US capital punishment fall to 40-year low in 2016

<div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkBu3-pmv1QknN8Gd_H9VQIr3726mikiS-OEZcOvhZm_oOxE16L-gYbwRdNrWCL8u_CyeolNlwykgiiV9BVyeaiUDvDPQf0WlY6baTOgppYaxivgX5cSlESRPWGBTDhHnTkNAE1U398a8-/s1600/21st+century.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkBu3-pmv1QknN8Gd_H9VQIr3726mikiS-OEZcOvhZm_oOxE16L-gYbwRdNrWCL8u_CyeolNlwykgiiV9BVyeaiUDvDPQf0WlY6baTOgppYaxivgX5cSlESRPWGBTDhHnTkNAE1U398a8-/s400/21st+century.gif" width="400" /></a></div><b>Fewer death sentences were handed down in the US this year than at any time in the last four decades, a study finds.</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Only 30 such penalties were imposed in 2016, the lowest since the US Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976 after a four-year hiatus.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Five states, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Florida and Missouri, carried out 20 executions.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It continues a 20-year downward trend in US capital punishment, says the Death Penalty Information Center.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The new <a href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/" target="_blank">DPIC report</a> showed that not only have executions slowed or even halted in the vast majority of states, but juries and judges are sentencing fewer people to death.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"This year, death sentences will be lower than at any other time in the modern history of the American death penalty," says Robert Dunham, executive director of the DPIC and lead author of the study. "That, I think, is a big story."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After the US death penalty was reinstated 40 years ago, the number of death sentences and executions began steadily rising.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In 1977, 137 death sentences were handed down.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The trend peaked in the 1990s, with 98 executions in 1999 and 315 new death sentences in 1996.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then the downward trend began.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In 2016, only 30 new death sentences were handed down, and 20 executions took place.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That was the fewest number of executions since 1991.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of the five states that put inmates to death in 2016, Georgia led the way with nine executions, followed by Texas with seven, Alabama with two, and both Florida and Missouri executed one person.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">New death sentences are down 37% from 2015, according to the report, and fewer death sentences were imposed in 2016 "than in any other year since the Supreme Court declared US death penalty statutes unconstitutional in... 1972".</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mr Dunham points out that the low number of new death sentences was notable as well.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Georgia, for example, sentenced no-one to death in 2016.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Texas had four new death sentences, which is very low for the state," he said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Dallas and Harris counties, which is where Houston and Dallas are, imposed no new death sentences for only the second time since the 1980s."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The halt of executions in some states can be explained by the difficulty procuring legally acceptable <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36292193" target="_blank">drugs needed for lethal injections in the US</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Many pharmaceutical companies refuse to provide them, and the European Union banned the export of the drugs to the US in 2011.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some states have resorted to clandestine deals with compounding pharmacies or different drug cocktails, and a series of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-27215508" target="_blank">botched executions</a> in recent years has raised legal and ethical concerns about these practices.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0FjVeBIOCT0IeRv_uebT-eiYv2P42FwBBXWfUeMy8YSLHLDLtBOUhkvPcYTzYfr0Q5ahR_lMvra7hNAhbOPm07AeUS2T6PRe2daWyfcH-CncI6zEWwATiHc7_ZsHeTBeizEplZ9fOpbLS/s1600/break.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0FjVeBIOCT0IeRv_uebT-eiYv2P42FwBBXWfUeMy8YSLHLDLtBOUhkvPcYTzYfr0Q5ahR_lMvra7hNAhbOPm07AeUS2T6PRe2daWyfcH-CncI6zEWwATiHc7_ZsHeTBeizEplZ9fOpbLS/s400/break.gif" width="400" /></a></div>Legal challenges that can take decades to resolve and exonerations around the country have also slowed executions.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So far there have been 156 men and women exonerated from death row in the US.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Lawyers cost an awful lot more than prison guards, and there is just enough ambivalence for state killing as a criminal punishment to make the due process standard higher than for other kinds of punishment," says Frank Zimring, a death penalty expert and professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The combination of high expense and low assurance has sort of taken the enthusiasm out."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">According to various polls, American opinions are roughly split when it comes to the death penalty.