A death sentence in the United States is not one decision but a sequence of them, and in some cases the sequence runs for decades. A jury convicts. An appeals court reverses. A second jury convicts again, a third sentences, a fourth court sets the sentence aside, and the families of the dead sit through each round. This is a count of such rounds in nine cases. The numbers are those the courts and reporters gave, with their dates, and no ranking is claimed. Where a conviction was overturned or a defendant acquitted, the legal outcome is stated as it is.
Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. was executed by the State of Florida on January 7, 2016. He had been convicted in three cases arising from 1986: the murder of Natalie Blanche Holley, 25, in Hillsborough County in January; of Stephanie Collins, 17, in Hillsborough County in November; and of Teri Lynn Matthews, 26, in Pasco County in December. The killings went unsolved until July 1990, when a call to Crime Stoppers in Indiana named him to investigators. By then he was in an Ohio prison on an unrelated kidnapping conviction. Hillsborough County indicted him on August 1, 1990, and Pasco County on February 19, 1991.
The first round came quickly. A Hillsborough County jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the Holley case on July 11, 1991, and he was sentenced to death on July 31. A second Hillsborough jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the Collins case on October 11, 1991. A Pasco County jury convicted him in the Matthews case on October 12, 1992, and he was sentenced to death on October 30. Within sixteen months, three juries had returned three death sentences.
Everything after that was about one piece of evidence. His former wife had told investigators what Bolin said to her in private while they were married, and the Florida Supreme Court reversed again and again over whether she should have been allowed to repeat it. The rule at issue is the marital privilege, which lets a spouse keep private conversations out of a courtroom. Prosecutors relied on a letter Bolin wrote in a jail cell on June 22, 1991, in which he told the chief investigator that anything more he wanted to know he would have to ask his former wife. They said it showed he had given up the privilege. The defense said he had never meant to give up anything. The letter was argued over for twenty years.
The Florida Supreme Court decided the Holley case on April 21, 1994, and again on August 30, 2001. The Collins case was decided on July 13, 2001, and again on February 21, 2013. The Matthews case went through postconviction review (July 1, 2010) and then an execution-warrant appeal (December 17, 2015). A Matthews retrial in December 2001 produced a death sentence affirmed on February 5, 2004. The Collins case ended in a death sentence in December 2007. The Holley case ended differently: after a 2005 verdict of second-degree murder and a second such verdict in 2012, he received a life sentence. A March 2009 St. Petersburg Times headline reported that he would get a fourth trial in that one case. The Associated Press counted the full total as ten guilty verdicts from ten juries in three cases.
Holley’s mother attended many of the trials alongside the mothers of the other two women. She died in 2012, the year of the last trial in her daughter’s case. On January 7, 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States denied his last applications, and he was pronounced dead at Florida State Prison at 10:16 p.m. He denied all three killings to the end.
Michael Dale St. Clair had been convicted of two murders in Oklahoma in September 1991, with judgment entered November 22, 1991, when he escaped from an Oklahoma jail. Within weeks two men were dead in other states: Timothy Keeling, 22, killed in New Mexico, and Frank Brady, a distillery worker from Bardstown, Kentucky, killed in Bullitt County in October 1991. He was arrested in Hugo, Oklahoma, about two months after Brady’s death and released by Oklahoma to Kentucky in 1995 under a governor-to-governor agreement. By then, Oklahoma juries had convicted him of four murders in all: his uncle, Ronnie St. Clair; William Henry Kelsey Jr.; Mary Louise Smith; and Edward Jefferson Large. Kentucky then tried him in two separate cases for the same set of events: capital murder in Bullitt County, and capital kidnapping and related counts in Hardin County.
The Bullitt County murder case produced three death sentences. A jury sentenced him to death in 1998. In 2004 the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed the conviction but reversed the sentence, chiefly because the judge had not told the jury that life without parole was one of the choices. A second death sentence came in 2005 and was reversed on April 22, 2010. A third jury sentenced him to death in October 2011, and the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed that sentence on August 21, 2014. Along the way he tried to overturn the conviction itself. Testimony from an FBI examiner about bullet lead, a method the FBI later abandoned, had been part of the 1998 trial, and in 2009 the bureau wrote that the testimony in his case had been inappropriate. The circuit court denied a new trial in January 2011, and the Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the denial in 2014, holding the bullet evidence a small part of the proof.
