Courtesy Pennsylvania Department of Corrections

In this undated photo, Terrance Williams is pictured. Williams is on death row for fatally beating Amos Norwood in 1984 in Philadelphia.

Updated at 6:30 p.m. ET: A Pennsylvania man on death row for the murder of his alleged sexual abuser failed to win clemency Monday from the state Board of Pardons.

Terrance "Terry" Williams, 46, is scheduled to be executed on Oct. 3. He is on death row at the State Correctional Institute at Greene in Pennsylvania for killing 56-year-old Amos Norwood with a tire iron in Philadelphia in 1984. Williams was 18 years old at the time of the murder. Defense lawyer Victor J. Abreu has said Williams' crimes were mitigated by the sexual abuse he experienced in his childhood. Norwood was allegedly one of his attackers.

After Monday’s hearing, the five-member board of pardons voted 3-2 in favor of clemency, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. However, under state law, a unanimous vote was needed in order to provide a nonbinding recommendation to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett to change the lethal injection to life in prison without parole, the Inquirer reported.

The clemency hearing was granted after a petition filed on Sept. 6 called upon Corbett and the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons to stop the execution. The petition included a statement from Norwood's widow, who said, "Several years ago, after much prayer and self-reflection, I found the strength and courage to forgive Terry Williams."

Courtesy Germantown High School

Williams is pictured here at age 17. His defense lawyers say his crimes are mitigated by a childhood of sexual abuse.

Related: Widow asks Pennsylvania governor not to execute husband's killer

"I do not wish to see Terry Williams executed,” she said in the statement.

On Friday, a Philadelphia judge agreed to hear testimony on the defense's claim that the prosecutor at Williams' 1986 trial withheld evidence from the jury pertaining to the sexual abuse, the Inquirer also reported.

One of Williams' attorneys, Shawn Nolan, said in a statement Monday that they are "deeply disappointed" in the denial for clemency. Nolan added that they will present new evidence on Thursday in court that reveals what the defense says is Williams' motive for the murders: years of sexual abuse.

"We are confident that a thorough review of the facts will make it clear that the jurors in this case did not have accurate and complete information about the crime or Terry Williams," Nolan said.

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Williams is also serving a life term for killing 50-year-old Herbert Hamilton when he was 17. Hamilton is another alleged abuser.

"[Williams] was a victim of horrific abuse since he was 6 years old,” Abreu told NBC News earlier this month. "The jury didn’t know that the two men who were killed were abusing him. That information was never presented to the jury."

Williams would be the first person executed in Pennsylvania in 13 years.

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A reporter who gained access to the nation's largest death row in California inadvertently discovered that she had captured pictures of Scott Peterson, who was convicted of murder more than seven years ago.

In a highly-publicized case, Peterson was sentenced to death in 2005 for the murder of his wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn child in California. He is currently on death row at the San Quentin State Prison in California.

Nancy Mullane, an independent reporter and producer, told TODAY's Matt Lauer on Wednesday that she has been going inside the facility as a reporter since 2007.

"There have been no reporters on death row in California in almost a decade," Mullane said. "So it took me years to build a relationship with the California Department of Corrections where they actually trusted me to be the first reporter to go in."

While spending time inside death row doing interviews with prisoners serving life in the San Quentin facility, she was allowed to take photos as part of her reporting.

"It wasn't until two months later that I was actually reviewing the photographs and I realized, 'Oh, I think these are Scott Peterson,'" Mullane said.

She described Peterson's environment in death row as "confined" and said that 68 prisoners live in his section of the facility. He reportedly has his own cell and can spend a few hours per day outside exercising or playing basketball.

Mullane did not get a chance to speak with Peterson, but did get to interview inmates willing to talk from their cell doors. Her reporting and observations are documented in a new book, "Life After Murder: Five Men in Search of Redemption."

 Related: Can a convicted murderer find redemption after the verdict?

In the last five years, Mullane has been studying and reporting on prisoners who are serving life in prison with the possibility of parole.

"What I have found is this is a population we don't know in prisons," Mullane said. "We don't know what people who commit a murder really are like after they've done the time, after they've done everything we've asked them to do."

Peterson is not part of that population, having been sentenced to death. He still claims innocence, and in July filed an appeal of his murder conviction with the California Supreme Court. The appeal is expected to take years to resolve.

