The Most SHOCKING 2024 Death Row Inmates Who Were Denied Appeals And Stays Of Execution (US)
In 2024, several US executions went forward amid lastminute appeals or clemency pleas that were denied under highly contentious circumstances. Many of these cases involved claims of innocence, intellectual disability, mental illness, or other mitigating factors that sparked public outcry when relief was refused.
Below, we examine seven prominent death row cases from 2024, each detailing the inmate’s crime. the denied appeals or clemency request, the reasons given, if any, for the denial, and the controversies and reactions surrounding the case. Willie Pie, State Georgia, method of execution, lethal injection. Willie Pie, a 58-year-old black man, was convicted of the 1993 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Alicia Yarro, on November 17th, 1993.
21-year-old Alicia Lin Yarro, Willie Pi’s ex-girlfriend, was attacked and abducted from her home in Spalding County, Georgia. Pi, angered by the fact that Yarro had a baby he believed was his, but whose birth certificate listed another man, enlisted two friends in a plan to rob Yarro’s new boyfriend, armed with a22 caliber pistol.
The trio forced their way into the house where Alicia was staying, stole her jewelry, and kidnapped her at gunpoint. callously leaving her infant child behind in the empty home. They drove Alicia to a motel where all three men took turns raping her before bundling her back into their car and heading down a remote dirt road.
There, in a desolate spot, Pi ordered Yarro out of the vehicle, made her lie face down on the ground and shot her three times execution style. Yarro’s lifeless body was discovered later that same day, and police swiftly arrested Pi and his accompllices. The 15-year-old accomplice confessed and implicated Pi and the other man, leading to charges against them all.
He was sentenced to death in 1996. He spent over 28 years on George’s death row before his execution on March 20th, 2024 by lethal injection. Pi’s case was the first execution in Georgia in four years and drew attention due to significant mitigating factors. Pi’s attorneys filed clemency petitions and lastminute appeals arguing that he is intellectually disabled with IQ scores around 68 which would make his execution unconstitutional under Atkins versus Virginia.
They presented extensive evidence of Pi’s suba intellectual functioning and severe childhood abuse and neglect that had never been shown to his jury. In fact, three surviving jurors from Pi’s trial wrote letters supporting clemency with one stating, “I don’t want Willie Pie to die.” and expressing regret that they hadn’t heard about his intellectual disability or traumatic background at trial.
Despite this, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency on March 19th, 2024 without public explanation. Final appeals in the courts were also unsuccessful. The US Supreme Court declined to intervene on the evening of March 20th, just hours before the execution. The denial of relief for PI was controversial because executing individuals with intellectual disability is barred by Georgia law and US Supreme Court president.
Pi’s advocates pointed out that George’s uniquely high burden of proof, requiring defendants to prove intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt made it virtually impossible for him to be legally recognized as disabled. Moreover, Pi’s courtappointed trial attorney, Johnny Master, was notorious for racist attitudes toward black defendants and did almost no mitigation investigation.
The 11th Circuit even found Pi’s death sentence to be a product of ineffective lawyering before that decision was later reversed on procedural grounds. The fact that jurors and even a state expert agreed PI met criteria for intellectual disability, yet he was executed led to public concern that an unconstitutional execution took place.
This case highlighted how George’s system effectively abandoned Pi, as his clemency petition put it, by failing to present critical evidence at trial and then refusing mercy despite that failure. After the execution, civil rights groups condemned the outcome, noting that even Pi’s jurors did not want this crushingly troubled man put to death.
Freddy Owens, State, South Carolina. Method of execution, lethal injection. Freddy Eugene Owens, also known as Khalil Alla, was convicted of a November 1997 murder of Irene Graves, a convenience store clerk in Greenville, South Carolina, during an armed robbery. Owens, who was 19 at the time of the crime, received a death sentence.
He spent over two decades on death row through multiple retrials and appeals. His case had lingered in part because South Carolina had not conducted executions for 13 years. Ultimately, after the state obtained lethal injection drugs, Owens was executed by lethal injection on September 20th, 2024.
part 2 👇
In the days leading up to Owens’s execution, an extraordinary twist fueled calls for a stay. Steven Golden, Owens’s codefendant and the key witness whose testimony helped convict him, came forward and signed a sworn statement admitting he had lied at the 1999 trial. Golden, who had secured a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, now revealed that Owens was not present when the clerk was killed and that he falsely named Owens as the shooter out of fear and self-interest.
