While the men’s death warrants were signed before Donald Trump took office January 20, the state executioners and the US judiciary were certainly emboldened to see these executions through to completion by the new administration’s rampage against democratic rights.
The US Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling just hours before the execution, declined to halt the execution. On Friday, a federal appeals court vacated a preliminary injunction blocking the execution granted by a lower judge.
Condemned man’s attorney: “Everything about this barbaric, state-sanctioned atrocity—from the choice to the method itself—is abjectly cruel. We should not just be horrified—we should be furious.”
The US carried out a double state killing on Thursday, with two states executing intellectually disabled death row inmates. These executions bring to five the number of executions carried out so far in 2025, with six more scheduled between now and March 20.
The executions of Steven Nelson in Texas and Demetrius Frazier in Alabama come in the context of the Trump administration’s efforts to bolster the federal death penalty and to encourage the 27 states that practice the death penalty to ramp up capital prosecutions.
Bowman’s execution was the third carried out in South Carolina since 2011, when the state unofficially halted executions as pharmaceutical companies stopped supplying lethal injection drugs, fearing public concern over suffering of those executed.
The executive order calls on the attorney general to “take all appropriate action to seek the overruling of Supreme Court precedents that limit the authority of State and Federal governments to impose capital punishment.”
Promotion of the death penalty is a critical component of Trump’s bid to establish a presidential dictatorship. It is part of the anti-immigrant agitation that is central to his America-first, ultra-nationalistic ideological offensive and fascist incitement.
The executions of Joseph Corcoran and Kevin Underwood underscore one of the most barbarous features of the death penalty system in America, which condemns inmates to death despite their documented severe mental illnesses.
Carey Dale Grayson was reportedly conscious for six agonizing minutes, during which he gasped for air, struggled with his restraints and shook violently.
Both Roberson and Lucio are innocent of the charges for which they were sentenced to death.
Moore is believed to be the only person in the history of South Carolina’s death penalty to be executed in connection with an armed robbery who did not bring the fatal weapon to the scene of the crime.
Robert Roberson is not only an innocent man; the state of Texas, led by the fascist Governor Greg Abbott and his equally foul Attorney General Ken Paxton are seeking to put him to death for a crime that never occurred.
If Roberson is put to death, he will be the first person in the United States convicted and executed based on now widely discredited scientific criteria for determining “shaken baby syndrome.”
Roberson has argued since his conviction that he is the victim of a justice system that wrongly attributed his daughter’s tragic death to “shaken baby syndrome” (SBS) and falsely pointed to him as the vicious perpetrator.
White’s life story mirrors that of many of the more than 2,200 men and women still on death row in America, as well as those of the 1,600 individuals who have already been sent to their deaths since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
Five death row inmates were put to death in the US over the past week, a pace unprecedented since July 2003. With the deaths of Freddie Owens, Travis Mullis, Marcellus Williams, Emmanuel Littlejohn and Alan Miller, the US has now executed 1,600 people since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
The continued existence of the death penalty in the United States is yet another confirmation of the criminality and violence of the capitalist political and economic system, which oozes filth out of every pore.
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to spare the life of Williams, who spent nearly a quarter-century on Missouri’s death row for a crime he did not commit.
The governor of Missouri and state Supreme Court refused Monday to halt the execution of death row inmate Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams. Williams, 55, has spent almost a quarter-century on death row for a crime he did not commit.
