Florida put to death a convicted murderer in the state’s first execution since September’s botched attempt involving Christa Pike in Tennessee, on Tuesday.
Officials said James Robertson, 63, was pronounced dead after he received a three-shot series of lethal injections at a Florida state prison in Raiford.
The execution of James Robertson, who said he deliberately killed another inmate to get on death row, occurred without complications, state officials said.
Timothy Broglio says Catholics on army firing squad should ask to be excused since it clashes with church teachings
The archbishop who oversees the spiritual care of Catholics serving in the US military condemned the Pentagon’s proposedplans to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan later this year.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio also stipulated in a Monday statement that any Catholic soldier assigned to the US army firing squad should ask to be excused from that duty, which he described as contrary to the teachings of the church. He joins other Catholic leaders in speaking out against the death penalty and the live stream plans.
A sample of people at the president’s midterm stump speech in Tennessee defended the Pentagon’s announcement that it would livestream the execution of a mass shooter.
Pike’s lawyers said she is back in same prison she’s lived in for last 30 years and will continue to receive medical care
Christa Pike has been discharged from the hospital after surviving Tennessee’s botched 30 September attempt to execute her by lethal injection and is back in prison, her lawyers said on Saturday.
Pike, 50, returned to the Deborah K Johnson rehabilitation center, where she has been imprisoned for the last three decades, her attorneys, Stephen Ferrell, Luke Ihnen, Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason, said in a statement.
People gathered during a March 4 Mercy protest against the death penalty at the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville last month, ahead of the scheduled execution of Christa Pike.
Legal experts say the former Army officer convicted in a 2009 mass shooting could face a narrow, rushed path to appeal a public execution by firing squad.
Nidal Malik Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood Army Base in 2009. It is unclear he will ask the courts to block the administration’s plans to execute him.
It is odd for the US defense secretary to be laying the groundwork for an event that could be organized by Tehran
Pete Hegseth’s plans to stage a public execution resemble a grotesque Iran-imitation game.
Having failed over the past seven months to defeat the Tehran regime on the battlefield, the self-styled “secretary of war” now proposes to mirror its notorious practice of enforcing the death penalty as a grand public spectacle.
The vice president also cast doubt on whether the public execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood gunman, would go forward as Pentagon officials have planned.
“If it’s through livestream, I’m not going to be watching it,” Vice President JD Vance said of the execution during a visit to Kentucky and Ohio on Friday.
Governor halts execution of William Lee Thompson, after Christa Pike survived failed lethal injections
Ron DeSantis cancelled a planned execution in the state on Friday, days before a 74-year-old man was due to be killed by lethal injection.
The move – the first time Florida’s governor has withdrawn a death warrant in his nearly eight years in office – comes just over a week after the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee.
The US is facing worldwide condemnation over a “barbaric” plan to execute a disabled man by firing squad and livestream it to the public, with critics comparing the Trump administration to dictatorships in Iran and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed on 3 December.
Livestreaming an execution could cause post-traumatic stress disorder in the viewing public, mental health experts have said, after the US confirmed plans to broadcast the death by firing squad of a man who shot dead 13 unarmed soldiers.
The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said on Thursday that Nidal Hasan, a former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be executed by firing squad on 3 December. Officials later confirmed it would be livestreamed. It is believed it will be the first public execution in the US in almost a century.
Lethal injection was a way for us to deny the reality of capital punishment. Pike’s experience shows us what it is
Christa Pike had asked to be hanged. In the weeks before her botched execution by lethal injection on 30 September, in which she survived two lethal doses of barbiturate pentobarbital and had to be hospitalized, Pike and her legal team had challenged Tennessee’s execution protocol.
The state’s lethal injection regimen had failed before. In May, Tony Carruthers was also sent to Tennessee’s death chamber, only to leave alive after prison officials struggled to find a vein.
Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defence department official later confirmed the execution would be livestreamed. In an interview with the rightwing channel Real America’s Voice, the defence secretary said the firing squad would carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas on 3 December. It would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years
A proposal to livestream the killing of Nidal Hasan by firing squad opens a window ever wider to the Trump administration’s complete moral vacuity
More fool me! Here I was thinking nothing that America’s Trump administration could do or say, no matter how politically and morally bankrupt, no matter how venal or violent, was capable of shocking me any longer.
Then I woke to today’s news that one of the Trump cabinet’s bigger boofheads – the uber Christian nationalist, crusader-fantasist and “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth had announced that America would have a public firing squad execution of murderer Nidal Hasan.
Flowers, tried six times over 1996 murders of four people, faced execution before supreme court tossed his conviction
Curtis Flowers, a Black man who spent more than 22 years in prison and was on death row in Mississippi before the US supreme courtthrew out his conviction and death sentence, has died. He was 56.