On September 18th, 2024, just 2 days before the scheduled execution, Golden stated, “I don’t want Freddy to be executed for something he didn’t do.” And said the real shooter had threatened him. Owens’s attorneys immediately filed an emergency motion to stay the execution and requested a new trial based on this recanted testimony, arguing that without Golden’s testimony, there was no credible evidence Owens committed the murder.
Despite the bombshell revelation, the South Carolina Supreme Court swiftly denied a stay of execution. In an order issued the very next day, the court refused to reconsider Owens’s case, stating that recantations are among the least reliable evidence, and noting that Owens had allegedly confessed to multiple other people decades ago.
Prosecutors claimed Owens confessed to five individuals, including law enforcement and a girlfriend, though Owens maintained his innocence in court. Governor Henry McMaster also declined to intervene even after a state senator personally urged him to delay the execution to investigate the new claims. Thus, no clemency or reprieve was granted and Owens’s execution proceeded on schedule on September 20th.
He died by lethal injection at 9:14 p.m. Still proclaiming his innocence in his final moments. Owens’s case became one of the most contentious of 2024 because of a strong possibility that South Carolina executed the wrong man. The last minute witness recantation cast serious doubt on Owens’s guilt.
Golden was the only eyewitness to implicate Owens in Graves murder. His admission that he lied on the stand decades earlier to save himself created what one juror called more than a shadow of a doubt. Critics argued the state should have at least postponed the execution to investigate who actually killed the victim. It was also noted that Owens’s trial and sentencing had other complications.
For example, Owens had a history of mental health issues and committed a violent assault in jail after his conviction, which may have influenced perceptions of him. Nonetheless, executing him despite new evidence of innocence raised alarms. There was more than a shadow of a doubt about his guilt and now the state has killed him, said the ACLU of South Carolina in a statement, calling the execution irrevocable and deeply unjust.
South Carolina’s handling of lethal injection secrecy added to the controversy as well. Owens’s execution was the first in a state in over a decade carried out under new secrecy laws that limited press observation which advocacy groups criticized as lacking transparency. Marcellus Williams state Missouri method of execution lethal injection.
Marcellus Kia Williams was convicted of the 1998 murder of Leysa Gale, a former St. Lewis Post Dispatch reporter who was stabbed to death in her home during a burglary. Williams, an African-American man, was sentenced to death in 2001 despite a notable lack of forensic evidence tying him to the crime. None of the fingerprints or DNA from the scene matched him.
For years, Williams maintained his innocence. In fact, he had twice come within days of execution in prior years only to receive temporary reprieves. In 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court granted a DNA test delay. And in 2017, Governor Eric Wrightens stayed his execution and appointed a special panel to review new DNA evidence that suggested another man’s profile on the murder weapon.
However, that special innocence review was disbanded by Greatton’s successor, Governor Mike Parson, and the case proceeded toward execution again. Williams was executed by lethal injection on September 26th, 2024 at the Bond Terara State Prison. Williams’ 2024 execution was extraordinarily controversial because even the prosecutors in his jurisdiction no longer stood by his conviction.
In January 2024, Wesley Bell, the St. Louisis County prosecuting attorney, a reform-minded Democrat, filed a motion to overturn Williams’s conviction, citing new evidence suggests that Mr. Williams is actually innocent. His filing noted that DNA testing on the murder knife repeatedly found DNA from an unknown male, not Williams, and that none of the considerable physical evidence, prints, hairs, footprints, could be linked to Williams.
Bell also highlighted constitutional concerns, pointing out that the original trial prosecutor had struck almost all black jurors. The final jury had 11 white and one black member and even admitted he removed one black juror for looking like Williams’ brother. In an unprecedented alignment, the prosecutor’s office several original jurors and the victim’s own family all supported sparing Williams’s life in light of the doubts about his guilt.
By August 2024, Williams’ lawyers and Bell’s office reached a tentative agreement. Williams would accept a life sentence, no contest plea, so that further investigation could continue without the risk of execution. A judge approved this deal, and even the victim’s family agreed to it. However, Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, intervened to block the agreement and push for execution.
Bailey, backed by Republican Governor Parson, argued that only the courts or governor could overturn the conviction, and he insisted on finality. The Missouri Supreme Court sided with the attorney general, voiding the life sentence agreement and ordering the execution to proceed. In the final days, Williams’ attorneys, joined by the St.
Lewis prosecutor’s office made urgent appeals for clemency to Governor Parson and filed last ditch stays in court to no avail. On Monday, September 23rd, Governor Parson denied Williams’s clemency petition, even though it noted that the victim’s family and three jurors supported commuting his sentence. The next day, the US Supreme Court also denied a stay of execution.
