Missouri execution to go ahead after governor declines to give 11th hour reprieve

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Missouri Governor Mike Parson has said he will not grant clemency to death row inmate Carman Deck after the US Supreme Court declined to intervene to halt the man’s execution.

Deck, 56, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 pm on Tuesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre for the double murder of an elderly couple during a robbing at their rural home in July 1996.

After the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Mr Parson said in a statement on Monday that the execution will go ahead.

“Mr Deck has received due process, and three separate juries of his peers have recommended sentences of death for the brutal murders he committed,” Mr Parson said in a statement.

“The State of Missouri will carry out Mr Deck's sentence according to the Court's order and deliver justice.”

Deck, from St Louis, confessed to killing James and Zelma Long while robbing their home in the eastern Missouri town of De Soto in July 1996.

After initially being sentenced to death in 1998, Deck’s death penalty has been thrown out three times over procedural errors.

The Missouri Supreme Court tossed the initial death sentence after it found Deck’s attorney had committed serious errors at trial.

The US Supreme Court threw out a second death sentence in 2005, saying that Deck had been unfairly prejudiced after he was shackled in front of the sentencing jury.

After Deck was sentenced to death for a third time in 2008, a judge overturned the sentence because trial witnesses had not appeared or could not be found during the sentencing phase.

Then in October 2020, a three-judge panel of the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals restored the death penalty, ruling that Deck should have raised his concern first in state court, not federal court.

Deck's attorney, Elizabeth Unger Carlyle, told KSDK the death sentences were “unconstitutional” due to the number of times they had been overturned on appeal.

“No one is suggesting that Carman Deck should get out of prison and go home tomorrow,” Ms Carlyle told the Missouri news site.

Deck’s appeal has also been supported by clemency advocates Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

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Executive director Elyse Max told KSDK: “The state just gets mulligan after mulligan to continue to pursue death even though they’re violating the constitutional rights of the defendants.”

A clemency petition on behalf of Deck cited abuse he suffered as a child, including sexual abuse and beatings. It also said he and his siblings often were left alone without food.

Deck’s only remaining hope of avoiding the injection is a last minute stay of execution.

The victims’ daughter, Angela Rosener, told KSDK Deck’s death would bring her “peace of mind”.

 “He doesn’t need to be pardoned or whatever else. He killed two people in cold blood.”

Last year Mr Parson also denied clemency to death row inmate Ernest Johnson, despite pleas from Pope Francis and members of Congress.

Johnson, who was tried and convicted of a 1994 triple murder, was intellectually disabled and had had part of his brain removed.

The number of executions in the US has declined significantly since peaking at 98 in 1998. The drop has coincided with a decline in public support for capital punishment that has fallen from a high of 80 per cent in 1994 to 54 per cent in 2021, according to Gallup polls.

Earlier Monday, Tennessee Gov Bill Lee paused executions for the rest of the year to enable a review of the state’s lethal injection procedures. That decision came after a testing oversight forced the state to call off the execution of Oscar Smith an hour before he was to die on 21 April.

The Independent and the nonprofit 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 attracted more than 150 well-known signatories to their Business Leaders Declaration Against the Death Penalty - with The Independent as the latest 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 and are making a pledge to highlight the injustices of the death penalty in our coverage.

Associated Press contributed to this report