South Carolina killer eats fried fish, fried shrimp, crab cakes, a baked potato, carrots, fried okra, cherry pie, banana pudding and sweet tea before execution

 The 23rd Execution of 2025

Stephen Stanko, a South Carolina man sent to death row twice for separate murders was put to death June 13, 2025 by lethal injection in the state’s sixth execution in nine months, reported The Associated Press.

Stanko, 57, was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m.

He was executed for shooting a friend and then cleaning out his bank account in Horry County in 2005.

Stanko also was serving a death sentence for killing his live-in girlfriend in her Georgetown County home hours earlier, strangling her as he raped her teenage daughter. Stanko slit the teen’s throat, but she survived.

The execution began after a 3 1/2 minute final statement where Stanko apologized to his victims and asked not to be judged by the worst day of his life. Witnesses could hear prison officials asking for the first dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital which was different from previous executions.

Stanko appeared to be saying words, turned toward the families of the victims and then let out several quick breaths as his lips quivered.

Stanko appeared to stop breathing after a minute. His ruddy complexion quickly disappeared and the color drained from his face and hands. A prison employee asked for a second dose of pentobarbital about 13 minutes later. He was announced dead about 28 minutes after the execution started.

Three family members of his victims stared at Stanko and didn’t look away until well after he stopped breathing. Stanko’s brother and his lawyer also watched. Attorney Lindsey Vann, who watched her second inmate client die in seven months rubbed rosary beads in her hands.

Stanko was leaning toward dying by South Carolina’s new firing squad, like the past two inmates before him. But after autopsy results from the last inmate killed by that method showed the bullets from the three volunteers nearly missed his heart, Stanko went with lethal injection.

Stanko was the last of four executions scheduled around the country this week. Florida and Alabama each put an inmate to death on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Oklahoma executed a man transferred from federal to state custody to allow his death

The federal courts rejected Stanko’s last-ditch effort to spare his life as his lawyers argued the state isn’t carrying out lethal injection properly after autopsy results found fluid in the lungs of other inmates killed that way.

Also South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster refused clemency in a phone call to prison officials minutes before the execution began.

A governor has not spared a death row inmate’s life in the previous 48 executions since South Carolina reinstated the death penalty about 50 years ago.

Stanko is the sixth inmate executed in South Carolina in nine months after the state went 13 years without putting an inmate to death because it could not obtain lethal injection drugs. The South Carolina General Assembly approved a firing squad and passed a shield law bill which allowed the suppliers of the drugs to stay secret.

In his final statement, Stanko talked about how he was an honor student and athlete and a volunteers and asked several times not to be judged by the night he killed two people.

“I have live for approximately 20,973 days, but I am judged solely for one,” Stanko said in his final statement read by his lawyer.

Stanko apologized several times to his victims and their families.

“Once I am gone, I hope that Christina, Laura’s family and Henry’s family can all forgive me. The execution may help them. Forgiveness will heal them.”

Stanko ate his last meal on Wednesday as prison officials give inmates a chance to enjoy their special food before their execution day. He ate fried fish, fried shrimp, crab cakes, a baked potato, carrots, fried okra, cherry pie, banana pudding and sweet tea.

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Bunch: 'Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization'

 Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: 

One can’t help but wonder if Braxton Bragg — the infamous and incompetent Confederate general who owned 105 enslaved African Americans, waged war on Mexicans, and was so awful his own troops tried to assassinate him ... twice — was looking up from his fiery eternity and smiling.

Nearly 149 years after Bragg’s death — and four months after a U-turn that involved a juvenile ploy to reattach this traitor’s name to the sprawling U.S. Army base in his native North Carolina — here came the 47th president of the nation that trounced Bragg up and down the Civil War battlefield. Yet, on Tuesday, Donald Trump all but promised a sea of beret-wearing soldiers a return to Confederate values, under a large banner that read, “THIS WE’LL DEFEND.”

The insurrectionist Bragg surely would have been heartened when Trump used his powerful platform to rally an entire army against democratically elected public officials like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — and when the uniformed troops of a once proudly apolitical U.S. Army answered with thunderous applause.

Like everything else about Trump’s strongman regime, the cheers had been manufactured. Military.com later reported that the chiseled forces of the storied 82nd Airborne Division behind Trump’s podium had been picked, in part, for their right-wing political views and also — according to one email obtained by the news site — to satisfy our allegedly 224-pound (lol) president with “no fat soldiers.” (Yes, Trump’s Tinder ad for his dream-date U.S. soldier essentially read, “No fatties.”)

“If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” read another email. No wonder Trump’s audience not only laughed and cheered at ugly diatribes against their prior commander in chief, Joe Biden, and a free press, but also lined up for a vendor who was somehow allowed into Fort Bragg to sell items such as “Make America Great Again” chain necklaces and phony credit cards labeled “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything.”

This we’ll defend?

It’s not an exaggeration to say that June 10, 2025, will go down in American history as a day of infamy, when an authoritarian president made clear that the world’s largest and most lethal fighting force now exists to enforce his personalist political agenda, and not to defend the nation’s people.

And it’s no surprise that Trump’s harshest critics came from the outraged ranks of patriotic veterans like Hurricane Katrina relief hero and retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who called the “damn” speech “inappropriate” in a tweet, adding that “I never witnessed that S..t [sic] like this in 37 years in Uniform.”

But while Trump’s blatant politicizing of the U.S. military was a horrific crime against democracy in its own right, this fateful moment did not occur in a vacuum.

Although the ostensible purpose of the Fort Bragg speech was to kick off the 250th birthday party for a U.S. Army launched in 1775 to oppose (irony alert) a cruel and arbitrary monarch, the real mission seemed to celebrate the two-day anniversary of Trump’s crossing-the-Rubicon decision to federalize the National Guard and call out Marines on the American soil of Los Angeles.

Under legal justifications that seemed invented from whole cloth, the California National Guard operation that Trump now commands against the will of Newsom — whose state is suing the regime — to quell protests against federal immigration raids that the White House falsely calls “an insurrection” is already seeing heavily armed troops detaining LA residents.

