Roderick Nunley is set to die by lethal injection in Missouri Tuesday night. His lawyer has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution.
Missouri Department of Corrections via AP
Roderick Nunley is set to be executed in Missouri on Tuesday for the 1989 rape and murder of 15-year-old Ann Harrison.
Nunley and his accomplice, Michael Taylor, abducted Harrison as she waited for her school bus on March 22, 1989, as they were driving in a stolen car in Kansas City, according to court documents.
After abducting the teenager, the men drove her to Nunley's mother's house, where they forced her to crawl down the stairs into the basement. After raping and sodomizing her, they put her in the trunk of the car and repeatedly stabbed her with a steak and butcher knife. The men then abandoned the car in another neighborhood, leaving Harrison to bleed to death.
Taylor was executed in February 2014 after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.
Nunley's attorney, Jennifer Herndon, has now appealed to the Supreme Court to stop her client's execution. In one appeal filed last week, Herndon argued that the death penalty violated Nunley's 8th Amendment right protecting him against cruel and unusual punishment. Another appeal argued that Nunley should have been sentenced by a jury and not a judge.
Nunley pleaded guilty and waived his right to jury sentencing, leaving the Missouri state court to sentence him to death.
Roderick Nunley during an interview at the Potosi Correctional Center, Missouri's maximum security prison, in 2007.
Jeff Roberson / ASSOCIATED PRESS
In a third appeal to the Supreme Court filed Monday, Herndon argued that Missouri's secrecy surrounding its lethal injection drug violated Nunley's constitutional rights, the Associated Press reported. Herndon challenged the state's refusal to disclose who makes the drug used to execute people and whether the drug was tested.
Missouri uses pentobarbital in a one-drug lethal injection protocol. Missouri is believed to procure its supply of pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy, which mixes individual ingredients in exact strength and dosages as prescribed. However, the state has previously refused to admit or deny that the drug is compounded as opposed to manufactured.
In July, taxpayers sued Missouri alleging that their tax dollars were used by the state to obtain execution drugs illegally.
If the Supreme Court refuses to intervene, Nunley would become the sixth person to be executed in Missouri this year. Gov. Jay Nixon is reviewing a clemency petition for Nunley, which claims that there was racial bias against him in the case.
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1LJ21rJ
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