Bid for execution delayed until at least next year

ST. LOUIS -- Missouri's bid to execute a man condemned in the 1989 stabbing death of a Kansas City girl stalled Wednesday at least into next year to accommodate appeals before the state Supreme Court.

Prosecutors sought to put Roderick Nunley to death as early as 12:01 a.m. Wednesday but could not get a federal appeals court or the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a stay issued Monday on Nunley's behalf by a federal judge in Kansas City.

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster asked the state Supreme Court to provide clarification for a previous ruling in the hope that it would sway Chief U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan Jr. to lift his stay. But the court ordered both sides Wednesday to file written briefs on the matter in December and to be ready to argue them in January.

Under state law, Missouri had until midnight Wednesday to carry out the execution or wait to have a new date set.

But a flurry of appeals Tuesday by Koster's office failed to clear the way for Nunley to be put to death in the abduction, rape and killing of Ann Harrison some 21 years ago in Kansas City.

Koster said he was disappointed by the delay.

"Roderick Nunley has now spent more time on death row than Ann Harrison spent on earth," Koster said in a statement. "The process of justice can be frustratingly slow, but this office pledges to continue to make our way through the courts until we reach justice in the name of Ann Harrison and her family."

Jennifer Herndon, an attorney for Nunley, considered the delay crucial in making her client's central theme that a jury, not a judge, should have determined whether he should live or die.

"Obviously we're happy," Herndon said. "If way back when they had they given him the right to jury sentencing, we wouldn't be in the position we're in today."

Herndon said Nunley embraced Wednesday's development when she told him by telephone in his holding cell near the death chamber at an eastern Missouri prison.

"It's still pretty stressful (because the appeals) pretty much came down to the wire, but he's glad they're going to take a look" at the sentencing issue, Herndon said. "I guess he's like anybody on death row -- until it happens and you're taken off of it, you're never completely free.

"We're just happy to have another day."

In issuing the stay Monday, Gaitan found Nunley was entitled to the delay to argue that his fate should have been decided by a jury. Gaitan put the matter back with the state's high court to decide whether the right to a jury should be retroactively applied to Nunley's case, as permitted in some cases by subsequent U.S. and state Supreme Court rulings.

Koster's unsuccessful quest to have the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court throw out the stay partly hinged on claims that Nunley squandered years to argue the matter in courts, waiting until Sept. 30 to make his case.

Nunley also has sought clemency from Gov. Jay Nixon.

Nunley, 45, and accomplice Michael Taylor hoped to avoid a death sentence when they decided against a jury trial, pleaded guilty and took their chances in 1991 with Alvin Randall, a Jackson County judge who never had sentenced a convict to death and was reputedly a death-penalty opponent. Randall sentenced both men to death.

Both men appealed, accusing prosecutors of racism and alleging Randall had been drinking before the sentencing.

Though a St. Louis circuit judge later vindicated Randall by ruling that that judge had had an alcoholic drink during his lunch break but was not impaired during the sentencing a short time later, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered new sentencing hearings. In 1994, both men again were sentenced to death by a different judge, rather than a jury as Herndon says they would have then preferred.

Taylor was hours from being executed in 2006 when the procedure was halted. His execution date remains unscheduled.

Authorities said Nunley and Taylor were on drugs when they stole a car then abducted 15-year-old Ann Harrison from a school bus stop near her home. Taylor raped the girl in the basement of Nunley's mother's house before the men forced her into the car's trunk, bound her and stabbed her 10 times out of concern she would identify them.

The men abandoned the car with Harrison's body in the trunk. Nunley later gave a videotaped confession.