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AP

In this undated Pennsylvania Department of Corrections' photo, shown is Terrance Williams who is on death row for fatally beating Amos Norwood in1984 in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Pennsylvania Department of Corrections)

A Pennsylvania widow says she has forgiven the man who killed her husband decades ago and is urging the governor of Pennsylvania to spare the condemned murderer scheduled for execution Oct. 3.

Terrance "Terry" Williams is on death row at the State Correctional Institute at Greene, south of Pittsburgh, for killing Amos Norwood, 56, with a tire iron in Philadelphia in 1984.

Defense lawyer Victor J. Abreu said Williams' crimes were mitigated by a childhood of sexual abuse that later included attacks by Norwood, who abused Williams for years. Williams was 18 at the time of the murder. Williams, now 46, is also serving a life term for killing another alleged abuser, Herbert Hamilton, 50, when he was 17.

Norwood's widow, Mamie Norwood, described her husband's killing as "unbearable" but wrote in a letter that "several years ago, after much prayer and self-reflection, I found the strength and courage to forgive Terry Williams."

"I do not wish to see Terry Williams executed,” she said in her letter.

Norwood’s letter was included in a clemency petition filed Thursday with the backing of dozens of lawyers and child welfare advocates who called upon Corbett and the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons to stop Williams' execution.

View petition for executive clemency (Pdf.)

Williams' clemency hearing is scheduled for Sept. 17, Abreu said. 

"He was a victim of horrific abuse since he was 6 years old,” Abreu told NBC News. "The jury didn’t know that the two men who were killed were abusing him. That information was never presented to the jury."

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Abreu said he spoke with Williams last week at the maximum security prison near Waynesburg and described their conversations as upbeat. "He remains hopeful that the board and the governor will intervene in this case. He's is optimistic about that," he said.

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A military appeals court has overturned the death sentence of Lance Cpl. Kenneth G. Parker, who had been the only Marine on the military’s death row, according  to court documents.

In 1995, Parker was sentenced to death after being convicted of two counts of premeditated murder, and one count of armed robbery and kidnapping. The appeals court threw out one of the two murder counts on Wednesday, and instead of the death penalty, Parker will spend the rest of his life in prison.

The first murder took place during a night of drinking and talk of racial tensions on March 26, 1992, according to court documents.

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While a group of six African-American Marines talked at Camp Lejeune, N.C., a rumor was circulating that a group of white Marines had tried to lynch an African-American Marine on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

A witness in legal proceedings testified that Parker said, “We are going to get us a white boy tonight.”

The men left the base and traveled to nearby Jacksonville, where Parker, carrying a loaded shotgun, picked out white Marine Lance Cpl. Rodney Page and shot him in the upper abdomen after he begged for his life.

In another killing several nights later, Parker allegedly shot and killed Lance Cpl. Christopher James, the husband of a woman having an affair with a fellow Marine, with the same weapon. It was in that case in which the court found numerous problems with the trial judge’s improper admission of evidence and other errors.

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“The appellant’s premeditated murder of LCpl Page, his fellow Marine, was carried out with chilling callousness and depravity,” Judge J.A. Maksym wrote in the opinion. “We have upset aspects of this verdict and will set aside the death penalty due to numerous and substantive procedural and legal failures at trial, some leading to constitutional deprivation. Yet no error by the trial judge below should distract us from the overwhelming evidence of the appellant’s guilt as to the robbery and murder of LCpl Page. This was truly a heinous killing and, minus the errors cited above, assuming the death penalty was awarded, we would have affirmed.”

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, five men remain on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The last military execution took place on April 13, 1961, when U.S. Army Private John A. Bennett was hanged after being convicted of rape and attempted murder.

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­­­­In 1987, Prosecutor Gary Van Brocklin addressed a panel of three judges deciding the fate of a man who had killed store clerk Ihsan Aydah of Youngstown, Ohio.

“Give him the same consideration he gave Ihsan Aydah – give him death,” Van Brocklin said. The judges agreed and sent the defendant, John Jeffrey Eley, then 38, to death row.

On Tuesday, 25 years after Eley was sentenced, Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted him clemency, in part because Van Brocklin, police detective Joseph Fajack and Judge Peter Economus changed how they felt about the case.

