On June 17, the State of Missouri plans to execute Reginald "Reggie" Clemons for the 1991 murders of two young women, Robin and Julie Kerry. It plans to execute him even though it has never proven, nor sought to prove, that he killed them or intended to kill them. It plans to execute him even though another man, convicted of more direct involvement in the same murders, received a life sentence.
The list of troubling problems with Reggie's case only begins with the accomplice liability and disproportionate sentence issues. It is an unfortunate primer on the role that race and economic status play in determining who is sentenced to the ultimate punishment.
The tragedy began on April 4, 1991 on the Chain of Rocks Bridge that connects St. Louis Missouri with neighboring Illinois. A group of four young men, three African American and one white, encountered the Kerry sisters and their cousin, Thomas Cummins. There are conflicting stories about what happened next, but the sisters ended up plunging to their deaths into the Mississippi River. The victims were white.
Suspicion initially fell on Thomas Cummins, who gave contradictory accounts of the events on the bridge. Thomas was badly beaten in police custody and eventually settled a lawsuit alleging police brutality.
Reggie and his two African American companions were then arrested and charged with the murders. All three were also brutally beaten by the police - in Reggie's case, so badly that, when he was arraigned, the judge sent him immediately to the hospital. During the course of this "enhanced interrogation," Reggie confessed to raping the young women, but not to murdering them. He immediately recanted the confession, asserting that it was given under duress. All three were initially sentenced to death, and one of them, Marlin Gray, who was identified as the ringleader, was executed in 2005. Another, Antonio Richardson, later had his death sentence vacated by the Missouri Supreme Court and was resentenced to life imprisonment. (The only white member of the group was offered a plea bargain in return for his testimony against the others, pled guilty to a lesser charge, and has been released from prison.)
The state's case against Reggie Clemons was that he was an accomplice to first degree murder. Missouri law does not recognize felony murder, which makes any participant in a felony criminally liable for any deaths that occur during or in furtherance of that felony. Therefore, in order to charge Reggie with a capital offense, the state had to prove either that he killed the young women, or that he was an accomplice. But accomplice liability requires proving intent to kill, which the state did not prove at trial. Nevertheless, the jury convicted Reggie Clemons of first degree murder and sentenced him to death.
The trial itself was a mockery. The public defender declined to take Reggie's case because it was already representing one of his companions. Reggie's family hired a pair of lawyers who had just gone through a contentious divorce and who failed to undertake even the most basic steps to prepare his defense. One of them was subsequently disbarred. The prosecutor engaged in outrageous, prejudicial behavior that earned him a contempt citation and a fine from the judge.
A federal district court vacated Reggie's sentence, but the court of appeals reinstated it. Many of Reggie's legal claims were determined to have been waived because his counsel did not properly address the issues at trial.
The Missouri Supreme Court rejected the argument of Reggie's new attorneys that his sentence was disproportionate given the life sentence imposed on Richardson. That court had initially used Richardson's original death sentence as a point of comparison for determining the proportionality of Reggie's sentence. After resentencing Richardson, it refused to revisit the proportionality issue.
The State of Missouri, then, is preparing to execute a man who it never claimed committed the act of murder, but was rather an accomplice, on the basis of very attenuated inferences of intent. It is preparing to execute someone who was, at worst, a lesser participant in the events of that evening, while letting the man whom prosecutors identified as the killer live. It is preparing to kill the second of the three African Americans who were convicted in the murders, while the white man who was also present and (on the state's reasoning) as eligible for accomplice liability as Reggie has served his sentence and is free.
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear Reggie's case. He is a party to a case that is currently before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the state's lethal injection procedures, but the Missouri Supreme Court has refused to stay the execution on that basis. Reggie's last hope lies in clemency from Governor Jay Nixon. However, the governor, elected in November 2008, was previously the attorney general who fought to have Reggie's death sentence upheld.
In 2009, in the United States of America, can a case with so many problems result in the loss of another life?