In the space of twelve days in June 1995, three people died in the farm counties of northern Missouri. Randy Hamilton, 39, and Stacey Hodge, 21, both of Spickard, were killed on June 11 in Mercer County. Alfred Pinegar, 29, of Davis City, Iowa, was killed on June 23 in Harrison County. Prosecutors said all three deaths were the work of one man, John C. Middleton, a drug dealer from Spickard, and that he killed them because he believed they were about to tell the police about his business.
Two juries agreed. In 1997 a jury in Adair County convicted Middleton of first degree murder in Pinegar's death and recommended that he be put to death. In 1998 a jury in Callaway County convicted him of two counts of murder in the first degree and two counts of armed criminal action for the deaths of Hamilton and Hodge, and he was sentenced to death on each murder count. A woman who had been his girlfriend pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in all three deaths and was sentenced to life.
Middleton never admitted the crimes. For nineteen years he moved through the state and federal courts, and in his final months his lawyers advanced two arguments at once: that new evidence placed Pinegar's death on a day when Middleton was already in custody in Iowa, and that he had become too mentally ill to be executed. In the last forty-eight hours a federal judge twice stopped the execution, and twice the federal appeals court above her lifted the stay. The Supreme Court of Missouri turned down his final petition by four votes to three, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to step in, and Governor Jay Nixon refused clemency. Middleton was executed in Bonne Terre, Missouri, on July 16, 2014. He was 54.
Middleton was born around 1960. He was 48 when his first execution date was set in June 2008 and 54 when he died. By the middle of the 1990s he was living in Spickard, a small town in rural northern Missouri, and dealing drugs in the surrounding countryside.
The people who would die were close to him. Pinegar lived just across the state line in Davis City, Iowa, and Hamilton and Hodge both lived in Spickard itself. The prosecution's case in both trials rested on what Middleton was said to have feared from them. On June 10, 1995, law enforcement arrested several drug suspects in northern Missouri. Middleton was not among them. The state's position, set out at trial and repeated by the Attorney General's office until the end, was that he concluded the three people closest to his dealing were likely to talk, and that he set out to make sure they could not.
Randy Hamilton was 39 years old and was known to the people around him as "Happy." Stacey Hodge was 21. Both lived in Spickard.
They died on June 11, 1995, one day after the June 10 arrests, in Mercer County. Their deaths would be tried separately from Pinegar's, a year after his case reached a jury, and it was in their case that the Supreme Court of Missouri set an execution date in 2008.
Alfred Pinegar was 29 and lived in Davis City, a small town in southern Iowa. He had a young daughter. Years later his uncle, speaking for the family after the execution, described her as "a little girl who had to grow up without her father."
Pinegar died on June 23, 1995, twelve days after Hamilton and Hodge, in Harrison County, Missouri. That date was the state's case. Nearly two decades later it became the center of Middleton's claim of innocence, when his lawyers argued that Pinegar had died a day later than the prosecution said.
Middleton was arrested in early July 1995 for the murder of Alfred Pinegar. On October 18, 1995, he was charged in the Circuit Court of Harrison County with first degree murder. The case was later moved on a change of venue to the Circuit Court of Adair County, where Judge Russell E. Steele presided.
The prosecution of the Hamilton and Hodge deaths followed a separate track. The counts were two of murder in the first degree and two of armed criminal action, and the trial was held in Callaway County.
Middleton's girlfriend at the time was also prosecuted. In 1998 she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in all three deaths, along with three counts of armed criminal action, and she was sentenced to life.
The Pinegar trial opened in Adair County on February 24, 1997. The state's evidence came largely from people who knew Middleton. Several acquaintances testified that he had admitted the killings to them, and a man who had been held in custody with Middleton in 1995 testified for the prosecution as well. The jury also heard evidence about the deaths of Hamilton and Hodge, although those deaths were not charged in that trial; the admission of that evidence later became one of the issues on federal appeal.
Middleton's trial lawyers chose to argue that he was innocent rather than to present a defense of diminished mental capacity. The Supreme Court of Missouri would later rule that this was a reasonable choice. The jury found Middleton guilty of first degree murder and recommended a sentence of death, and the court imposed it.
