Lawyers: Government Schedules Eighth Federal Execution At Indiana Prison

Lawyers said Wednesday that the U.S. government had scheduled another federal inmate’s execution, a week after it carried out two death sentences in Indiana.

Orlando Hall would be the second Black inmate to be executed by the federal government since the Trump administration resumed executions this summer. Since July, the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute has executed seven inmates.

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Attorneys for Hall said that the proceedings that landed him on death row in 1995 were marked by racial bias and incompetent legal representation.

“Under these circumstances, allowing Mr. Hall’s execution to go forward would be a grave injustice,” attorneys Marcia Widder and Robert Owen said in a statement.

They say Hall’s jury was entirely White and that the prosecutor was cited for discriminating against Black jury members in a prior case. They say Hall’s attorneys at the time also conducted no meaningful investigation and failed to make jurors aware of some of the traumas he suffered growing up. And they say Hall has expressed profound regret.

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Hall was one of five men convicted of taking part in the kidnapping and murder of Lisa Rene, 16, in Arlington, Texas, the attorneys said. They added that the group targeted Rene because her two older brothers had stolen money from them.

“Mr. Hall has never denied the role he played in the tragic death of Lisa Rene,” they said. “But the jury that sentenced him to death did not know key facts about his background, and the path toward personal redemption that Mr. Hall has followed in prison shows that he is not among the ‘worst of the worst’ for whom the death penalty is properly reserved.”

A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson did not immediately respond to inquiries.

Adam Pinsker contributed to this report.