Judicial death sentence gets second hearing

For the second time this year, the Missouri Supreme Court is considering whether a judge can impose a death penalty in the absence of explicit jury findings.

The court heard arguments on April 9 in the case of Craig Michael Wood, who was convicted of first-degree murder for the 2014 abduction, rape and killing of 10-year-old Hailey Owens in Springfield. During the penalty phase, the Greene County jury unanimously found several aggravating factors that qualified Wood for the death penalty, including that the act involved “torture and depravity.”

The jury deadlocked, however, on whether there were mitigating factors that weighed against those aggravators. Judge Thomas E. Mountjoy then considered the evidence anew and sentenced Wood to death himself.

That procedural twist mirrors one that arose in a case the Supreme Court heard in January. After a jury deadlocked during the penalty phase, a judge sentenced to death Marvin Rice, a former Dent County sheriff’s deputy convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend. But earlier this month, the Supreme Court ordered a new penalty phase for Rice for unrelated reasons, leaving the question of judicially imposed death sentences unresolved.

Under section 565.030 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri, a judge can impose a death sentence when the jury is unable to agree upon punishment. Rosemary Percival, a public defender representing Wood on appeal, argued on April 9 that the Missouri law is unconstitutional.

“This court must strike down Missouri’s deadlock procedure,” she said. “Not only does it make Missouri an extreme outlier, but it violates the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury.”

At one point, she invoked Missouri’s adoption of the Nonpartisan Court Plan, the first system in the nation for merit selection of judges. In contrast, she said, “With the deadlock provision, we’re at the back of the pack.”

Much of the argument hinged on the format of the jury instructions. After finding the aggravating circumstances, the jury is asked to “unanimously find that there are facts and circumstances in mitigation of punishment sufficient to outweigh facts and circumstances in aggravation of punishment.”

The jury answered “No” in Wood’s case, but Percival argued that it was unclear what that meant.

“There could have been anywhere from 0 to 11 jurors who found that the mitigation outweighed the aggravation,” she said. “Because the judge did not know what the jury found, he could not have relied on it. The judge must have made the factual finding himself.”

A 2016 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, Hurst v. Florida, held that the Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find the facts necessary to impose a death sentence.

The court wrestled, however, with whether the importance of the mitigating factors was really a part of the jury’s fact-finding role.

“It seems like this last step is more of an instruction on how to proceed now that the defendant is eligible for the death penalty — how do you get from there to a sentence — than it is asking another discrete factual question,” Judge Paul C. Wilson said.

Judge Laura Denvir Stith noted that the underlying statute makes no mention of unanimity on the mitigating factors.

“Are the instructions incorrect in adding ‘unanimous’ when it’s not in the statute?” Stith asked. Assistant Attorney General Daniel McPherson said that question had been resolved in earlier death-penalty cases, but Stith pushed back. “I don’t think it’s ever been put in this way,” she said.

As in the earlier Rice case, Wood’s appeal involved other issues that could allow the Supreme Court to order a new trial or penalty phase for Wood without resolving the constitutionality of his death sentence.

Percival also argued that the prosecutor had improperly suggested during closing arguments that Hailey’s family wanted Wood to receive the death penalty, even though they had specifically asked for a life sentence instead. The family’s wishes were excluded from the penalty phase at the request of the prosecution.

Wood’s appeal also challenges the introduction of the extent of his gun collection, which Percival argued was inflammatory. But McPherson argued that, because Wood killed the victim with a specific gun retrieved from his basement rather than any of the guns that were closer at hand, it demonstrated deliberation.

The case is State v. Wood, SC96924.

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