The second trial began in Callaway County on March 30, 1998. In the guilt phase the defense called no witnesses. Its lawyers attacked the credibility of the state's witnesses and told the jury that the prosecution had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
The jury convicted Middleton on all four counts: two of murder in the first degree and two of armed criminal action. In the penalty phase the defense changed course and turned to his mental state. His lawyers argued that years of drug use had left him in a condition like that of a paranoid schizophrenic, and that he could not be held fully accountable. The court sentenced him to death on each count of murder. His conviction for the murder of Alfred Pinegar stood before the jury as an aggravating circumstance, and so the first judgment became one of the foundations of the second.
Under Missouri law a death sentence goes straight to the state's highest court. On June 29, 1999, the Supreme Court of Missouri, sitting en banc, affirmed the Pinegar conviction and death sentence in an opinion written by Judge Price. Rehearing was denied on August 3, 1999. That same day the court affirmed the convictions and death sentences in the Hamilton and Hodge case, and rehearing in that case was denied on September 7, 1999.
The Supreme Court of the United States denied review of the Pinegar case on February 22, 2000, and it also declined to take up the Callaway County case that year.
Middleton then turned to the post-conviction process, in which a prisoner may raise claims that lie outside the trial record, such as the failings of his own lawyers or evidence the state kept from the defense.
In the Pinegar case the trial court in Adair County held an evidentiary hearing in February and March 2001 and denied relief. In the Callaway County case the claims reached the Supreme Court of Missouri first. On June 11, 2002, in a unanimous opinion by Judge Benton, the court upheld the convictions and death sentences. It rejected Middleton's claims that his trial lawyers had been ineffective and that the state had made secret deals with its witnesses, and it held that counsel had acted reasonably in keeping his mental state out of the guilt phase. Rehearing was denied on August 27, 2002.
The Pinegar appeal followed. On April 1, 2003, the court, in an opinion by Judge Stith with every judge concurring, affirmed the denial of relief. Middleton had not shown that any witness had an undisclosed deal with the state, the court found, and his lawyers had been entitled to choose an innocence defense over a defense of diminished capacity. His remaining claims were rejected.
With the state courts exhausted, Middleton petitioned the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. On September 21, 2005, Judge Catherine D. Perry denied his petition in the Pinegar case, though she granted a certificate of appealability on several issues, allowing him to take them to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
The Eighth Circuit ruled in 2006 and again in 2007. On August 17, 2007, it affirmed the denial of relief on the four issues certified: the trial court's refusal of a continuance, the jury instructions in the penalty phase, the admission of evidence about the uncharged Hamilton and Hodge deaths, and the adequacy of the state supreme court's review of whether the death sentence was proportionate.
In June 2008 the Supreme Court of Missouri set an execution date of July 30, 2008, in the Hamilton and Hodge case. In mid-July the court postponed it so that Middleton could join a federal challenge to Missouri's execution procedures. The date was moved to September 17, 2008, and on September 3 that date was also stayed, with oral argument set for October 7 in a challenge brought by sixteen condemned men and others. By the court's own count Middleton had been given at least three execution dates before 2014, and each had been stayed.
For the next several years, as litigation over execution procedures continued, Missouri carried out no executions. When the state resumed in late 2013, Middleton's case returned to the court's calendar.
In January 2014 the Supreme Court of Missouri ordered Middleton to show cause why an execution date should not be set. In February his lawyers filed a petition asking for a new trial in the Pinegar case, on grounds that went to the core of the 1997 verdict.
The first ground concerned the date of death. An expert at the University of Missouri, reviewing the original evidence, revised the estimate of when Pinegar had died, placing it on June 24, 1995, a day after the date the prosecution had used. On June 24, Middleton's lawyers said, he was in custody in Iowa on an unrelated misdemeanor charge. If the revised estimate was right, he could not have committed the crime. One of his lawyers, Kay Parish, would describe it as "an iron-clad alibi."
The second ground was a sworn statement. In February 2014 a witness who asked not to be named signed an affidavit attributing Pinegar's death to two other men. Harrison County Sheriff Josh Eckerson reviewed the statement and found nothing to support it. "There's no evidence to state that anything happened other than what had previously been reported in the court system," he said.
The petition also alleged that the state had withheld evidence from the defense and that one of its witnesses had been paid. And it renewed the claim that Middleton was seriously mentally ill.
