ST. LOUIS — The fate of a Missouri man convicted of murdering his cousin and her husband nearly two decades ago appears to be in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, with just hours to go before his scheduled execution.
Brian Dorsey, 52, will die by injection Tuesday evening at the state prison in Bonne Terre. Gov. Mike Parson denied a clemency request Monday. Two more appeals are pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. One focuses on Dorsey’s record of good behavior since his incarceration.
The other says his life should be spared because his trial lawyers had a conflict of interest. The pair of public defenders received a lump sum of $12,000, which gave them no incentive to invest time in his case, the appeal said. At their recommendation, Dorsey pleaded guilty despite failing to reach an agreement with prosecutors that he would be spared the death penalty.
Dorsey would be the first person in Missouri to be put to death this year after four executions in 2023. Another man, David Hosier, is scheduled to be executed on June 11 for the 2009 murder of a Jefferson City woman. Nationwide, there are up to four men executed so far. 2024 – one each in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and Oklahoma.
Dorsey, 52, formerly of Jefferson City, was convicted of killing Sarah and Ben Bonnie on Dec. 23, 2006, at their home near New Bloomfield. Prosecutors said Dorsey had called Sarah Bonnie earlier that day to borrow money to pay two drug dealers who were at his apartment.
Dorsey went to the Bonnies’ house that evening. After they went to bed, Dorsey took a shotgun from the garage and killed them both before sexually assaulting Sarah Bonnie’s body, prosecutors said. Police said Dorsey stole several items from the home and was trying to pay off a drug debt with some of the stolen property.
A day after the murders, Sarah Bonnie’s parents went to check on the Bonnies after they failed to show up for a family gathering. They found the couple’s four-year-old daughter on the couch watching TV. She told her grandparents that her mother “doesn’t want to wake up.”
Dorsey surrendered to police three days after the murders.
Lawyers for Dorsey said he was suffering from drug-induced psychosis at the time of the crime. He came clean in prison, they said.
Dozens of corrections officers were responsible for his rehabilitation.
“The Brian I’ve known for years can’t hurt anyone,” someone wrote in the clemency petition. “The Brian I know does not deserve to be executed.”
In a letter to Parson as part of the clemency petition, former Missouri Supreme Court Justice Michael Wolff wrote that he was on the court when it denied an appeal of his death sentence in 2009. Now, he says, that decision was wrong.
“Missouri Public Defenders are now opting out of the fixed defense fee, in recognition of the professional standard that such an arrangement presents the attorney with an inherent financial conflict of interest,” Wolff wrote.
Dorsey’s execution raised new concerns about Missouri’s protocol, which does not include a provision on the use of anesthetics. Dorsey’s attorneys describe him as obese, diabetic and a former intravenous drug user, all factors that could have made it difficult to obtain a vein to inject the deadly drug. When that happens, a reduction procedure is sometimes necessary.
A cutdown involves an incision and then the use of forceps to pull tissue away from an internal vein. A federal lawsuit on Dorsey’s behalf argued that without local anesthetic, he would be in so much pain that it would interfere with his right to religious freedom by preventing him from having meaningful interactions with his spiritual advisor, including performing last rites.
A settlement was reached on Saturday in which the state took unspecified steps to limit the risk of extreme pain. The settlement did not specify the specific changes the state agreed to, including whether narcotics would be available.