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/29/support-for-death-penalty-lowest-in-more-than-four-decades/" target="_blank">Pew Research Center poll</a> shows approval for the death penalty has declined from a high of 80% in the 1990s to only 49% in favour now.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, Robert Blecker, a death penalty supporter and professor at New York Law School, says that the majority of Americans still favour the use of capital punishment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"[Approval may be] down from an all-time high of 80%, but it's also up from the 1968 low," he says.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"California supported it, Oklahoma put it in its constitution, and Nebraska reversed its own legislature.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"How much clearer evidence could you possibly want as to where American public opinion is?"</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">During this year's election season, three US states had items related to capital punishment on their ballots, and in all three states, death penalty proponents won big on election night.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nebraskans voted to bring their death penalty back after legislators <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-32910693" target="_blank">banned the practice</a> in 2015.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Californians voted to speed up their executions rather than abolish them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In Oklahoma, voters approved new constitutional language to protect the use of capital punishment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mr Zimring concedes that the general public may not necessarily approve of the precipitous decline in the use of capital punishment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But he points out that when other nations abolished their death penalty it took some time for the general public to concur.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"When you study the western European decline of the death penalty, it turns out that public support for hanging people persists for almost 20 years after moral leadership abolishes the death penalty," he says.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"It takes a long time for public passions to catch up with the moral leadership of elites."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Although this year's figures continue to bolster the narrative that the American criminal justice system is increasingly turning away from the death penalty, the end of capital punishment may still be a long way off.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The end game is going to be long and expensive and in a deep way, unnecessary," says Mr Zimring.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"That's billions of dollars and many too many executions in the American future."</div><br />Source: <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38371479" target="_blank">BBC News</a>, Jessica Lussenhop, December 21, 2016<br /><br /><br /><h2>The Strange Case of the American Death Penalty</h2><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKwTmZcrR1QcpiLUbkxn6Jp_cHISVJuD2c8si4LKlVMC2Q_LQ79SVx2JJsdWv3QutacI-AciHorJQrt7FeW5EhT8Zw4CPG8Sq0_FEcBQLCQNXsUK_9gvhjg3aZSXbE7Kr7XXeaijeJF4dK/s1600/k5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKwTmZcrR1QcpiLUbkxn6Jp_cHISVJuD2c8si4LKlVMC2Q_LQ79SVx2JJsdWv3QutacI-AciHorJQrt7FeW5EhT8Zw4CPG8Sq0_FEcBQLCQNXsUK_9gvhjg3aZSXbE7Kr7XXeaijeJF4dK/s400/k5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>It’s a paradoxical moment in the history of the death penalty in the United States. The number of executions has dwindled to just a few, but the voters, even in the most liberal states, seem to want the punishment to remain on the books. That’s the message of the <a href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/" target="_blank">annual report</a> from the Death Penalty Information Center, which produces the most comprehensive analysis of the subject each year.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The headline on the report—“Another Record Decline in Death Penalty Use”—notes that the remarkable fall in the number of executions and death sentences is part of a longer trend, one that continued this year. The numbers were the lowest in the modern era of the American death penalty, after a period, between 1972 and 1976, when the Supreme Court put a stop to executions. There were just twenty executions in the United States in 2016, down from a peak of ninety-eight, in 1999. Even more remarkable, just thirty people were sentenced to death this year, compared with three hundred and fifteen in 1996. Indeed, as the report further notes, “Fewer new death sentences were imposed in the past decade than in the decade preceding the Supreme Court’s invalidation of capital punishment in 1972.” The reduction in death sentences means that the decline in executions is likely to continue as well, because the pipeline of new cases is not as full.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Despite these numbers, death-penalty abolitionists also received a host of bad news this year. In 2015, after a long political struggle, the Nebraska state legislature (which is unicameral) repealed the death penalty. But supporters of capital punishment put the issue on the ballot in the 2016 election, and more than sixty per cent of the voters supported its restoration. Voters in California were asked to address two contradictory initiatives concerning the death penalty. One would have ended executions in the state once and for all; the other sought to remove some of the legal barriers that have prevented executions from proceeding quickly, or really at all, in the state. The abolition initiative failed, with fifty-three per cent of the voters opposed, and the law for expediting the death penalty passed, with slightly more than fifty-one per cent of the vote. (It’s not clear what, if any, practical difference passage of the initiative will mean. The legal standoffs in California are likely to continue. There are <a href="http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/state_by_state" target="_blank">seven hundred and forty-one</a> people on death row in the state, but there hasn’t been an execution there since 2006.