Executed despite pleas for clemency
WASHINGTON: A Missouri man convicted of murdering his cousin and her husband was executed on Tuesday, despite widespread calls for his life to be spared.
Brian Dorsey, 52, was pronounced dead following lethal injection for the 2006 murders of Sarah Bonnie, 25, and her husband Ben Bonnie, 28, in New Bloomfield, Missouri.
Dorsey pleaded guilty to shooting the couple after they took him in for the night to protect him from drug dealers chasing him for a debt. Their ’ four-yearold daughter, who was in the house at the time of the murders, was unharmed.
In a petition to the Supreme Court asking for a stay of execution, Dorsey’s lawyers said his was “the rare case where a person facing an imminent execution unquestionably is fully rehabilitated”.
“Brian Dorsey committed the offence during a drug-induced psychosis,” they said.
“During Mr Dorsey’s many years on death row, removed from the circumstances that led to his psychosis, he has been rehabilitated.”
Among those seeking clemency were Catholic bishops and 70 correctional officers from the prison where Dorsey had been incarcerated for the past 17 years.
“Generally, we believe in the use of capital punishment,” the correctional officers said in a letter to Missouri Governor Mike Parson, a Republican.
“But we are in agreement that the death penalty is not the appropriate punishment for Brian Dorsey,” they said.
Former Missouri Supreme Court chief justice Michael Wolff, several Republican Missouri politicians and five of the jurors who handed down Dorsey’s death sentence had also urged clemency.
But the court declined to intervene and spare him.
There have been four other executions in the US this year, including one in Alabama that was the first using nitrogen gas.
The others in Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas were carried out by lethal injection.