Flowers’ family confirmed that he died on Wednesday at his home in Mississippi, attorney Rob McDuff told the Associated Press on Thursday.
Recovery marks a dramatic turnaround for Pike, who remains in hospital after a botched execution in Tennessee
Christa Pike is “up and walking” in hospital, her lawyer said, just more than a week after she survived two lethal injections during a botched execution in Tennessee.
The recovery marks a dramatic turnaround after Pike was declared brain dead on Monday, before waking up and beginning to speak on Tuesday. Her ordeal has shocked many in the US and overseas and galvanized critics of the death penalty.
A warning for this episode - it covers details of a murder and an execution that some might find distressing.
In this episode of Guardian Australia’s US politics podcast, co-hosts Jonathan Yerushalmy and Reged Ahmad examine what happened when the state of Tennessee tried to execute prisoner Christa Pike. They also look at the controversy over taxpayer-funded ads promoting US president Donald Trump, midterm AI attack ads and the Elon Musk-Trump bromance that appears to be back on.
Attorneys say Pike was set to be taken off life support before she woke up, as judge orders officials to preserve evidence
Christa Pike awoke “angry and confused” after surviving two lethal injections, her attorneys said on Wednesday, as a judge ordered Tennessee state officials to preserve all evidence related to the failed execution.
Pike, 50, was taken to hospital unconscious but alive from Tennessee’s execution chamber last Wednesday after two supposedly lethal doses of the barbiturate pentobarbital.
Christa Pike, a death row inmate who survived the state of Tennessee’s attempt to execute her last week, is conscious and speaking. The 50-year-old is recovering in hospital after surviving two lethal injections in a case that has shocked many in the US and prompted a debate about the death penalty. She was due to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Michael Safi speaks to the chief reporter for Guardian US, Ed Pilkington – watch on YouTube
Christa Pike’s lawyers said that Pike remains shackled to her hospital bed.
“Based on our understanding, medical staff have asked that the shackles be removed and have been denied that request by [the Tennessee corrections department],” they said, adding: “We would also amend our request and ask for that relief.”
Lawyers seek preservation of evidence after prisoner received two doses of pentobarbital on 30 September
Christa Pike, a Tennessee prisoner who survived the state’s attempt to execute her, is awake and speaking as she receives treatment at a hospital, her attorneys said, as they head to court on Wednesday seeking a court order requiring preservation of all evidence relating to the botched exercise by the state.
Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital, a sedative, as Tennessee officials attempted to put her to death last Wednesday in a case that shocked many in America and created headlines around the world. She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
The death row inmate in Tennessee received two doses of a lethal injection drug last week but lived. She was taken from the execution chamber in an ambulance.
Tennessee’s unsuccessful attempt to end the life of Christa Pike is spurring more scrutiny over capital punishment techniques, and whether the death penalty should exist at all.
In a photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections, the state’s death chamber in Columbia, S.C., including the electric chair, right, and a firing squad chair, left.
The Pentagon said that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who carried out the deadliest mass shooting at an American military base, would be executed by firing squad.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan in 2010. During his court-martial, he was convicted after admitting to killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others at Fort Hood in Texas.
Ex-lawyer for woman Tennessee attempted to execute says defense filings said she was at risk for ‘exactly what happened’
A former lawyer for Christa Pike says he was not surprised that Tennessee botched its attempt to execute her because attorneys had warned that problems accessing her veins could make the procedure dangerous and potentially cruel.
James Crowson, who represented Pike during part of her post-conviction appeals, said he had followed the case from afar before the failed execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on 30 September.
The failed execution of Christa Pike, which left her clinging to life in Tennessee, was the latest grisly error to take place in an American execution chamber.
The failed execution of Christa Pike has prompted new scrutiny of Frank Strada, who resigned as the state’s top prison official on Saturday, and his past role overseeing executions in Arizona.
Prosecutors want remote testimony for witnesses unable or unwilling to travel to Guantánamo. The defense wants jurors to be told that, guilty or innocent, the defendant will not go free.
What happened to Pike was gruesome. No one deserves what she went through, not even those who commit horrible crimes
Botched executions are nothing new in US history. In the era when hangings were common, some condemned people were decapitated. Later, when the electric chair was in vogue, every now and again, someone would catch fire during an electrocution. And nitrogen hypoxia, the US’s newest execution method, has already proven notoriously unreliable.
But, of all of the ways we have tried to execute people, lethal injection has the worst track record. More than 8% of all lethal injection executions have been botched. Most of them resulted when those charged with carrying them out could not find a usable vein.
Ms. Slemmer was killed in 1995 by Christa Pike, whose execution in Tennessee was botched on Wednesday. Her family celebrated what would have been her 51st birthday last month.
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