Lawyers and civil rights advocates are scrambling to stop the execution a black death row inmate in Missouri who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury for his role in a double murder.



Barring last-minute intervention from Missouri governor Jay Nixon or the courts, Earl Ringo, 40, will be injected with a massive dose of lethal drugs at one minute past midnight local time on Wednesday morning. The pending execution has kicked up a storm of controversy, both over the secrecy that the state has imposed over its lethal injection procedures and the racial overtones in the case.

Ringo was put on death row in 1998 for having taken part in a robbery of a Ruby Tuesday restaurant in Columbia in which two employees, Dennis Poyser and Joanna Baysinger, were murdered. When the case came to trial, 163 people formed the pool from which the final jury would be drawn. Only four were black.

Of those four, only one was asked questions to ascertain whether she was eligible to serve on the jury, and even she was struck out by the judge. That left a panel of 12 white jurors, together with a white prosecutor and a white judge, sitting in judgment over a black defendant.

The racial disparity in Ringo’s prosecution chimes with a general statistical imbalance in Missouri’s criminal justice system. Black people are five times more likely to be incarcerated in the state than people who are white.

St Louis University law school has been conducting research specifically on Missouri’s practice of the death penalty in the modern era with the assistance of an expert in this area, Professor Ray Paternoster. The preliminary results of the study have found that murder convictions are three times more likely to end with a death sentence in Missouri in cases, like Ringo’s, where the defendant is black and the victim white.

Such cases make up between 5 and 6% of all murders in Missouri since 1977, yet constitute about 25% of death sentences since that date. Three of the past nine executions that have taken place in Missouri over the past year have involved the same black defendant-white victim disparity.

The issue of the racial disparity of the jury has been raised by more than 50 civic, religious and community groups in Missouri’s black community who have written to Nixon to plead for a stay of execution. The Missouri branch of the NAACP that coordinated the letter said that Ringo’s trial was symptomatic of racial injustice in the state.

“It is fundamental that your office take seriously the very real concerns presented by Mr Ringo’s case, and by the disturbing realities of the role that race plays in our criminal justice system and the capital sentencing system as a whole,” the letter says.

Ringo’s lawyers have petitioned for a stay of Wednesday’s execution to give state authorities time to investigate any racial flaws in the case. Separately, the condemned man’s attorneys are also calling for a delay in the execution because of irregularities in the use of lethal injection drugs in recent Missouri executions.

In common with many active death penalty states, Missouri has been drawn into the controversy over lethal injection drugs that has followed a European-led boycott on sales of the substances for use in US executions. States have been forced to improvise on the drugs they use as supplies have run dry, turning in particular to a sedative, midazolam, previously untested in this context.

A series of botched executions in Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma and Arizona, all involving midazolam, have raised serious questions about the efficacy of the drug in judicial killings.

Officials in Missouri have indicated that they have used pentobarbital as a single lethal injection in the nine executions that have been carried out since last November. The director of the department of corrections, George Lombardi, stated under oath that midazolam would not be used even were pentobarbital unavailable.

But last week St Louis Public Radio revealed that contrary to that statement, Missouri has used midazolam in combination with pentobarbital in all its executions this year, in quantities that would induce a deep coma in the inmate or even stop them breathing. On the back of that revelation, Ringo’s lawyers have submitted court filings that have accused top officials of committing perjury. “Lawyers for the state have submitted highly misleading pleadings and false claims in various courts about Missouri’s administration of executions,” the complaint says.

The department of corrections has denied any deception, insisting that it has used the midazolam only to reduce the anxiety of a prisoner going into the death chamber and not as part of the execution procedure itself.