Mo. governor declines to halt inmate’s execution

Missouri Governor Mike Parson on Monday declined clemency for a man who faces execution Tuesday evening for killing two jailers in an illfated effort to free someone else from a county jail.

Michael Tisius, 42, would be the third person in Missouri, and the 12th person nationally, to be executed in 2023. He’s accused of killing officers Leon Egley and Jason Acton in June 2000.

“It’s despicable that two dedicated public servants were murdered in a failed attempt to help another criminal evade the law,” Parson said in a statement. “The state of Missouri will carry out Mr. Tisius’s sentences according to the Court’s order and deliver justice.”

Tisius has at least one pending court appeal. His appeals and his clemency request have focused on several issues. Among them: He was just 19 at the time of the killings; he had been neglected as a child; and a juror at his 2010 resentencing may have been illiterate — in violation of Missouri law.

The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to halt the execution based on Tisius’s age when the crime occurred. A federal judge last week stayed the execution over the claim that a juror was illiterate, but an appeals panel reinstated it. The Supreme Court hasn’t yet ruled on that issue.

Elizabeth Unger Carlyle, a lawyer for Tisius, said the appeals are taking a toll.

“I think he’s sort of, frankly, on an emotional roller coaster,” Carlyle said. “He’s pretty anxious. He doesn’t want to die. I think he’s angry and frightened.”

A 2005 Supreme Court ruling prohibits executions for those who were under 18 at the time of the crime. But Carlyle said “emerging science plus information about Mr. Tisius’s own brain dictates that they should now change that rule to apply to Mr. Tisius.”

A court filing from the Missouri attorney general’s office noted that both the original trial jury and the jury at resentencing considered Tisius’s age and mental health, “yet both juries still decided to impose the death penalty.”