Notably, three justices dissented, an unusual sign of concern from the court’s liberal wing. Thus, all avenues of relief were shut, and Missouri executed Williams on September 26th, 2024, with the state insisting they were carrying out a lawful sentence that courts had upheld over the years. Robert Robersonson, state, Texas.
Robert Robersonson was convicted in Texas for the 2002 death of his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis. Prosecutors alleged at trial that he fatally shook the child, relying on what was then commonly known as shaken baby syndrome, SPS, to explain her brain injuries. Robersonson has always maintained his daughter died from an undiagnosed illness, pneumonia causing seizures and not abuse.
There was no visible external trauma. Nonetheless, he was sentenced to death in 2003. By 2024, Robersonson, now 57, had spent roughly two decades on death row. His case became a focal point in Texas as scientific consensus about SBS shifted. In the years since his trial, shaken baby syndrome has been widely debunked or called into question by medical experts.
It’s now seen as an area rife with wrongful convictions. Despite this, Robersonson remained under a death sentence with Texas authorities moving forward to execute him based on the original evidence. An execution date was set for October 17th, 2024. In 2024, Robersonson’s legal team and advocates launched a concerted effort to stop what would have been the first US execution premised on the disproven shaken baby theory.
His lawyers filed successive petitions to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals presenting overwhelming new medical evidence that Nikki died of natural causes, pneumonia, and that the telltale symptoms attributed to shaking were in fact misinterpreted or caused by her illness. They also highlighted Robersonson’s autism, diagnosed years after trial, which explained his unemotional demeanor seen as lack of remorse by investigators.
Meanwhile, a diverse coalition rallied behind Robersonson. 86 Texas legislators from both parties, scientists, medical professionals, and even the lead detective from his case all argued that his conviction was unsupported by modern science and should be halted. On October 11th, 2024, however, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals summarily denied Robersonson’s final state appeal.
Even though just two days prior, that same court had overturned another Shaken Baby conviction in a markedly similar case for being based on junk science. The inconsistency infuriated reform advocates. With the execution date imminent, the Texas Board of Pardons and Parrolles unanimously denied clemency for Robersonson on October 16th, offering no explanation.
The following day, even the US Supreme Court declined to stay Robersonson’s execution when his lawyers petitioned for relief, effectively greenlighting the lethal injection. At the 11th hour, a highly unusual intervention occurred. A bipartisan group in the Texas House of Representatives issued a legislative subpoena compelling Robersonson to testify before them about his case.
This maneuver created a showdown among Texas’s branches of government. Just hours before Robersonson’s scheduled execution on October 17th, the Texas Supreme Court in a civil proceeding stepped in and temporarily halted the execution, not necessarily on the merits of the innocence claim, but to resolve the conflict between the legislaturator’s subpoena and the impending execution.
Justice Evan Young wrote that executing Robersonson would mute the legislative inquiry and raise separation of powers concerns. So a stay was needed until that could be sorted out. This stay was extraordinary. It marked one of the rare instances of a state’s high court pausing an execution at the behest of lawmakers.
The Texas Attorney General, however, indicated he would seek a new execution date once the legal clash is resolved. As of the end of 2024, Robersonson remains on death row with his execution on hold. A temporary reprieve born of legislative action, not an acceptance of his innocence claim. While Roberson remains alive as 2024 ends, his fate and the willingness of Texas courts to reconsider the evidence remains uncertain, making this an ongoing flash point in the death penalty debate.
Kenneth Smith, State: Alabama. Method of execution, nitrogen hypoxia. Kenneth Eugene Smith was sentenced to death for the 1988 murder for hire of Elizabeth Senate in Alabama. Senate, a pastor’s wife, was brutally killed at the behest of her husband, who promised two men, including Smith, $1,000 each for the killing.
Notably, at Smith’s trial, the jury voted 11 to one in favor of a life sentence, but a judge overrode the jury and imposed death, a practice called judicial override that Alabama has since outlawed. This override, combined with the fact that Smith’s co-conspirator had already been executed in 2010, put Smith’s case in a controversial light even before 2024.
Smith, 58, had been on death row for over three decades. In 2022, Alabama attempted to execute him by lethal injection, but that attempt was botched. Executioners struggled for hours to set four lines, repeatedly puncturing him until the effort was called off near midnight. Smith became one of the rare inmates to survive a failed execution.