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The debate over the death penalty seems to have taken on some of the characteristics of the Presidential race this year, as a contest between populists and élitists. Judges play the part of the élites in this particular debate, and the judiciary, as a whole, has shown ever-greater hostility toward approving executions. This year, the Supreme Court ruled for prisoners in several high-profile death-penalty decisions, holding that racial bias infected jury selection, in Foster v. Chatman, a case from Georgia, and rejecting Florida’s system of allowing judges to impose the death penalty even when jurors support life in prison, in Hurst v. Florida. (The Florida legislature sought to correct the defects identified by the Supreme Court in the Hurst case, only to have the Florida Supreme Court overrule the new law as well.) Delaware’s Supreme Court also nullified its state’s death-penalty law this year.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqOe-7Oh76c4SgqTgbQPvj9WuZvXdUNsVzT21T8yBzDqmoborj19YG7Orkhyphenhyphen0OskknQx8gVCBIh7VhTeBimD1pCwnaIPnruBRS4-MtZ-ySFncOH6CFrCpLMuzLVQgxXEINFTxNf9eu3Fg/s1600/right+trick.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqOe-7Oh76c4SgqTgbQPvj9WuZvXdUNsVzT21T8yBzDqmoborj19YG7Orkhyphenhyphen0OskknQx8gVCBIh7VhTeBimD1pCwnaIPnruBRS4-MtZ-ySFncOH6CFrCpLMuzLVQgxXEINFTxNf9eu3Fg/s400/right+trick.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>But, as the election results in California and Nebraska illustrate, the voters—the populists—continue to back the death penalty, as does the President-elect. (Donald Trump notoriously called for the execution of the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/donald-trump-and-the-central-park-five" target="_blank">Central Park Five</a>, fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds who were charged with a high-profile rape and beating, in 1989. Even though the five were later exonerated, Trump, during this year’s campaign, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/opinion/why-trump-doubled-down-on-the-central-park-five.html" target="_blank">reiterated his belief in their guilt</a>.) The Death Penalty Information Center report notes that public-opinion polls show some decline in support for the death penalty, but the opposition has never achieved close to a majority. And, notwithstanding ambiguous poll numbers, politicians from Trump to Barack Obama understand that support for the death penalty, at least in some form, is less politically risky than opposition to it. (Obama, for example, has supported executions for “extraordinarily heinous crimes.”) Trump’s victory, and those of other Republicans, can only reinforce that view.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Many factors have led to the decline in the death penalty in recent years: less crime over all, with less fear among the public as a result; DNA exonerations leading jurors to pause before imposing death; the reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to provide lethal-injection drugs and the resulting search (still under way) for a drug protocol that passes constitutional muster; the length and expense of the appeals mandated by the Supreme Court. All those reasons for the decline remain, but so, too, does the United States remain a country that has had the death penalty in effect for virtually all of its history. That’s not likely to change, either. The death penalty may keep shrinking, but it will probably never entirely go away.</div><br />Source: <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-strange-case-of-the-american-death-penalty" target="_blank">The New Yorker</a>, Jeffrey Toobin, December 21, 2016<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">⚑ | Report an error, an omission; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: <a href="mailto:deathpenaltynews@gmail.com">deathpenaltynews@gmail.com</a>.</div><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; border: 0px solid rgb(255, 204, 0); color: black; text-align: center; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr> <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/WebDPN/" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL4sspwgGptzvuHVklum5TwxKppRN-lIC5TN8RLZFq_B4ZOtBrX1ssXPNKQ6XpSyQFRJRtVQN45HMkpt3VX0JtOW0TovwxZAurG-AV6gh98IAXo7Ip6QlpkZr9WrM3_m943Mwy-gGxBAY/s1600/Find+us+Facebook.jpg" /></a></div></td> <td><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://twitter.com/WebDPN" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiULIPEaT_P6oIauxAZd17XRRxljesDLS7iIjdQXT7Xct99uHeohx4IYmiAB6S044gTjMDGSy50sL2vDzOyPZ-3vJj9zwcYQ2rgzJh9v1-QDiunKAQtLLLqJ83s38qN3HABxGIC8GsIOD0/s1600/Find+us+twitter.jpg" /></a><span id="goog_1427852018"></span><span id="goog_1427852019"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a></div></td> </tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><b>Opposed to Capital Punishment? 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US capital punishment fall to 40-year low in 2016

Fewer death sentences were handed down in the US this year than at any time in the last four decades, a study finds. Only 30 such penalties ...

