Missouri Gov. Michael Parson on Monday rejected a clemency petition from Brian Dorsey, 52, a death row inmate scheduled to be executed Tuesday for a 2006 double murder.
“The pain Dorsey has caused others can never be remedied, but carrying out Dorsey’s sentence under Missouri law and the Court’s order will bring justice and closure,” said Governor Parson, a former sheriff who has served since taking office in the country has not blocked an execution. 2018, wrote in a statement.
The Missouri inmate’s attorneys condemned the decision in a statement, pointing to Dorsey’s commitment to rehabilitation and what they see as his flawed original legal representation.
“Governor Parson has chosen to ignore the wealth of information before him that shows Brian Dorsey is uniquely deserving of mercy,” attorney Megan Crane said Monday. “Brian has spent every day of his time in prison trying to atone for his crime, and dozens of correctional officers have testified to his repentance, transformation and commitment to service. Brian’s unprecedented support and his irrefutable evidence of redemption are exactly the circumstances for which leniency is intended. It is devastating that Brian is executed despite this truth.”
Some family members of the victims, Dorsey’s cousin Sarah and her husband Ben Bonnie, support the death sentence, while others have opposed it.
“Through all these years of pain and suffering, we are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” a group of family members said in a statement earlier this year. “Brian will get the justice that Sarah and Ben have deserved for so long.”
The clemency decision comes despite Dorsey appealing in state and federal court, and a group of more than 70 current and former corrections officers calling for a reduction in the man’s death sentence.
“In general, we believe in the use of the death penalty,” the officers previously wrote to the governor. “But we agree that the death penalty is not the appropriate punishment for Brian Dorsey.”
Dorsey was sentenced to death for the murder on December 23, 2006, a sentence that was upheld in appeals to state, federal and U.S. Supreme Court courts.
According to the Missouri Attorney General’s office, the couple invited Dorsey to their home for a night in New Bloomfield, Missouri, during a time when Dorsey feared a group of drug dealers were pursuing him to collect a debt.
Prosecutors also allege that after Dorsey killed them, he sexually assaulted Sarah and poured bleach on her, although these charges were not fully considered in court because Dorsey pleaded guilty.
Dorsey has turned himself in to the police and is not appealing because he is innocent; rather, he claims that he received constitutionally deficient original legal representation, thereby violating his Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
According to attorneys, Dorsey’s original attorneys failed to present key pieces of evidence, a possible result of each being paid a flat fee of $12,000 to defend him, a practice that legal observers say has led to hasty decisions in capital cases can encourage, which can last for years.
The Missouri man’s original attorneys did not make public Mr. Dorsey’s claim that he was in a drug-induced psychosis during the murders and did not explore or present his previous struggles with mental health, including a major depression diagnosis and seeking inpatient treatment. This is reported by the Death Penalty Information Center.
They also negotiated a guilty plea deal that contained no guarantees about the sentence Dorsey would receive.
The practice of paying flat fees in capital cases has long been considered “improper” by the American Bar Association because of its potential to “discourage attorneys from doing more than what is minimally necessary.”
In a March letter to the governor, Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court justice who once upheld Dorsey’s death sentence, said this was a “rare case in which those of us sitting in the judgment of a man who has been convicted for capital murder were wrong” and added that the lump sum scheme, which Missouri has since stopped using, “undoubtedly affected everything.”
When contacted byThe independent, his original attorneys, Chris Slusher and Scott McBride, declined to comment.
According to prison staff, Dorsey has not committed any violations since his imprisonment and has become a trusted barber for inmates and an occasional prison staff member.
Last weekend, attorneys for Dorsey and the state reached a settlement on another issue, namely whether protocols were in place to prevent unnecessary suffering if executioners struggled to insert an IV line to deliver the execution drugs. In some cases, the execution staff resorts to a ‘cutdown’, which involves making a potentially deep incision in the skin to locate a good vein.
The death row inmate had argued that because he is obese, diabetic and a former intravenous drug user, this could make a reduction more likely, a painful process according to his lawyers compared to “surgery without anesthesia.”
Barring a last-minute postponement, Dorsey is expected to be executed by lethal injection at Missouri’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center prison at 6 p.m. local time.
Missouri executes more people than almost all other US states. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the state has executed 97 people since 1976, trailing only Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia and Florida.
Last year it was one of only five states to carry out executions, killing four people.
The independent and the non-profit organization Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ) have launched a joint campaign calling for an end to the death penalty in the US. The RBIJ has signed more than 150 high-profile signatories to its Business Leaders Declaration Against the Death Penalty – with The Independent last on the list. We join high-profile executives like Ariana Huffington, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson as part of this initiative in pledging to highlight the injustices of the death penalty in our reporting.