Missouri shouldn’t execute Carman Deck after 3 overturned sentences. But it will

On Tuesday, Carman Deck is scheduled to die by lethal injection in Missouri.

Like so many on death row, Deck’s childhood abuse in foster care and other mitigating circumstances weren’t heard by jurors during the penalty phase of his third death sentence trial.

A petition for clemency has been filed on his behalf, but we all know that a stay isn’t likely.

Last year, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson ignored pleas of mercy from Pope Francis and others when he denied an appeal for clemency for Ernest Lee Johnson, an intellectually disabled man who had had part of his brain removed.

In 1998, Deck was convicted of first-degree murder. His guilt was never in doubt: Deck confessed to the 1996 killings of James and Zelma Long, an older couple from near St. Louis.

He was sentenced to death. The penalty was overturned three times.

Parson “is reviewing the matter as he does with all court ordered executions,” a spokesperson said in an email.

In 2002, the Missouri Supreme Court threw out Deck’s death sentence due to ineffective counsel from his trial lawyers.

His second death sentence was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 because during that second sentencing, he appeared before the jury in leg irons, handcuffs and a belly chain — all but screaming to those who would decide his fate that he was too dangerous to be unshackled, even in court.

In 2008, Deck was sentenced to death for the third time. But the case lacked substantial evidence available in the first two trials, U.S. District Judge Catherine D. Perry ruled in 2017.

Three years later, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit reinstated the death penalty, and earlier this year, the Missouri Supreme Court condemned Deck to death yet again. If at first you don’t succeed, etc.

Deck would be the fourth person put to death in Missouri since Parson became governor in 2018. Johnson, Russell Bucklew and Walter Barton were all executed after Parson denied their requests for clemency.

Johnson was convicted of a 1994 murder of three Columbia convenience store workers — Mary Bratcher, Mable Scruggs and Fred Jones. His intellectual deficits were so significant a reasonable jury would not have recommended execution, former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Michael Wolff said in support of keeping Johnson alive.

Part of Johnson’s brain was removed along with a tumor in 2008. Yet despite Johnson’s mental condition, Parson declined to halt the execution.

Until his death in 2020, Barton maintained he was innocent of the 1994 murder of Gladys Kuehler. Despite thousands of pleas to halt Barton’s execution, Parson proceeded, making Missouri the first state in the country to carry out an execution during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bucklew was convicted of first-degree murder in the March 1996 shooting death of 27-year-old Michael Sanders. In 2018, Bucklew was executed despite a rare medical condition called cavernous hemangioma, which causes malformed blood vessels.

Buckley would likely suffocate on his own blood if tumors in his head, nose and throat burst as he was being put to death, his attorneys argued.

But again, Parson was unmoved.

He seems to be for the death penalty in all cases, no matter how unconstitutionally compromised the condemned person is.

In 2018, our editorial board came out against capital punishment in all cases.

Why? Decades of study tell us that racial disparities in the meting out of justice continue to be systemic. There is no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent.

Capital cases are far more expensive to prosecute and death row inmates cost the state much more than do convicts sentenced to life without parole.

A common argument for the death penalty is that the worst criminals don’t deserve to live, and that may be. But the American public does deserve better than to have innocent people killed in our name, ever, without equal treatment under the law, doing nothing to reduce the crime rate, and at greater cost to taxpayers.

As we asked four years ago, do we deserve to remain in the moral universe inhabited by the world’s other top executioners: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan?

In “pro-life” Missouri, the answer is always yes.

This story was originally published April 29, 2022 at 5:00 AM.