The Missouri Supreme Court has ordered a new sentencing trial for Marvin D. Rice (pictured), a former sheriff’s deputy whose trial judge sentenced him to death despite the votes of 11 of his 12 jurors to sentence him to life. On April 2, 2019, the court vacated the death sentence imposed by St. Charles County Judge Kelly Wayne Parker in 2017 under the state’s controversial “hung jury” sentencing provision. Under that law, the trial judge has authority to independently evaluate the evidence and determine the sentence to be imposed whenever the jury vote for life or death is not unanimous. Rice, a former Dent County deputy sheriff and state correctional officer, was charged with murdering his ex-girlfriend, Annette Durham, during a custody dispute over their son and killing her boyfriend, Steven Strotkamp. The jury convicted Rice of capital murder for killing Durham but was deemed hung when a single juror held out for death. It convicted him of second-degree murder in Strotkamp’s death and agreed to a life sentence for that murder. Parker disregarded the jury’s vote and imposed the death penalty for Durham’s murder.
No state in the United States authorizes a judge to override a jury’s recommendation of a life sentence and all three states that previously permitted the practice ended it in the past three years. Missouri law, however, considers a non-unanimous vote a nullity rather than a recommendation, entrusting the sentencing decision to the judge. Rice challenged the constitutionality of the statute under the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2016 ruling in Hurst v. Florida that “[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.” Rice also argued that the prosecutor’s repeated comments about his decision not to testify at trial violated the Fifth Amendment, which bars the use of a defendant’s silence against him. The Missouri court granted a new sentencing trial on the Fifth Amendment issue, avoiding having to decide the constitutionality of the state statute.
No jury has sentenced anyone to death in Missouri since 2013. However, since that time, Missouri judges have sentenced two defendants to death under the hung jury provision. In addition to Rice, a trial judge sentenced Craig Wood to death in 2018 after his jury split 10-2 in favor of a death sentence. As in Rice’s case, Wood’s lawyers have argued that allowing a judge to impose a death sentence when a jury does not reach a unanimous sentencing decision is unconstitutional. In 2016, the Florida Supreme Court and the Delaware Supreme Court struck down provisions in their death-penalty laws permitting judges to impose death sentences based upon non-unanimous jury recommendations for death. Alabama still permits that practice if ten or more jurors have voted for death.
(Brian Hauswirth, Missouri Supreme Court issues ruling in Marvin Rice death penalty case, Missourinet, April 3, 2019; Jack Suntrup, Missouri sheriff’s deputy convicted of double murder will have another day in court, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Apr. 2, 2019.) Read the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Rice, No. SC96737 (Mo. Apr. 2, 2019). See Sentencing and Prosecutorial Misconduct.
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