US death penalty - Missouri governor spares death row inmate Kimber Edwards three days before execution

The Guardian
Jay Nixon made a surprise announcement on Friday amid a mounting chorus of protests that the prisoner, Kimber Edwards, was innocent

Missouri governor Jay Nixon

The governor of Missouri has spared a death row inmate from execution just three days before the prisoner was scheduled to be killed by lethal injection, commuting the punishment to life without parole.

Jay Nixon made a surprise announcement on Friday amid a mounting chorus of protests that the prisoner, Kimber Edwards, was innocent. Edwards was sentenced to death for having hired a hit man, Orthell Wilson, to murder Edwards’ ex-wife, Kimberly Cantrell, in St Louis in 2000.

But in April Wilson told the St Louis Post-Dispatch that he had committed the murder alone and that he had lied about Edwards hiring him to do it because he wanted to spare himself the death chamber. Wilson was given a life sentence as part of a plea deal.

In a statement, Nixon said he remained convinced that Edwards was guilty of the first-degree murder of Cantrell. However, he did not explain why in that case he had decided to commute the death sentence – an unusual move for a governor who, though a Democrat, is an enthusiastic advocate of capital punishment.

All he said was that the commutation was “not taken lightly, and only after significant consideration of the totality of the circumstance. With this decision, Kimber Edwards will remain in prison for the remainder of his life for this murder.”

Wilson was categorical in his interview with the Post-Dispatch that Edwards played no role in the murder. He told the paper: “Him and I never had that conversation about him trying to kill his wife. We never had that conversation. I’m just telling you point blank.”

Kimber Edwards’ impending execution had been contentious for other reasons. He was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury after prosecutors for St Louis County had struck all three potential black jurors from the jury pool.
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One of those African Americans was rejected by prosecutors under a ruse dubbed the “Postman’s Gambit” whereby people who have worked for the postal service are deemed unsuitable for sitting on a jury. The St Louis County prosecutors’ office has denied any racial motivation behind striking postal workers, though defense lawyers have pointed out that most employees for the postal service in the county are black.

In 1986 the US Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to strike potential jurors from the pool on grounds of race.

The postman’s gambit was used in 2001 to achieve an all-white jury in the case of Marcellus Williams, who is still on death row in Missouri. It was also used in the case of Herbert Smulls, who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury and executed in 2013. Both Williams and Smulls are black.

During jury deliberation at the start of the Smulls trial, a St Louis County prosecutor explained his decision to strike a black woman who had worked in Monsanto’s mailroom. “In my experience, [postal workers] are very disgruntled, unhappy people with the system and make every effort to strike back.”

The Edwards commutation marks the second time in two days that death row inmates have been pulled back from imminent execution. On Wednesday, Oklahoma’s governor Mary Fallin issued a stay for Richard Glossip after an embarrassing mix-up in its lethal injection supplies was discovered.

The unexpected interventions in Oklahoma and Missouri come amid a flurry of activity among death penalty states which are renewing their efforts to judicially kill prisoners with renewed vigor following a recent US Supreme Court ruling that deemed new experimental lethal injection protocols constitutional. That ruling was also posited on the case of Glossip, whose fate still hangs in the balance – he has already come within hours of the death chamber three times.