Missouri Death Row

Gregory Bowman was sentenced to death today for the 1977 murder of Velda Joy Rumfelt in St. Louis County. According to a story at STLToday.com, Bowman served time for separate murders in Belleville in 1978 but won retrials, which are pending. It was after he was released on bond in 2007 in those cases that authorities matched his DNA with that taken from the clothing of Rumfelt who disappeared from the Brentwood area during a visit to family on June 5, 1977. The case will be appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court.

The state supreme court has let the murder conviction stand but has thrown out the death penalty for prison inmate Mark Gill. The court says Gill’s defense lawyer failed to question the character of the victim, which might have led the jury to recommend a life prison term.

Relatives of his victim, Ralph Lape of Cape Girardeau, had testified about his good character during the penalty phase of the trial. But Gill’s lawyer did not bring up evidence that Lape’s computer contained images of child pornography, bestiality, and other sexual content.

The Cape Girardeau County prosecutor says he’ll ask for the death penalty again.

The 8th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals rejected a suit brought by eight death row inmates to block Missouri’s executions because the execution team would not be trained medical professionals and would violate the 8th amendment to the United States Constitution that bans cruel and unusual punishment.

Attorney General Christ Koster’s office said they would soon be seeking execution warrants. [Full story at Columbia Missourian]

A federal appeals court has upheld the death sentence for Leon Taylor, who killed an Independence service station attendant 15 years ago. Taylor had claimed the prosecutors improperly removed African-Americans from the juries that convicted him and recommended his execution.

Taylor killed the attendant as his eight-year-old stepdaughter watched.  The prosecutor says Taylor also pointed a gun at the girl’s head but it didn’t go off. [Missourinet]

State Supreme Court Chief Justice Ray Price spoke on a wide range of issues with reporters in June of this year,  including executions. He said he doesn’t plan to schedule any until legal issues are resolved by the 8th Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals. The appellate court stopped the execution of Reginald Clemons last week after his defense team raised questions about Missouri’s use of lethal injection. Legal questions surrounding lethal injection halted executions in Missouri between October of 2005 and last month when the state put Dennis Skillicorn to death. [Missourinet.com story includes audio]

CNN.com: "Mike Graczyk has spent about 40 hours of his life watching men — and a few women — die. Graczyk, a correspondent for The Associated Press, is believed to hold a macabre record. He's almost certainly watched more executions than anyone else in the United States. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, no state has executed more inmates than Texas. And no one has witnessed more of them than Graczyk.

He's on the witness list for 315 of the state's 439 executions — more than any other reporter, prison employee or chaplain — and no records were kept for another 80."

The newest appeal of the death sentence of a man convicted of a Columbia triple murder claims he’s mentally retarded. Lawyers for Ernest Johnson have argued in a Columbia courtroom that his sentence should be commuted to life in prison. Two mental health experts say he is mildly retarded and has partial fetal alcohol syndrome. His lawyer says Johnson had a brain tumor removed last year and has trouble walking now. He was convicted of killing three employees of a convenience store in 1995. His death sentence has been overturned twice but reinstated both times. [Missourinet.com]

State prison inmate Reginald Clemons was to have been executed during the night. But questions about the people who would perform the execution have kept him alive. The federal appeals court in St. Louis issued a stay June 5th on today's execution of Clemons after Clemons' lawyers raised questions about the execution protocol.

Courts seemingly had resolved issues about the constitutionality of the three-drug system used to execute prisoners in Missouri and in other states. But Clemons' lawyers have found a new angle and Attorney General Chris Koster does not expect the appeals court to rule until mid to late summer.

He says the stay has nothing to do with the facts in the case. Instead, he says, the questions are about the qualifications of the people who perform lethal injections at the Bonne Terre prison.

Missouri has executed one inmate, Dennis Skillicorn, since the courts found the system constitutional. Skillicorn was executed May 20th. Koster says Skillicorn raised the issue in his last hours but he and his lawyers did not have an appeal on this issue before the federal appeals court.

Clemons is under a death sentence for his part in the rapes and murders of two St. Louis sisters on a Mississippi River Bridge in 1991. One accomplice has been executed. Another is awaiting an execution date. The fourth man involved is serving life. [Missourinet.com/Bob Priddy]

AUDIO: Interview with AG Chris Koster

Attorney General Chris Koster has asked the state supreme court to set an execution date for Joseph Paul Franklin, who killed a man outside a St. Louis synagogue in 1977.

Koster says Franklin carefully planned the murder in Richmond Heights. He confessed to the murder in 1994. By then Franklin was serving six consecutive life sentences at a federal prison in Illinois. Franklin, who joined the neo-Nazi movement and the Ku Klux Klan, also has been convicted of murdering two African-American men in Utah, of killing an interracial couple in Wisconsin, and of bombing a synagogue in Tennessee. He also claims he is the one whose gunshots left Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt paralyzed.

He’s under a Missouri death sentence for murdering Gerald Gordon, and of wounding two other men in a synagogue parking lot after a Bar Mitzvah.

Governor Jay Nixon’s office says its office has received 185 calls to stop the execution of Reginald Clemons according to Missourinet’s Twitter feed.  Clemons’ execution has been stayed by the U.S. Court of Appeals; the stay may be lifted at any time clearing the way for the June 17th execution to proceed.

On Saturday afternoon at a rally of 90 people at the Lane Tabernacle CME church Reginald Clemons’ family asked supporters to call state officials on Monday to halt the execution.  The execution warrant is issued for June 17th; if the stay is not lifted it will expire causing a new warrant to be issued.

Clemons was convicted of the 1991 murders of two girls at the Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi River near St. Louis. [STLToday]

Thanks to Andy Small for contributing this update.