Missouri death row inmate executed despite widespread calls for clemency

Missouri governor Mike Parson denied a last-minute appeal to stay the execution of Dorsey, pictured here, and the US supreme court declined to intervene. Photograph: Jeremy Weis

Brian Dorsey, who was convicted of murdering his cousin and her husband in 2006, was executed in Missouri’s Bonne Terre state prison Tuesday despite an extraordinary effort by corrections officials and his appeals judge to have his capital sentence commuted.

Prison officials confirmed that Dorsey had been put to death by lethal injection. They said he had been pronounced dead at 6.11pm.

Legal avenues for Dorsey’s life to be spared had been closed down Tuesday, first when Missouri governor Mike Parson denied a last-minute appeal to stay Dorsey’s execution and then when the US supreme court declined to intervene.

Dorsey’s clemency petition had been supported by 72 current and former Missouri correctional officers, a former judge of the Missouri supreme court, five of the jurors who sentenced him to death, Republican state legislators, mental health experts, faith leaders, and members of his family, some of whom were related to the victims.

Dorsey, in a final statement handed out prior to the execution, expressed deep sorrow for the killings.

“Words cannot hold the just weight of my guilt and shame,” the written statement said, in part.

The correctional officers submitted a letter asking Parson to commute Dorsey’s death sentence. “Generally, we believe in the use of capital punishment,” they wrote. “But we are in agreement that the death penalty is not the appropriate punishment for Brian Dorsey.”

One officer wrote: “Some inmates never change, no matter how many years they are in. But that’s not Brian … The Brian I have known for years could not hurt anyone. The Brian I know does not deserve to be executed.”

But Parson was not moved to commute Dorsey’s sentence.

“The pain Dorsey brought to others can never be rectified, but carrying out Dorsey’s sentence according to Missouri law and the Court’s order will deliver justice and provide closure,” he said in a press release after denying the appeal.

Separately, the US supreme court denied Dorsey’s requests to consider whether he was denied the effective assistance of counsel by his attorneys’ flat-fee compensation – or whether executing someone who is fully rehabilitated is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the eighth amendment of the US constitution.

Ahead of the execution, Dorsey attorney Kirk Henderson described his client as “kind, gentle, hardworking, and humble” – someone who had “spent every day of the past 18 years trying to make up for the single act of violence he committed, serving the prison community as the staff barber and never getting in even the slightest trouble”.

“If anyone deserves mercy, it is Brian,” he said, adding that executing Dorsey was “a pointless cruelty, an exercise of the state’s power that serves no legitimate penological purpose”.

Separately, Dorsey’s cousin Jenni Gerhauser, who was also a cousin of victim Sarah Bonnie, said that she was “devastated and disheartened” by the failure of legal appeals. Gerhauser said that it was “easy to see that we as a society have not only failed Brian – we are failing ourselves”.

“The death penalty isn’t punishment for the convicted. This evening, Brian will be set free. His punishment will end, and for all of us only guilty of loving him, ours will begin. That is not the life sentence we sought,” she added.

Shortly before the execution, a small number of protesters gathered in an area near the prison.

Dorsey shot Bonnie to death alongside her husband Benjamin Bonnie, 28, in their home two days before Christmas 2006. Attorneys for Dorsey have argued that he murdered the Bonnies during a drug-induced psychosis and therefore lacked the intent necessary to be guilty of first-degree murder, which is punishable by death.

Supporters of Dorsey had hoped he would be given a sentence of life imprisonment rather than be put to death.

Dorsey is the first person put to death in Missouri this year after four executions in 2023. Another man, David Hosier, is scheduled for execution 11 June for the killing of a Jefferson City woman in 2009. Nationwide, four men have been executed so far in 2024 – one each in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and Oklahoma.