Judge vacates death sentences of Pervis Payne, who was to be executed for a crime he says he didn't commit
CNN
A Tennessee judge this week vacated the death sentences of Pervis Payne, who has spent more than three decades on death row for two murders he says he did not commit, due to the inmate's intellectual disability.
As a result, Payne now faces two life sentences, though it remains to be decided whether he will serve them concurrently or consecutively.
"Thirty-four years of trauma and pain and fear just released themselves in that courtroom," Payne's attorney, Supervisory Assistant Federal Public Defender Kelley Henry, said in an interview Friday, describing the moments before Tuesday's hearing when Payne wept as he hugged her.
Elected officials, Jewish advocacy groups and civil rights leaders are vowing to “push back” against the message of a White nationalist group that staged a march last week near downtown Columbus, Ohio, calling the demonstration an act of hate unwelcome in their community – and the United States more broadly.
In 2020, the woman who has become Donald Trump’s pick to be the nation’s top spymaster met with one of the most infamous leakers of all time.
Mark Begich’s flip of Alaska’s lone House seat will pad Republicans’ slim House majority — but with several members departing to join President-elect Donald Trump’s administration and just three races left to be decided, the party could enter the new year with very little room for error.
A California woman told police that Trump Cabinet pick Pete Hegseth physically blocked her from leaving a hotel room, took her phone, and then sexually assaulted her even though she “remembered saying ‘no’ a lot,” a police report obtained by CNN shows.
For more than a decade, Chinese students have flocked to the United States, drawn by the prestige of an overseas education and the glamor of the American Dream. But that’s changing now – and recent statistics suggest the allure may be wearing off.
After rarely being seen in public in the two weeks since he delivered a brief, 46-second victory speech on election night, JD Vance reemerged this week to play one of the most important roles he will be expected to fill as Donald Trump’s No. 2: His point person on Capitol Hill.
A Florida man was arrested Wednesday and charged in a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange this week, according to the FBI.
The Senate on Wednesday voted down an effort led by Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to block a series of planned US weapons sales to Israel.
Republicans on the House Ethics Committee fell in line behind GOP leaders and voted not to release the results of their investigation into Donald Trump’s attorney general pick, Matt Gaetz, despite growing calls from the Senate GOP to make the findings public ahead of his confirmation hearing.
Senate Democrats have confirmed some of President Joe Biden’s picks for the federal bench this week in the face of President-elect Donald Trump’s calls for a total GOP blockade of judicial nominations – in part because several Republicans involved with the Trump transition process have been missing votes.
A former University of Virginia student pleaded guilty Wednesday to fatally shooting three football players and wounding two other students on the Charlottesville campus in 2022.