The added call-up of 700 Marines — troops trained not to enforce public safety but to kill people — is making clear that an increasingly botched American Experiment is entering a terrifying new phase in which the might of our grossly oversized military is deployed to silence domestic dissent.

The shocking video this week of a train carrying scores of Army M1-A1 Abrams tanks past the Washington Monument and into the center of Washington, D.C., where a 250th Army anniversary parade on Saturday night coincidentally falls on Trump’s 79th birthday, makes clear the real point: Trump has been planning a military junta style of undemocratic government from Day One.

This week, Rolling Stone reported that the military is likely to remain on the streets of LA for weeks, accompanying agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they increase raids on Home Depots, car washes, and farms to meet the regime’s arbitrary mass deportation goal of one million migrant arrests this year. A source told the magazine that “it is hard to imagine that protesters would stay home for this, and that escalation in such a scenario is all but inevitable.”

And yet, it’s disturbing the extent to which even smart and good pro-democracy politicians and pundits still aren’t seeing this. Wednesday night, I heard Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin — fresh off a well-deserved grilling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Capitol Hill — go on MSNBC and still insist that Trump sending in the Marines in Southern California is “a distraction” from his failed economic policies.

No.

This is not a distraction from the essence of the 47th presidency. This is rather what Trump’s MAGA movement was always all about, imposing his will on the divided nation that just barely elected him in November as the kind of “red Caesar” dictator that extreme-right “thought leaders” have been pleading for, and using brute force to get there.

A president whose disastrous first term ended with a violent attempted coup to block the peaceful transfer of power is now moving quickly in his second term to consolidate power, to accomplish the form of autocracy he sought on Jan. 6, 2021.

What we are watching this week, from the chaos in downtown LA to the Mussolini-like strutting at Fort Bragg to the soon-to-be-pothole-ravaged streets of D.C., is nothing less than Trump’s second attempted self-coup against the United States. And this one offers a much greater chance of success, unless the resistance mobilizes quickly.

It’s true that — as the brilliant New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and others have noted — Trump and his henchmen, like anti-immigrant guru Stephen Miller, are making their move now less because he is a strongman, and more because his nearly five months in office have revealed him as a weak man.

His “Big Beautiful Bill” that would devastate U.S. healthcare and other public goods is not surprisingly foundering in Congress. Scores of judges — some appointed by Trump in his first term — are striking down his worst dictatorial moves. Most importantly, the president’s public support is plunging rapidly toward Nixonian levels, with a new Quinnipiac Poll showing 56% of Americans oppose his mass deportation, while his overall approval has sunk to 38%.

What would Chairman Mao or Comrade Lenin do? The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, an expert on authoritarianism, nailed it in her latest essay: “Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors. Give up — or radicalize. Find compromise — or polarize society further. Slow down — or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to promote violence.”

What’s happening in Los Angeles is bad, but it’s only the beginning. It was reported this week that ICE is planning to send militarized “tactical units” into Democratic-run cities, including Philadelphia — as well as Chicago, New York, Seattle, and northern Virginia. It’s noteworthy that the Trump regime’s open-ended orders federalizing National Guard members in California weren’t limited to the Golden State, suggesting that we could see armed troops patrolling past Independence Hall sooner rather than later.

With all the scary stuff that’s happening right now, arguably the most alarming is the Trump regime’s efforts — amplified by the predictable Fox News tape reels of the few cars that burned last weekend in LA — to claim that any form of dissent is now a terrorist threat against “the homeland.” From the Oval Office, the president said of the D.C. tank parade: “If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force.”

Not rioters. Not looters. Protesters. American citizens exercising their First Amendment right to air their grievances with the government and voice dissent would be greeted in the nation’s capital with tanks, just as happened in Tiananmen Square 36 years ago this month.

This is a 10-alarm fire for American democracy that screams out for action.

As it happens, there is a protest slated for Saturday — a huge one. It’s called, beyond fittingly, No Kings, and marches and rallies are now planned for more than 1,800 cities, state capitals, and small towns in all 50 states. Everywhere except Trump’s childish D.C. birthday party in Washington. If you are able to attend No Kings and rekindle the spirit that threw off one monarchy here in Philly in 1776, I’d urge you to do so.

A general who once fought to defend a tyrannical regime of slavery predicted in 1861, “We shall show you that we are stronger than you, and that we will beat you in the long run.” That was, of course, Braxton Bragg, on his buffoonish journey toward the dustbin of history. The most important thing about reactionary movements and the dictators who lead them is that they fail.

Donald Trump’s second coup will fail, too — but only after we the people make clear that this will not stand.

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LAW & CRIME: Trump’s deployment of military to the streets of Los Angeles exceeds his presidential authority

Matthew T. Mangino
LAW & CRIME
June 14, 2025

President Donald Trump’s deployment of nearly 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles has exceeded the legal limits of how the military can be used to enforce domestic laws in American cities.

The Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, intends to prove that in a court of law. The state has filed a lawsuit alleging, “President Trump has repeatedly invoked emergency powers to exceed the bounds of lawful executive authority.”

“On Saturday, June 7, he used a protest that local authorities had under control to make another unprecedented power grab, this time at the cost of the sovereignty of the state of California and in disregard of the authority and role of the Governor as commander-in-chief of the state’s National Guard,” says the complaint, which was filed in federal court.

U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer agreed. Breyer, a Bill Clinton appointee who also happens to be the brother of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, declared that Trump’s “actions were illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” and ordered control of the National Guard returned to Newsom. The order was supposed to take effect Friday at noon, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court granted an administrative stay late Thursday night, pausing — at least temporarily — Breyer’s order.

What this lawsuit comes down to is the Insurrection Act versus the Posse Comitatus Act. One act is more than 200 years old and the other, nearly a century and a half.

The Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, authorizes the president to deploy military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion, invasion or to enforce federal law in certain situations. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878, was put in place to ensure that the federal military would not be used to intervene in the establishment of Jim Crow laws in the former Confederacy after Reconstruction. The overarching principle of the Act is to prevent the military from interfering in the affairs of civilian government.

