escalated attacks on dissent — prosecuting protesters as terrorists and punishing free speech — Gamble’s misdemeanor charges in small-town Alabama seem relatively minor. A conviction would most likely to result in a fine and a suspended sentence, according to her lawyer, David Gespass, a veteran civil rights attorney who has spent decades representing people abused by police — and who called the whole thing “absurd.”

Nonetheless, Gespass did not expect the prosecution to get this far. “One would have thought at some point somebody would have decided to dismiss the case,” he said.

He was especially struck by the knee-jerk response by city leadership, which endorsed Gamble’s arrest before the facts were clear.

“This type of behavior or display is not acceptable and will not be tolerated in Fairhope,” Mayor Sherry Sullivan told reporters. “Protests should remain peaceful and free of profanity and obscene displays.”

Fairhope City Council President Jack Burrell said the costume violated “community standards.”

To Gamble, who has turned down media requests while her prosecution is pending, the case is about much more than her individual rights.

“What Renea has been saying all along is that it’s not so much about her,” said Gespass. “It’s the Constitution and the First Amendment that are on trial.”

“Mayberry on the Bay”

Gamble’s prosecution has moved forward as state and local governments are pushing to clamp down on free expression and expand censorship all over the country. Battles over speech have been especially heated in schools and public libraries across the South.

Just this week in Tennessee, a contentious library board meeting culminated in the firing of the library director over her alleged refusal to move scores of children’s books with LGBTQ+ subject matter to the adult section.

It was a similar fight, over the Fairhope Public Library, that set the stage for tensions that erupted after Gamble’s arrest. Over the past few years, the Alabama Public Library Service, which disperses federal funds, has remade its board and rewritten the rules around material considered offensive or obscene. In a controversy that made national news, the state agency stripped funding from Fairhope’s library over its refusal to move books flagged by right-wing activists.

The efforts were spearheaded by a “Moms for Liberty” activist who now heads a group called Fairhope Faith Collective — and who decried the No Kings protest where Gamble was arrested as a failure by local politicians.

“If they were doing their job by upholding conservative values in our city these people wouldn’t be attracted to Fairhope,” she complained on Facebook.

In a separate post, she applauded Gamble’s arrest: “It looks like the ‘Penis Perp’ may be connected to ANTIFA,” she wrote, adding that Gamble’s conduct was “typical ANTIFA behavior.”

Beyond social media, however, locals do not seem to share such rigid views. Although the city overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the last election, residents of Fairhope have vocally opposed the defunding of their library. Many see it as a betrayal of the city’s cherished identity as a haven for literature and the arts.

Fairhope was founded as a utopian experiment in the late 1800s: a “single tax” settlement modeled on a belief that land ownership should serve the greater good. The image of a place founded by independent thinkers has imbued Fairhope with an enduring sense of civic pride.

Its natural beauty and small-town charm — nicknamed “Mayberry on the Bay,” after the town in “The Andy Griffith Show” — has also made Fairhope a popular destination for retirees from northern cities. Today, the fast-growing city is predominantly white and more affluent than its neighbors, while its origin story remains a badge of honor — “a colony built by and for artists, writers and other ne’er do-wells,” as JD Crowe, the progressive political cartoonist, put it last year.

Rae, the Indivisible Baldwin County organizer, said that, in addition to other issues like aggressive immigration enforcement in the area, the library controversy has drawn people to their cause. At one Fairhope city council meeting, activists stood outside holding signs that read “Ban bigots, not books.”

Meanwhile, the claim that the Fairhope Police Department is the arbiter of family values has been met with a wave of scorn and derision. Babb, a K-9 officer who regularly represents the police force at community events, brought a flood of criticism to the department’s social media accounts after Gamble’s arrest.

“I would NOT trust this clown around elderly people anymore,” one commenter wrote on an old Instagram post showing Babb at a “Coffee With a Cop” event held at a local senior center. “What if they happen to somehow offend him?”

Long-Term Gamble

In an email to The Intercept, Sullivan, the mayor, declined to say more about Gamble’s prosecution. “I cannot comment on pending court cases,” she wrote.

The city attorney, Fairhope Police Department, and city council president did not respond to requests for comment.

In his statements to the press last year, Burrell, the city council president, said he wanted to be sure that people’s constitutional rights were respected.

He added, “And I hope the police have enough evidence that they stand behind the charges.”

More than five months later, however, the evidence against Gamble remains a mystery. There are no witness accounts or recordings that show her breaking the law.

According to the official statement by the Fairhope police after the arrest, Babb arrived at the scene due to complaints over “traffic hazards in the area,” not anything Gamble had done. In a more recent filing ostensibly meant to clarify the charges, Municipal Court Prosecutor Marcus McDowell, who is also the city attorney, wrote that “members of the public called police concerning traffic safety issues and a person dressed as a giant penis thereby created a substantial traffic and safety hazard.”

Gespass, the civil rights lawyer, maintains that the city is seeking to punish his client simply for exercising her right to free expression. In a motion to dismiss the charges filed last November, he argued that Babb arrested Gamble based “solely upon his own prejudices.”

“No provision of Fairhope’s disorderly conduct ordinance applies to what she was doing or wearing when she was arrested,” he wrote. “Both her costume and her actions were protected First Amendment speech.”

In a one-line order, Municipal Judge Haymes Snedeker denied the motion.

More recently, Gesspass sought to subpoena the records from the radio station poll that elected Gamble as “Alabamian of the Year.” Although Gamble has not been charged with obscenity, her arrest was based on the accusation that her costume was obscene. Under prevailing case law, the question of whether something is obscene turns in part on “contemporary community standards.” While city leaders claimed that Gamble violated community standards, the radio poll showed the opposite, Gespass wrote. Snedeker disagreed, granting McDowell’s motion to toss the subpoena.

As her trial approaches, activists are preparing to show up at the courthouse to show their support for Gamble, now a minor celebrity known as Fairhope’s “Penis Lady.” In the meantime, more Fairhope residents joined the most recent No Kings protests on March 28, growing the number of participants to just under 1,200 people. This time, police set up barricades between the street and the protest.

The protest maintained its sense of humor, advertising itself as the “Official Site of #PenisGate.” On the Indivisible chapter Facebook page, Rae added photos of homemade signs in advance of the rally. One made creative use of a cartoon banana next to the words, “Free Speech is A-PEEling” and “Fuck ICE.” Another, featuring a wide-eyed hot dog, read, “Don’t Be a Meanie, It’s Just a Weenie.”

Gamble has tried to keep a low profile since her arrest. At the No Kings protest last week, though, the “No Dick Tator” sign appeared in the hands of a masked woman who wore dark sunglasses and a bandana over her face.

It was Gamble, again wearing an inflatable costume.

She was dressed as an eggplant.

The post Grandmother Faces Trial in Alabama for Wearing Penis Costume to No Kings Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

He could not stop smiling.

“I’m feeling wonderful,” Burton told me.

Burton, 75, wore white sneakers and a brace on his right hand, his tan quilted jacket and slacks fitting loosely over his thin frame. A tan helmet, given to him by the prison to protect from his occasional falls, sat on the table next to an array of photos taken with family earlier that day, along with a bag of quarters for the vending machines.

Burton identified the people in one of the photos for me. Several were still in the visiting room: his sister Eddie Mae Ellison, his son Charles Burton III, and his grandson Charles Burton IV. No sooner had one group of relatives left the visiting room than another showed up — a rolling family reunion.

Burton had been sitting in that same visiting room with his lawyers 24 hours earlier, on Tuesday, March 10, when his longtime paralegal Nancy Palombi got a phone call in Montgomery, 120 miles away. While the rest of the legal team was at the prison without access to their cellphones, Palombi had stayed behind to field any communications from the U.S. Supreme Court, which had just received their final filings aimed at stopping Burton’s execution.

