Justice Alito's Order for additional briefing in Christeson v. Roper is available in Adobe .pdf format.
For those who want to stay up to date on case developments in Missouri, I'd recommend following St. Louis Public Radio's Chris McDaniel's Twitter feed.
"Missouri prepares for 9th execution of 2014," is the updated AP report filed by Jim Salter, via the Springfield News-Leader.
Missouri officials were preparing on Tuesday to execute a man who wasn't able to appeal his conviction in federal court because his attorneys missed a filing deadline.
Mark Christeson was scheduled to die at 12:01 a.m. CDT Wednesday for the killing of a woman and her two children in 1998.
Christeson had two appeals pending with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. One challenges the state's planned use of a made-to-order execution drug produced by an unidentified compounding pharmacy. The other argues that he deserves the chance to appeal his case in federal courts, which is the norm for inmates sentenced to death.
Christeson would be the ninth person executed by Missouri this year, which would equal the state record set in 1999. That could be exceeded next month, as Leon Taylor is scheduled for execution Nov. 19 for killing a gas station attendant in suburban Kansas City 20 years ago.
In addition to the court appeals, Gov. Jay Nixon was weighing a clemency request.
The Guardian reports, "Calls mount for Missouri to stay execution of inmate 'abandoned' by lawyers," by Ed Pilkington.
Fifteen former federal and state judges have called for a stay of execution for Mark Christeson, a Missouri death row inmate who is set to be executed on Wednesday, arguing that the prisoner has in effect been abandoned by his own court-appointed lawyers.
Christeson, 35, will be judicially killed by lethal injection at 12.01am on Wednesday, barring a last-minute stay of execution. He is the only death row inmate in Missouri to have been denied a habeas review of his case – a crucial stage in the legal process that allows a prisoner to challenge his death sentence in the federal courts.
The legal record shows that the two public defense lawyers who have represented Christeson at the federal review stage missed a key deadline to file his petition. As a result, the prisoner was told he was not entitled to have his case looked at again because his request had been made in an “untimely” manner – thus destroying his last major hope of having his sentence overturned before execution.
The spotlight is now falling on his two Missouri-based lawyers, Eric Butts from St Louis and Philip Horwitz from Chesterfield. Not only did they file the petition 117 days late, they only met the prisoner for the first time more than a month after the April 2005 deadline had passed.
Earlier coverage of Mark Christeson's case begins at the link.
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