Capital Punishment in Missouri
The slaying of two Randolph County jailers a decade ago was again detailed this morning in Boone County Circuit Court, during a penalty phase retrial for convicted murderer Michael Tisius.
The defendant, 29, was sentenced to death after a jury convicted him on two counts of first-degree murder in 2001 in Boone County Circuit Court. The retrial concerns only Tisius’ sentence, not the conviction.
The state Supreme Court has upheld the conviction and death sentence of a man involved in one of the Kansas City area’s most sensational recent murder cases.
Richard Davis was convicted of murdering a woman he and his girlfriend, Dena Riley, had sexually abused and killed. Jurors saw a videotape that showed Davis and Riley suffocating Independence resident Marsha Spicer.
All seven judges agree the trial court made none of the mistakes Davis claims it made. The court split on two other points in the case but upheld the trial court’s decision on each issue.
Riley, the girlfriend, is in prison for life without parole.
Story by Bob Priddy, Missourinet
Briefs, summaries of the written arguments and link to the audio of the oral arguments »
A major move from the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, affecting the enforcement of the death penalty in Missouri. The court denied hearing the Clemons v. Crawford case. Attorney General Chris Koster explains the implications:
“The Missouri death penalty protocol has been tangled up in the federal courts on and off for more than two years now. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision should clear the final hurdles and legitimize the constitutionality of Missouri’s death penalty protocol and we can now go forward with these death penalty cases,” Koster said.
Executions in Missouri had been put on hold by the Eighth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals while the case was reviewed. That Court’s ruling led to the petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The basic argument that was put forth in the Clemons v. Crawford case was that the three drug protocol caused paralysis but then one of the drugs that was injected into the defendant’s body would cause excruciating internal suffering prior to death. That case the federal courts decided was no proven, and the U.S. Supreme Court said that the Missouri three-drug protocol, the same standard that is used in most of the 50 state that have the death penalty, is constitutional,” Koster said.
He is wasting no time getting the process started again.
“We will now go back to the Missouri Supreme Court and in appropriate cases where all the federal appeals have been run, we will go ahead and ask the Missouri Supreme Court to set execution dates,” Koster said.
Koster says he’s already asked the Missouri Supreme Court to set an execution date for Joseph Franklin, a ‘neo-Nazi murderer’ who shot three people outside a St. Louis synagogue, killing one of them. Franklin also killed four other people in incidents in Utah and Wisconsin and bombed a synagogue in Tennessee.
Story by Ryan Famuliner, Missourinet.com [AUDIO :60]
“To avoid the possibility of another death sentence at his third trial this summer, Gary W. Black this week sought and obtained a plea bargain that will keep him locked up for the rest of his life for the 1998 stabbing death of Jason Johnson.
Black, 54, entered an Alford plea Wednesday in Jasper County Circuit Court to the first-degree murder charge he has been facing for 12 years.
Black was twice convicted of the charge and twice sentenced to die by Jasper County juries. Both convictions were overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court, and a third capital-murder trial was set to begin in late July, with selection of jurors from Cass County.”
SC90618 – Velda Rumfelt was murdered in 1977. There were ligature marks and a laceration around her throat. The medical examiner concluded that strangulation was the cause of death. No one was charged with the murder.
In 1979, Gregory Bowman was convicted in Illinois of killing Ruth Ann Jany and Elizabeth West and was sentenced to two concurrent terms of life imprisonment. In 2001, the convictions were vacated and new trials were ordered on grounds that Bowman’s confessions were coerced. Bowman remained in jail in Illinois until he posted bail in 2007.
Shortly after Bowman’s release from jail, James Rokita, an investigator with the Belleville, Illinois, police department, forwarded Bowman’s DNA profile to the St. Louis County police department. St. Louis County investigators compared Bowman’s DNA profile to the DNA profile extracted from sperm recovered from Rumfelt’s underwear. Bowman’s DNA profile matched the DNA profile of the sperm recovered from Rumfelt’s underwear. Bowman was charged with Rumfelt’s murder.
The State presented evidence that Bowman’s DNA was found in Rumfelt’s underwear. Dr. Mary Case, the St. Louis County medical examiner, testified that the cause of death was strangulation and that Rumfelt was the victim of a probable sexual assault. One of Rumfelt’s friends testified that she saw Rumfelt walking with an unidentified young man on the evening of June 5, 1977. Another friend testified that she saw Rumfelt on the morning of June 6, 1977. Rumfelt’s body was discovered on June 7, 1977. The jury convicted Bowman of first-degree murder.