Instead, she got a call from a reporter she knew. The reporter was screaming, “Have you heard?” The governor’s office had just sent out a press release with the subject line, “Update from Governor Kay Ivey: Charles L. Burton.” And that’s how Palombi learned that her client of 20 years would not be executed.

“I was the first member of the team to find out,” Palombi told me that morning, her voice still trembling with a mix of shock, joy, and relief.

Palombi called the prison and spoke to the warden’s secretary, who entered the visitation room with a smile on her face. She told Burton’s lead attorney, Assistant Federal Defender Matt Schulz, that he should call his paralegal right away. “And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, it happened,’” Schulz said. “But I still didn’t want to let myself believe it, because I didn’t know yet.”

Schulz rushed to his car, drove out of range from Holman’s cellphone blockers, and called Palombi. He then sped back.

Describing the scene the next day, Burton turned and pointed toward the hallway that runs along the perimeter of the visiting room. That’s where prison staff celebrated as the news spread on death row. Nurses and officers waved and gave him thumbs ups through the horizontal window slats. “Guards were saying, ‘Sonny got clemency! Sonny got clemency!’” Burton said.

A day later, everyone was still a bit shellshocked. Burton’s son, who had flown in from New York, got the news while loading up his rental car for the drive to Atmore. Burton’s sister was at the doctor’s office in Montgomery, where she saw a local news alert. She ran outside and dropped to her knees. “And then the tears just flowed,” she said.

For decades, the visiting room had been the site of agonizing goodbyes between the condemned and their loved ones in the hours before an execution. Now it was home to warm hugs and tranquil smiles, no one’s bigger than Burton’s. He invoked the famed blues harmonica player Snooky Pryor: “I’m too cool to move.”

Burton’s commutation was historic: the third time in the modern history of Alabama’s death penalty that a person facing execution received clemency by the governor. Ivey, a staunch Republican, has presided over 25 executions since she took office in 2017. Although she commuted the sentence of Burton’s neighbor, Rocky Myers, last year due to serious doubts over his guilt, few were optimistic that she would exercise such mercy again.

Burton would have been the ninth person executed using nitrogen gas in Alabama in just over two years. The method was adopted following complications carrying out lethal injection, a wider trend that has reshaped the landscape of executions across the country. The state’s last execution prompted a forceful dissent from Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who described the psychological torture in visceral detail. “You want to breathe; you have to breathe,” she wrote. “But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.”

Burton’s commutation also came as a searing documentary about the state prison system, “The Alabama Solution,” was in the race to win an Oscar. The film, which was produced using footage from contraband cellphones, forced politicians to acknowledge the deadly conditions and inhumane punishments inflicted on people incarcerated in their state. On the day I visited Burton, lawmakers met in Montgomery to discuss legislation to impose oversight on Alabama’s prisons.

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It was this kind of public pressure that undoubtedly saved Burton’s life. “I would have 100 percent died without it,” Burton told me. In Montgomery, activists held vigils every Monday for weeks in front of the governor’s mansion, while downtown businesses posted flyers about Burton’s case in their front windows. On the eve of Ivey’s decision, two of Burton’s daughters led a march to the state Capitol to deliver petitions to her office.

The campaign for clemency was launched by Burton’s legal team, who believed they had nothing to lose. They highlighted Burton’s remorse, his advanced age and poor health, and, above all, his lack of culpability for the murder that sent him to death row. “This is one of those cases that shocks people,” Schulz said in a clemency film produced last year. “And it shocks people in a totally different way than most death penalty cases.”

Burton was 40 years old when he led a group of younger men in an armed robbery at an AutoZone in Talladega, Alabama. A 34-year-old father and military veteran named Doug Battle walked in as the crime was underway — and one of the young men fatally shot him in the back.

At first, Burton denied any role in either the robbery or the shooting. His apparent lack of remorse helped convince jurors at his 1992 trial that he should be punished as severely as the man who actually shot Battle, a 20-year-old named Derrick DeBruce, who had already been sent to death row. After a four-day trial, Burton, too, was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to die.

But a federal court eventually threw out DeBruce’s death sentence, finding that his lawyer failed to effectively represent him during the punishment phase of his trial. The Alabama attorney general’s office initially appealed the decision, contending that it would be “arguably unjust” to allow Burton to be executed for his co-defendant’s actions. But in 2015, the state agreed to reduce DeBruce’s punishment to life without parole. He died five years later.

The notion that Burton should now pay with his life for another man’s crime spurred outrage among people in Alabama and beyond. The campaign to save Burton was bolstered by six of the eight living jurors who voted to send him to death row, as well as by Battle’s daughter, Tori Battle, who was outspoken in her opposition to the execution. “What is the execution of Mr. Burton supposed to accomplish or solve?” she asked Ivey in a letter that was submitted as part of Burton’s 88-page clemency petition. “Is it for my father? For me? To deter crime? I honestly do not understand.”

The petition argued, first and foremost, that Burton never killed anyone. “He did not pull the trigger that killed Douglas Battle,” his lawyers wrote. In fact, he didn’t even witness the murder. “Mr. Burton was already outside of the AutoZone building where the shooting took place.” Although Alabama’s felony murder statute allows defendants to be held responsible for the actions of others, Burton was only supposed to be eligible for capital murder if he intended to take somebody’s life — and there was nothing to prove that this was the case.

The state’s star witness against Burton was a teenager named LuJuan McCants who agreed to testify in order to avoid the death penalty. He said that Burton had gathered the group with the intention of committing a robbery — and if something went wrong, “he said let him take care of it.” According to prosecutors, this directive proved that Burton intended to kill anyone who might stand in the way of the robbery. But even this weak evidence was undermined by McCants’s own testimony, as well as by an interrogation video discovered by Burton’s lawyers years after the trial. It showed McCants repeatedly telling investigators that Burton had not wanted anyone to get hurt — and that he’d been upset upon learning that DeBruce shot Battle.

Some of the jurors who spoke out against the execution said they were haunted by their decision. “I have questioned whether death is an appropriate punishment,” one woman wrote in a letter submitted with the clemency petition. “I have often thought about Mr. Burton’s mother, who was no doubt devastated by the sentence.”

But for most, it came down to the obvious unfairness of executing Burton for DeBruce’s crime. “Had I known the shooter would later be taken off death row,” one juror wrote, “I would not have voted for the death sentence.” Another juror wrote that Burton may have been the ringleader, “but if Charles Manson can get a life sentence for leading his group to kill many people, it is fair for Mr. Burton to serve life without parole.”

Like most people living on death row, Burton bears no resemblance to Charles Manson — or to the people Americans picture when they hear the term “worst of the worst.” His early life had many of the familiar hallmarks of those who are put to death in the United States: poverty, racism, childhood abuse, and trauma. By the time Alabama came close to executing him, he’d long since apologized for his actions and was in frequent pain from rheumatoid arthritis, unable to walk on his own.

But he was also lucky, he told me. If there was anything that sustained him during his years at Holman, it was a strong family structure, which many of his neighbors lack. Indeed, Burton’s clemency petition was filled with letters from relatives, pen pals, and advocates who described Burton as a positive and nurturing presence in their lives.

I was supposed to attend Burton’s execution — not as a media witness, but as one of the people placed on his personal list. Burton did not wish for his family to be subjected to his death, and his legal team decided that, should the killing move forward, they wanted the world to know what Alabama had done. They invited me and two other journalists to join them in the witness room.

