There were plenty of reasons for concern over the verdict that Dennis Lawley was responsible for the murder of an ex-convict named Kenneth L. Stewart, whose body had been found on the side of a road in California’s Central Valley days after he was released from prison in 1989.
Five days before he was scheduled to be put to death in 2016 for the 2002 murder of his two-year old daughter, Robert Leslie Roberson III won a reprieve from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has unanimously voted in favor of a 120-day reprieve for death-row inmate Rodney Reed, who is scheduled to be executed Wednesday despite significant evidence of his innocence.
Lovell McDowell was awakened one night in April, 1988, by the sound of her infant daughter, Brittany Smith. McDowell found her boyfriend, then known as Charles Robins, holding the 11-month old and hollering, “Brittany, come on. Brittany, wake up. Wake up, Brittany.”
Firefighters who put out a smoldering fire in the living room of a Columbus, Mississippi, house in February, 1992, found Georgia Kemp, 82, lying dead on her bedroom floor, a bloody butcher knife on her bed.
John George Spirko, Jr. was a criminal with a system he believed would help cut his time in prison: He made up information for authorities, pretending to have knowledge that would help solve crimes.
Texas lawmakers, the European Union, celebrities and more than two million petitioners have asked Gov. Greg Abbott to halt the November 20 execution of inmate Rodney Reed, amid growing evidence of his innocence.
Nobody doubts that Charles Ray Jarrell Sr. shot and killed Marlin Shuler, a marijuana dealer, in 1990, after the two had been drinking beer together by a northern Alabama lake.
Four years after the naked and battered body of Barbara Jean Horn was found in a trash bag in Philadelphia, the police had made no arrests despite having a series of suspects.
The bodies of Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig, both 81, were found on the kitchen floor of their rural Ohio home in 1990, along with ten .25-caliber shell casings. Police found open jewelry boxes in the bedroom that had been rifled through.