THIEL COLLEGE Comment No. 2

Did the U.S. Supreme Court get it right when they decided Furman v. Georgia in 1972? The decision found that the death penalty was not cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment, but was unconstitutional arbitrary in its application. 

Florida executes a man for murder of traveling salesman

The 2nd Execution of 2026

Ronald Palmer Heath was convicted of killing a traveling salesman he and his brother had met at a bar became the first person executed in Florida this year, according to The Associated Press.

Heath, 64, was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. on February 10, 2026 following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. Heath was convicted of first-degree murder, robbery with a deadly weapon and other charges in the 1989 killing of Michael Sheridan.

When the curtain to the execution chamber went up at the scheduled 6 p.m. start time, Heath was already strapped down with an IV inserted in his arm. Asked by the warden if Heath had any final statement, he said, ”I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. Thank you.”

As the drugs were being administered, Heath showed little outward reaction, closing his eyes and then appearing to fall asleep before becoming motionless. A medic was called in about 8 minutes after the drugs began, and Heath was declared dead 2 minutes after that.

It was the state’s first execution of 2026 and followed a record 19 executions in Florida last year. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis oversaw more executions in a single year in 2025 than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976. The previous Florida record was eight executions set in 2014.

According to court records, Heath and his brother Kenneth Heath met Sheridan at a Gainesville bar in May 1989. After hanging out at the bar for some time, the three men agreed to go somewhere else to smoke marijuana.

At some point, the brothers plotted to rob the other man, investigators said. Ronald Heath drove the group to a remote area, where Kenneth Heath pulled a handgun on Sheridan. The man initially refused to give the brothers anything, and Kenneth Heath shot Sheridan in the chest.

As Sheridan emptied his pockets, Ronald Heath began kicking the man and stabbing him with a hunting knife, prosecutors said. Kenneth Heath then shot Sheridan twice in the head.

The brothers dumped Sheridan’s body in a wooded area and returned to the Gainesville bar to take items from his rental car, according to the court record. It said the brothers made multiple purchases with Sheridan’s credit cards the next day at a Gainesville mall.

Ronald Heath was arrested several weeks later at his home in Douglas, Georgia, after investigators connected him to the stolen credit cards. Officers recovered clothing purchased with the stolen cards, as well as Sheridan’s watch, according to court records.

Kenneth Heath was also charged with Sheridan’s murder, but was sentenced to life in prison as part of a plea agreement.

More than a dozen family members of victims of Heath’s crimes witnessed his execution.

When Heath was 16, he was convicted of killing teenager Michael Green, and served 10 years in prison.

Days after Sheridan’s death, authorities also found the body of Tony Hammett. Heath was charged with Hammett’s killing, but the case never went to trial.

Sheridan’s brother, Thomas Sheridan, said during a news conference following the execution that his family, as well as the families of Green and Hammett, had been waiting for this day for more than three decades.

“Tonight, Ronald Palmer Heath was released to the custody of his new parole officer. As far as I’m concerned, any forgiveness is between him and God,” Thomas Sheridan said.

The Florida Supreme Court denied appeals filed by Ronald Heath last week. His attorneys had argued that Florida corrections officials had mismanaged its own death penalty protocols, that the state’s secretive clemency process blocked due process, that Heath’s incarceration as a juvenile stunted his brain development and that jurors did not recommend the death penalty unanimously.

On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Heath’s appeal.

A total of 47 people were executed in the U.S. in 2025. Florida led the way with a flurry of death warrants signed by DeSantis. Alabama, South Carolina and Texas tied for second with five executions each that year.

Two more Florida executions have already been scheduled for later this month and next month. Melvin Trotter, 65, is scheduled to die on Feb. 24, and the execution of Billy Leon Kearse, 53, is set to follow exactly a week later on March 3.

All Florida executions are carried out via lethal injection using a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.