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One of them, Lee Hedgepeth, had already witnessed seven executions in Alabama, including three by nitrogen gas. The last one had been the longest to date, lasting 40 minutes. Schulz had seen two of his clients killed with nitrogen. Their accounts were harrowing: Terror and panic was visible on the faces of the condemned, who gasped and thrashed on the gurney. As Burton’s execution date neared, Schulz wondered how it would compare. Would his elderly client suffer more or less due to his age and poor health? Could his more shallow breathing cause the execution to last longer? Or would the fact that he does not have as much oxygen in his lungs to begin with mean it would be shorter?

What was certain was that executing Burton would have been a horrifying spectacle. Guards would have had to lift him onto the gurney, adjusting the thick black straps to fit more tightly over his withered body, and putting a mask over his face. Witnesses would then have watched as Alabama suffocated an elderly man, who killed no one, in the name of justice.

Instead, Burton is now poised to live out the rest of his days behind bars. On the day after our visit, he was moved out of the prison where he spent more than three decades and driven up to Kilby Correctional Facility outside Montgomery, where newly incarcerated people are housed before being transferred to their designated prisons. The move is sure to be a shock to the system for a man who has hardly begun to process the trauma of his near-execution and who has spent much of the past 10 years between his cell and the prison infirmary. After age 65, Burton told me, he slowed down. “I haven’t been outside in eight years,” he said.

In a less punitive system, it would be obvious that Burton should go home to spend the rest of his life with his family. As he said, “I ain’t got much longer to live.” His relatives harbor some hope that he may some day be eligible for medical release. But for now, according to Schulz, Burton was in good spirits when they spoke on the phone from his new location. “He said he knew many of the nurses there, and that they all were greeting, and treating, him warmly,” he said.

“And he’s alive,” Schulz added. On Thursday at 6 p.m., the hour he had been scheduled to die, Burton planned to eat ice cream at the same time as his attorneys and savor the feeling of gratitude. “God has given me a second chance,” Burton told me. This, he believed, was God’s work. “He put the right people in my path.”

The post In the Room Where Death Row Prisoners Say Final Goodbyes, He Learned He Would Live appeared first on The Intercept.

It was mid-February in Oklahoma City, and one of Glossip’s lawyers had just explained the main reason why his client should be released on bond. Under Oklahoma law, defendants like Glossip are entitled to bail unless there is a firm basis to believe they are guilty. The evidence against Glossip had never been strong — and the U.S. Supreme Court demolished the state’s case when it vacated Glossip’s conviction over false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, the attorneys argued, there was no justification for keeping him in jail.

Harmon responded with scorn. “The defendant’s argument reminds me of a Bruce Springsteen song,” he said. “It’s called ‘Glory Days.’”

“The gist of that song is that glory days will pass you by,” he went on. Glossip’s attorneys were clinging to their cherished Supreme Court victory because, after years of losing in court, “they finally won one,” he said. “And they want to wave that Supreme Court opinion around.”

In other words, Glossip’s lawyers were like Springsteen’s former high school baseball star — still talking about his winning fastball at a roadside bar.

In the quiet courtroom, Harmon’s zinger landed with a thud. The comparison was clumsy and ill-fitting; a Supreme Court victory is anything but fleeting. Lawyers and courts are bound by Supreme Court decisions — invoking its rulings is sort of the point.

Glossip, meanwhile, sat at the defense table in his orange prison garb over a thermal shirt. Oklahoma County District Court Judge Natalie Mai — the seventh judge assigned to his case since the high court sent it back to Oklahoma — had allowed him to be unshackled for the hearing. Just a few days earlier, Glossip had turned 63, his 29th birthday behind bars. He knew more than most people about time you can never get back.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to die for the 1997 murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally killed at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of town. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese but insisted that Glossip pushed him to do it. Sneed’s account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip — and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. Sneed is serving a life sentence.

But the case began unraveling soon after Glossip arrived on death row. Footage 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. In the decades that followed, Glossip’s attorneys discovered that prosecutors hid and destroyed evidence in the case — and that Sneed had attempted to recant his testimony multiple times.

The case ultimately ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Glossip’s favor on February 25, 2025. The justices found that Sneed lied on the stand, that prosecutors had failed to correct his testimony, and that additional evidence of prosecutorial misconduct “further undermines confidence in the verdict.”

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Yet one year later, the case is far from over. Rather than release Glossip, as advocates expected him to do, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder — and asked a judge to keep him in jail awaiting trial. An Oklahoma County judge granted the request and refused to release Glossip on bond, only to later step down from the case after admitting that she was close friends with the lead prosecutor at his second trial. A revolving door of recusals followed, with five more criminal court judges leaving the case due to their own ties to the district attorney’s office that sent Glossip to death row.

Mai, a civil judge, was assigned to the case in December. It was now up to her to reconsider whether Glossip should be released from jail. Standing before her, defense attorney Corbin Brewster urged Mai to consider the Supreme Court’s decision before weighing the other factors that judges use to make bond decisions — whether a defendant is a flight risk, for example, or a danger to the community. The “threshold question” before the court, he said, was whether prosecutors could show by clear and convincing evidence that Glossip should be presumed guilty of murder. The answer was clearly no. If Mai agreed, she could rule from the bench and free Glossip that day.

But Mai wasn’t ready to do that. She told Brewer that she had reserved the whole day for the hearing and would issue an order after considering all the evidence. “I would like to get all the information today, so that way I can make a written finding in an expedient manner,” she said.

After three decades insisting on his innocence, Glossip would have to wait a little bit longer.

The 2025 ruling in Glossip v. Oklahoma was momentous: an astonishing victory for a man who had stared down nine execution dates and lived. For Glossip’s longtime attorney, Don Knight, the ruling should have marked the end of a protracted legal battle that had made his client the most famous death row prisoner in the country — and which had won the support of the Oklahoma attorney general himself.

Drummond, who entered the attorney general’s office in 2023, once took unprecedented steps to stop Oklahoma from killing Glossip. After commissioning an independent investigation into his case, he asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn Glossip’s conviction. When the court refused, setting Glossip up for execution, Drummond personally testified before the state’s pardon and parole board, urging them to spare Glossip’s life.

But things changed in the months following the Supreme Court’s decision. After initially basking in the justices’ ruling, Drummond vanished as the public face of the case. In June, he shocked Glossip’s longtime supporters — including conservative allies of the Republican attorney general — by announcing he would retry Glossip.

The most obvious explanation was politics: Drummond’s decision coincided with his run for governor — and his previous interventions in Glossip’s case had infuriated members of Oklahoma’s conservative legal establishment. In the months after the ruling, Drummond lurched noticeably to the right, going out of his way to align himself with the Trump administration’s political agenda. In the meantime, he left it to one of his deputies, Harmon, to retry Glossip’s case.

Harmon has since downplayed the significance of the Supreme Court ruling while peddling a warmed-over version of the state’s discredited case. The lack of new evidence was striking at Glossip’s first bond hearing, when he introduced exhibits designed to cast Glossip in a sinister light — but which fell far short of proving he was capable of murder. He presented affidavits from Glossip’s ex-wife and another woman who had previously provided him with financial support, both of whom wrote that they later felt used and manipulated. Harmon also played a recording of a phone call between Glossip and a third woman, in which Glossip expressed estrangement from his family — an attempt to show that he had no deep ties to Oklahoma.

At the time, Oklahoma County Criminal Court Judge Heather Coyle seemed somewhat skeptical of the evidence. She reminded Harmon that she needed “clear and convincing evidence” that Glossip was likely to be found guilty at a third trial, asking him to “please expand on the facts that support that.” Harmon directed her to the transcripts from Glossip’s previous trials, which ultimately proved persuasive enough.

There was little guarantee that the same approach would prove convincing to Mai. Yet Harmon mostly repeated his prior presentation, resubmitting the affidavits and phone recording, along with the transcripts from Glossip’s two trials. “We have a plethora of evidence,” he told Mai, only to acknowledge that there was nothing new. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” he said.

