JEFFERSON CITY • The Missouri Supreme Court issued an execution order Wednesday for a man convicted of killing a mother and her two children in 1998, despite an ongoing appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.
Barring a stay from a federal court, Mark Christeson’s execution date is set for the twenty-four hour period beginning at 6:00 p.m. on Jan. 31, 2017.
In 1998, Christeson, then 18, and his 17-year-old cousin, Jesse Carter, broke into the home of Susan Brouk near Vichy, Mo. Armed with shotguns, they had planned to steal her car.
Once inside, Christeson raped Brouk. He and Carter later drove her and her two children to a nearby pond. Brouk, who was 36, and her son Kyle, 9, were stabbed and thrown into the water to drown. Her daughter Adrian, 12 was suffocated.
Carter later testified against Christeson and was sentenced to life in prison.
Christeson was originally sentenced to executed on Oct. 29, 2014, but adjunct professors and Death Penalty Clinic students at St. Louis University Law School helped him win a stay of the execution just hours before it was scheduled.
Christenson had been too poor to afford counsel and was represented at trial by state public defenders. When his state appeals were exhausted, a federal judge in western Missouri appointed new attorneys to handle his federal appeals.
The U.S. Supreme Court halted his execution after finding those attorneys missed the federal appeal deadline by 117 days. They also admitted they hadn’t met with Christeson until six weeks after the appeal was due, with no evidence they communicated with him before that.
New attorneys were appointed again, who sought to bring in experts to testify to Christeson’s mental impairment, which they argue left him totally reliant on lawyers. But a U.S. district court only provided $10,000 of the $161,000 they asked for, with no explanation as to why funding was slashed.
Now, attorneys from three leading criminal defense organizations and the MacArthur Justice Center in St. Louis are hoping to overturn the decision denying the funding, but the execution order makes for a tighter deadline.
Celeste Bott • 573-556-6186
@celestebott on Twitter
?cbott@post-dispatch.com
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