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Group calls for moratorium on Missouri death penalty

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — In barely more than one year, Missouri has executed more criminals on death row than the entire preceding decade combined. In the last 12 months, Missouri has executed 10 men. Today, a coalition of groups, both state and national, organized in the Capitol to support legislation placing a moratorium on Missouri’s capital punishment.

Representatives from the NAACP, the American Bar Association, the ACLU of Missouri, the Innocence Project, Missouri Faith Voices and Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty all gathered in the Missouri Capitol today to urge lawmakers to support HB 561. The bill, sponsored by Rep. John Rizzo, D-Kansas City, calls for the creation of a “Task Force on the Death Penalty,” to study alternatives and “legislative remedies” to a death penalty system that some say has become barbaric and lacks transparency.

“I am convinced that any meaningful discussion about the ultimate penalty must be proceeded by a thorough state specific assessment of the accuracy and fairness with which it is applied,” Rizzo said in a statement.

Steve Saloom, former Policy Director for the Innocence Project, said that it costs the state more to execute someone than it does to give them a life sentence, and that a stark number of convictions have been overturned by DNA evidence.

“We have to require officials to properly store and preserve biological evidence throughout the duration of someone’s incarceration,” Saloom said. “The criminal justice system is just that, it’s a system. Systems cannot be perfect, but we can fix them. And we can take steps to correct a broken system.”

Missouri’s elected officials have briefly been forced to weigh legislation on the death penalty in recent years. When the European manufacturer of the anesthetic drug Propofol threatened to embargo the drug’s sale to the U.S. unless state’s promised not to use it to execute criminals, states like Missouri scrambled to find a substitute drug. Missouri soon found a pharmacy in Oklahoma willing to provide them with an execution cocktail drug, but only under the condition of anonymity. Many pharmacies demand secrecy when providing prisons with execution drugs for fear it could negatively impact other business.

Some Missouri lawmakers moved to prohibit the purchase of execution drugs with cash or the transport of the drugs across state lines. While those efforts failed, Missouri’s supply pharmacy was revealed not to be a accredited to sell drugs in Missouri. The state has since switched drug providers, but declines to identify the source.

Several of the groups represented at today’s press event said that an ultimate repeal of the death penalty was their own personal goal, but that a moratorium and an improvement on the system was desperately needed for Missouri. Paul Litton, Co-Chair of the ABA Death Penalty Assessment Team in Missouri said that the group supported a series of reforms including: strict requirements to video record the entirety of suspect interrogations, new rules on storing and preserving biological evidence for the duration of an accused individual’s incarceration and trial, prohibiting executions of the mentally ill or disabled, less discretion among prosecutors on which defendants to seek the penalty against.