Harmon also insisted that Glossip posed a danger to the community. “He’s not as young as spry as he was,” he said. But “Mr. Glossip’s manipulative behavior is dangerous in and of itself.”

Glossip’s attorneys, too, repeated arguments from the prior hearing. But there was one major development that had unfolded since then. In July 2025, while the decision to grant bond was pending before Coyle, Glossip’s lawyers revealed a secret deal between Knight and Drummond dating back to 2023. The attorney general had agreed to let Glossip plead to a lesser charge and then walk free. Although the deal was based on the erroneous assumption that the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals would grant Drummond’s request to vacate Glossip’s conviction, it remained current well after the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a lengthy affidavit filed by Knight last summer.

Lawyers for Glossip asked the court to enforce the agreement — an issue that is being litigated separately. At the bond hearing, Brewster invoked the deal to remind Mai that Drummond himself clearly did not buy Harmon’s portrayal of Glossip as a “killer.” If he did, he would never have agreed to a deal that allowed for Glossip’s immediate release.

At the end of the hearing, Mai told the lawyers she needed time to review the full record, which she had yet to receive from the state. She also requested a last round of briefs from both sides. “If you can get that to me in about 30 days, and give me another 15 to 30 days to work with it, I promise I will try to get it out as soon as possible,” she said. “But the reality is my docket is just so full right now, and so I’ll work on it to the extent that I can.”

Shortly afterward, Glossip was placed back in shackles and escorted out of the courtroom. Sheriff’s deputies took him down the elevator to await transfer back to the county jail. Speaking to reporters, Knight reiterated that Drummond should honor their previous agreement to release Glossip — and if he refuses, the court should make him do it.

Knight expressed some hope that, by taking the time to study the record, Mai might see the case for the travesty it is — and give his client a long-overdue taste of freedom. Nobody should have to spend so much time waiting for their first fair trial. “This is wrong,” he said. “It’s been wrong for 30 years.”

Jordan Smith contributed to this report.

The post A Supreme Court Win Didn’t Free Richard Glossip. But This Judge Could. appeared first on The Intercept.

The 30-year-old father of three became an emblem of Trump’s cruelty and lawlessness after being abducted and sent to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran torture prison where hundreds of people were incarcerated last year at the behest of the White House. After conceding that Abrego had been expelled in “error” — violating a court order barring Abrego’s deportation to his country of origin — the Trump administration nonetheless refused to bring Abrego back to the U.S., smearing him as a terrorist and leaving him to endure months of violence, deprivation, and psychological torture.

Abrego was finally returned last June. But his arrival only marked a surreal new chapter in his ordeal. Rather than bring him back to Maryland, where he lived with his wife and young children, he was jailed in Tennessee, as federal prosecutors devised a dubious new case against him. Before he’d even landed on U.S. soil, Abrego was indicted on sweeping criminal charges for allegedly smuggling gang members across state lines over the course of a decade.

Abrego, who has pleaded not guilty, was supposed to go to trial in January at the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. But late last year, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw canceled the trial date, instead scheduling an evidentiary hearing on a pending question before the court: whether Abrego is the target of a “selective and vindictive prosecution” by the Trump administration.

The hearing, set for Thursday morning at the federal courthouse in Nashville, will ultimately determine whether the criminal case against Abrego moves forward. If Crenshaw concludes that Abrego was indeed the target of a revenge campaign, he could dismiss the case altogether.

As a legal and historical matter, this would be a big deal — and a major defeat for federal prosecutors. But it would also fall far short of accountability for those who have dedicated themselves to ruining Abrego’s life. Nor does it stand to impact the countless others whose lives have been destroyed by Trump’s lawless mass deportations. Abrego’s case, which so shocked the American public in the early days of the president’s term, was a harbinger of things to come. “We really thought this was going to be one of a kind,” one of his immigration lawyers recently told NPR. “If anything, it was just the tip of the spear.”

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Abrego was released from jail last year and spent the holidays with his family. While not currently incarcerated, he remains under federal supervision and still faces deportation. He entered the country illegally as a teenager to escape gang violence in El Salvador, was given “withholding from removal” status by an immigration judge in 2019, which allowed him to live and work in the U.S. while checking in once a year with ICE. But the Trump administration dismantled such protections, arresting Abrego in March 2025. While his criminal case has placed his removal on hold, the federal government has gone to extreme lengths to make his eventual deportation a punishment unto itself, scheming to send him to a third country in Africa rather than Latin America.

Abrego’s prosecution is also a potent example of Trump’s eagerness to weaponize the Justice Department against those who cross him. In the year since Abrego was sent to CECOT, the DOJ — whose headquarters now feature a large banner of Trump’s face — has dropped any pretense of independence. One associate deputy attorney general who was apparently instrumental to Abrego’s prosecution reportedly told U.S. attorneys last month that Trump is their “chief client.”

This makes Abrego’s upcoming hearing a new test of the courts. Crenshaw, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2015, has already put himself in the crosshairs by considering Abrego’s rare vindictive prosecution challenge. The hearing comes at a moment when federal judges are increasingly vocal about the threat posed by the Trump regime, while the president and his backers increasingly villainize the judges who stand in their way.

On the surface, the question of whether Abrego is the target of a “vindictive prosecution” is no mystery. The government’s brazen retribution campaign has been publicized at every turn.

To recap: After Trump invoked the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act to declare an “invasion” of gang members in mid-March 2025, exiling hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men to CECOT, Abrego appeared in a photo taken at the prison, released by the Salvadoran government. The overhead image showed two rows of men kneeling on the ground with their hands behind their shaved heads. His wife recognized Abrego from his tattoos.

On March 24, 2025, Abrego sued for his release. Less than two weeks later, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego’s return — and the Supreme Court upheld her order. Rather than complying, Trump held a backslapping Oval Office meeting with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, where U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was up to Bukele, not Trump, to bring Abrego back to the U.S.

For the next several weeks, the Trump administration demonized Abrego, repeatedly labeling him a gang member and releasing records showing that his wife took out an order of protection against him years earlier. The Department of Homeland Security posted on X that Abrego was “not the upstanding ‘Maryland Man’ the media has portrayed him as” — a line loudly amplified by Trump’s supporters.

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Abrego was finally flown back to the U.S. in June 2025 — but only after the DOJ laid the groundwork for a new criminal case against him, which allowed Trump to put a new spin on the government’s narrative. At a press conference on June 6, Bondi announced that Abrego had been indicted for playing a “significant role in an alien smuggling ring” — crimes she described as his “full-time job — and that he had been returned to the U.S. to face justice.

The same line was parroted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, on Fox News. As Abrego’s lawyers lay out in their vindictive prosecution motion, Blanche — who was previously Trump’s defense attorney — declared that the DOJ began investigating Abrego only after “a judge in Maryland” interfered with Trump’s decision to deport him.

Abrego’s motion also points to comments made by Trump aboard Air Force One, in which he said the DOJ made its decision in response to “these judges [who] want to try and run the country.” Asked by a reporter how the criminal case came to pass, Trump said, “I could see a decision being made — bring him back, show everybody how horrible this guy is. And frankly we have to do something because the judges are trying to take the place of a president that won in a landslide.”

Finally, Abrego’s lawyers highlight the resignation of Assistant U.S. Attorney Ben Schrader, who quit his position as chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee the same day Abrego was indicted, “reportedly over concerns that the case was being pursued for ‘political reasons.’” (In an email to The Intercept, Schrader, who is now in private practice, declined to comment on the case.)

