Missouri Governor Mike Parson announced on Monday that Michael Tisius will be executed today (June 6) despite some former members of the jury wanting the double murder convict's sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment.
Tisius is set to die by lethal injection at the state prison in Bonne Terre for fatally shooting two jail guards – Leon Egley and Jason Acton – on June 22, 2000, during a botched plot to free his former cellmate.
After initially fleeing when he had murdered the two men, Tisius surrendered to the police.
The 42-year-old – who was 19 at the time of his crime – was said to have been neglected as a child and was homeless by the time he was in his early teenage years, KCTV5 reports.
The jury spent hours deliberating in July 2010 when asked to sentence Tisius for the murders. Ultimately, they decided on the death penalty.
Now, six jurors, including two alternates, have given sworn affidavits saying they would either support or decline to oppose if Tisius' sentence was commuted to life in prison.
"I feel angry and remorseful," former juror Jason Smith told The New York Times. "I feel that I wronged Michael. I hated having a part in somebody dying."
Another former juror revealed that during the time of the 2010 death sentence, he was unable to read English – a requirement for jury duty in the state of Missouri. A federal court stayed Tisius' execution so that an investigation into the claim could be carried out, but an appeals court overruled that decision last week.
Tisius' lawyers are arguing that because Tisius was a teenager at the time of the murders, his brain was not yet fully developed and he was more susceptible to manipulation.
Roy Vance – the former cellmate who Tisius tried to free at the time of the killings – once bragged that the death row inmate was a "a kid in a grown man’s body and I knew I could manipulate him into what I wanted him to do," per the Kansas City Star.
In June 2000, Tisius was sent to the Randolph County Jail to serve a 30-day probation violation sentence for theft. He had previously met his cellmate, 27-year-old Roy Vance, through mutual friends. Vance was facing a 50-year sentence at the time.
Organizations including the American Bar Association, Missouri State Public Defender’s Office, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the Vatican have shared their opposition to the planned lethal injection.
"In particular, the ABA opposes the death penalty for certain categories of individuals who have unique vulnerabilities that make them less culpable than the average offender," the ABA wrote in a letter to Missouri governor Michael Parson, as reported by the Independent.
"Michael committed two murders when he was an immature 19-year-old whose underlying brain defects and dysfunction caused him to behave like a much younger individual."
Linda Arena, sister of Jason Acton, one of the jail guards Tisius killed, told The New York Times she supports the death sentence. "He’s a nonentity to me. A nonentity who took my brother."