When it comes to the Insurrection Act, troops can be deployed under several sections of the law. The statute’s requirements are not clearly defined, leaving some aspects of the law to the discretion of the president. One provision provides that the president can send in troops at a governor’s request. A second provision provides the president with the authority to deploy troops to “enforce the laws” of the United States or to “suppress rebellion” whenever unlawful obstructions make it difficult to enforce federal law — even against the state’s wishes.

A third provision provides if anyone in a state is being deprived of a constitutional right and state authorities are unable or unwilling to protect that right — think Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy following Brown v. Board of Education — the president can deploy troops.

“He [Trump] is declaring utterly bogus emergencies for the sake of trying to expand his power, undermine the Constitution and destroy civil liberties,” Ilya Somin, a libertarian professor at Antonin Scalia Law School, told the New York Times.

Now let’s juxtapose the Insurrection Act with the Posse Comitatus Act. The Posse Comitatus Act consists of just one sentence: “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

In practice, this means that members of the military who are subject to the law may not participate in civilian law enforcement unless doing so is expressly authorized by a statute or the Constitution. Supposedly that statute would be the Insurrection Act — but clearly there is no insurrection or rebellion, and Trump has said as much.

Here is Trump’s rationale, straight from a June 7 White House memo:

In light of these incidents and credible threats of continued violence, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property.

Section 12406 provides that the President may active the National Guard if the country” is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign country”; there is a “rebellion or danger of rebellion”; or the president is unable with regular forces “to execute the laws of the United States.” None of those circumstances exist, and even if one did, Section 12046 concludes with, “Orders for these purposes shall be issued through the governors of the States …

The White House is violating, in the most blatant way, the United State Constitution. But why? The New York Times suggests, after talking with various experts that the “real purpose, they worry, may be to amass more power over blue states that have resisted Trump’s deportation agenda. And the effect, whether intentional or not, may be to inflame the tensions in L.A., potentially leading to a vicious cycle in which Trump calls up even more troops or broadens their mission.”

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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Man executed in Oklahoma for murder of 77-year-old woman

 The 22nd Execution of 2025

John Fitzgerald Hanson, 61, was executed for the 1999 murder of a 77-year-old woman. He pronounced dead at 10:11 a.m. Thursday, June 12, 2025 at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. "Peace to everyone," he said at the end of his last words while strapped to the execution gurney, reported The Oklahoman.

He had been scheduled for execution on Dec. 15, 2022, but the Biden administration refused to return him to Oklahoma from a federal prison in Louisiana. The transfer went through on March 1, weeks after Trump began his second term.

He was executed for the fatal shooting of Mary Agnes Bowles, who was kidnapped from the parking lot of a Tulsa mall on Aug. 31, 1999. The victim was 77.

Hanson and an accomplice, Victor Miller, wanted the retired banker's car for a robbery spree. Hanson has always denied being the shooter, his attorneys said.

Hanson had been serving a life sentence, plus 82 years, at the U.S. Penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana, for federal crimes involving the robbery spree. Oklahoma's attorney general, Gentner Drummond, sought Hanson's transfer after Trump issued a sweeping executive order on his first day back in office "restoring" the death penalty.

Hanson was executed in Oklahoma as a direct result of President Donald Trump's return to office, reported The Oklahoman.

"It is the policy of the United States to ensure that the laws that authorize capital punishment are respected and faithfully implemented, and to counteract the politicians and judges who subvert the law by obstructing and preventing the execution of capital sentences," Trump stated in his order.

President Joe Biden opposed the death penalty. In December, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row.

“This case demonstrates that no matter how long it takes, Oklahoma will hold murderers accountable for their crimes," Drummond said in a news release after witnessing the execution. 

One of the inmate's attorneys said after the execution that Oklahoma had carried out an act of pointless cruelty.

"There was no need for Oklahoma to execute John Hanson," attorney Callie Heller said in a news release. "He would have lived the rest of his life in federal prison, costing the state nothing and posing no danger to anyone."

The execution took only 10 minutes to complete after Hanson made his brief final statement. It was the 17th in Oklahoma since lethal injections resumed in October 2021 after a long hiatus and one of the fastest.

It also was the third in the United States this week. A fourth execution is scheduled for Friday, June 13, in South Carolina.

Hanson blinked rapidly as the curtain to the execution chamber was raised at 10 a.m. He then said either "just forgive me" or "just forgiveness" when asked if he had any last words. Media witnesses differed on what he said at first because he spoke in a low voice.

A spiritual adviser, pastor Michael Scott, stood by the inmate's feet and read from a Bible as the execution drugs began to flow into his arms. Hanson could be heard snoring when the Oklahoma Department of Corrections operations chief announced he was unconscious.

Who was Mary Bowles?

The retired banker was from Tulsa. She was kidnapped after walking at the Promenade Mall for exercise. She had done volunteer work earlier that day at a Tulsa hospital in the intensive care unit for babies.

The two men took her in her car to a dirt pit near Owasso.

There, the accomplice shot Jerald Thurman, the owner of the dirt pit, after he spotted them on his property, according to trial testimony. Thurman died about two weeks later.

Hanson shot Bowles four to six times in a ditch near the dirt pit. Her body wasn't found for days.

The stolen Buick broke down after the two men went to a motel in Tulsa. They abandoned the car there.

Hanson also was convicted of the dirt pit owner's murder and sentenced for that crime to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The accomplice, Miller, was given life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murders after death sentences were thrown out on appeal. He is now 62.

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 on May 7 to deny Hanson clemency. The vote meant Gov. Kevin Stitt could not consider commuting his sentence.

At his clemency hearing, he told the board members he was not an evil person.

"I haven't lived my life inclined to do wrong," he said. "I was caught in a situation I couldn't control. Things were happening so fast, and at the spur of the moment, due to my lack of decisiveness and fear, I responded incorrectly, and two people lost their lives.

"I can't change the past, and I would if I could."

His attorneys and death penalty opponents said he was autistic and easily manipulated. His attorneys also contended there was overwhelming evidence that the accomplice was the one who actually shot Bowles.