These arguments have already proven persuasive to Crenshaw. The federal district judge concluded last year that there was at least some evidence to show that Abrego’s prosecution was retaliatory in nature. “The totality of events” point to a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness,” he wrote last fall. He was struck by the timing of the government’s investigation of Abrego, which came “a mere seven days after he prevailed” at the Supreme Court, as well as by Blanche’s “remarkable statements,” which appeared to confirm that the prosecution was born of revenge for Abrego’s successful lawsuit “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”

Another STRONG SIGN that Abrego is the target of a vindictive prosecution is the weakness of the government’s criminal case itself. While the DOJ has insisted that it has damning evidence to show that Abrego is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the allegations look increasingly like a house of cards.

In September, prosecutors submitted a sworn affidavit laying out how the case against Abrego unfolded. The document, which was signed by Acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire, traces the case back to November 30, 2022, when Abrego was pulled over on the highway in Putnam County, Tennessee, while driving a Chevy Suburban carrying eight passengers, all of whom were Latino. State troopers questioned Abrego but ultimately sent him on his way without a ticket.

The affidavit acknowledges that the traffic stop did not lead to a prosecution until 2025. As McGuire tells it, he got a call the night of April 27, 2025, from the local Special Agent in Charge for Homeland Security Investigations about “potential human smuggling committed by Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia,” who by then was already famous for being sent to CECOT. According to the affidavit, McGuire, who had experience with smuggling cases, “decided to handle the matter himself.” After examining body camera footage from the Tennessee Highway Patrol, he “immediately noted the similarities” between the footage and cases he had handled.

“Over the next several weeks, law enforcement conducted multiple interviews of individuals with information about Abrego Garcia’s activities in Tennessee and elsewhere,” the affidavit goes on. McGuire ultimately concluded that Abrego “had been involved in a human smuggling conspiracy for years.” The evidence was in fact “overwhelming.”

But at a lengthy detention hearing last year, the government’s case against Abrego looked flimsy at best, cobbled together from dubious statements made by highly incentivized federal informants, none of whom actually took the stand. Prosecutors’ sole witness was an HSI special agent whose testimony was based on interviews he neither conducted nor attended — evidence the presiding judge skeptically described as “multiple levels of hearsay.”

McGuire, who represented the government at the hearing, also sought to link Abrego to “a mass casualty event” involving some of the “same actors” involved in his alleged smuggling scheme. But when the judge asked whether any testimony would show that Abrego himself was involved in this mass casualty event, McGuire said no.

Lawyers with the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee, which represented Abrego at the time, pointed out myriad holes in the government’s case. “The cooperators the government is relying on here have very serious credibility issues,” one attorney argued. The informants provided their statements as part of deals that would allow them to avoid deportation, giving them an obvious incentive to lie. What’s more, “their stories are facially implausible.” The informants claimed that Abrego often brought his own children with him as he zig-zagged across the U.S. for his smuggling operation. “The idea that he is taking them on these cross-country trips multiple times per week is just ridiculous on its face.”

A few weeks later, the judge ruled in Abrego’s favor, finding that there was no evidence that justified keeping him in jail while awaiting trial. But she noted that he would almost certainly be kept behind bars either way, given the “anticipated removal proceedings that are outside the jurisdiction of this Court.” While this might make her decision appear to be “little more than an academic exercise,” she wrote, “the foundation of the administration of our criminal law depends on the bedrock of due process. … The Court will give Abrego the due process that he is guaranteed.”

In their motion alleging that Abrego is the target of a selective and vindictive prosecution, his lawyers acknowledge that the legal threshold is high. To win, they must prove that Abrego was specifically targeted for exercising his constitutional rights in court. Such claims “are infrequently made and rarely succeed,” they write. “But if there has ever been a case for dismissal on those grounds, this is that case.”

Indeed, as the lawyers lay out, Abrego was sent to CECOT, successfully sued for his release, and was then slapped with a dubious and apparently politically motivated criminal case. “This case results from the government’s concerted effort to punish him for having the audacity to fight back, rather than accept a brutal injustice.”

In the six months since they first asked Crenshaw to throw out the case on these grounds, the evidence supporting their argument has only gotten stronger. Crenshaw has repeatedly ordered the DOJ to turn over materials that might further illuminate the DOJ’s decision to prosecute Abrego, often to no avail. When prosecutors have turned over evidence, the disclosures have undermined their own case.

On December 30, Crenshaw unsealed an order that appeared especially damning. The judge had examined thousands of pages of government documents submitted for his review, ultimately determining that a portion should be turned over to Abrego’s legal team. “Some of the documents suggest not only that McGuire was not a solitary decision-maker,” Crenshaw wrote, “but he, in fact, reported to others in DOJ with others who may or may not have acted with improper motivation.”

The “others” in question include Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, who works under Blanche, and who appeared to have “a leading role” in the decision to prosecute Abrego. A recent Bloomberg Law profile of Singh described the former gang prosecutor as “the Trump Justice Department’s brashest enforcer when it comes to clamping down on US attorneys’ autonomy,” noting that Singh pushed prosecutors to go after people like Abrego, former FBI Director James Comey, and former CNN host Don Lemon.

Crenshaw’s order supports this characterization, highlighting emails and conversations between Singh and McGuire last year. On April 27, 2025 — the same day McGuire reportedly heard about HSI’s investigation into a potential smuggling case against Abrego, according to the previously submitted affidavit — Crenshaw noted that Singh contacted McGuire “to discuss Abrego’s case.” This detail was not included in the government’s original narrative.

Also absent from McGuire’s affidavit was the fact that Singh told McGuire that Abrego’s prosecution was a “top priority” for Blanche — and that McGuire, who explicitly said that he’d decided to handle the Abrego case “himself,” later wrote to his staff in mid-May that Blanche wanted Abrego charged “sooner rather than later.”

To Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who famously traveled to El Salvador to see Abrego and remains an outspoken advocate in his case, the disclosures were a “smoking gun.” As he told CNN, the unsealed document shows that the DOJ “decided to bring these charges against [Abrego] because he asserted his due process rights when they illegally shipped him off to CECOT.”

With the evidentiary hearing approaching, the Trump administration has kept stalling, rather than turn over additional evidence. Last month, prosecutors filed a new motion explaining why it should not have to provide material it had previously agreed to disclose. Whereas the DOJ once agreed it was obligated to turn over the prior statements of the witnesses they planned to call to the stand — tentatively two HSI investigators, as well as McGuire himself — prosecutors now argued that, in fact, they do not have to turn those statements after all. Their previous position was rooted in “an honest misunderstanding” of the applicable law, they wrote, a mistake “largely based on the fact that these kinds of hearings are exceedingly rare.”

Whether or not DOJ prosecutors ever turn over the materials in question, the government’s witnesses could face a hard time if called to testify on Thursday. Crenshaw already appears to have caught the Trump administration in a series of lies, which could ultimately prompt him to simply call the government’s bluff and just end the farcical prosecution altogether.

“If there were any communications or documents that helped the government prove its narrative that this case was not motivated by vindictiveness, the government would no doubt have produced them,” Abrego’s lawyers wrote last month. “The Court should draw the obvious inference that flows from the government’s stonewalling: the presumption of vindictiveness is warranted and unrebutted, and this case must be dismissed.”

The post Trump Won’t Stop Trying to Punish Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared first on The Intercept.

“One of my biggest questions is whether the Department of Justice followed its own policies in making this decision,” Robin Maher, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The Intercept at the time. The answer was no. “I’ve been handling capital cases for over 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” a defense attorney in the Southern District of New York, told Vanity Fair. “There’s a very detailed process that is supposed to be followed that is spelled out in the [DOJ] Justice Manual, and for the attorney general to just preempt that process is unheard of, as far as I know.”