The Hardin County kidnapping case ran on its own track and produced two death sentences. The first came in 2001 and was reversed in 2005 (October 20, 2005). A second, in 2012, with 35 years on the other counts, was reversed on February 19, 2015. The court held that testimony from Keeling’s widow should not have been admitted at the 2012 trial and at the 2011 resentencing, because Keeling was not the victim of the crime on trial there. On April 12, 2017, St. Clair pleaded guilty in the kidnapping case and received 30 years for kidnapping, 20 years for attempted murder of a state trooper, and five years each on two counts of receiving stolen property and on facilitation of second-degree arson. In New Mexico he was convicted of second-degree murder in Keeling’s death in 2014, the Kentucky attorney general’s office reported.
One ruling in the middle matters to the count. While the murder conviction was on appeal, St. Clair asked the Kentucky Supreme Court to stop the Hardin Circuit Court from trying him for capital kidnapping, arguing that two death sentences for one death would punish him twice. On November 18, 1999, in St. Clair v. Roark, the court refused and overruled its own 1989 decision in Cosby v. Commonwealth, holding that it is the victim’s death, not a murder conviction, that raises kidnapping to a capital offense. The Associated Press described him in 2014 as a man with six murder convictions. Brady’s widow, according to the attorney general’s office, attended every one of his trials over the following decades. St. Clair was back on death row at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville in April 2017.
Dayton Leroy Rogers ran a small engine repair shop in Woodburn, Oregon, in 1987. He was convicted of the aggravated murder of Jennifer Lisa Smith in Clackamas County in 1988, and in 1989 of 13 counts of aggravated murder in six cases involving women named in the Oregon Supreme Court’s opinion by surname: Gyles, Mock, Cervantes, DeVore, Adams and Hodges. The six forest cases were tried together. The jury convicted him on all counts and, at the penalty phase, answered yes to each question put to it, and the court sentenced him to death.
On July 9, 1992, the Oregon Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Peterson, affirmed every conviction and rejected his claims about venue, jurors and evidence. It vacated the death sentence for a narrow reason: the penalty jury had not been asked whether death was the right sentence for this defendant, considering every aspect of his life and crimes. A second penalty jury chose death again in 1994. On May 4, 2000, the court vacated that sentence too, because the jurors could choose only between death and life with the possibility of parole, and the court said they should have been able to consider life without it. A third penalty trial in 2006, before Clackamas County Circuit Judge Ronald D. Thom, ended in a third death sentence, which the court vacated on October 11, 2012, in an opinion by Justice Walters, four members of the court not taking part. The fourth death sentence came in 2015, according to KGW. On November 12, 2021, the Oregon Supreme Court vacated that one and remanded the case for resentencing, holding that a 2019 change in state law meant his crimes were no longer punishable by death.
That makes four death sentences, in 1989, 1994, 2006 and 2015, and four vacaturs, in 1992, 2000, 2012 and 2021. His convictions were never overturned. The case went back to Clackamas County for that resentencing.
Rodney Alcala, a photographer, was tried three times for the murder of Robin Samsoe, 12, of Huntington Beach, who was killed on June 20, 1979. He was arrested on July 24, 1979, in Monterey Park. The first conviction came in 1980, and the California Supreme Court reversed it on August 23, 1984. A second came in 1986, was affirmed by the California Supreme Court on December 31, 1992, and was set aside by the Ninth Circuit on June 27, 2003, after earlier federal proceedings in 2001.