“It was something that bothered my conscience,” Van Brocklin told msnbc.com on Tuesday. “He wasn’t smart.”

At the time, a clinical psychologist found that Eley had borderline intelligence. Since then, a psychiatrist has found him to be mentally disabled -- relevant because the Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that mentally disabled defendants cannot be sentenced to death.

Van Brocklin recalled that Eley hadn't seemed sharp. The former county prosecutor, a self-described conservative Republican, said he had offered Eley a four-to-six year sentence in exchange for his testimony against his accomplice, Marvin Green. Green had given Eley the gun and told him to hold up the store.

But Eley refused to testify against his old friend.

“To this day, he quotes the Bible saying you shouldn’t be a witness,” Van Brocklin said. “But the Bible says you shouldn’t bear false witness. He’s not a bright guy.”  

There were other details about the case that bothered the three lawmen. Eley had waived his right to a jury trial – that wouldn’t happen today. Also, life without parole was not a possible sentence at the time.

“This was the kind of case that nowadays would not be indicted capitally,” Van Brocklin said. “John Eley killed a man – life without parole would be a fair punishment. I never felt that I was overzealous, but I felt that it wasn’t fair.”

In June, Judge Economus wrote the parole board: "If I had been presented the additional mitigating evidence outlined in the clemency petition at the time of the trial, especially evidence of Mr. Eley's low intellectual functioning, his impoverished childhood, his significant alcohol and substance abuse, and his probable brain impairment, I would have voted for a sentence less than death." 

It hadn't helped over the years that defending Eley was difficult, said Vicki Werneke, the assistant federal public defender who oversaw his case. Eley refused to be evaluated and spoke with her only by phone.

“He told his sisters he thought he would be released from prison and that Jesus was going to save him,” Werneke told msnbc.com. “I’m a believer and I think that maybe God did have a hand in it, but maybe it was through us.”  

But the state didn't heed their pleas. On June 20, exactly 10 years after the Supreme Court ruling, an Ohio parole board voted, 5-3, to uphold Eley's death sentence.

It was unusual for the board to be divided, Werneke said. Even more so, however, was that the governor overruled their decision.

Then again, Gov. Kasich appears to be examining death row cases. In September, he spared a man who had slashed a woman’s throat during a 1987 robbery, The Associated Press reported. The governor said he was compelled by the man’s mental health history and the story of his tragic childhood.

In June, the governor removed a man from death row because the details of the crime were “frustratingly unclear.”

Of the governor, Van Brocklin said, “I have to commend him for a courageous stand. It’s easy to run the other way.”

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The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the state's execution law Friday, calling it unconstitutional.

In a split decision, the high court sided with 10 death row inmates who argued that, under Arkansas' constitution, only the Legislature can set execution policy. Legislators in 2009 voted to give that authority to the Department of Correction.

The 2009 law says a death sentence is to be carried out by lethal injection of one or more chemicals that the director of the Department of Correction chooses.

Death row inmate Jack Harold Jones Jr. sued the head of the correction department in 2010, challenging the constitutionality of the law. Nine other inmates have since joined the suit, asking that the law be struck down.

The state, meanwhile, asked the court to free up several executions it halted because of this lawsuit.

It wasn't immediately clear what the court's ruling will mean for the 40 men on death row in Arkansas. There aren't any pending executions, and the state hasn't put anyone to death since 2005, in part because of legal challenges like this one.

Three Arkansas inmates who were scheduled to be put to death last summer were spared by the state Supreme Court almost exactly a year ago. Jason Farrell McGehee, Bruce Earl Ward, and Marcel Wayne Williams, all of whom are plaintiffs in the lethal injection lawsuit, received stays of executions from the high court on June 23, 2011, according to ArkansasNews.com.

Josh Lee, an attorney for the death row inmates who challenged the law, declined to comment Friday.

During oral arguments last week, Lee said the state would have two options if the court found the law unconstitutional.

"The Legislature could either choose to stick with the 1983 statute, which everybody concedes is constitutional, or the Legislature could decide we want to amend it," Lee said last week.

The state adopted lethal injection as its method of capital punishment in 1983. There have been legal challenges to the way the state kills its condemned prisoners since then. In 2009, in the midst of a legal battle over lethal injection, the state Legislature passed the law that the court struck down Friday.