It was perhaps foreseeable, then, that the capital case against the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson might wither under scrutiny. The presiding judge tossed the death-eligible charge against Mangione last month — another high-profile setback for an administration whose mounting authoritarianism has driven out scores of DOJ prosecutors and overwhelmed the federal courts.

Yet while Mangione received frenzied attention from the start, Bondi has continued her heedless push for new death sentences mostly under the radar. To date, according to data collected by the Federal Capital Trial Project, Bondi has authorized federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty against at least 30 defendants in 24 cases.

This doesn’t include cases in which Bondi has promised to seek death but has not yet filed an official notification, known as a “Notice of Intent.” After Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly gunned down two National Guard officers in Washington, D.C., Bondi vowed to “do everything in our power to seek the death penalty against that monster who should not have been in our country.” But prosecutors told a federal judge last week that none of the charges they have filed allow them to seek the death penalty.

Trump had always vowed to ramp up the death penalty when he returned to the White House. After carrying out 13 executions in his first term, he started his second term furious over President Joe Biden’s decision to spare the lives of 37 people on federal death row. Under Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland paused federal executions and halted new capital prosecutions almost entirely.

Trump’s response was a bloodthirsty executive order on Inauguration Day calling on prosecutors to seek the death penalty as often as possible. Before long, Bondi was fast-tracking capital prosecutions, running roughshod over procedural guardrails and upending the process that is supposed to govern such decisions at the Justice Department.

This ham-fisted approach has largely backfired. Federal judges have taken the death penalty off the table in at least nine of Bondi’s 30 individual authorizations so far — an emblem of the DOJ’s recklessness. “Prosecutors are supposed to have a firm basis to seek the death penalty before they decide to authorize it,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Project. “When you see a string of cases being deauthorized because they’re not legitimate death penalty cases, that tells you that prosecutors are overreaching.”

For its part, Trump’s DOJ has argued that prosecutors have no obligation to its own protocols — and judges have no authority to enforce them. The rules and procedures that govern capital prosecutions are a mix of law and policy that Bondi is happy to dismantle, sowing chaos and curtailing defendants’ rights.

Trump’s death penalty agenda is inextricable from the violence he has unleashed in Minneapolis and beyond. The cases pursued by Bondi reflect Trump’s wish to punish immigrants, people of color, and perceived political enemies — regardless of their alleged crimes. More than two-thirds of Bondi’s death penalty authorizations have been filed against defendants who are Black, Latino, Asian, or Native American, with Black people comprising the largest share. And two-thirds target jurisdictions that, like D.C., don’t have the death penalty — states like Vermont and Maryland, as well as territories like Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

But perhaps most revealing are the authorizations driven by Trump’s spiteful fixation on undoing the work of his predecessor. Of the 30 defendants Bondi has sought to punish with a death sentence, 15 are people whose cases were previously handled by Biden’s DOJ, in which Garland decided against seeking death. Such decisions, known as “no-seeks,” are filed in the vast majority of death-eligible cases. Yet Trump’s DOJ has systematically sought to reverse Biden’s no-seeks – an unprecedented move that has disrupted countless federal prosecutions.

The push has not gone very well so far. At least eight of the 15 authorizations in which Bondi reversed a no-seek have been thrown out by the presiding judge, with more likely to follow. Most of these cases have proceeded as non-capital trials. But one is pending before a circuit court, with DOJ lawyers insisting the judge did not have the authority to rule as he did.

“What we’re seeing with the death penalty is exactly what we’re seeing with the extrajudicial use of violence,” said Dunham. “There’s a belief that because the Trump administration wants to, they can do it — and the law be damned.”

The extraordinary push to reverse Biden’s no-seeks was spelled out in a memo sent to DOJ employees on February 5, 2025, the day after Bondi was confirmed. Written as a rebuke of Biden, Bondi vowed to restore the death penalty to its rightful place. “This shameful era ends today,” she wrote.

The memo included a sweeping order to the DOJ’s Capital Review Committee — the set of federal prosecutors who make death penalty recommendations to the attorney general. Within 120 days, the committee was to review every pending case in which Biden’s DOJ had declined to pursue the death penalty. “This group shall reevaluate no-seek decisions and whether additional capital charges are appropriate,” she wrote.

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Attorneys general have routinely reviewed cases inherited from prior administrations. In pending capital cases, a new AG has the discretion to take death off the table. Garland withdrew dozens of death penalty authorizations brought by his predecessors, while continuing prosecution of people like Robert Bowers, who was sentenced to death in 2023 for slaughtering 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue.

Reversing a no-seek, however, is virtually unheard of. While the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act requires prosecutors to provide a reason to withdraw a Notice of Intent, the law did not account for a scenario in which they would decide against seeking death only to later change their minds. While prosecutors can amend charges against defendants in “superseding indictments”—making it possible that a prosecution could become a capital case — the law holds that they must give notice that they will seek the death “a reasonable time before the trial.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how many cases fit the scope of Bondi’s ordered review. But one anonymous DOJ official gave the Associated Press an estimate of 459. The order to “reevaluate” hundreds of cases in just a few months was far-fetched — and seemingly rigged against certain people from the start. Bondi’s memo instructed the Capital Review Committee to pay “particular attention” to specific types of defendants: undocumented immigrants, people affiliated with “cartels or transnational criminal organizations,” and those whose alleged crimes occurred “in Indian Country or within the federal special maritime and territorial jurisdictions.”

These marching orders fit neatly into Trump’s broader agenda. But from a practical standpoint, reversing no-seeks would make a mess of prosecutions headed for a trial or plea deal. For lawyers, judges, and families on both sides, the result would be chaos and delay. For defendants, it would be an assault on their right to due process.

Capital cases and non-capital cases proceed along distinctly different tracks from the start. People facing the death penalty are entitled to specific legal protections, including the appointment of an experienced capital defense attorney known as “learned counsel,” who must immediately investigate their client’s life to uncover mitigating evidence – factors like mental illness, generational trauma, poverty, and childhood neglect or abuse. In death penalty cases, this evidence often decides whether a defendant lives or dies.

Mitigating evidence is not reserved for sentencing, however. Under well-established DOJ protocols, prosecutors weighing the death penalty must solicit such evidence from defense lawyers. The process generally begins with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office and — should prosecutors recommend the capital case move forward — culminates in a presentation before the Capital Review Committee in Washington, D.C.

Most federal cases never make it this far. But the DOJ’s Justice Manual makes clear that the meeting is a fundamental part of the process. “No final decision to seek the death penalty may be made if defense counsel has not been afforded an opportunity to present evidence and argument in mitigation,” it reads.

The whole undertaking is time-consuming for defense attorneys and costly for the courts, which must budget for the significant resources a capital case demands: the appointment of learned counsel, as well as a mitigation specialist, psychological experts, and investigators. In part for this reason, prosecutors are expected to give notice early if they plan to pursue a death sentence, by a deadline set by the presiding judge. Once the government gives word that it will not seek death, a defendant is no longer entitled to the additional resources.

In the cases subjected to Bondi’s memo, defense lawyers had been preparing for ordinary trials, without the legal and investigative tools afforded to capital defendants. They had not been doing what capital defense attorneys are obligated to do: prioritize the penalty phase of the trial, to prevent a client from being sentenced to die. “If you’re in a no-death case and it suddenly becomes a death case, the entire life history of the defendant becomes relevant when it wasn’t relevant before,” Dunham explained.

A proper mitigation investigation can take years. “In cases involving foreign nationals — who are being disproportionately targeted by the Trump administration — it not only takes years, it takes investigations in foreign countries,” Dunham points out.

Nonetheless, within days of the Bondi memo, defense teams began hearing from the Justice Department that they should prepare for a meeting with the Capital Review Committee.

It would not take long for judges to push back.