The Attorney General's office answered each point. It called the revised estimate of the date "manufactured" and said the anonymous witness was not "credible." On May 27, 2014, the Supreme Court of Missouri denied Middleton's petition for habeas corpus, refused his request for discovery and for a special master to take evidence, and overruled his motion to vacate the execution date. Three days later, on May 30, it set his execution for July 16, 2014.
On July 14 the Eighth Circuit declined to halt the execution on the strength of the innocence claim. The fight then moved to the question of Middleton's mind.
Under the Constitution a prisoner who does not understand that he is being executed, or why, may not be put to death. On July 15 Judge Perry, who had denied his habeas petition a decade before, stayed the execution so that a hearing could be held on whether he was competent. She found that his lawyers had made a "substantial threshold showing of insanity," and she was careful to set the limits of her ruling. "This is not a decision that he is not competent to be executed," she wrote.
Middleton's lawyer Joseph Perkovich said that if Middleton "had zealous representation at trial he likely would have been acquitted." The Attorney General's office said that "the time for enforcement of Missouri's criminal judgment against John Middleton is long overdue."
The stay lasted only hours. On the same day a panel of the Eighth Circuit, Judges Wollman, Loken and Colloton, vacated it on procedural grounds. "Middleton has not presented his present Ford claim to the Supreme Court of Missouri," the panel wrote, referring to the Supreme Court decision that bars the execution of the insane. On July 16 the district court issued a second stay, and the Eighth Circuit vacated that one as well.
Middleton's lawyers took the competency claim to the Supreme Court of Missouri, and on July 16 the court denied it by four votes to three. Judges Russell, Breckenridge, Fischer and Wilson formed the majority. "Middleton plainly understands he is to be executed as punishment because he was found guilty of murdering his three victims," the majority held. Judges Draper, Stith and Teitelman dissented. In Judge Draper's words, "the court has denied Middleton even a bare modicum of due process."
The same day the Supreme Court of the United States denied Middleton's petition for review and his application for a stay. Governor Nixon denied clemency.
John C. Middleton was executed in Bonne Terre, Missouri, on July 16, 2014, at the age of 54. He was the sixth man executed in Missouri that year and the eighth since the state had resumed executions the previous November.
Attorney General Chris Koster said that evening: "This evening, Mr. Middleton paid the ultimate price for his choices." Governor Nixon named the three people Middleton had been convicted of killing. "Alfred Pinegar, Randy Hamilton and Stacey Hodge were murdered in cold blood," he said, and he spoke of the drug that had run through the case as one that "can have such a monstrous impact on so many lives." He added: "Tonight has brought a conclusion to a case."
For Pinegar's family the conclusion had been a long time coming. "Nineteen years seems like a long time to wait for justice," his uncle said.
Middleton was convicted under section 565.020 of the Missouri Revised Statutes. A person commits first degree murder in Missouri "if he knowingly causes the death of another person after deliberation upon the matter." The offense is a class A felony, and the statute allows only two punishments: "either death or imprisonment for life without eligibility for probation or parole, or release except by act of the governor." Armed criminal action is a separate offense charged alongside the underlying felony, which is why the Callaway County jury returned four verdicts for two deaths.
A Missouri death sentence passes through a fixed sequence of courts. The Supreme Court of Missouri has exclusive jurisdiction over the direct appeal. The prisoner may then file a post-conviction motion in the county where he was tried, as Middleton did in Adair County and Callaway County, with a further appeal to the state supreme court. After that come federal habeas corpus proceedings in the district court and the Eighth Circuit, and finally the Supreme Court of the United States. Middleton went through each stage twice, once for each conviction.
His last claim rested on two decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, Ford v. Wainwright and Panetti v. Quarterman, which bar the execution of a prisoner who lacks a rational understanding of the punishment and the reason for it. A prisoner who raises the claim must first make a "substantial threshold showing" of incompetence before he is entitled to a hearing. The Missouri majority held that Middleton had not made that showing. The dissenters also challenged section 552.060 of the Missouri statutes, under which only the director of the state's corrections department may begin the process of referring a condemned prisoner for a competency examination.