Joseph Cordi, an attorney for the state, told the Supreme Court last week that he thought the state would be left with the earlier law if the court struck down the entire statute.

Part of the 2009 law also says that in the event it's found unconstitutional, death sentences will be carried out by electrocution.

"That would be up for the lawyers to untangle and figure out what it means, but that's a possibility," prisons spokeswoman Dina Tyler said.

Since the reinstatement of capital punishment by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, Arkansas has been the only state to ever conduct three executions on the same night, according to The Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization. Triple executions were done twice in Arkansas's history: first on Aug. 3, 1994, under Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, and then again on Jan. 8, 1997, under Gov. Mike Huckabee, records on DeathPenaltyInfo.org show.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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LOS ANGELES -- James Lee Crummel, a pedophile and convicted killer sentenced to die for the 1979 murder of a teenage boy, has hanged himself on California's death row, months before voters in the state are due to decide whether to abolish the death penalty, prison officials said on Tuesday.

The 68-year-old was found hanging in his cell at San Quentin State Prison, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman Sam Robinson said in a written statement.

He was pronounced dead at 4:20 p.m. local time (8.20 p.m. ET) on Sunday, Robinson said.

Crummel had been housed on death row since he was sentenced to death in 2004 for the 1979 kidnapping, sexual abuse and murder of 13-year-old James Wilfred Trotter.

Trotter was snatched as he walked to meet his school bus in Costa Mesa, California, in April of 1979. His charred remains were found more than a decade later, in 1990, but not confirmed as that of the boy until 1996.

Crummel was also convicted in San Bernardino County, California, for molesting three boys in Big Bear City, and was suspected of abducting and killing 9-year- old Big Bear Lake resident Jack "J.D." Phillips, who disappeared near his home in 1995, the San Bernadino Sun newspaper reported. 

It said Jack's remains have never been located, and his father said in June 2004 that Crummel refused to disclose to authorities where the boy's remains were located unless the death penalty was taken off the table.

The suicide comes ahead of a ballot measure in November which asks voters to repeal the death penalty in California, home to nearly a quarter of the nation's death row inmates.

The ballot initiative focuses on the high cost of the death penalty in a state that has executed 13 people since capital punishment was reinstated in the nation in 1976. More than 720 inmates sit on death row pending lengthy and expensive appeals.

Crummel joins another 20 inmates who have committed suicide while on California's death row. According to the corrections department, since capital punishment was reinstated in California in 1978, 57 condemned inmates in the state have died from natural causes and six died from other causes.

A federal judge halted all California executions in 2006 after ruling that the three-drug protocol that has been used for lethal injections carried the risk of causing the inmate too much pain and suffering before death.

California has since revised its protocol but an appeals court has blocked resumption of executions over the same objections.

A 1997 profile of Crummel and the detective who helped secure a key conviction against him, was re-published by the Orange County Register on Wednesday.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press

The execution room at San Quentin in California has since been renovated, although gas remains one of two methods of execution in the state. Here, the gas chamber in 1983. California has executed 13 inmates since 1976.

Editor's note: A caption on a photo of Oregon's death chamber that appeared on an earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the year of the state's last execution. It was in 1997, according to a state Department of Corrections spokeswoman. The photo showed the execution chamber prepared for inmate Gary Haugen. But Haugen received a reprieve in November and is still on death row, the spokeswoman said.

If California voters suspend the death penalty in November, they will have removed one-quarter of the nation's current death row population.

The initiative -- which got enough signatures Monday to be placed on the ballot -- could return the state's 723 death row inmates to the general prison population, the Los Angeles Times reported. Their sentences would be reduced to life without parole and they would be expected to work; their earnings would go to crime victims.

California’s death row ballooned in size because, simply put, the state rarely executes its inmates, said Richard Dieter, executive director of Death Penalty Information Center.

California voters to consider ending capital punishment

Compare California to Texas, for example – both states sentence about 20 people to death every year, Dieter said. But while Texas executes one inmate a month, sometimes even one per week, California hasn't executed anyone since 2006.

The Times reported that California has executed 13 inmates since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, and that death row inmates are far more likely to die of old age.

“California is very ambivalent about the death penalty,” Dieter said.

The last time nearly so many inmates had their sentences commuted was in 1972, when the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty. At the time, 600 inmates had their sentences reduced to the next level.