The trauma left him with physical and psychological scars diagnosed with PTSD and set the stage for an unprecedented decision by Alabama to change execution methods. Alabama officials unable to reliably establish for access in several executions turned to a new untested method, nitrogen hypoxia. In late 2023, Governor K. Ivy signed Smith’s new execution warrant specifying nitrogen gas as the means of execution, making him the first person in US history slated to be executed by this method.
Smith’s attorneys filed multiple legal challenges. First, they argued that subjecting him to a second execution attempt after the 2022 debacle would violate the eth amendment as cruel and unusual punishment, essentially amounting to torture and an illegal second punishment. Second, they contended that nitrogen asphyxiation, never before used in any execution, was a novel experiment that risked extreme pain, akin to human experimentation.
They pointed out the lack of medical consensus on how an inert gas would kill and raised specific concerns. For example, Smith feared he might vomit and aspirate while unconscious, essentially drowning in his own vomit. These arguments were presented in state and federal courts in the weeks before Smith’s execution date of January 25th, 2024.
All requests for a stay were ultimately denied. On January 10th, 2024, a federal judge upheld Alabama’s nitrogen execution protocol, and a divided 11th circuit panel also refused to stop it. Smith’s final appeal went to the US Supreme Court, which declined to intervene. In a late night order on January 24th, the Supreme Court denied Smith’s application for a stay, allowing Alabama to proceed with the nation’s first nitrogen execution.
No justice publicly dissented in that ruling, though it was noted that during the first attempted execution in 2022, three liberal justices had dissented, warning against giving Alabama a doover debt. Alabama’s governor does have clemency power, but Governor Ivy, a staunch supporter of capital punishment, did not grant any reprieve.
Thus, on January 25th, 2024, Kenneth Smith was executed by nitrogen hypoxia at Holman Correctional Facility. The first use of this method in Alabama or any other state. Richard Moore, state, South Carolina. Method of execution, lethal injection. Richard Bernard Moore was executed in South Carolina in 2024 under contentious circumstances.
His case dated back to September 1999 when Moore, who struggled with cocaine addiction, attempted to rob Nikki’s Speedy Mart in Spartanberg County. In the course of that robbery, Moore entered the store unarmed. The clerk, 42-year-old James Mahoney, pulled a gun on Moore and shot him in the arm. A scuffle ensued in which Moore rested away one of the clerk’s two guns and fatally shot Mahoney.
Moore fled with a small amount of cash and was arrested some days later. In 2001, he was convicted of murder and the jury sentenced him to death. Over the next two decades, Moore’s case underwent extensive appeals, including two re-sentencing trials. But each time, a death sentence was reaffirmed. By 2022, Moore had been on death row for over 20 years, and he notably chose the electric chair over lethal injection during a dispute when South Carolina lacked lethal injection drugs.
This was before the state obtained drugs and resumed executions. Ultimately, after South Carolina passed a secrecy law to acquire execution drugs, the state scheduled Moore’s execution for November 1st, 2024. He was executed by lethal injection at 6:24 p.m. on November 1st, 2024, becoming the second person executed in SC that year after Owens.
As Moore’s execution date approached, his lawyers and supporters mounted a strong clemency campaign. They argued that Moore’s case was not the type of worst of the worst murder typically deserving of the death penalty. Key figures who knew the case took Moore’s side. two jurors from his original trial, the judge who presided over that trial, and even the former director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, John Osmond, all publicly petitioned Governor Henry McMaster for clemency.
They pointed out that Moore had a clean, disciplinary record in prison, had expressed profound remorse, and had rehabilitated himself over 23 years. Osmint, a former prosecutor and prison chief, stated that objectively reviewed, Richard’s crime would never have been considered for the death penalty in most counties in our state, noting that many other killers with far more heinous crimes were serving life sentences.
In fact, he and others highlighted a notorious Spartanberg case of a serial killer, Todd Coh, who received a life sentence to illustrate the arbitrariness of Moore’s death sentence. Moore’s clemency petition emphasized these disparities and also reminded officials that prosecutors at Moore’s trial had struck every eligible black juror from the pool, raising issues of racial bias in his sentencing.
Moore is black and his jury ended up all white. One prosecutor later made a racially charged comment that a potential black juror looked like Moore’s brother. Additionally, South Carolina Supreme Court Justice Kay Hearn had previously written that Richard Moore will be put to death for a sentence that I do not believe is legal, underscoring that under today’s laws and standards, Moore likely wouldn’t face execution.
Despite these appeals, on the day of execution, Governor McMaster formally denied clemency. In a statement, McMaster said he had reviewed trial transcripts, court decisions, and spoken with the victim’s family and saw no reason to overturn the jury’s decision. It’s worth noting that no South Carolina governor has granted clemency in a capital case in over 30 years, spanning 40 plus executions.