The timing of his execution followed the wider course of capital punishment in Missouri. Between 2005 and 2013 the state's executions came to a halt while challenges to its procedures moved through the courts. Middleton was one of the prisoners who joined that litigation in 2008. When executions resumed in November 2013 they came quickly, and the ten carried out in 2014 set a record for the state.
Middleton maintained his innocence to the end. Every court that heard his claims rejected them, and all three convictions stood.
The central dispute was the date of Pinegar's death. The prosecution placed it on June 23, 1995. The revised estimate offered by the defense in 2014 placed it on June 24, when Middleton was in custody in Iowa. The state called the revision "manufactured," and no court accepted it as grounds for a new trial.
The February 2014 affidavit attributing Pinegar's death to two other men was never tested at a trial. The sheriff of Harrison County found nothing to support it, and neither man was charged.
The claims of secret deals with prosecution witnesses were rejected by the Supreme Court of Missouri in 2002 and again in 2003. The claim that a witness had been paid was raised in 2014 and was not upheld.
Middleton's lawyers also pointed to the case of Mark Woodworth, whose murder convictions in Chillicothe, Missouri, were overturned in 2014 after a judge found a "manifest injustice." They argued that three members of the North Central Major Case Squad had worked on both investigations. The squad's chief deputy denied any wrongdoing, and no court made any finding about Middleton's case on that basis.
His mental state was argued at the penalty phase in 1998, in post-conviction proceedings and in the final competency litigation. A federal judge found in July 2014 that his lawyers had made a threshold showing sufficient for a hearing; the Supreme Court of Missouri, by four votes to three, held that they had not, and no hearing took place.
June 10, 1995: Several drug suspects are arrested in northern Missouri; Middleton is not among them.
June 11, 1995: Randy Hamilton and Stacey Hodge, both of Spickard, are killed in Mercer County, Missouri.
June 23, 1995: Alfred Pinegar, of Davis City, Iowa, is killed in Harrison County, Missouri.
Early July 1995: Middleton is arrested for the murder of Alfred Pinegar.
October 18, 1995: Middleton is charged with first degree murder in the Circuit Court of Harrison County.
February 24, 1997: The Pinegar trial opens in Adair County on a change of venue; Middleton is convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death.
1998: Middleton's girlfriend pleads guilty to second-degree murder in all three deaths and is sentenced to life.
March 30, 1998: The Callaway County trial opens; Middleton is convicted of two counts of murder in the first degree and two counts of armed criminal action and sentenced to death on each murder count.
June 29, 1999: The Supreme Court of Missouri affirms the Pinegar conviction and death sentence.
August 3, 1999: The Supreme Court of Missouri affirms the Hamilton and Hodge convictions and death sentences.
February 22, 2000: The Supreme Court of the United States denies review in the Pinegar case.
February to March 2001: Post-conviction evidentiary hearing in Adair County; relief denied.
June 11, 2002: The Supreme Court of Missouri unanimously upholds the Callaway County convictions and sentences on post-conviction appeal.
April 1, 2003: The Supreme Court of Missouri affirms the denial of post-conviction relief in the Pinegar case.
September 21, 2005: Judge Catherine D. Perry denies federal habeas relief in the Pinegar case.
August 17, 2007: The Eighth Circuit affirms the denial of habeas relief.
June 27, 2008: An execution date of July 30, 2008, is set.
July and September 2008: The July 30 and September 17 dates are stayed during litigation over Missouri's execution procedures.
January 2014: The Supreme Court of Missouri orders Middleton to show cause why an execution date should not be set.
February 2014: Middleton's lawyers petition for a new trial in the Pinegar case, citing a revised date of death and a new affidavit.
May 27, 2014: The Supreme Court of Missouri denies his habeas petition and refuses to vacate the execution date.
May 30, 2014: The execution is set for July 16, 2014.
July 14, 2014: The Eighth Circuit declines to halt the execution on the innocence claim.
July 15, 2014: Judge Perry stays the execution for a competency hearing; the Eighth Circuit vacates the stay.
July 16, 2014: A second stay is vacated; the Supreme Court of Missouri denies the competency petition four votes to three; the Supreme Court of the United States denies a stay; Governor Nixon denies clemency. Middleton is executed in Bonne Terre, Missouri.