The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recent­ly revealed that a Missouri man who was entrust­ed with state and fed­er­al exe­cu­tions had a crim­i­nal past. The man, a licensed nurse who was called to Indiana in 2001 to assist in the fed­er­al exe­cu­tion of Timothy McVeigh, first need­ed per­mis­sion from his pro­ba­tion offi­cer before leav­ing the state. In 1998, the Missouri exe­cu­tion­er was charged with felony aggra­vat­ed stalk­ing and first-degree tam­per­ing with prop­er­ty of a man who was hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with the exe­cu­tion­er’s estranged wife. He plead­ed no con­test, was con­vict­ed of mis­de­meanor stalk­ing and tam­per­ing with prop­er­ty, and was placed on pro­ba­tion. Memos obtained by the Post-Dispatch showed that state and fed­er­al offi­cials knew of the executioner’s con­vic­tion and pro­ba­tion sta­tus, and they still want­ed to use him.

At least one super­vi­sor in the Missouri Division of Probation and Parole was alarmed by the fed­er­al request of a man who was on pro­ba­tion to aid in an exe­cu­tion. She wrote, ​“As I stat­ed to you pre­vi­ous­ly, it seems bizarre to me that we would know­ing­ly allow an offend­er, on active super­vi­sion, to par­tic­i­pate in the exe­cu­tion process at any lev­el.” The man was per­mit­ted to make the trip.

Missouri has had dif­fi­cul­ty find­ing med­ical­ly skilled exe­cu­tion­ers in the past, espe­cial­ly because the American Medical Association has an eth­i­cal guide­line against doc­tors par­tic­i­pat­ing in exe­cu­tions. In Kansas City in 2006, how­ev­er, the doc­tor who helped to devel­op Missouri’s exe­cu­tion pro­ce­dure and over­saw 54 exe­cu­tions, tes­ti­fied that he was dyslex­ic and often had prob­lems mix­ing the cor­rect pro­por­tions and amounts of the lethal drugs. The doc­tor, who had tes­ti­fied anony­mous­ly, was lat­er iden­ti­fied by a Post-Dispatch inves­ti­ga­tion, lead­ing to the cre­ation of a Missouri law designed to pro­tect the iden­ti­ties of cur­rent or for­mer exe­cu­tion­ers and to allow them to seek dam­ages in civ­il court if their names are revealed.

When asked about the crim­i­nal past of the Missouri exe­cu­tion­er, Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law pro­fes­sor and expert on meth­ods of exe­cu­tion, stat­ed, ​“It sug­gests secu­ri­ty is not the rea­son for not reveal­ing their iden­ti­ties. They have oth­er rea­sons, and the rea­sons are that these peo­ple have trou­bled behav­ioral and emo­tion­al his­to­ries.”
(“Execution nurse had crim­i­nal past,” by Jeremy Kohler, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 12, 2008). See Executions and Lethal Injection.

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