The third trial was in Orange County, and it was larger. In 2010 prosecutors tried the Samsoe case together with four Los Angeles County killings: Jill Barcomb, 18; Georgia Wixted, 27; Charlotte Lamb, 32; and Jill Parenteau, 21. On February 25, 2010, the jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder and one of kidnapping. On March 9 it recommended death, and on March 30, 2010, Judge Francisco Briseño sentenced him to death, the third death sentence in the Samsoe case. The jury had held the special circumstance of multiple murder true, among others.
Two more proceedings followed in other states. In New York he pleaded guilty on December 14, 2012, to the murders of Cornelia Crilley, 23, in 1971 and Ellen Hover, 23, in 1977, and on January 7, 2013, was sentenced to 25 years to life by Justice Bonnie Wittner. In 2016 a Wyoming prosecutor charged him with the murder of Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, of San Antonio, Texas; she was never tried, and the charge was dismissed after his death. Alcala died of natural causes on July 24, 2021, at 77, while under sentence of death. The automatic appeal from the 2010 judgment was still pending in early 2013, and no decision on it has been reported. California executions had been halted by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2019.
In 1971 twenty-five men, most of them older transient farmworkers, were killed north of Yuba City, California. Juan Vallejo Corona, a farm labor contractor who hired crews for ranches along the Feather River, was arrested on May 26, 1971, and indicted by a Sutter County grand jury in July on 25 counts of murder. The trial was moved to Fairfield, in Solano County. On January 18, 1973, the jury convicted him on all 25 counts and he was given 25 life terms.
The conviction did not last. On May 8, 1978, the California Court of Appeal reversed it, holding that his lawyer, who had taken the literary rights to Corona’s life story as his fee, had given him no real defense. The Hayward retrial in Alameda County ended in September 1982 with convictions on all 25 counts again, this time with 25 concurrent terms of 25 years to life. The Court of Appeal affirmed the second judgment on June 14, 1989. The appeal courts therefore reversed once and affirmed once, and a second jury reached the same verdict on every count.
Corona was refused parole repeatedly, and at a 2011 hearing, according to the prosecutor present, he admitted the killings. He died of natural causes at an outside hospital on March 4, 2019, at 85. He never gave a reason for the killings.
Robert Edward Maury was convicted in Shasta County on August 24, 1989, of the first-degree murders of three women, Averill Weeden in 1985 and Belinda Jo Stark and Dawn Berryhill in 1987, with the special circumstances of multiple murder and robbery-murder. The same jury convicted him on related counts. On September 8, 1989, after a penalty trial in which he urged the jurors to choose death, it returned a death verdict. The case rested on calls to a county Secret Witness hotline that the courts held the jury could attribute to him.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in 2003 (People v. Maury, 30 Cal.4th 342) and the Supreme Court of the United States denied review in 2004. He filed his first state habeas petition in 2004, amended it in 2007, and had it denied in 2011. In April 2012 he went to the federal court in the Eastern District of California without a lawyer; Judge William B. Shubb’s court appointed two lawyers from the Habeas Corpus Resource Center and denied a stay of execution as unnecessary because no date was set. The federal petition was filed in October 2012, the State answered in December 2013, and his reply came in March 2017. One lawyer withdrew in 2015, counsel changed twice more after 2017, and the Federal Public Defender was appointed in May 2019.
From October 2019 the court paused the case several times so that new counsel could investigate. A November 2020 recommendation by a magistrate judge extended a stay through March 1, 2021, citing the pandemic. In May 2021 Maury asked to add claims that earlier lawyers had failed to raise because of conflicts of interest, and in September 2022 the magistrate judge recommended denying that request without prejudice because the claims had not first been presented to the state courts. A second state petition, denied in 2021, was affirmed by the California Court of Appeal on October 2, 2024; review was denied on January 15, 2025, and an order on the federal findings followed on January 21, 2025. As of January 2025 the federal case was still pending, more than thirty-five years after the death verdict.