Hanson did not testify at his 2001 trial in Tulsa County District Court. He also did not testify at a 2006 resentencing trial.

More: 'A remarkable development': States expanding their execution methods to firing squad, more

His attorneys tried to stop his execution, complaining in lawsuits about his transfer to Oklahoma and his clemency hearing. They also made a last-minute claim of newly discovered evidence about a key prosecution witness.

An Oklahoma County judge granted Hanson a temporary stay on Monday, June 9, so his lawsuit over his clemency hearing could be considered. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Wednesday, June 11, the judge did not have that authority.

The execution went forward after the Oklahoma Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court denied Hanson's last requests for emergency stays.

"I feel like now we can finally be at peace with this," said Jacob Thurman, the dirt pit owner's son, after witnessing the execution. "I feel like we have some closure and our families can pick up the pieces now and move forward."

The son, who lives in Tulsa, said it took an army of people to make the execution happen. He specifically thanked U.S Attorney General Pam Bondi, who ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to transfer Hanson "so that Oklahoma can carry out this just sentence."

Bowles' niece, Sara Parker Mooney, called for reforms after witnessing the execution.

"Capital punishment is not an effective form of justice when it takes 26 years," said Mooney, who lives in Texas. "Respectfully, if the state is going to continue to execute individuals a better process is needed. This existing process is broken.

"There must be limitations on taxpayer-funded frivolous litigation as exemplified in the past two weeks. It's ridiculous, it's expensive and it only revictimizes the survivors."

She said she is relieved that the execution is over with. "But nobody wins," she said.

Hanson did not request anything specific for his last meal, said Steven Harpe, the executive director of the Corrections Department.

Hanson did eat the regular meal of a chicken pot pie, two fruit cups, two rolls and some carrots, the official said. Hanson declined a sedative.

Witnessing the execution were reporters for The Oklahoman, The Associated Press, the Tulsa World, a Tulsa television station and the online news site NonDoc.

The execution came as corrections officials are still dealing with damage from a tornado that struck Saturday, June 7. The entrance for executions at the penitentiary had boards up where the storm destroyed windows.

The roof of the warden's mansion is sagging where a massive tree fell into it. The mansion was already under renovation.

The storm downed trees across McAlester and knocked a wall off one brick building. The street in front of the building was still closed Thursday.

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Florida executes man for raping and killing a young woman in 1994

 The 21st Execution of 2025

Anthony Wainwright, 54 convicted of raping and killing a woman three decades ago after kidnapping her from a supermarket parking lot was executed  on June 10, 2025 in Florida. The execution was the second of the day, reported NBC News.

Wainwright received a lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was convicted in the April 1994 killing of 23-year-old Carmen Gayheart, a mother of two young children, in Lake City.

The execution began about 6:10 p.m. Wainwright’s shoulders shuddered a couple of times, and he blinked and took several deep breaths before becoming completely still at 6:14 p.m.

Wainwright was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m., according to Byran Griffin, a spokesman for Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Wainwright made a final statement, but the words were inaudible from the witness room.

He is the sixth person put to death in Florida this year, and another execution is scheduled for later this month. The state executed six people in 2023, but only carried out one execution last year. There were four executions scheduled around the country this week, including another one on Tuesday in Alabama. A temporary stay was issued Monday for an execution scheduled for Thursday in Oklahoma.

Richard Hamilton, the other man convicted in Gayheart’s killing, was also sentenced to death. But he died on death row in January 2023 at the age of 59.

Gayheart’s sister said before the execution that three decades is too long to wait for justice.

“It’s ridiculous how many appeals they get,” Maria David told The Associated Press, adding that each step of the appeals process reopened her family’s wounds. “You have to relive it again because they have to tell the whole story again.”

Wainwright and Hamilton escaped from prison in North Carolina, stole a green Cadillac and burglarized a home the next morning, taking guns and money. Then they drove to Florida and when the Cadillac began to have problems in Lake City, they decided to steal another vehicle.

They confronted Gayheart, a community college student, on April 27, 1994, as she loaded groceries into her blue Ford Bronco, according to court documents. They forced her into the vehicle at gunpoint and drove off. They raped her in the backseat and then took her out of the vehicle and tried to strangle her before shooting her twice in the back of the head, court filings say. They dragged her body several dozen yards from the road and drove off.

The two men were arrested in Mississippi the next day after a shootout with police.

A jury in 1995 convicted Wainwright of murder, kidnapping, robbery and rape and unanimously recommended that he be sentenced to death.

Wainwright’s lawyers had filed multiple unsuccessful appeals over the years based on what they said were problems with his trial and evidence that he suffered from brain damage and intellectual disability.

Once his execution was scheduled, his lawyers argued in state and federal court filings that his execution should be put on hold to allow time for courts to hear additional legal arguments in his case.

In a filing with the U.S. Supreme Court, his lawyers argued that his case was “marred by critical, systemic failures at virtually every stage and through the signing of his death warrant.” Those failures include flawed DNA evidence that wasn’t disclosed to the defense until after opening statements, erroneous jury instructions, inflammatory and inaccurate closing arguments and missteps by court-appointed lawyers, the filing says.

The filing also said that a jailhouse informant who testified at Wainwright’s trial finally admitted last month that he and another informant had testified in exchange for lighter sentences, a fact that had not been disclosed to the defense.

The Supreme Court on Monday denied Wainwright’s several of his final appeals without comment.

His lawyers filed a last-minute effort to seek a stay of execution Tuesday morning, focusing on claims that he was improperly barred from hiring a lawyer of his choice under state law. The high court denied his request in the evening.

David, Gayheart’s sister, said she felt cheated that Hamilton died before the state could execute him.

She said she was “overcome with emotion” when she heard the governor had signed a death warrant for Wainwright. Her parents both died while waiting for justice to be served, she said.

“There’s nothing that would keep me from seeing this all the way through,” she said.

Her sister loved animals and surprised her by training to become a nurse rather than a veterinarian, David said. Gayheart was two years younger than her sister but became a mother first, and David said she marveled at her sister’s patience with her young children.

“She was here, she mattered, she should be remembered, and she was loved,” David said of her sister.