In May 2025, a federal judge in Nevada rejected the government’s first attempt to undo a no-seek. The Biden DOJ had notified defense lawyers that they would not seek the death penalty, only for prosecutors to reverse course 12 days before the trial was set to begin. Although Bondi’s memo had suggested that no-seek reversals would be based on “additional capital charges,” prosecutors offered nothing to justify their move. There was no new evidence or major developments, U.S. District Judge Miranda Du wrote in a scathing order. “The government may not now unilaterally derail the course of proceedings with regard to this matter of clear procedural and constitutional weight.”

Soon afterwards, a Trump-appointed judge in Maryland tossed Bondi’s authorizations against three men accused of committing crimes as part of MS-13. “The government assured the Defendants and this Court, in writing, that it would not seek the death penalty,” wrote U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher. “This Court will not cast aside decades of law, professional standards, and norms to accommodate the government’s pursuit of its agenda.”

The judges highlighted a glaring problem with the DOJ’s attempts to justify its actions. “Taken to its logical conclusion,” Du wrote, “the government’s position would mean that defense counsel and the Court would have to continue to treat every single capital-eligible case as a death case … lest the government attempt to reverse its decision at the last minute.”

This would be untenable for obvious reasons. It could also bankrupt the judiciary. If a no-seek could be revoked at any moment, judges could never safely withdraw the additional resources defendants were required to receive. All death-eligible defendants would be entitled to enhanced funding and resources until trial. According to the National Association of Federal Defenders, the resulting cost would be “incalculable,” with the average number of cases requiring such resources ballooning from an estimated seven per year to “roughly 150 additional cases annually.”

These warnings came at an auspicious time. As Bondi ramped up prosecutions over the summer, the program that pays private court-appointed attorneys to represent indigent clients in federal cases ran out of money, leaving lawyers working without pay. Then came the federal shutdown. Those most heavily impacted were the very same legal teams facing the wave of new death penalty cases. “Federal capital defense lawyers are under tremendous pressure to secure the time, resources, and funding they need to adequately defend these cases,” said Maher, the director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The situation was especially senseless given how few capital prosecutions actually culminate in a death sentence — let alone an execution. Public opinion has largely turned against capital punishment, with juries increasingly refusing to send people to death row. “Securing federal death sentences will be a very difficult task given the low level of public support for the death penalty and rising concerns about federal overreach and abuse,” Maher said. It will be harder still in places that have rejected capital punishment. “Jurors may be understandably hostile to a federal government that doesn’t respect local views and decisions.”

All of this made the Trump DOJ’s targeting of U.S. territories especially vexing. In Puerto Rico, whose Constitution banned capital punishment more than 70 years ago, U.S. prosecutors have failed to win a single death sentence despite some 19 authorizations over three decades. Yet Bondi, who has authorized at least one new death case in Puerto Rico, is determined to expand such efforts to a jurisdiction that has never seen a death penalty case: the U.S. Virgin Islands.

One year before the Bondi memo, federal prosecutors filed a no-seek in the case of Richardson Dangleben Jr., charged with killing a St. Thomas police detective on the Fourth of July. Garland’s DOJ “intends to proceed with either a non-capital trial or plea agreement in this matter and will not seek the death penalty,” the local U.S. Attorney wrote in February 2024. This confirmed what prosecutors had told Dangleben’s defense attorney, Federal Public Defender Matthew Campbell, more than six months earlier. At the time, this was to be expected. The U.S. Virgin Islands, Campbell would later point out in an affidavit, “had no history of authorizing or carrying out capital sentences.”

In February 2025, however, Campbell got word that federal prosecutors might seek the death penalty after all. The presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Robert Molloy, swiftly appointed learned counsel, who warned that Dangleben’s defense had already been severely compromised. “If this were a capital case from its inception, we would have hired a mitigation specialist and we would have been preparing a mitigation packet for the Department of Justice from day one,” she said in a phone conference. Instead – more than a year and a half after prosecutors said that they would not seek the death penalty – the lawyers were scrambling to present before the Capital Review Committee in a matter of weeks.

In May, the DOJ filed a Notice of Intent to seek the death penalty.

The authorizations in the Virgin Islands didn’t stop there. Over the next few months, the government filed Notices of Intent against two more men, co-defendants Enock Cole and Jiovoni Smith. As in Dangleben’s case, prosecutors had previously said that they would not seek death only to reverse course after Trump returned to office. Even more shocking was an authorization in a third Virgin Islands case, that of Rosniel Diaz-Bautista. In his case, the DOJ had apparently decided to seek a death sentence “without granting the defense any opportunity to submit mitigating evidence, make a mitigation presentation, or otherwise participate in the capital-authorization process,” as Campbell wrote in a court filing. This was “wholly unprecedented in the thirty-plus year history of the modern federal death penalty.”

Judges struck down the authorizations against Dangleben, Cole, and Smith. Ruling in Dangleben’s case, Molloy — a Trump appointee — echoed the federal judges who had previously refused to allow the DOJ to reverse its no-seeks. Prosecutors had said “unequivocally” that they would “proceed with either a non-capital trial or plea agreement in this matter,” he wrote. The trial “will proceed as a non-death penalty case.”

But prosecutors appealed Molloy’s ruling to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which took the case. Just days before Dangleben’s trial was set to start, Molloy abruptly canceled it.

In December, lawyers on both sides of Dangleben’s case appeared before a panel of Third Circuit judges in St. Croix for oral argument. It was the first time an order rejecting one of Bondi’s no-seek reversals was being tested before an appellate court. The judges have yet to rule. But if the DOJ prevails, it would potentially turn decades of case law on its head.

The National Association of Federal Defenders filed an amicus brief in support of Dangleben, warning that the government was trying to erode the authority of district courts with arguments that were “novel and extreme.” DOJ lawyers were increasingly claiming that judges lacked the power to enforce the deadlines prosecutors were supposed to follow when deciding whether to seek death — or to hold them to those decisions.

The panel seemed perplexed by the whole situation. “Do you have any cases where a no-seek notice was filed, whether formal or informal, and then the case proceeded to trial as a death case?” a judge asked William Glasser, one of two lawyers representing the Trump administration.

“Your Honor, I’m not aware of any off the top of my head,” Glasser replied.

“So this would be the first,” the judge said. He could see why some prosecutors might wish to change their minds after filing a no-seek, say, upon uncovering new evidence. But that didn’t happen in this case.

Glasser pushed back. The government “reevaluated” the evidence, he said, and decided it merited death after all. “Was it really a reevaluation?” another judge asked. “Or was it more a policy change?”

Glasser insisted that the DOJ’s actions were not as disruptive as they appeared. The panel seemed skeptical. “District court judges have not only the right but the duty to set up an orderly process,” one judge said. In Dangleben’s case, prosecutors filed their Notice of Intent just four months before the trial date.

“Four and a half months, your Honor,” Glasser clarified. But in any given case, he maintained, a trial date could simply be pushed back.

“There’s a level of game theory and gamesmanship here that seems to be inimical to what we want in trials generally and especially homicide trials,” one judge remarked. Perhaps more concerning, there was no “limiting principle” to the government’s position: The DOJ was essentially saying it could change its mind on a whim and everyone else would have to adapt.

Glasser suggested that courts could just appeal to the government’s willingness to be reasonable. “I’ve seen district judges saying to the government, ‘Look, tell me if you’re going to [bring a superseding indictment]. I need to know that for planning purposes.’ And that’s perfectly legitimate.”

Can judges really count on the government to honor such a claim?

Yes, Glasser said.

The judge asked the obvious question: Then why can’t they count on the government when it says, “We’re not seeking the death penalty?”

Glasser gave a lengthy response. But the real answer was obvious to anyone who has watched Trump’s assault on the courts. The real answer is that the DOJ can’t be trusted at all.