Donald William Dufour was convicted of murders committed during robberies in 1982 in two states. In Mississippi, a Hinds County jury convicted him in 1983 of the capital murder of Earl Wayne Peeples, who died in Jackson on October 14, 1982, and sentenced him to death. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed on June 6, 1984, and the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear the case on October 14, 1986, with Justices Brennan and Marshall dissenting. A later round of post-conviction review turned on the instruction for the aggravating circumstance of an especially atrocious or cruel killing; he later received an agreed sentence of life without parole, on a date that has not been reported. His court-appointed lawyers had called no evidence in mitigation at the Mississippi penalty stage, and that gap was the basis of his later appeals.
In Florida, an Orange County jury convicted him on May 31, 1984, of the first-degree murder of Zack Miller, and a judge sentenced him to death on July 3, 1984. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on September 4, 1986. On March 6, 1986, he pleaded no contest to the first-degree murder of Edward Wise and received a life sentence; a charge over the death of John Stinson was dropped as part of that plea. Postconviction relief was denied and affirmed on April 14, 2005, and his claim that he was intellectually disabled and could not be executed was rejected by the Florida Supreme Court in a revised opinion of February 3, 2011. His lawyers pointed to school records, to a repeated second grade and placement in basic classes; the State pointed to a GED diploma earned in prison and a small-engine repair course, and a court-appointed psychologist testified that Dufour admitted cheating on the GED test. The Florida Commission on Capital Cases listed him under sentence of death as of March 2011.
Surender Koli, a domestic servant from Uttarakhand, was the principal accused in the Nithari case, in which children and young women from a village in Noida died over 2005 and 2006. The deaths came to light at the end of December 2006, when he and his employer, a Noida businessman, were arrested. The Central Bureau of Investigation took over within days and registered nineteen cases, closed three for lack of evidence, and charged Koli in sixteen. Its case rested chiefly on a confession recorded before a magistrate in New Delhi on March 1, 2007, and on recoveries said to follow from his statements to investigators. According to a chronology placed before the High Court, a legal aid lawyer was appointed that day and was not present when the statement was recorded. The People’s Union for Democratic Rights said in 2014 that Koli told the courts he was tortured into confessing and that the statement was in English, which he said he did not understand.
Special courts at Ghaziabad convicted Koli in case after case from 2009. The first death sentence came on February 13, 2009. The Allahabad High Court upheld it on September 11, 2009, and the Supreme Court of India on February 15, 2011. The President rejected a mercy plea in July 2014, and in the early hours of September 8, 2014, the Supreme Court stayed his execution. A review petition was dismissed in 2014. In 2017 a CBI court sentenced him and his employer to death in a further case, Outlook reported.
The reversal came in 2023. On October 16, 2023, the Allahabad High Court set aside the convictions in twelve cases and acquitted him; the Supreme Court dismissed the appeals against the acquittals on July 30, 2025. He had already been acquitted at trial in further cases, the first on March 26, 2021. The last conviction standing, in the case of his first death sentence, was set aside by the Supreme Court on a curative petition on November 11, 2025, when it recalled its own 2011 judgment. SCC Times headlined it his acquittal in the thirteenth Nithari case. Koli was released from Luksar jail in Greater Noida in November 2025, and the families of the children asked, in a Press Trust of India report, who had killed them. No conviction stands against him or his employer for any of the Nithari deaths. He was reported dead in Haridwar on September 18, 2026.
Eric Edgar Cooke was executed at Fremantle Prison on October 26, 1964, the last person executed in Western Australia. A jury took about an hour and a half to convict him of one wilful murder, John Sturkey, 18, in 1963; he was sentenced to death on November 27, 1963. No appeal by Cooke against that conviction was reported. His case belongs in a count of appeals for a different reason: his confessions to other killings produced more than four decades of litigation for two other men.
He told police he had killed eight people and tried to kill 14 others between 1959 and 1963. For two of those killings, other men had already been convicted. D.B., 18 or 19 at the time, had been convicted of the wilful murder of Jillian Brewer, 22, in Cottesloe, in 1961 and sentenced to death, later commuted. J.B., 19, was convicted of the manslaughter of a 17-year-old, Rosemary Anderson, in May 1963 and sentenced to 10 years. Both appealed in 1964 and lost. The Court of Criminal Appeal declined to order a new trial for D.B. on the strength of Cooke’s confessions, and the Australian Dictionary of Biography records that the court placed little weight on Cooke’s testimony and that Chief Justice Sir Albert Wolff called him a "villainous unscrupulous liar." D.B. went on to lose a series of appeals, including one to the Privy Council in London in 1965. About fifteen minutes before his execution, Cooke reportedly swore on a Bible that he had killed both women.
