ST. LOUIS (AP) – Eighteen convicted killers have been executed in Missouri in the last two years, a pace that is expected to slow significantly with death sentences on the decline and many of the 28 remaining death row inmates still filing appeals.
Only Texas, with 24, has performed more executions than Missouri since November 2013. But execution appears to be imminent for just one Missouri inmate.
“They’ve basically run out of people to kill, to put it in an undiplomatic way,” said Kent Gipson, a Kansas City-based attorney who represents several inmates.
Executions across the U.S. were largely on hold for many years due to a de facto moratorium as the Supreme Court grappled with the constitutionality of lethal injection. Once that cleared, execution drugs became hard to obtain because major companies refused to sell drugs for lethal use.
Missouri eventually turned to pentobarbital, obtained from a source the state won’t disclose, in late 2013. By then, there was a backlog of inmates whose appeals were exhausted. Attorney General Chris Koster asked the state Supreme Court to set execution dates for many of them, and the court obliged, scheduling one a month since November 2013 (some were halted by court action or clemency).