When Robert Dennis Wayne Hope was 22 years old, in 1980, he went on a robbery spree. Using a handgun he robbed five stores. No one was injured. He was sentenced to 80 years to life. After a few years in a maximum security Texas prison, he and another inmate slipped through a hole in […]
In 2002, the Supreme Court of the United States in Atkins v. Virginia ruled that executing an intellectually disabled person was a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.” Here’s what Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his opinion:”Construing and applying the Eighth Amendment in the light of […]
We can always count on the glorious state of Texas to bring us the extremes of the criminal justice system: executing a man with a 61 IQ, for example. And now from Polk County Texas comes a story that a judge was texting a prosecutor a line of questioning in the middle of a trial, […]