Over the years, she has kept a book where she put every court filing, from the initial indictment through the latest appeals.

“I’m looking forward to getting the last pieces of paperwork that say he’s been executed to put into the book and never having to think about Anthony Wainwright ever again,” David said.

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Alabama executes man by nitrogen hypoxia for 1988 murder

The  20th Execution of 2025

The state of Alabama has executed Gregory Hunt by nitrogen hypoxia for the 1988 murder of Karen Lane, reported Montgomery Advertiser.

A doctor pronounced Hunt to dead at 6:26 p.m. June 10, 2025. His death marked Alabama's third execution of the year.

Overall, Hunt is the fifth person to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama. The state executed its first inmate by nitrogen hypoxia in 2024. Across the globe, organizations, including the Vatican, have protested the use of nitrogen hypoxia in execution, calling it cruel and unusual punishment.

Execution timeline

In the execution chamber, there is a digital clock, but the seconds are not visible. The following times are approximate.

5:52 p.m. The curtains to the death chamber were opened. Hunt was wrapped in a white sheet and strapped to a gurney. A mask was affixed to his face.

5:54 p.m. Hunt declined to give any last words. He made what appeared to be a peace sign with his left hand.

5:56 p.m. Hunt began taking deep breaths.

5:57 p.m. He began gasping and lifted his head. His entire body began convulsing.

5:59 p.m. Hunt turned his head and then lifted his head. Hunt's head fell back, and he groaned loudly.

6 p.m. Hunt moved his head and gasped. He continued intermittently gasping for the next several minutes.

6:04 p.m. Hunt appeared to take his last breath.

6:19 p.m. Hunt had remained still for the past 15 minutes. His left fist remained clenched. The curtains to the death chamber were closed.

Victim's family: 'End of a nightmare'

John Hamm, the Alabama Department of Corrections commissioner, defended nitrogen hypoxia as a humane way to execute people in Alabama.

Hamm said that five of Lane's family members witnessed the execution, and Hamm read a statement from her family.

"... Make no mistake, this night is not about the life of Greg Hunt," the family said in the statement. "This night is about the horrific death of Karen Sanders Lane, whose life was so savagely taken from her. Karen was shown no mercy. She was not given a second chance. Karen was shown no grace. This is also not about closure or victory. This night represents justice and the end of a nightmare that has coursed through our family for 37 long years."

Gov. Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall released statements in support of Lane and her family.

“Decades ago, Karen Lane, at only 32 years old, experienced unimaginable final hours of her young life," Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement. "Tonight, the state carried out the lawfully imposed punishment for Gregory Hunt, who is undeniably guilty.

"And after his last-minute attempts to evade justice, he has faced the consequences of his evil crimes against Karen Lane, actions he has admitted to, even in a letter to the victim’s heartbroken father. Alabama stands with Karen Lane, and we pray her loved ones can finally find peace and closure.”

Marshall called Hunt's execution long overdue and expressed his confidence in Hunt's guilt.

“Karen deserves more than silence," Marshall said in a statement. "She deserves to be remembered for who she was, and yet some have made this case about her killer, barely mentioning her name. That is not justice. That is a disgrace. Karen Lane was a daughter and a sister. She was a human being. And tonight, we honor her by speaking the truth and by refusing to let it be buried under political theater.”

On the day of Hunt's execution, he was visited by two of his attorneys. He ate a breakfast of biscuits, eggs, oatmeal and fruit punch and a lunch of bologna, carrots, black-eyed peas, a roll, rice and gravy and fruit punch. Hunt refused a dinner and did not request any special items.

He had no phone calls June 10 and had no witnesses to his death.

More: James Osgood Execution Alabama executes James Osgood for 2010 rape and murder

The death of Karen Lane

Hunt beat Lane to death Aug. 2, 1988 in her home in Cordova. He was charged with sexual abuse, burglary and capital murder.

Hunt admitted murdering Lane but denied that he sexually abused her, even filing a final appeal May 23, claiming he did not sexually abuse Lane. The appeal requested a stay in his execution to allow the court time to process his argument.

Court documents show Hunt beat Lane with his hands, feet and a bar stool. She had 62 individual external injuries to her body. Internally, Lane had more than 20 fractures to her ribs and rib cage, a broken sternum, a lacerated liver and injuries to her aorta.

She died of blunt force trauma and bruising of the brain.

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CREATORS: Prosecuting Parents for Unsafe Sleep Environments

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
June 9, 2025

Every year in this country over 4,500 babies die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Children's Hospital of Philadelphia defines SIDS as "the sudden and unexplained death of an infant under one year of age." SIDS is one of the leading causes of death in babies from 1 month to 1 year of age. It seems to plague otherwise healthy infants, usually during sleep time.

Several states have infant safe sleep laws. In Pennsylvania, the legislature enacted a specific law requiring parents to follow the sleep recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The law provides, "Infants shall be placed in the sleeping position recommended by the AAP." In 1992, the AAP recommended, "Infants should be placed in the supine position for every sleep until the child reaches 1 year of age."

During a 2007 committee hearing on the proposed Pennsylvania legislation, Eileen Carlins, the Director of Support and Education for SIDS of Pennsylvania, told legislators, "Over and over in my job I keep hearing the same thing, they didn't know, they didn't know."

In an effort to educate new parents, the law requires hospitals, birthing centers and health care practitioners to provide educational materials, then ask the parents to sign off on a certification that they received the information.

Delaware, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Colorado have similar laws, but Pennsylvania has taken it a step further. The state is prosecuting parents for failure to provide safe sleep environments. There has been prosecution of parents in other states like Virginia and Indiana for accidental suffocations and "overlays" where a parent sleeps next to an infant and rolls onto the infant, causing death by suffocation.

According to a recent article in Spotlight PA, a nonpartisan investigative journalism website, two sets of Pennsylvania parents face felony charges after police say their infants died while in "unsafe" sleep positions.

While experts and family advocates agree babies should sleep on their backs without anything in the crib, should simply failing to follow the recommendations amount to murder-three or involuntary manslaughter?