The post Pam Bondi Is Pushing Death Sentences for People Spared By Her Predecessor appeared first on The Intercept.

It was not how he’d pictured his first Christmas after leaving death row.

Glossip won the victory of a lifetime last February, when the U.S. Supreme Court vacated his conviction, finding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. After almost three decades facing execution for a crime he swore he didn’t commit, Glossip hoped the ruling would mark the end of his ordeal.

But nearly a year later, he was stuck in the county jail with no end in sight. Rather than resolve the case as Glossip’s advocates expected him to do, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced that he planned to retry Glossip for first-degree murder — and asked a judge to reject his request for bond in the meantime. Although defense lawyers pointed out that their 62-year-old client was not a flight risk and posed no danger to society, prosecutors convinced Oklahoma County District Court Judge Heather Coyle to keep Glossip at the jail — a notoriously overcrowded and filthy facility known as one of the deadliest in the country.

In the months since, the state has been unable to get its prosecution off the ground. Glossip’s legal team has successfully sought the recusal of every criminal court judge assigned to the case — all of them former prosecutors who once worked for the Oklahoma County District Attorney, the same office that sent Glossip to death row. While the attorney general’s office has accused Glossip’s lawyers of “judge shopping,” an October evidentiary hearing showed the defense attorneys’ concerns over the judges’ impartiality to be well-founded. One judge assigned to the trial, who had originally refused to step down, was revealed to have taken multiple vacations with the original prosecutor in Glossip’s case.

Nevertheless, each recusal has pushed a potential trial date further into the future. While Glossip has had no choice but to be patient, the wait is taking its toll. The sensory chaos of the county jail is overwhelming for a man who spent decades in isolation on death row. According to Lea, he wears foam earplugs to try to drown out the constant noise, sometimes wrapping a towel around his head.

The conditions are “absolutely exhausting,” Lea said. And while Glossip is grateful to no longer be under a death sentence, he is now in a kind of “purgatory” — waiting for a trial that seems less likely to happen with each passing day.

“This is not where we ever expected to be,” she said.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of hotel owner Barry Van Treese at a rundown Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to attacking and fatally beating Van Treese with a baseball bat but claimed that Glossip coerced him into committing the crime in exchange for money. Sneed agreed to testify against Glossip in exchange for a life sentence. He remains incarcerated.

But Sneed’s story was shaky from the start — and the state’s case against Glossip began falling apart from the moment he was sentenced to die. Over the decades that followed, numerous witnesses came forward to counter the state’s portrayal of Sneed as a follower who was powerless to stand up to Glossip, describing him instead as calculating and violent. Glossip’s attorneys also uncovered records revealing that Sneed sought to recant his testimony against Glossip on multiple occasions.

Nevertheless, Glossip came close to execution numerous times before Drummond took office in January 2023 and immediately announced that he was launching an independent investigation into the case. Unlike his predecessors, who had aggressively fought back against Glossip’s innocence claims, Drummond expressed concern over the possibility that the case was a miscarriage of justice. The resulting review found myriad red flags — including that prosecutors had hidden key evidence from Glossip’s defense and that Sneed had lied on the stand — convincing Drummond that Glossip’s death sentence should not be carried out. In April 2023, he asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction.

At the same time, behind the scenes, Drummond was secretly discussing an agreement with Glossip’s longtime attorney, Don Knight, to resolve the case. “Once the conviction is vacated,” Knight wrote to Drummond in an email on April 1, 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.

But in a stunning move, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Drummond’s request to overturn the conviction. It was not until after the Supreme Court took up Glossip’s case and ruled in his favor almost two years later that the secret deal between Drummond and Knight could finally move forward. According to Knight, all signs pointed to the plan remaining in place after the high court’s decision – Drummond’s office told him to expect Glossip’s release to take place by Easter.

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But that never happened. Instead, on April 22, 2025, Glossip was picked up from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and driven to Oklahoma City, where he was booked into the county jail just before 3 a.m. In early June, Drummond announced that he would try Glossip for first-degree murder.

Today, with the race for governor in full swing, Drummond denies that he ever made a deal with Knight. After Knight exposed their emailed agreement in a motion filed this summer — filing a lengthy affidavit detailing how Drummond made the deal “based on his own political calculus” — the attorney general’s office rejected his version of events. “Contrary to defense counsel’s abrupt, new theory, the parties have never reached a plea agreement in this matter,” prosecutors wrote.

On the Monday after Christmas, Glossip found himself back in court before a new judge. With six criminal court judges disqualified from presiding over the retrial, the Oklahoma County Chief District Judge had been forced to step in to move the case forward. He turned to the court’s roster of civil judges and, at a hearing in early December, chose two with experience handling criminal cases. He placed their names into a box and drew District Judge Natalie Mai.

Appearing in Mai’s courtroom on December 29, Glossip’s legal team requested two new court dates in early 2026: one on the pending motion asking the court to enforce Knight’s agreement with Drummond — which they maintain is a binding contract — and another once again arguing for Glossip’s release on bond. Mai granted the hearings, scheduling them back to back in mid-February.

The bond hearing will go first, on February 12. In their new bond motion, the lawyers argue that Judge Coyle should never have kept Glossip in jail awaiting trial. She had presided over his bond hearing “despite having an undisclosed, disqualifying source of bias” — a friendship with Connie Smotherman, the very prosecutor who had been found by the Supreme Court to have committed misconduct. Although Coyle had recused herself from Glossip’s case after conceding the relationship, Glossip was still paying for her decision.

The new bond motion also argues that Glossip’s health has deteriorated in the months he has spent in the county jail, where, despite repeated requests, he has only seen a doctor once. He has high blood pressure and has developed leg swelling and painful cramps, raising concerns about a possible blood clot. He also has “several soft tissue lumps” in different areas of his body, which have not been properly examined. “His remaining in the jail with a lack of medical attention and treatment puts his life and health at risk,” the lawyers write.

Finally, the motion reiterates what the lawyers argued at the last bond hearing: Any decision to keep Glossip in jail must be based in part on some kind of evidence that he is guilty of the crime for which he stands accused. But the state has yet to present anything new. Coyle’s order was “directly at odds” with the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning his conviction, which rendered Sneed’s testimony unreliable, the lawyers write. “Because Sneed’s testimony was the only direct evidence of Glossip’s guilt of capital murder, the jury’s assessment of Sneed’s credibility was necessarily determinative here,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder.”

This ruling should have been the final nail in the coffin of the state’s case, Glossip’s attorneys argue. But as long as the state of Oklahoma insists on pressing forward using the same evidence as before, the lawyers will seek to put Sneed on the stand. The court “must hold an evidentiary hearing to independently assess Mr. Sneed’s willingness to stand by his testimony and his credibility,” they argue in the new bond motion.

The Oklahoma attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment. With the state’s response to Glossip’s bond motion due in mid-January, there is reason to expect that prosecutors will argue against allowing Sneed on the stand. The state’s star witness has never been able to keep his story straight — and he has tried multiple times to recant his testimony against Glossip. Nearly 30 years after he murdered Van Treese, Sneed may be the one who unravels Oklahoma’s case once and for all.

Jordan Smith contributed to this report.

The post It’s 2026. Why Is Richard Glossip Still in Jail? appeared first on The Intercept.

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.

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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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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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Her Mentor Sent Richard Glossip to Death Row. Can She Give Him a Fair Trial?

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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Trump’s Cult of Power Cancels Free Speech

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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Indiana’s Midnight Executions Are a Relic of Another Age

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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When It Comes to the Death Penalty, the Supreme Court Legalized Torture Long Ago

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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The Death Penalty’s Other Victims

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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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.