Appeals court affirms man’s death sentence

On the same day the U.S. Department of Justice announced it planned to resume federal executions for the first time in 16 years, a federal appeals court upheld a Missouri man’s death sentence.

On July 25, a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the sentence of Wesley Paul Coonce Jr.

Coonce was convicted in 2014 for the murder of Victor Castro-Rodriguez, his cellmate at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield. At the time, he was serving a life sentence for a 2002 kidnapping and rape conviction in Texas.

According to the opinion, written by Judge L. Steven Grasz, prison officials found Castro dead in his cell in January 2010, with his hands and feet bound and a cloth wrapped around his neck. An expert testified at trial that Castro died from asphyxiation from a compressed larynx.

A jury found that the death penalty was appropriate in his case, and a federal judge imposed the sentence. Coonce appealed the sentence to the 8th Circuit.

Coonce raised several arguments on appeal, including that he is not eligible for the death penalty because he is mentally retarded and as such meets an exception to the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994.

The panel disagreed. Grasz said the U.S. Supreme Court and the 8th Circuit both have repeatedly noted the consensus that, in order for the exception to apply, one must have an onset of mental retardation before age 18.

Coonce conceded that his intellectual deficits were onset at age 20, Grasz said.

Coonce argued before the 8th Circuit that the age of onset is not rigid or will change in the near future. The court rejected that argument, saying it disregards a fundamental canon of statutory construction, that words generally should be interpreted by their ordinary meaning at the time Congress enacted a law.

“Both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities agreed at the time Congress enacted the FDPA’s ‘mentally retarded’ exception that the impairment must onset by definition before eighteen,” Grasz said. “Thus, as a matter of statutory construction, Coonce’s argument is meritless.”

Judges James B. Loken and David R. Stras concurred.

Barry Fischer, a federal public defender from Albany, New York, represented Coonce. He declined to comment. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri, which represented the federal government, also declined to comment.

The 8th Circuit panel issued its decision in Coonce’s case on the same day the DOJ announced that U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to adopt an addendum to the federal execution protocol which allows for the use of a single drug — pentobarbital — rather than the previous three-drug procedure.

The federal government’s last execution was in 2003. A date has not been set for Coonce’s execution, but the DOJ announced it plans to execute a Missouri federal death-row inmate on December 13.

That inmate is Wesley Ira Purkey. He was convicted in 2003 of raping and murdering a teen girl from Kansas City, then dismembering, burning and dumping her body in a septic pond.

The case is U.S. v. Coonce, 14-2800.