Although the Supreme Court made the death penalty legal again in 1976, the push to remove the sentence from state books began in 2007. Since then, four states – New York, New Jersey, Illinois and New Mexico – have repealed capital punishment. (Thirteen states nixed capital punishment before the 1960s; Michigan hasn’t had the death penalty since 1846, Maine since 1887.)

Connecticut is expected to follow suit in coming days.

Dieter said the more recent efforts to get rid of the death penalty have been grassroots efforts.

In California, an unlikely group of advocates have banded together to overturn the law, including El Dorado County Supervisor Ron Briggs, a self-described staunch conservative, who helped write the 1978 initiative to expand the death penalty.

“We'd thought we would bring California savings and safety in dealing with convicted murderers,” Briggs wrote in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. “Instead, we contributed to a nightmarish system that coddles murderers and enriches lawyers. Our initiative was intended to bring about greater justice for murder victims. Never did we envision a multibillion-dollar industry that packs murderers onto death row for decades of extremely expensive incarceration. We thought we would empty death row, not triple its population.”

Chuck Robinson / AP

The death chamber, equipped for lethal injection, at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., shown in this April 1995 photo. Indiana, which currently holds 14 death row inmates, has executed 20 since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty nationwide.

The American Civil Liberties Union also supports the initiative, as does Jeanne Woodford, a former warden of San Quentin State Prison, where the male death row is located, and who oversaw four executions. There are 19 women on death row in California who are imprisoned at Chowchilla.

Dieter said the death penalty itself may be slowly dying – last year, 78 death sentences were given, compared with 315 in 1996. Executions have also dropped by half.

Some states don’t employ the death penalty. In the past year, of the 34 states with the death penalty, 13 carried out an execution. Some didn’t hand out death sentences. In exchange for information, Washington state agreed not to execute Gary Ridgway, the notorious Green River Killer who was found guilty of murdering 48 women.

“A lack of meaningful use of the death penalty is leading some states to abandon it,” Dieter said. “Whatever the goals were, they’re not being reached.”

Dieter said the advent of DNA analysis may explain the decline in executions. DNA testing famously revealed that innocent men were on death row in Illinois, which resulted in then-Gov. George Ryan declaring a moratorium on executions in 2000. The Legislature abolished the death penalty in 2011.

“There’s less confidence in the system,” Dieter said. “Juries are returning fewer death sentences. Prosecutors are seeking it less. The whole system is responding more cautiously to carrying out the death penalty.”

Dieter said the economy has also played a part – although most state legislators point to other issues, some have noted that the state could be putting the money it spends on death-penalty cases elsewhere, such as to restore money cut from the budgets of libraries and police departments.

Internationally, countries are also doing away with the death penalty, Dieter said. European Union countries have abolished capital punishment and South Africa got rid of the death penalty when it rewrote its constitution in 1997.

“We are in much more than a legal ripple,” Dieter said.

---

Top five death row inmate populations by state:

California: 723
Florida: 402
Texas: 312
Pennsylvania: 211
Alabama: 202
Nationwide: 3,199

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California voters will decide whether to abolish the death penalty this November, the Silicon Valley Mercury News reported. A group in favor of doing away with the nation’s largest death row gathered more than 800,000 signatures –- enough to put capital punishment on the ballot.

Death would be replaced with life in prison without possibility of parole, according to the Mercury News. Inmates currently on death row would live out life in prison instead.

"It's a proposition whose time has come," measure proponent Jeanne Woodford, a former San Quentin State Prison warden, told reporters Monday morning, according to the Mercury News.

Abolishing the death penalty could save California tens of millions of dollars, which could be redirected to solving rape and murder cases, Woodford said. Woodford, who oversaw four executions as warden, now heads Death Penalty Focus, which opposes the death penalty.  

The measure is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and some law enforcement and victims rights groups, the Sacramento Bee reported.

The death penalty was reinstated in California in 1978. Since then, 13 people have been executed, according to Death Penalty Focus. The Los Angeles Times reported that $4 billion has been spent to administer capital punishment –- about $308 million per execution.

California has been moving in this direction for several years. In 2006, a U.S. District Court judge halted all executions out of concern that they resulted in unnecessary pain, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. In December, a Superior Court judge rejected the state’s new lethal injection protocols because officials hadn’t considered a one-drug method used in other states.

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