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CREATORS: Kidnappings Are Rare and Unpredictable

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
February 10, 2026

The desperate search for Nancy Guthrie continues in Tucson, Ariz. Guthrie is the mother of NBC's "Today Show" co-anchor Savannah Guthrie. Guthrie has been missing for over a week, and concern grows about her physical health and the possibility of her kidnapping for ransom.

Kidnapping for ransom is a relic of a bygone era. The most notable kidnappings of the last century have been resolved in various ways, including returned unharmed, battered, deceased and incarcerated. With past kidnappings as a guide, it is anyone's guess as to the outcome of Guthrie's disappearance.

Maybe the most well-known kidnapping of the twentieth century was the abduction of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The 20-month-old Lindbergh was abducted on March 1, 1932, from his crib in the family's posh New Jersey home.

Lindbergh's father, Charles Lindbergh, Sr., was an international celebrity as a result of completing the first nonstop solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. His celebrity made his family a target.

A ransom note was left in the child's crib, and several other notes were sent over several weeks. A ransom was paid in April, and the child was not returned. On May 12, the child's battered body was discovered on the side of a road by a truck driver not more than five miles from the Lindbergh home.

More than two years after Lindbergh's murder, a German immigrant, Bruno Hauptmann, was arrested. He was convicted of first-degree murder and executed in 1936.

Little more than 30 years later, Frank Sinatra, Jr. was kidnapped after a performance in Lake Tahoe in 1963. Sinatra was the 19-year-old son of the renowned singer and actor Frank Sinatra.

The kidnappers demanded a large sum of money. Frank, Sr., gathered the ransom of $240,000 and delivered the money as directed. His son was safely returned.

A police investigation revealed that Barry Keenan, Joe Amsler and John Irwin conspired to kidnap Frank Jr. for ransom. Apparently, Keenan was a former classmate of Frank Jr.'s sister Nancy Sinatra. The conspirators were convicted and sentenced to prison.

About 10 years later, John Paul Getty III, the grandson of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, was kidnapped in Rome, Italy. Getty's abductors had originally demanded $17 million. Getty's grandfather, once the richest man in the world, refused to pay.

After the refusal, Getty's severed ear was mailed to a newspaper. The family relented and paid a renegotiated ransom. Getty was released about five months after his kidnapping. After his return, Getty's life spiraled into alcohol and drug addiction. He overdosed in1981 at the age of 25, leaving him severely disabled for the rest of his life.

Patricia Hearst was kidnapped in 1974. She was the granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Her kidnapping did not unfold like other high-profile kidnappings.

Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Initially, the SLA had offered to release Hearst if authorities would release a jailed SLA member. When the state of California refused, the SLA demanded that the Hearst family give every needy Californian $70 for food.

However, something strange happened while Hearst was in captivity. She became sympathetic to her captors; she joined the SLA and was involved in criminal activity, including a bank robbery where she appeared on video surveillance with an automatic weapon.

Hearst was later found by police. Instead of being reunited with her family, she was jailed. At her trial, the prosecution suggested that Hearst had willingly joined the SLA. However, she testified that she had been sexually assaulted and threatened with death while held captive.

In 1976, she was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Her sentence was commuted by former President Jimmy Carter, resulting in her release from prison. She was later pardoned by former President Bill Clinton.

Other than Sinatra, the kidnappings chronicled here — good, bad or tragic — were not resolved for months.

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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Analyst suggests spending "a lot" of money has altered the arch of violence

Jeff Asher, a crime-data analyst who frequently writes about the crime rates and runs the firm AH Datalytics, which powers the Real Time Crime Index, talked to New York Magazine about falling violent crime:

I would say that the thing that resonates strongest with me is that this has all been national in scope. It went up everywhere, and it’s going down pretty much everywhere. It’s happening in an environment where we didn’t see dramatic increases in policing, and we didn’t see huge increases in clearance rates — they plunged in 2020 and 2021 and have recovered since then, but that largely reflects the fact that we’ve just got fewer crimes, which usually means higher clearance rates. So there hasn’t been some massive improvement from law enforcement. A lot of times activists will talk about the root causes of crime — how you’ve got to fix poverty, you’ve got to fix education. We didn’t fix any of that. And the country is still awash in guns.