Nothing changed in Cooke’s lifetime. A Perth journalist, Estelle Blackburn, spent six years reassembling the record. The Western Australian Court of Criminal Appeal quashed J.B.'s conviction on February 25, 2002. The government announced on June 28, 2002, that D.B.'s conviction would be appealed, the court heard the appeal in October 2004, and on April 1, 2005, it quashed that conviction too, forty-one years after the first appeal failed. The state paid J.B. $460,000 in 2003 and D.B. an ex gratia sum of more than $400,000 in 2011. In this case the longest chain of appeals belonged to men who had not committed the crimes the record attributes to Cooke.
Counting rounds is not the same as counting error. Bolin’s ten verdicts came out of one disputed rule about a spouse’s testimony. St. Clair’s five death sentences came from two cases that ran on separate tracks for twenty years. Rogers’s four sentences fell to a statute, a missing question and a change in the law. Alcala and Corona each had a conviction undone for the way the trial was run, and each was convicted again by a second jury. Maury’s case has been in the courts for more than thirty-five years without a final ruling in the federal court. Koli’s ended with every verdict set aside. Only in Cooke’s case did the appeals belong to someone else.
• 1971 to 1973: Corona arrested May 26, 1971, indicted in July 1971; convicted on 25 counts in Solano County, January 18, 1973.
• May 8, 1978: California Court of Appeal reverses Corona’s convictions.
• 1980: first Alcala conviction in the Samsoe case; reversed August 23, 1984.
• September 1982: Corona convicted again on all 25 counts at Hayward; affirmed June 14, 1989.
• 1983 to 1986: Dufour sentenced to death in Mississippi (1983) and Florida (July 3, 1984); Mississippi appeal denied review October 14, 1986.
• August 24, 1989: Maury convicted in Shasta County; death verdict September 8, 1989.
• 1989: Rogers sentenced to death; Oregon Supreme Court vacates that sentence July 9, 1992.
• July 11, 1991: Bolin convicted in the Holley case; death sentence July 31.
• October 1991: Bolin convicted in the Collins case; St. Clair’s Oklahoma judgments entered November 22, 1991.
• October 12, 1992: Bolin convicted in the Matthews case; death sentence October 30.
• 1998: Kentucky jury sentences St. Clair to death for Brady’s murder.
• November 18, 1999: Kentucky Supreme Court decides St. Clair v. Roark.
• May 4, 2000: Oregon Supreme Court vacates Rogers’s second death sentence.
• February 25, 2002: J.B.'s conviction quashed in Western Australia.
• June 27, 2003: Ninth Circuit sets aside Alcala’s second Samsoe conviction.
• April 1, 2005: D.B.'s conviction quashed in Western Australia.
• February 13, 2009: Koli sentenced to death for the first time.
• 2010: Alcala convicted February 25, 2010, sentenced to death March 30, 2010; Kentucky Supreme Court reverses St. Clair’s second death sentence April 22, 2010.
• October 11, 2012: Oregon Supreme Court vacates Rogers’s third death sentence.
• August 21, 2014: Kentucky Supreme Court affirms St. Clair’s third Bullitt County death sentence.
• January 7, 2016: Bolin executed.
• April 12, 2017: St. Clair pleads guilty in the Hardin County kidnapping case.
• November 12, 2021: Oregon Supreme Court vacates Rogers’s fourth death sentence and remands for resentencing.
• October 16, 2023: Allahabad High Court sets aside Koli’s convictions in twelve cases.
• October 2, 2024: California Court of Appeal affirms denial of Maury’s second state petition; review denied January 15, 2025.
• November 11, 2025: India’s Supreme Court acquits Koli in the last case.