In one case, according to newspaper reports, back in May of last year, police in Lebanon County, Pa., responded to the Penn State Health Hershey Medical Center for the death of a three-month-old infant. Police said that the child's mother, Gina Strause, found the child unresponsive inside his crib.

According to police documents, "(Gina) related she went to get the child inside his crib to feed him and that was when she observed he was cold to the touch and appeared blue and she immediately called 911 and performed CPR until EMS arrived."

Police charged Strause, 40, and her husband, David, 42, with endangering the welfare of children, involuntary manslaughter and recklessly endangering another person. According to police, Strause said she placed the child back in his crib between 1:00 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. "on a 'pillow' and he was placed on his stomach (prone)."

In a second case, 19-year-old Natalee Michele Rasmus is facing murder charges for the death of her infant in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Rasmus is charged with third-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment in the death of her one-month-old daughter in October of 2022.

An autopsy determined the infant's death was caused by asphyxia due to mechanical compression.

Although parents in Pennsylvania are informed of safe sleep environments — being provided a pamphlet and signing a certification may not be enough, and certainly shouldn't be the basis for criminal charges.

An ongoing study by Johns Hopkins University is analyzing the use of an infant sleep assessment tool and motivational interviewing to enhance parent communication on safe sleep.

While the study is still recruiting participants, researchers hypothesize it will improve effective communication on sleep practices, reducing SIDS risk.

There is even research published in eBiomedicine that has identified a potential biomarker for SIDS. Yet, parents devastated by the death of an infant child face the wrath of the criminal justice system.

Nancy Maruyama, the executive director of Sudden Infant Death Services of Illinois, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about safe-sleep practices told Spotlight PA,

"To charge them criminally is a crime, because they have already suffered the worst loss."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Inmate whose Supreme Court case changed threshold for executing persons with mental illness dies in prison

Scott Panetti, a convicted murderer diagnosed with schizophrenia who represented himself at trial in a 1920s-era cowboy costume while attempting to subpoena John F. Kennedy and Jesus as witnesses — and whose execution was stayed by a landmark Supreme Court ruling on capital punishment and mental illness — died on May 26 in a prison hospital in Galveston, Texas. He was 67.

The cause was acute hypoxic respiratory failure, according to the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, reported The New York Times.

In the 2007 case Panetti v. Quarterman, the U.S. Supreme Court raised the bar for executing the mentally ill, holding that an individual must have a “rational understanding” of why the state planned to put him to death. (Nathaniel Quarterman was director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.)

An earlier standard required only that a mentally ill person be aware that he or she was going to be executed and why.

“A prisoner’s awareness of the State’s rationale for an execution is not the same as a rational understanding of it,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s 5-4 majority.

Mr. Panetti was first diagnosed with a psychotic disorder when he was 20. He was hospitalized repeatedly for delusions and psychotic episodes over a decade before he killed the parents of his estranged second wife in 1992.

At a hearing to determine if he was competent to serve as his own lawyer, his first wife recalled an episode in which he was convinced that the devil possessed their home, leading him to bury their valuables in the yard. A jury ruled him competent to represent himself.

In his rambling opening statement at trial in 1995, wearing a big cowboy hat and a purple bandanna, he showed off a tattoo and spoke of bull riding and how his father looked like Colonel Sanders.

A standby lawyer at the trial called Mr. Panetti’s courtroom performance “trance-like” and “scary” and the procedure “a judicial farce.” He was found guilty and sentenced to death. 

For decades, prosecutors in Texas argued in state and federal courtrooms that Mr. Panetti was mentally competent to be executed. Although the Supreme Court made it harder to execute the insane when Mr. Panetti’s case came before it, the court did not commute his sentence. The case was returned to lower courts to further weigh his competency.

Testifying for Mr. Panetti, psychiatric experts who had diagnosed him with schizo-affective disorder said he was under the delusion that he was being put to death because of a battle between “the forces of the darkness and God and the angels and the forces of light.”

Texas prosecutors argued that he was faking it. The state said that secretly recorded conversations with his parents “provide conclusive evidence that Panetti has a rational understanding of the relationship between his crime and his punishment,” and that he “has been grossly exaggerating his symptoms while being observed.”

Greg Abbott, who was Texas’s attorney general then (he is now governor), said in 2014, “Panetti knows that he killed his in-laws while his wife and child looked on, and he knows that he has been sentenced to die for that crime.” The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7-0 against commuting Mr. Panetti’s death sentence.

Texas’s push to execute him drew a national outcry. Opponents said imposing the death penalty on an insane person who had possibly been unaware of his actions crossed a moral line and violated the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

In December 2014, on the date that Mr. Panetti was scheduled to be put to death, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals in New Orleans stayed the execution and ordered a new competency hearing.

In 2022, while the case continued to wend its way through the courts, Mr. Panetti’s lawyer, Gregory Wiercoch, said, “It is unprecedented to be litigating on an execution competency claim for 20 years.”

The next year, a federal judge in Austin, Robert Pitman, ruled that Mr. Panetti should not be executed. “There are several reasons for prohibiting the execution of the insane,” the judge found, “including the questionable retributive value of executing an individual so wracked by mental illness that he cannot comprehend the ‘meaning and purpose of the punishment,’ as well as society’s intuition that such an execution ‘simply offends humanity.’ Scott Panetti is one of these individuals.”

Scott Louis Panetti was born on Feb. 28, 1958, in Hayward, Wis., one of four children of Louis and Yvonne (Empereur) Panetti. At 18, he enlisted in the Navy, and after an honorable discharge joined his parents in Fredericksburg, Texas, where they had moved to manage ranches.

He is survived by his sisters Victoria Panetti-Studer and Jacki Maenius; three children from his first marriage, Chase, Katrina and Mary Perry; a daughter from his second marriage, Amanda Panetti-Lamb; and three grandchildren.

In Fredericksburg, west of Austin, Mr. Panetti dressed in buckskin clothes and claimed to have fought in Vietnam, though he was 15 when the United States withdrew its forces from the country. His marriage to Jane Luckenbach ended in divorce. His second marriage, in 1989, to Sonja Alvarado, was rocky. Several times he was involuntarily committed to Kerrville State Hospital in the grip of delusional episodes.

