News and Updates

Credit: LM Otero/Associated Press

Craig Watkins wants to ensure penalty is done fairly.

DALLAS — The district attorney leading an aggressive push to free wrongly imprisoned inmates, in a county where more than two dozen wrongful convictions have been overturned, is calling for a review of the capital punishment system in the nation's busiest death penalty state.

Craig Watkins' tenure as Dallas County's top prosecutor has earned him a national reputation. Now, as Watkins publicly acknowledges that his great-grandfather was executed in Texas almost 80 years ago, he called on state lawmakers to review death penalty procedures to ensure the punishment is fairly administered.

"I think it's a legitimate question to have, to ask: 'Have we executed someone that didn't commit the crime?'" Watkins said in an interview with The Associated Press.

A man shot and wounded by Oakland police over the weekend is a cousin of Oscar Grant, the BART passenger killed by a police officer in 2009, and was unarmed when he was shot in the back, his attorney said Wednesday.

Tony Jones, 24, was shot once in the back by an Oakland officer on the 2000 block of 62nd Avenue in East Oakland about 11:45 p.m. Sunday after he ran from a van that police had stopped, according to police and Jones' attorney, Waukeen McCoy. Jones is being treated at Highland Hospital in Oakland.

Police have said Jones was armed with a gun, but McCoy said that was not true. Jones ran because he saw a police car behind him and "thought they were coming up too close to him," McCoy said.

Every week for 18 years, Anthony Graves was allowed to make one phone call from prison. And each call would be to his mother.

Reggie Clemons, an inmate on Missouri's death row, is shown in a photograph taken on April 7, 2007.

COLUMBIA — The Old Chain of Rocks Bridge has stood crooked just downstream of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers since it was built in 1929. Hooked 22 degrees at its middle — a concession to the river that would not let it run true — it once took motorists between St. Louis and Madison, Ill., along a stretch of historic Route 66.