By Kim Bell
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — Missouri will be taking a new approach to executing inmates.
For an execution scheduled for March 17 for a Barry County cop-killer named Cecil Clayton, the Missouri Supreme Court has given executioners a new time frame to carry out the death sentence.
In the past, Missouri would get a certain day on the calendar to complete the task and the state would start at 12:01 a.m. on that particular day. If something was delayed with appeals or something went wrong in the procedure, the Supreme Court’s execution warrant would be good for the rest of that calendar day.
Now, the state still has a 24-hour time limit, but the clock will begin at 6 p.m. Missouri was the only remaining state to use the midnight start time, a federal court official said.
Department of Corrections’ spokesman David Owen said the department wanted the change to better accommodate witnesses.
“Moving the execution time to 6 p.m. makes it more practical for witnesses attending an execution and for the courts reviewing the case, and falls in line with the majority of other states that carry out executions,” Owen said in an email.
Families of the victim and the condemned often make the drive to the execution site to watch it unfold. They are summoned hours before the 12:01 a.m. start, told to check in by about 10 p.m., then kept hours on site while courts ponder appeals and act on stays of execution. Even if the execution goes off without delays, the witnesses typically are driving home at 2 or 3 a.m.
For years, this was the routine. It was done that way when executions were carried out at Potosi, and more recently at Bonne Terre. State employees whose job it is to oversee the execution often would stay in hotels near the execution site.
Missouri will stick with the midnight start once more -- for its execution of Walter Storey scheduled for 12:01 a.m. next Wednesday.
Observers have said the reason for the midnight executions was, in part, to cut down on the risk of inmate disturbances and large protests.
Richard Sindel, a defense attorney in Clayton who has represented men on death row, said it may serve a dual purpose of allowing protesters on either side of the debate who want to voice their opinions a more convenient time to stage their protests.
But Sindel said he doesn’t support the move. “I don’t support any change in the execution protocol as long as they are executing people. The protocol I object to is the entire process.”
Clayton, the first prisoner set to be executed under the time change, was convicted of killing Barry County Sheriff’s Deputy Christopher Lee Castetter south of Cassville, Mo., in November 1996. The deputy, 29, was shot in the head while responding to a call about a suspicious vehicle. Prosecutors alleged that Clayton was upset after a break-up and he took a loaded gun to the home of his girlfriend’s parents.
Clayton’s trial was moved to Joplin in Jasper County on a change of venue. The defense attorney argued that Clayton didn’t understand his actions that night and that he had lost part of his brain in a accident years earlier.
Clayton is now 74.
Michael Gans, clerk of the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, has worked on every death penalty case in the circuit that covers Missouri, Arkansas and Nebraska for the past nearly 30 years. He’s handled more than a hundred such cases. He was chief deputy from 1985 to 1991, then clerk since 1991. He said Arkansas and Nebraska haven’t had executions in years, but they last used a start time of between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.
Missouri’s midnight start has meant late nights of work for the federal courts. Missouri executions, even though set to begin just after midnight, have actually happened on occasion closer to 2 or 3 a.m. In some, officials have stopped their work because of motions pending or temporary stays issued, and picked up against the next day at 8 a.m.
As for Missouri’s switch, Gans said: “It’s great to have an earlier starting point than midnight. That doesn’t guarantee they won’t have court proceedings late. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. I assume some will go forward close to 6 p.m. For others, I’m sure, because of what is going on in the case, the execution will start well after 6 p.m.”
Gans said he was told by the U.S. Supreme Court staff that Missouri was the last state to execute prisoners starting at 12:01 a.m. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Supreme Court has not replied to a request for comment.
“We were always told that the Department of Corrections preferred this time (midnight) because of security and prisoner management issues,” he said. “It’s always easier to do it when the prison is locked down at midnight than when people are moving around.”
In 1997, then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor complained about the hour of death in an Arizona execution: “Dispensing justice at that hour of the morning is difficult, to say the least, and we have an obligation . . . to give our best efforts in every one of these instances.”
According to the Associated Press that year, it was 3 a.m. in Washington DC before the high court finally rejected a flurry of last-minute appeals for Arizona killer William Woratzeck and cleared the way for his death by injection minutes later.
A few years before O’Connor’s comments, Texas switched its execution time to 6 p.m. instead of between midnight and dawn. And the Associated Press said Ohio quit midnight executions in 2001 partly to save thousands of dollars in overtime to prison workers.
Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the midnight executions meant the justices weren’t in the same room to discuss a case and were considering last-minute appeals at 10 and 11 p.m., or later.
“It’s become very rare to have these at midnight or just after midnight,” he said. “So it makes sense for Missouri to change, I think.”