An American sentenced to death for the 2006 murder of his cousin and her husband was executed Tuesday in Missouri, in the central United States, despite numerous calls for a commutation of the sentence.
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Brian Dorsey, 52, was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 6:11 p.m. (2311 GMT).
This is the first execution since the start of the year in Missouri and the fifth in the country, in addition to the one canceled at the last minute on February 28 in Idaho (northwest), due to failure to administer to the condemned the lethal solution within the legal time limit.
Brian Dorsey pleaded guilty to the Dec. 23, 2006, gun-toting deaths of his cousin, Sarah Bonnie, and her husband, Ben Bonnie, in their bed.
The couple had put him up for the night after bringing him back from his home where two drug dealers had come to demand money from him, according to court documents.
The couple’s four-year-old daughter was found unharmed.
In their appeal to the Supreme Court to request the suspension of his execution and the review of the sentence, his lawyers argued that it was “a rare case in which a person awaiting imminent execution is fully redeemed” and that he had acted under “the influence of a drug-induced psychosis”.
They had highlighted the petition signed by more than 70 guards at his prison demanding that the sentence of this model inmate be commuted to life in prison. A former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and five of the jurors in the trial of Brian Dorsey joined these calls for clemency, to no avail.
A total of 24 executions were carried out in the United States in 2023, all by lethal injection.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 American states out of 50. Six others (Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee) observe a moratorium on executions by decision of the governor.