In the summer of 1992, Ms. Alvarado left him, obtained a restraining order and, with their young daughter, moved to the home of her parents, Joe and Amanda Alvarado.

Mr. Panetti stalked the family, peering into the windows at night. One early morning in September 1992, he shaved his head, put on camouflage clothes and broke a glass door to his in-laws’ home. He shot Mr. and Mrs. Alvarado at close range with a rifle. He took his wife and daughter hostage and drove to a friend’s house, where he was living. He changed into a suit and surrendered to the police.

“I was crying the whole time,” Sonja Alvarado said in an interview 15 years later, when Mr. Panetti’s case reached the Supreme Court. “He told me he’d heard voices, that he didn’t know if he was going to kill us or let us go.”

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President takes unprecedented action to unilaterally call in the national guard in California

President Trump took extraordinary action on Saturday by calling up 2,000 National Guard troops to quell immigration protests in California, making rare use of federal powers and bypassing the authority of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, reported The New York Times.

It is the first time since 1965 that a president has activated a state’s National Guard force without a request from that state’s governor, according to Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent law and policy organization. The last time was when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators in 1965, she said.

Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, immediately rebuked the president’s action. “That move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions,” Mr. Newsom said, adding that “this is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.”

Just what the President wanted, unrest in a deep blue state so he could further incite the perception of lawlessness and expand his authoritarian goals.

Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states. But the directive signed by Mr. Trump cites “10 U.S.C. 12406,” referring to a specific provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services. Part of that provision allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

It also states that the president may call into federal service “members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary to repel the invasion, suppress the rebellion, or execute those laws.”

Mr. Trump’s directive said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Saturday night that Mr. Trump was deploying the National Guard in response to “violent mobs” that she said had attacked federal law enforcement and immigration agents. The 2,000 troops would “address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester,” she said.

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Federal Court allows colleges and universities to directly pay student-athletes

A US federal judge granted approval Friday of a landmark $2.6 billion class action settlement that transforms college athletics by allowing schools to directly pay student-athletes for the first time in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) history, reported Jurist.

In a released statement, NCAA President Charlie Baker said, “This is new terrain for everyone… Opportunities to drive transformative change don’t come often to organizations like ours. It’s important we make the most of this one.”

The settlement resolves antitrust claims brought by  Division I student-athletes in a class action lawsuit challenging NCAA restrictions on Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) compensation and athletic services payments. The case affects over 389,000 class members comprised of current and former student-athletes dating back to 2016.

The settlement creates multiple funds to pay out damages, the majority of which will be paid to class members made up of football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball players. Within each sport, damages will be paid out based on the sport, conference, years played, recruitment ratings, and various performance metrics.

Friday’s settlement also requires the NCAA to enact new rules for student-athlete compensation over the next 10 years. Schools in the NCAA’s five largest (“Power 5”) conferences will supply benefits and direct compensation to student-athletes in amounts worth up to 22% of the average annual athletic revenue for participating schools. Revenue is estimated to be more than $20 million per school in the 2025-26 school year and over $19 billion in total for the 10-year period.

Shortly after Friday’s court ruling, it was announced that former Major League Baseball executive Bryan Seeley had been appointed to run the College Sports Commission, a newly-formed organization that will oversee student-athlete revenue distribution for the Power 5 schools.

The case involves a contentious legal history starting with O’Bannon v. NCAA. The 2015 case established that NCAA amateurism — a doctrine purported to maintain the fundamental character of collegiate sports — did not exempt the NCAA from federal antitrust laws. However, the court still allowed the NCAA to limit student-athlete payments to the full cost of attending college.

In 2019, California approved Senate Bill 206, allowing for student-athletes playing in-state to accept NIL compensation, and several other states passed similar laws the following year. A 2021 Supreme Court ruling further established that the NCAA was violating antitrust regulations by restricting athlete pay. In July 2021, the NCAA adopted an interim policy that allowed student-athletes to receive NIL payments while maintaining amateur eligibility. NIL payments are made by “Collectives” — independent organizations that fundraise money for the universities. 

Friday’s judicial approval came from Senior Judge Claudia Wilken of the US District for the Northern District of California. Wilken is the same judge who originally heard O’Bannon v. NCAA.

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SCOTUS already capitulated to broad presidential authority on travel bans

President Trump has signed a new travel ban. Travelers from 12 countries will be barred from entering the US, and people from an additional seven countries will face partial travel restrictions, reported NPR.

The proclamation goes into effect June 9 — and fulfills something Trump has long-promised: to bring back the travel ban from his first term.

But that ban was the subject of many legal challenges. Some legal scholars say President Trump has learned a lot since then.

In Trump v. Hawaii, a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court gave broad leeway to presidential authority. The Supreme Court upheld President Trump's travel ban that barred nearly all travelers from five mainly Muslim countries as well as North Korea and Venezuela.

The president's proclamation was "squarely within the scope of Presidential authority under the INA," the court wrote in its majority opinion, referring to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The court acceded broadly to presidential power. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, noted that the INA exudes deference to the president. The executive order, he wrote, was more detailed than similar orders by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

Roberts then deferred to the president's power. The only thing a president has to signal is that entry for people from various countries would be detrimental to the interest of the United States. The president undoubtedly fulfilled that requirement here, the court noted.

The president, Roberts said, has extraordinary power to express his opinions to the country, as well. The plaintiffs argued that Trump's past campaign and other statements about Muslims should be taken into account, but the majority said it is not the court's role to do that.

The upshot of the court's precedents is clear, he said. The court should not inhibit the president's flexibility in responding to changing world conditions, and any court inquiry into matters of into national security is highly constrained. As long as the president presents an explanation for the travel ban that is "plausibly related" to a legitimate national security objective, Roberts said, he is on firm constitutional ground.

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Pennsylvania criminalizes poor parenting

Two sets of Pennsylvania parents face felony charges after police say their infants died in unsafe sleep positions, reported Spotlight PA.

