Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, left, traveled to the Capitol this week in support of a bill that would abolish the death sentence in Missouri, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Jim Murphy, center. Democratic Rep. Steve Butz, right, also spoke in favor of the bill (Steph Quinn/Missouri Independent).
There are 32 attorneys, investigators and specialists in the Missouri State Public Defender Office dedicated to preventing the wrongful execution of innocent people on death row.
The agency spends almost $3 million each year on salaries for these personnel, said Matthew Crowell, director of Missouri’s public defender system.
“We’re also using 16 of my best and most experienced attorneys to handle 11 cases out of 90,000,” Crowell said.
Guards, parole officers and other corrections staff also spend years of their working lives alongside Missourians who are sentenced to death — supervising them in the visiting room and locking them up for bad behavior.
And these staff “are still watching the state take the life of that person,” said Dr. Heidi Moore, executive director of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty and a former institutional parole officer in Potosi Correctional Center.
As Missouri lawmakers this week once again consider a bill that would abolish the death penalty, religious leaders, advocates and a former lawmaker urged them to heed the financial and human costs of capital punishment in the state.
The bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Jim Murphy of St. Louis County, would mandate a sentence of life imprisonment without parole for people convicted of first degree murder or other serious crimes. It would not alter the sentences of Missourians already on death row.
Lawmakers have sponsored similar bills in each of the past five years. Murphy’s bill passed out of the House last year but did not advance in the Senate.
Since 1973, at least 202 people nationwide have been exonerated after being sentenced to death, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. In Missouri, four people have been acquitted or had their charges dropped after receiving the death sentence since 1999.
“The state, frankly, makes mistakes,” Murphy told reporters.
But it was the experience of a victim’s family that led Murphy to change his position on the death penalty, he said.
During his first run for office eight years ago, he spoke with a man who witnessed the killing of his parents in their house as a child.
The man opposed the death penalty because the mandatory appeals process for capital sentences delayed closure for him and his family, Murphy said. Missouri law requires the state Supreme Court to review all death sentences, giving the court the choice of affirming the trial court’s sentence, re-sentencing or remanding the case to the lower court.
“The next 15 years, over and over and over again, he and his family were dragged back to court, appeal after appeal after appeal,” Murphy said.
The man told Murphy the state should do away with the death penalty.
“We can’t continue to relive this,” he told Murphy.
Financial and human costs
Two religious leaders testified in support of the bill, citing the sanctity of life and urging against irreversible punishment.
Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of the Archdiocese of St. Louis described the death penalty as “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the human person” and quoted Pope John Paul II, who during a 1999 trip to St. Louis urged the abolition of the death penalty and called on people to be “unconditionally pro-life.”
The death penalty, Rozanski said, also “deprives the offender of the opportunity of redemption.”
Advocates and members of the legal team for Lance Shockley — a man who was convicted in 2009 of murdering a Missouri State Highway patrolman, insisted on his innocence and was executed in October — argued last year that his work as a mentor to fellow inmates in Potosi should have qualified him to continue that role while incarcerated.
Republican state Rep. Barry Hovis of Whitewater said he was concerned that there would be no possibility of meaningful consequences for people sentenced to life without parole who might kill a fellow incarcerated person or guard.
“They’re not going to be able to get to double life without parole,” Hovis said.
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Clifton Davis, representing Missouri Justice Coalition, told committee members that while he was an inmate in the state’s Department of Corrections, most of the men he met who had received death sentences were housed in the honor dorm as a reward for good behavior.
“Yes, men on death row violated the rules, like all of us violate the rules, but I don’t know a single case of a man on death row killing anyone,” Davis said. “I do know individuals who were not on death row that have killed other offenders while they were serving sentences that were parolable.”
The Rev. Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister from Jefferson City, encouraged lawmakers to “do what’s best for the state.”
“What is actually justice?” Kaylor asked. “What is actually fiscally responsible? What is actually going to work?”
Crowell, of the state public defender’s office, told lawmakers that abolishing the death penalty would allow his agency to devote more resources to other cases and services that could keep people out of the criminal justice system.
“I’d be able to reassign the capital attorneys and staff to our many non-death penalty clients throughout the state and to recidivism-reducing programs,” Crowell said. “…Missourians would get far more value for their dollar.”
But Republican state Rep. Jim Kalberloh of Lowry City said victims’ families should be able to express to prosecutors if they want to pursue the death penalty.
While that’s ultimately the prosecutor’s choice, Crowell said, prosecutors often look to families’ wishes for guidance.
“That’s the way it should be,” Kalberloh said. “If they don’t want [the death penalty], then we ought not to do that. If they do want it, I don’t know that I want to take that choice away.”
Davis said what he hears from supporters of the death penalty is always, “what about the victims?”
“Well,” he said, “there’s a lot of things we could do to reduce victims.”
Prospects
The bill has bipartisan support that spans both legislative chambers.
Democratic state Rep. Steve Butz of St. Louis told reporters he supports Murphy’s bill, partly because of his experience of his sister’s murder 15 years ago.
Butz’s dad told prosecutors he didn’t want to pursue the death penalty.
“He said, ‘My faith says all life is sacred, even this murderer’s life,’” Butz said.
Republican state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman of Arnold told reporters that vengeance is not the same as justice. She is sponsoring a bill that would keep judges from deciding on the death penalty in cases when there is a hung jury.
“If we are a pro-life state, and I believe that we are,” Coleman said, “we need to be protecting even those who deserve it the least.”