The trend started in 2023, so the “why” probably has its roots in things that happened in 2021 and 2022, because these things don’t usually change suddenly. So what are the explanations that fit? An article I wrote last summer focused heavily on investing in communities. We spent a lot of money on a lot of things, some of which had direct crime-fighting benefits to it, like the Department of Justice increasing its budget for grants by a billion dollars between 2021 and 2023 and 2024. A lot of those went to programs specifically designed to reduce violence, and a lot went to things that are not specifically directly tied to violence reduction but that we know have crime-fighting benefits: enormous increases in state- and local-government infrastructure, spending on streets and highways, on lighting, on neighborhood and social centers, on public-safety infrastructure. So a lot of money was available. We threw a lot of crap at the wall and we don’t know what stuck, but some of it undoubtedly stuck.

After writing that piece, I’ve been struck by other stuff that’s also plunging at the same rate. You look at drug overdoses, you look at traffic-accident deaths, alcohol deaths, suicides. And you look at something like carjackings, which I have a piece I’m going to run about in the next few weeks. Carjackings are down an insane amount. In Chicago, they’re down like 70 percent between 2021 and 2025. And carjackings are very specific, because they are, even more than murder, a young person’s crime. The average age of an offender is much younger than that of a shoplifting or a home burglary. So to see carjackings go up so much in 2020 and then plunge since 2022, 2023, suggests more of a societal change to me. You combine the drug-overdose deaths and the alcohol-related deaths and the murders and the carjackings, and it points to something that broke in the U.S. in 2020, and which is now healing. When I think about what’s driving this, it’s a combination of spending a lot of money on a lot of stuff, and some of it working, and that the thing that broke and caused all of this to go up is not as broken anymore.

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U.S. Speaker of the House: 'Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant'

"Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant."

                                                           -Speaker of the House Mike Johnson

Those are the complaining words of Johnson a Republican from Louisiana, who was voicing his support for the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which now claims that its agents have the right to forcibly enter private homes without first obtaining a warrant signed by a judge, reported Reason. According to ICE, its agents may forcibly enter homes in certain immigration enforcement contexts based merely on a so-called "administrative warrant," which is not actually a warrant at all, but is rather just a piece of paper signed by someone in the executive branch.

To fully appreciate the inherent lawlessness of the Johnson view, simply replace the phrase "getting a judicial warrant" with any constitutional requirement that you like in the above-quoted statement. For example:

"Imagine if we had to go through the process of guaranteeing freedom of speech."

"Imagine if we had to go through the process of respecting the right to keep and bear arms."

"Imagine if we had to go through the process of paying just compensation when private property is taken for a public use."

You get the idea.

When a government mouthpiece complains that it would be too difficult to follow the commands of the Constitution in a given context, that's a dead giveaway that the government is already violating (or planning to violate) the commands of the Constitution in that context.

The principle that law enforcement must generally obtain a judicial warrant before entering a home is well-established in Fourth Amendment caselaw. In California v. Lange (2019), for example, the U.S. Supreme Court declared, "we are not eager—more the reverse—to print a new permission slip for entering the home without a warrant." At issue in that case was a decision by the California Court of Appeals which said that a police officer may always enter a suspect's home without a judicial warrant if the officer is in "hot pursuit" of the suspect and has probable cause to believe that the suspect has committed a misdemeanor.

But the Supreme Court overturned that lower court ruling because it violated the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. "When the totality of circumstances shows an emergency—such as imminent harm to others," the Court said, "the police may act without waiting." But "when the nature of the crime, the nature of the flight, and surrounding facts present no such exigency," the decision held, "officers must respect the sanctity of the home—which means they must get a warrant." Indeed, the opinion stated, "when the officer has time to get a warrant, he must do so—even though the misdemeanant fled."

