User:Chaser/Capital punishment in Missouri

Capital punishment is a legal form of punishment in the U.S. state of Missouri.

Public opinion

Judicially imposed limits (or limits generally)

Capital crimes
A person can be executed in Missouri for committing first-degree murder. In theory, death is also a sentencing option for aggravated kidnapping, drug trafficking, aircraft hijacking, and placing a bomb near a bus terminal. In practice, no one has been executed in recent years for anything other than first-degree murder and capital punishment for other crimes is in significant doubt since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana.

History
The first execution in Missouri was performed in August, 1810, by hanging. Since then, more than 292 people have been executed in Missouri, mostly by hanging. The state switched to the gas chamber in 1938, ceased executions in 1968 in anticipation of a U.S. Supreme Court-imposed ban in Furman v. Georgia, and switched again to lethal injection when capital punishment in the state resumed in 1975.

Import this to this section???

Death row inmates have been housed at the maximum security Potosi Correctional Center since 1989 and were integrated into that prison's general inmate population in 1991.

Missouri began executing far fewer people starting in about 2003. The change came in March 2002, when the appointment of Judge Richard Teitelman created a 4-3 majority of appointees of Democratic governors on the Missouri Supreme Court. The current court is much more willing to limit the death penalty, eliminating the death penalty for juveniles, freeing a condemned man due to scant evidence of the crime, and commuting judge-imposed death sentences in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision finding them unconstitutional.


 * Katherine Barnes, David Sloss and Stephen Thaman. Life and Death Decisions: Prosecutorial Discretion and Capital Punishment in Missouri (March 16, 2008). 3rd Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies Papers. also see one author's article on their paper


 * Other sources (link itself probably not an RS): http://fidnet.com/~weid/capitalpunishment.htm#mo)


 * BJS reports: http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/pubalp2.htm#cp (all states)


 * Minors and MO capital punishment http://www.jaapl.org/cgi/reprint/32/4/443.pdf see Roper v. Simmons for SCOTUS's opinion banning death penalty for under-18s.


 * Missouri capital punishment laws is Findlaw an RS?; besides that, seems to be out of date, as info about minors doesn't reflect Roper v. Simmons


 * Early abolition and restoration of MO death penalty from JSTOR


 * ABA Assessment - results to be published in Arizona Law Review (April 2011 according to Columbia newspaper)


 * Three hours in Missouri by the Economist

Sorensen, Jonathan R. and Wallace, Donald, H.: "Missouri proportionality review: an assessment of a state supreme court's procedures in capital cases"; 8 Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy 281 (1994)