(Washington) The state of Missouri on Tuesday executed a man who had been sentenced to death three times for a double murder committed more than a quarter century ago.
Updated yesterday at 9:06 p.m.
Carman Deck, 56, received a lethal injection at 6:10 p.m. at Bonne Terre Penitentiary in the central United States, the state prison service said.
On Monday, Missouri Governor Mike Parson refused to grant him clemency and commute his sentence to life imprisonment, as demanded by local activists.
“Tonight, justice has been served,” commented the governor in a statement after the execution, saying he thought of the relatives of the “innocent victims of the atrocious violence of Carman Deck”.
The U.S. Supreme Court also dismissed a final appeal by his lawyers on Monday, making him the 5and convict executed in the United States since 1er january.
In 1996, Carman Deck killed an elderly couple, James and Zelma Long, in suburban St. Louis. He always admitted his responsibility for the crime.
According to the newspaper Kansas City Star, whose editorial writers pleaded for his sentence to be commuted, the Missouri Supreme Court in 2002 overturned the verdict of a first trial, on the grounds that his lawyers had poorly defended him. In particular, they had failed to expose his difficult childhood in foster families.
The Supreme Court of the United States had invalidated in 2005 a second trial, where he had been presented with restraints on the feet, wrists and abdomen likely to influence the perception of jurors.
In 2008, he received the death penalty in a third trial, but the sentence was overturned in 2017 by a federal judge, on the grounds that all available evidence had not been presented to jurors. An appeals court, however, restored the ruling in 2020, a ruling later upheld by the state Supreme Court.