The Lange decision also contained a helpful reminder of the warrant requirement's deep roots in Anglo-American jurisprudence by quoting from a venerable British common law judgment:

"To enter a man's house" without a proper warrant, Lord Chief Justice Pratt proclaimed in 1763, is to attack "the liberty of the subject" and "destroy the liberty of the kingdom." That was the idea behind the Fourth Amendment.

Which brings us back to Johnson, who whined, "imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant."

But if an ICE agent has the time to obtain a piece of paper signed by a superior in the executive branch before heading out to bust down somebody's front door, then that agent also has the time to obtain a real warrant signed by an actual judge. As the Supreme Court instructed in Lange, "when the officer has time to get a warrant, he must do so." The "sanctity of the home" demands it under our Constitution.

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Guthrie's alleged 'kidnapping' for ransom is a relic from a bygone era

“A true kidnapping for ransom is a throwback to the Lindbergh time,” former FBI agent Katherine Schweit told the USA Today, citing the 1932 kidnapping for ransom of Charles Lindbergh’s son. The “kidnapping” of Nancy Guthrie is unusual.

These days, most kidnappings are typically connected to domestic or family issues, human smugglers or mental illness. Cases targeting wealthy or famous individuals, though uncommon, garner outsized attention, such the 1974 abduction of William Randolph Hearst’s granddaughter. 

“They’re what movies are made of because they're dramatic and scary. You don't see them playing out in real life,” said Lance Leising, a former FBI agent. “Now you are, unfortunately, in a horrible way for the family and the victim.”

Guthrie was first reported missing by her family on Feb. 1, when she didn't show up for church. Her disappearance sparked a large search effort in the Catalina Foothills community, perched north of Tucson, and a criminal investigation by the Pima County Sheriff's Department and FBI. Sheriff Chris Nanos later said Guthrie was believed to be "taken from her home against her will.”

Three days later, on Feb. 2, ransom messages were delivered to several media outlets, demanding payment in Bitcoin. But with no further contact, the family posted social media videos urging anyone holding Guthrie to make contact. On Feb. 5, the FBI arrested Derrick Callella in California, who authorities say sent text messages referencing Bitcoin payments to Guthrie’s family shortly after they publicly pleaded for her safe return. He’s facing charges including with transmitting ransom-related communications, according to a criminal complaint.

On Feb. 6, the FBI announced it was examining a new ransom message without providing further details. Tucson TV station KOLD, which received both the most recent and one of the first potential ransom note, said the new note contains information that seemed intended to prove that the senders were the same. Still no suspects have been identified.

The latest Guthrie family posted a new Instagram video on Feb. 7.

"We received your message and we understand," Savannah Guthrie also said in the video.

Leising, the former FBI agent, said that "the 'understand' comment is obviously referring to something in the note that we are not privy to." He said that could be a nod to the kidnappers grievances or directions on how to deliver money, while the “celebrate” reference could refer to a resolution of some kind.

"I do think investigators are going on the assumption that she is still alive, however, there are indications in the family statement that indicates they are concerned that she is no longer alive," he said.

It marked the latest in a case in which law enforcement has been trying to determine the validity of the demand.

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Clintons call for public testimony before Congress regarding convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein

Former US president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary are calling for their congressional testimony on ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to be held publicly, to prevent Republicans from politicising the issue, reported The Guardian.

Both Clintons had been ordered to give closed-door depositions before the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, which is investigating the deceased financier’s connections to powerful figures and how information about his crimes was handled.

Democrats say the probe is being weaponised to attack political opponents of president Donald Trump – himself a longtime Epstein associate who has not been called to testify – rather than to conduct legitimate oversight.

House Republicans had previously threatened a contempt vote if the Democratic power couple did not show up to testify, which they have since agreed to do.

But holding the deposition behind closed doors, Bill Clinton said Friday, would be akin to being tried at a “kangaroo court”.

“Let’s stop the games + do this the right way: in a public hearing,” the former Democratic president said on X.

Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, said the couple had already told the Republican-led oversight committee “what we know”.

“If you want this fight ... let’s have it in public,” she said on Thursday.

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