While experts and family advocates say young babies should sleep on their backs without anything in the crib, simply failing to follow the recommendations shouldn’t amount to a crime.

In both cases, brought in the past six months, law enforcement say the parents knowingly put their children at risk. Parents from Lebanon County are accused of putting their son to sleep on his stomach with a pillow in the crib (the mother told PennLive she put her son on his back, but that he had learned how to roll over). A mother from Luzerne County, meanwhile, was charged after police say she let her daughter sleep face down in a U-shaped pillow.

Law enforcement argued in charging documents that the parents should have known better. They cited signed acknowledgements created as part of a 2010 law the state legislature passed to educate parents about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). The law requires hospitals, birthing centers, and health care practitioners to provide educational materials, then ask the parents to certify they received them.

The statement is voluntary, and there is a box noting if parents refused to sign.

The lawmaker who championed the measure, former state Rep. Lawrence Curry (D., Montgomery), died in 2018. News reports from the time say the bill was written with input from two safe-sleep experts with Cribs for Kids, a Pittsburgh-based organization that seeks to prevent sleep-related deaths.

Neither expert was available to comment, but other people dedicated to educating parents and preventing SIDS deaths oppose bringing criminal charges against grieving parents and note that there is no law against stomach sleeping.

“To charge them criminally is a crime, because they have already suffered the worst loss,” said Nancy Maruyama, the executive director of Sudden Infant Death Services of Illinois, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about safe-sleep practices and provides support to families who have experienced the loss of an infant.

“There’s nothing else you could have done to me that would have caused any more pain than the payment I had,” said Maruyama, who lost her son in 1985. “My heart’s broken.”

Safe-sleep experts stressed that these situations are not as cut and dried as a parent should have known better.

They talked about potential contributing factors like the differences in time spent educating parents in the hospital, if someone a parent trusts tells them stomach sleeping is OK, and even images parents see online that show an infant sleeping on their stomach.

The law “says that families have to receive that education, but it doesn’t say how that education is delivered, and it doesn’t state how families’ understanding or learning is evaluated,” said Devon George, chief programs officer at Cribs for Kids. (George was not involved in the drafting of the law.)

In Lebanon County, Gina and David Strause were charged in May with involuntary manslaughter, recklessly endangering another person, and endangering the welfare of children after the death of their son Gavin. Gina Strause told PennLive she put her son on his back, but that he was able to roll over. She told the outlet she did not recall taking home safe-sleep instructions.

In Luzerne County, Natalee Rasmus was charged in December with third-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and endangering the welfare of children after her 1-month-old daughter, Avaya, died.

Officers say they found the baby face down in a bassinet propped up on a U-shaped pillow linked to other infant deaths.

“Yeah, she wouldn’t sleep, she’ll just scream, so she has to be like propped up,” Rasmus, who was 17 at the time her daughter was born, told the investigating officer, according to the documents.

Rasmus’ public defender did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the district attorneys in Lebanon and Luzerne Counties.

Maruyama said it’s her job to use evidence-based, peer-reviewed information to educate people with a baby about safe-sleep recommendations.

“But, you know, sometimes they’re just so tired and they just want their child to sleep, and they know if they put them on their tummy, they’ll sleep,” she said.

In 1992, the American Academy of Pediatrics first recommended that infants sleep on their backs or sides. Four years later, the organization changed the recommendation to only back sleeping. Since then, SIDS rates have plummeted, although sleep-related deaths remain a leading cause of infant mortality.

That’s what prompted the 2010 law, which directed the Pennsylvania Department of Health to create and recommend safe-sleep materials.

The “information provided to parents must include risk factors associated with sudden unexpected infant death (SUID) and advise them about safe sleep practices,” a department spokesperson told Spotlight PA.

The agency provides a brochure that complies with Act 73 in hard copy and electronic format. That brochure is two pages long and repeats recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics that babies should not sleep with others and should sleep on their backs in an uncluttered crib.

The state also funds PA Safe Sleep, which provides birthing hospitals with services including patient education information and expert training, and safe-sleep education at the county level through children and youth agencies.

George said it’s important to question how hospitals are delivering information and evaluating what parents are learning.

But the most important question about these situations, she said, should be: “How are we helping families? How are we supporting families?”

Of the 343 infant deaths reported in Pennsylvania in 2022 (the most recent year data is available), unsafe sleep factors were present in 68 cases, according to a state report.

While education is crucial to drop the rates of these deaths, it is not enough on its own, said Michael Goodstein, a neonatologist at WellSpan hospital in York County. He is also the director of the county Cribs for Kids program and a member of an American Academy of Pediatrics subcommittee on sudden unexpected infant deaths.

A parent who watches a video with their doctor and gets all their questions on safe sleep answered versus the parent who gets a handout will have a different level of understanding on the topic, Goodstein said.

Like all experts who spoke to Spotlight PA, Goodstein said this is a complex issue that needs more attention, more awareness, and more research.

“It’s really important to follow the safe-sleep recommendations,” Goodstein said. “I’m not going to say it’s easy to do. Babies get fussy and parents are sleep deprived, and at some point, they sometimes do things that might help the baby get back to sleep faster, so that they get some sleep, but in the end, is not a safe thing to do.”

Rare charges

It’s extremely rare for parents to be charged with a crime after their infants die sleeping on their stomachs, said Daniel Nevins, who has over 20 years of experience as a criminal defense attorney.

Nevins said he couldn’t name another case off the top of his head with similar facts.

Spotlight PA identified a handful of criminal cases nationwide related to the deaths of infants sleeping in Boppy pillows, like the one police say Rasmus used. Charges have also been brought against parents who slept in the same bed as their child.

In the recent Pennsylvania cases, Nevins said the burden of proof for prosecutors is high.

To secure a conviction for involuntary manslaughter — which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison — prosecutors will have to prove that the parents acted dangerously or recklessly and that they should have known better.

For third-degree murder — which can be punished with up to 40 years in prison — prosecutors do not have to prove that the death was intentional but do have to demonstrate malice.

“The commonwealth had better think long and hard about whether or not they have enough evidence to pursue these types of charges,” Nevins said.

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