The life-or-death decision was in Judge Kelly Wayne Parker’s hands.
Twelve jurors had found Marvin Rice guilty of murdering his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend. But they could not unanimously agree on whether he should live or die. Missouri is one of two states where a judge gets the final say when jurors can’t agree on the punishment — even when they vote 11 to 1 for life, as they had in Rice’s case.
He then sentenced Rice to death.
“It was a very lonely and daunting position to be in,” Parker, now a defense attorney in south-central Missouri, told The Marshall Project – St. Louis recently.
Defendants were previously sentenced to life without parole when Missouri jurors deadlocked in a capital case. That’s the default most states with the death penalty use today. A few conduct a new penalty phase.
Since Missouri changed its law in 1984, Rice is one of at least 18 people who have been sentenced to death by a judge. Four of them have been executed.
Missouri is an outlier in allowing judges to impose death. Some say judges have a better legal understanding of the death penalty than juries and argue that some crimes are so heinous that death is appropriate even when a jury isn’t unanimous.
Opponents say the process undermines the importance of juries and that one person should not decide life or death. They also say the way Missouri’s statute is written is unconstitutional.
“It is an issue that remains an issue,” said Robert Dunham, an attorney and director of the Death Penalty Policy Project.
There’s also a racial component when it comes to the death penalty in Missouri. Of the 18 people sentenced by judges, 11 — or 61% — were Black. Forty-one percent of all the defendants sent to death row in the state were Black, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. That is dramatically disproportionate in a state where 11.7% of the population is Black, according to U.S. Census data.
Rice was later resentenced to life without parole on account of other violations in his case, including comments from the prosecution that infringed on Rice’s Fifth Amendment rights referencing his decision not to testify.
From death row to life
The jury in Joseph Whitfield’s 1994 trial in St. Louis also voted 11 to 1 for life in prison without parole.
Whitfield’s life was spared after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Ring v. Arizona, which ruled in 2002 that only a jury can decide on facts necessary to impose the death penalty. In Whitfield’s case, the Missouri Supreme Court said jurors must first agree on two categories of facts to impose death: the presence of an aggravating circumstance and that it outweighs any mitigating factors. These steps would continue to be a source of legal disputes in life-or-death decisions for years to come.
In the third and final step, the so-called mercy step, jurors decide if they still want to impose death. That can be carried out by jurors or, if they cannot agree, a judge.
In several Missouri cases where a judge had been the decider, it wasn’t clear where jurors hit a roadblock in the process or what aggravators and mitigators they had discussed.
Eleven of the 18 judge-imposed death sentences have been changed to life. Most were a cascading consequence of Ring and Missouri’s subsequent decision for Whitfield, who died in prison on May 26 at age 85, according to the Missouri Department of Corrections.
Among them was Deandra Buchanan. In March 2002, he was found guilty of fatally shooting his aunt, girlfriend and stepfather. The jury could not agree on a sentence.
The judge handed down death.
He was resentenced to life without parole by the Missouri Supreme Court in the wake of the Ring decision. He was not present when the court revisited his case. In September 2024, public defender Tyler Coyle filed a motion arguing Buchanan’s life sentence was invalid because he had a right to be in court.
A judge denied the motion on June 16. Coyle said he will appeal.
A recent execution
Amber McLaughlin was sentenced to death by St. Louis County Circuit Judge Steven Goldman in November 2006. McLaughlin became the first openly transgender person to be executed in the U.S. when she died by lethal injection on Jan. 3, 2023.
Before becoming a judge, Goldman — then a prosecutor — helped devise the law that gave judges the power to impose death sentences.
Other states have moved to limit judicial death sentences. In a 2016 decision from the Supreme Court of Delaware, the justices said the state’s capital punishment statute was unconstitutional because it allowed judges to make findings on the aggravating circumstances and weigh those against mitigators. The ruling ended the death penalty in Delaware. Only Missouri and Indiana continue to permit a judge to impose death when a jury is hung. Indiana is less active when it comes to capital punishment, having executed 15 people since 2000. Missouri has executed 60, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center.
Goldman said judges have more familiarity with the death penalty.
“I think judges are well qualified to do it, probably more so than juries in that regard,” he said.
Retired Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Wolff said the right to a jury trial is fundamental.
“Especially in death penalty cases, but in every case that jurors hear, the jury is, among other things, a conscience of the community,” Wolff said.
As McLaughlin’s execution date approached, Wolff and six retired circuit judges wrote to then-Gov. Mike Parson, urging him to commute McLaughlin’s sentence to life without parole. They said her sentence had been reversed in 2016 because her trial attorney failed to present information about her mental health. That mitigating evidence could have tipped the scales when the jury couldn’t agree. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals later overturned the 2016 decision.
When Goldman sentenced McLaughlin, he acknowledged there were conflicting rules and said it wasn’t clear what mitigating circumstances were considered by the jury, according to court transcripts.
Larry Komp, a federal public defender who represented McLaughlin in her appeals, said he didn’t think the court’s actions were constitutional.
“But I guess it is in Missouri,” he said.
The Missouri Supreme Court itself has noted the importance of juries in death penalty cases. In denying a stay for Kevin Johnson before he was executed in 2022, the court emphasized that the jury had found the aggravators, weighed them and decided on death.
If officials genuinely believed in juries, Komp said, “Amber wouldn’t have been executed.”
Waiting on death row
Missouri has cleared much of its death row, primarily through a steady stream of executions that picked up as the pandemic waned. The state carried out four executions in 2023 and another four in 2024. Craig Wood, 57, and Lance Shockley, 48, are two of the eight people remaining. Both were sentenced by judges.
During an appeal in Wood’s case, the Missouri Supreme Court backtracked on the three-step process juries go through. Now, a jury only has to unanimously agree on the presence of an aggravator.
Several attorneys said they doubt questions about the process authorizing judge-imposed death sentences would be taken up by the courts again. That leaves it up to the Missouri Legislature.
In the past eight years, at least 14 pieces of legislation were drafted to repeal the law allowing judges to impose the death penalty. Most were sponsored by Republicans.
Another bill to repeal the law got a hearing this year in the Senate, where it was debated for over 90 minutes. It was sponsored by state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, a Republican from Arnold.
“It is my firm belief that one person in the state of Missouri should not hold the power of the state to kill somebody,” she said during Senate debate.
The bill died.
This article was originally published by The Marshall Project – St. Louis, a nonprofit news team covering Missouri’s criminal justice systems.