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Alabama court rules death penalty law constitutional in 3 cases SCOTUS sent back for review

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfqMRqid7JyFlFbXKd6gRF5W4hjDtchqkIlqwt-TTrFoyVLAKMx-JeJ1cDvRfWw_WKyoI5kj40a80K76BbJovNpoJlLu64J1yyRmMaMCbnhUyYpymwhVgrmth0gF6ms3hdR93fnPKF-wk/s1600/Alabama.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Alabama" border="0" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfqMRqid7JyFlFbXKd6gRF5W4hjDtchqkIlqwt-TTrFoyVLAKMx-JeJ1cDvRfWw_WKyoI5kj40a80K76BbJovNpoJlLu64J1yyRmMaMCbnhUyYpymwhVgrmth0gF6ms3hdR93fnPKF-wk/s400/Alabama.jpg" title="Alabama" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals on Friday ruled the death sentences of 3 state inmates are constitutional and don't conflict with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down Florida's similar death penalty sentencing scheme.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The U.S. Supreme Court had vacated the sentences of Alabama death row inmates Ronnie Kirksey, Corey Wimbley, and Ryan Gerald Russell, this year and sent them back to the state appeals court to review in light of its Florida ruling.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Alabama's death sentencing law has been compared to Florida's because both allowed judges to override jury recommendations for life and instead impose death.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On Friday the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals said it wasn't the same and affirmed the convictions of Kirksey, Wimbley and Russell. The court said Alabama's law is constitutional and does not "run afoul" of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Hurst v. Florida in January.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Prosecutors and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange have repeatedly argued that Alabama's law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1995 and is not the same as the portion of the Florida law struck down in Hurst.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Florida's law had required the judge -- not the jury -- to find the existence of an aggravating circumstance in order for the defendant to be subject to the death penalty.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Alabama's law already requires the jury to find an aggravating factor, such as murder during the commission of a robbery, kidnapping or rape, prosecutors argue. Therefore, at the time of conviction, the jury has already agreed upon at least one aggravating factor before the sentencing phase began.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In Alabama, after the jury unanimously convicts a defendant with at least one aggravating factor at the trial jurors in a separate hearing then weigh any other aggravating factors and mitigating circumstances and recommend life without parole or death. Jurors must vote 10-2, 11-1 or 12-0 to recommend death. The judge then imposes the final sentence and at that time can override the jury's life or death recommendation. Most of the overrides in Alabama have resulted in the death penalty.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In its order in Wimbley's case, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals found that the jury - not a judge - had determined Wimbley was eligible for the death penalty because it had unanimously convicted him of murder during the course of a robbery and arson. Robbery and arson are both aggravating factors.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Consequently, the jury's guilt-phase verdict satisfied Wimbley's Sixth Amendment right to a jury finding as to the existence of an aggravating circumstance," the appeals court stated. "That, as the Alabama Supreme Court explained, is all that "Ring (a previous SCOTUS ruling) and Hurst require ... nothing more and nothing less."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Florida's legislature enacted a new law that gives the jury, not the judge, the power to impose a death sentence. In Delaware, the only other state that allowed judicial overrides, that state's Supreme Court struck down its override law in August. That leaves Alabama as the only state that allows judicial override.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Alabama is now the only state to allow judges to override jury recommendations for life without parole and for those recommendations to be non-unanimous.</div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Jefferson County Circuit Judge Tracie Todd in March ruled in four of her capital murder cases that Alabama's capital punishment sentencing scheme is unconstitutional based on the Hurst case.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In its order the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals told Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Tracie Todd to vacate her March 3 order</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In June the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ordered Todd to vacate her rulings and declared the state's law is constitutional.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then on Sept. 30, the Alabama Supreme Court weighed in. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled in the case of death row inmate Jerry Bohannon that Alabama's death penalty law is constitutional in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Hurst v. 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Alabama court rules death penalty law constitutional in 3 cases SCOTUS sent back for review

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals on Friday ruled the death sentences of 3 state inmates are constitutional and don't conflict with ...

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