Lethal injection in the US
Man sentenced to death three times executed
05/04/2022, 09:48 am
In 1996, Carman Deck killed an elderly couple in a robbery. The US judiciary needs three trials to convict him. Nevertheless, his lawyers try to prevent the execution of the death penalty – in vain.
A man whose death sentence was overturned three times has been executed in the US state of Missouri. As the prison administration announced, the 56-year-old Carman Deck received a lethal injection. Deck had killed James and Zelma Long in a suburb of St. Louis in 1996. He had always admitted responsibility for the crime, Deck had shot his victims in the back of the head and robbed them. Police said he confessed to the murders, but Deck’s defense argued in court that it was a false confession.
However, this did not delay his conviction, rather his trial had to be repeated three times due to procedural errors. According to local media, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned Deck’s first death sentence in 2002 because his attorneys had poorly defended him. Among other things, they had failed to describe his difficult childhood with foster parents. The US Supreme Court invalidated a second trial in 2005 because Deck had been presented at trial with ankle, wrist, and stomach cuffs on, which could affect jury perception.
He was sentenced to death at a third trial in 2008, but the sentence was overturned by a federal judge in 2017 on the grounds that the jury had not been presented with all available evidence. An appeals court restored the verdict in 2020.
Real justice?
Local activists had called for the death penalty to be commuted to life imprisonment because of the judicial marathon. However, both Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to further stay the execution.
Deck was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. local time. “Justice was served tonight,” said Anne Precythe, director of the Missouri Department of Justice. Elizabeth Carlyle, one of Deck’s lawyers, told CNN that his execution was “unjust and immoral.” Deck had endured “a pattern of abuse and neglect” that the Missouri Supreme Court failed to adequately address. Close family members taught him how to steal, the attorney said, leading to a prison sentence that “transformed him from a non-violent thief into the person who committed two horrific murders.”