So, Moore’s last hope was always slim. The courts also did not step in. The US Supreme Court turned down Moore’s final petitions. South Carolina’s own courts had earlier cleared the way for executions to resume by resolving method of execution challenges. So there were no outstanding legal stays. Moore had opted for lethal injection over electrocution or firing squad, which under a new state law were alternatives, and the execution proceeded routinely once the governor said clemency was off the table. Lauren Cole, State Florida.
Method of execution, lethal injection. Lauren Cole was executed in Florida in 2024 after a quarter century on death row under circumstances that made his case especially emotionally charged. In 1995, Cole was convicted of a horrific crime. The kidnapping of two college students, brother and sister, John and Grace Asterisk Edwards, who were camping in the Ocala National Forest, the rape of the sister, and the murder of the brother in 1994.
The crime was brutal, and Cole, then 18, received the death penalty for the murder. Cole’s background, however, included severe trauma that would only fully come to light much later. As a juvenile, Cole had been sent to the notorious Arthur G. Doer school for boys in Florida, a reformed school later exposed as a site of rampant abuse, torture, and even unexplained child deaths spanning decades.
Cole’s experiences at Doure in the 1980s were nothing short of nightmarish. He was raped by a guard, beaten frequently, having his legs broken during one escape attempt, and left deeply scarred psychologically. Much of this history was suppressed at his trial. Cole himself had repressed many of the memories until years later. Fast forward to 2023 to 2024.
Florida’s government formally acknowledged the atrocities at Doure. In June 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill granting financial compensation to Doure victims and apologizing for the state’s role in their abuse. Yet, ironically, on July 29th, 2024, Governor DeSantis signed Cole’s death warrant, scheduling his execution for August 29th, 2024.
This was Florida’s first execution warrant of 2024 after a 10-month pause while Dantis ran for president. Cole was 57 at the time. In the month before the execution, Cole’s attorneys launched appeals focusing on two main issues. one, the newly recognized Doure school abuse evidence, and two, Kohl’s health condition, Parkinson’s disease, that could make lethal injection torturous.
They argued that Florida bore responsibility for having facilitated and inflicted horrific abuse on Cole during his youth at a state institution, and that this mitigating evidence had never been considered by a jury. If jurors had known, the lawyers argued, “There is a reasonable probability Cole would have been spared the death penalty.
” The timing of the governor’s warrant just a month after compensating other Doure victims was highlighted to underscore the injustice of executing Cole without reckoning with what the state had done to him. Separately, Cole’s team contended that his Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative neurological disorder, would likely cause him to suffer intense pain or a botched execution under Florida’s lethal injection protocol.
They presented medical opinions that Parkinson’s could cause involuntary tremors and movements, making it hard to place for lines, risking another botched for scenario, and that the disease’s effects might interact poorly with the lethal drugs, causing needless pain and suffering. Based on these claims, Cole sought an evidentiary hearing and a stay of execution.
The Florida Supreme Court, however, rejected Cole’s appeals. On August 23rd, 2024, the state high court denied relief, ruling that the abuse evidence was not sufficiently new. They said Cole had mentioned DOER abuse in prior appeals, albeit without the state’s recent acknowledgement, and that it probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
They also were unpersuaded by the Parkinson’s argument, effectively brushing it aside without a detailed hearing. The US Supreme Court was also petitioned. On the morning of the execution, August 29th, the Supreme Court refused to stay Cole’s execution. Governor Dantis, wielding sole clemency power in Florida, did not grant clemency.
Indeed, Dantis had never granted clemency to any death row prisoner and was not expected to, especially while positioning himself as tough on crime. Thus, all stays were denied and Lauren Cole was executed by lethal injection at 6:13 p.m. on August 29th, 2024 at Florida State Prison. The above cases from 2024 illustrate the range of controversies that can surround death penalty proceedings, from claims of actual innocence and discredited evidence to severe mental impairments and childhood trauma to unprecedented execution methods. In each instance,
appeals for relief were denied despite significant public and legal protest. These stories fueled ongoing debates about the fairness and humanity of a death penalty. They highlight how final decisions by governors, pardons boards, and courts can carry life and death consequences even in the face of lingering doubts or changing societal standards.
2024 proved to be a year that tested the limits of the justice system’s willingness to reconsider or show mercy in capital cases, leaving a legacy of questions and calls for reform that will persist in the years to come.
