News and Updates

DRAPER, Utah (AP) — A death row inmate who had used a gun to fatally shoot two men suffered the same fate Friday morning as he was executed by a team of marksmen — the first time Utah used the firing squad to carry out a death sentence in 14 years.

A barrage of bullets tore into Ronnie Lee Gardner's chest where a target was pinned over his heart. Two minutes later an ashen Gardner, blood pooling in his dark blue jumpsuit, was pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m.

FILE - In this Thursday, June 10, 2010 picture, Ronnie Lee Gardner listens to proceedings during his commutation hearing at the Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah. Gardner is scheduled to be executed by firing squad at midnight on June 18, 2010. (AP Photo/Trent Nelson, Pool)

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that, under extraordinary circumstances, courts should accept death row appeals even after a one-year statute of limitations has expired.

Washington —

The US Supreme Court has made it easier for some death row inmates to overcome a one-year statute of limitations for filing a federal appeal of their capital sentence.

The high court ruled 7 to 2 on Monday that under certain extraordinary circumstances courts should allow an appeal to be filed even after the one-year deadline has expired.

The decision came in the case of Florida death row inmate Albert Holland, who lost his right to file a federal appeal of his death sentence when his lawyer missed the one-year deadline established under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA).

As Capital Punishment Is Used Less Often, Arguments Persist Over its Validity - and Death Row Inmates Continue to Wait

Credit: AP Photo

The chair where Ronnie Lee Gardner will be strapped, facing a firing squad, in the execution chamber in Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, Utah. He would be the third person executed by firing squad in the U.S. since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

(CBS)  When it comes to issues of CRIME and PUNISHMENT, the stakes are never higher than when the crime is murder, and the punishment is death. Opinion about capital punishment is sharply divided in the United States, and the debate is playing out right now in two very different Death Row cases. Seth Doane reports our Cover Story:

Ronnie Lee Gardner deserves to die: So say the people of Utah, where he killed a bartender in cold blood, then murdered an attorney during an escape attempt.

Gaile Owens also faces death, in Tennessee on September 28, for hiring someone to kill her husband in 1985.

This story was reported by Rachel Cicurel, Gaby Fleischman, Emily Glazer, and Alexandra Johnson.

In March 1995, a jury left a Fort Worth, Texas, courthouse having unanimously decided that DNA testing and compelling testimony led to an inescapable verdict: Henry "Hank" Skinner deserved to die for the murders of his live-in girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two adult sons in their home on New Year's Eve 1993.

Twila was bludgeoned to death; her sons were stabbed. The jury primarily based its decision on evidence that showed the victims' blood on Skinner's clothes and the testimony of a neighbor. They deliberated for less than two hours, and Skinner has been on Texas' death row ever since.