Missouri inmate John Middleton has been executed after a series of final hour requests for stays and a delay were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.
His execution for three murders in Northwest Missouri in 1995 was scheduled to have happened at 12:01 Wednesday morning but was delayed through the day by various court filings.
After the Missouri Supreme Court strongly rejected Middleton’s claim that he was incompetent to be executed, his three requests for stay to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito were rejected.
John Middleton, 54, died from an injection of pentobarbital, the sixth
execution in Missouri this year. Only Florida and Texas, with seven
each, have performed more executions.
Middleton was convicted of killing Randy "Happy" Hamilton and Stacey
Hodge in early June 1995, then Alfred Pinegar several days later.
Middleton
was a small-time meth dealer in sparsely populated northern Missouri in
the mid-1990s. After several drug suspects were arrested on June 10,
1995, he allegedly told a friend: "The snitches around here are going to
start going down."
A day later, according to court records,
Middleton and his girlfriend met Hamilton and Hodge on a gravel road.
Prosecutors said Middleton shot and killed them both and hid the bodies
in the trunk of Hamilton's car.
Pinegar, another meth dealer, was shot in the face on June 23, 1995. His body was found in a field near Bethany.
Acquaintances
say Middleton told them he killed all three. Police also had eyewitness
accounts of Middleton purchasing ammunition in the hours before
Pinegar's death. Middleton was convicted in 1997.
Middleton's
girlfriend, Maggie Hodges, is serving life in prison after pleading
guilty to second-degree murder in all three deaths.
In February, a
man whose name has not been disclosed because he fears retribution
signed an affidavit saying that two rival meth dealers drove him to a
rural area soon after Pinegar's death and accused him of being a snitch.
He said the men showed him Pinegar's body, saying: "There's already
been three people killed. You want to be number four?"
The witness said the two dealers then beat him unconscious with a baseball bat and raped his girlfriend.
Harrison
County Sheriff Josh Eckerson agreed to take a new look at the case but
said his investigation found no evidence to back up the claims. He is
convinced that Middleton was the real killer.
The execution
Wednesday evening occurred several hours after it was originally
scheduled, at 12:01 a.m. A federal judge granted a stay of execution
late Tuesday, citing a need for a hearing to determine if Middleton was
mentally ill. A federal appeals court overturned the stay and neither
the U.S. Supreme Court nor the Missouri Supreme Court would halt the
execution. Middleton's appeals on claims that he was innocent were also
turned away, and Gov. Jay Nixon denied a request for clemency.
Middleton becomes the 6th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in
Missouri and the 76th overall since the state resumed capital punishment in
1983.
Middleton becomes the 25th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the
USA and the 1384th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17,
1977. By this date last year, the USA had carried out 20 of its 39 national
executions for the year.
