Federal capital defendants are disproportionately sentenced to death in Missouri compared to other states, with 14.5% of the 62 prisoners currently on federal death row having been prosecuted in Missouri’s federal district courts. By contrast, a DPIC analysis of FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics shows that Missouri accounted for only 2.26% of murders in the United States between 1988, when the current federal death penalty statute was adopted, and 2012. Not surprisingly, an article in The Guardian by David Rose reports that, since the 1990s, the chances that a defendant will be sentenced to death in a Missouri federal court are significantly greater than in other federal jurisdictions. Rose suggests that the questionable performance of defense counsel and repeated failures to investigate and present mitigating evidence relating to the backgrounds and life histories of Missouri federal capital defendants has significantly contributed to that disparity. Though federal funding for defense attorneys is more generous than state funding, Rose says the federal death penalty system shows evidence of the same failures in representation that so often appear in state death penalty cases. Four of the nine prisoners sentenced to death in Missouri were represented by the same lawyer, Frederick Duchardt. In the three cases of Duchardt’s clients that have reached the appeals stage, all three raised claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. In each case, Duchardt failed to employ a mitigation specialist, in violation of American Bar Association guidelines. Mitigation specialists investigate a client’s background to find evidence that may convince a jury to impose a sentence less than death. Duchardt’s clients all suffered serious abuse during their childhoods. One had an IQ of 68, placing him on the threshold of intellectual disability. Another had been diagnosed with psychosis, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. None of these issues were presented to the jury, a decision Duchardt later claimed was “strategic,” but which his client’s appeal attorneys argue was a result of failure to prepare or investigate. Professor Sean O’Brien of the University of Missouri Law School, described the appointment of counsel for indigent defendants as a “lottery,” saying, “Many defendants lose that lottery, and they get a lawyer more worried more about pleasing the court and the prosecutor than about fighting for the client. Those are the ones who die. When one lawyer produces nearly half the federal death sentences in a state, there’s a problem.”

(D. Rose, “Death row: the laywer who keeps losing,” The Guardian, November 24, 2016; Death Penalty Information Center, “Murders in Missouri As a Percentage of All Murders in the United States, 1988-2012,” December 1, 2016.) See Representation and Federal Death Penalty.

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