Judge stays Missouri man’s execution; groups call for inquiry into innocence claim
Update: A federal court of appeals has vacated the stay of execution for Walter Barton, clearing the way for Missouri to put him to death Tuesday. That story is posted here.
A federal judge on Friday stayed the execution of Walter Barton, a southwest Missouri man who was set to be executed Tuesday. The judge said he needed more time to review claims raised by Barton’s lawyers.
Barton, now 64, was set to die by injection. He was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1991 killing of 81-year-old Gladys Kuehler, who was stabbed more than 50 times at a mobile-home park she managed in Ozark, Mo., south of Springfield.
Last week, Barton’s attorneys filed a motion raising concerns about evidence used at trial, such as testimony from a bloodstain-pattern analyst. They also argued Barton could not be executed because he suffered a brain injury and was therefore incompetent.
In his order, Judge Brian Wimes said the 15 days between the filing and Barton’s scheduled execution was not long enough to consider all the issues raised by Barton’s petition. He gave Barton a 30-day reprieve.
The order said the court must assess whether Barton was likely to succeed in his petition and, if it can’t dismiss the petition on its merits before the execution, “must issue a stay to prevent the case from becoming moot.”
Barton was set to be the first person executed in the U.S. since the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic.
The Missouri Attorney General’s Office is appealing the order.
Barton went on trial five times from 1993 to 2006, a rarity in death penalty cases. He has maintained his innocence.
Three of the 12 Cass County jurors who convicted Barton recently said findings that contradict the state’s bloodstain-pattern analyst would have influenced their consideration of his guilt. They would have made one “uncomfortable” recommending the death penalty.
Barton was among three people who found Kuehler dead in her blood-drenched bedroom on Oct. 9, 1991. When officers questioned Barton, they noticed small bloodstains on his clothing.
He told police he must have gotten the victim’s blood on him when he pulled Kuehler’s granddaughter away from the body and slipped. The granddaughter initially confirmed Barton pulled her from the body, but she later changed her story.
At Barton’s trial, the state’s expert, William Newhouse, opined that three small bloodstains found on Barton’s clothing were the result of impact spatter ejected by blows to the victim.
Barton’s lawyers have since retained another crime-scene analyst, Lawrence Renner, who determined that whoever killed Kuehler — who had also been sexually assaulted and slit across the throat — could not have been wearing Barton’s clothes.
The killer, he believed, would have been covered in blood.
When the Missouri Supreme Court affirmed Barton’s conviction and sentence in a 4-to-3 decision, the judge who wrote the dissenting opinion raised similar issues: “How could Barton have perpetrated the kind of violent, forceful attack that killed Ms. Kuehler and walked away quite unstained by the effort?”
Calls for investigation
Several organizations have called on Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to halt Barton’s execution.
The American Bar Association on Wednesday urged Parson to reprieve the execution and consider commissioning a board of inquiry to exam Barton’s conviction and sentence.
Former Gov. Eric Greitens in 2017 appointed such a board to look into the innocence claim of Marcellus Williams, who was convicted of fatally stabbing a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter in 1998. He was set to die before Greitens stayed the execution.
In her letter Wednesday, the American Bar Association’s president, Judy Perry Martinez, called the history of Barton’s case “troubling” and said there were “lingering doubts” about Barton’s guilt.
The same day, the NAACP and Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty submitted more than 5,000 petition signatures to Parson, urging him to grant clemency to Barton.
Parson’s office has said it is not planning to halt Barton’s execution.
The Innocence Project, the Midwest Innocence Project and the MacArthur Justice Center have also called on Parson to appoint a board of inquiry. Barton’s “shaky” conviction, the groups said, relied on two of the leading causes of wrongful convictions: dubious blood spatter evidence and an incentivized jailhouse informant.
“Mr. Barton’s case has the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction,” they wrote Friday to Parson.
The case against Barton included testimony from a woman who claimed he told her he would kill her “like he killed that old lady.”
That witness, who then went by Katherine Allen, had 29 convictions on her record for offenses involving dishonesty, including for forgery and fraud. She had charges dropped in exchange for her testimony against Barton, his lawyers have said. She is now in federal prison under a new name for defrauding financial institutions and people, according to Barton’s defense team.
Testimony from jailhouse informants is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases, the Innocence Project’s letter noted.
Barton’s case, the letter stated, was “too flimsy for conviction, much less a death sentence.” It said Barton’s trials were marred by prosecutorial misconduct, which the groups said were part of a pattern at the attorney general’s office at that time.
His case was prosecuted by a special unit in the office, which assisted local prosecutors in capital cases. The unit had an established practice of “gravely unethical and unconstitutional tactics,” which resulted in several wrongful murder convictions, the groups wrote.
That included Josh Kezer, who spent 16 years in prison for a 1992 killing. He was exonerated in 2009 when a judge ruled that prosecutors kept key evidence from his defense attorneys.
The Innocence Project’s letter noted a hair found on Kuehler did not match Barton. Neither did biological material under her fingernails.
As for the bloodstain expert testimony, the Innocence Project said Missouri should consider creating an accreditation requirement for bloodstain-pattern analysts — something Texas did in 2018.
“Until it does so, it should not rush to execute a man whose conviction hinges on this debunked ‘science,’” the groups wrote.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 9:26 PM.
