Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty

John Middleton was sentenced to death for the 1995 murders of Randy Hamilton, Stacey Hodge and Alfred Pinegar. Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty (MADP) offers condolences to the Hamilton, Hodge and Pinegar families for their loss. We strongly condemn all acts of violence and believe perpetrators should be held accountable and suffer just penalties for their crimes.

However, we believe that death is an inappropriate sentence for John Middleton. MADP opposes all death sentences, but the sentence of death for John Middleton is particularly distressing given his decreased mental ability, history of abuse endured as a child, and the fact that the case against John depended on the testimony of criminals that the prosecution purchased by offering them more lenient punishments than they deserved.

John Middleton was sentenced to death without his jury having the opportunity to hear from witnesses who could have offered essential information about Middleton's history of abuse as a child and impaired mental ability-factors which could have made the difference between a sentence of death and life imprisonment, and which mandatory Supreme Court precedent required his trial counsel to investigate, which they did not.

While he was a child, Middleton's mother had a history of inhaling gasoline to the point she would pass out from the fumes. John Middleton's father was a drunk and a criminal. The senior Middleton, who did not want his son to be born, was physically and verbally abusive to the mother, often in front of John and his sister. When John was five years old, he and his sister shot a gun at their father in an attempt to stop him from strangling their mother. The physical violence in Middleton's childhood home averaged twice a week and included occurrences where Mr. Middleton would have to confront his father not to hurt his mother. After Mrs. Middleton divorced her husband, she had difficulty supporting her children, as she received no child support. She later entered another abusive relationship where her children also were victims of domestic violence. This male partner often took young John to bars.

In addition to enduring a childhood plagued with violence, John Middleton was developmentally disabled. He attended Head Start for two years, rather than one, because of learning difficulties. He repeated one of the primary grades and eventually was placed in special education classes. Test scores indicate that Mr. Middleton is borderline mentally retarded. Although former employers testified in post-conviction relief proceedings to John's hard work, they also made the point that he could only handle the most menial tasks such as shoveling manure.

But John Middleton's jury did not hear from witnesses who could have told of his troubled history. Trial counsel failed to call them or even to interview some of them. Although he had two separate trials in which one would expect the penalty phase to cover about the same material, counsel in the second trial did not read the transcript from the first.

One of the main elements in John's mental-health problems was methamphetamine psychosis. The pieces of truth that trial counsel omitted would have explained to the jury why John's involvement in that lifestyle was not really the product of free choices-that even if he did some of the things the prosecution's despicable witnesses said he did, it was the product of methamphetamine psychosis, which was in turn the product of unusually low mental capability coupled with a childhood of abuse and negative male role-models.

Instead, the jury heard from career criminals including one with mental disorders. That was the best the prosecution could do. There were no eyewitnesses or police confessions linking Mr. Middleton to the shootings. The prosecution relied heavily on the word of established criminals to get a conviction. One witness the prosecution used was a jailhouse informant who suffered from bipolar disorder and who was found not guilty of another charge by reason of insanity. The prosecution had to get a court order to have this witness released from a mental hospital long enough to testify. Then-in violation of a longstanding rule that expert testimony is not admissible on the credibility of another witness-the prosecution called a psychiatrist to testify that the jury should believe him anyway. Two other witnesses, with various criminal cases pending against them, had their cases favorably disposed of after Mr. Middleton was convicted and sentenced to death. It remains at issue after ten years which of these deals the prosecution disclosed to the defense in time for counsel to cross-examine the witnesses fully and forcefully about their purchased testimony.

John's mental condition has deteriorated in the Department of Corrections. He has lived for over ten years in a maximum-security prison under threat of death. It has been necessary for some people to raise claims about lethal injection - in doing so they've raised the worst case scenarios. Given his limited mental capacity, it stands to reason that exposure to these terrifying worst case scenarios may have added to his inability to deal with reality. His attorneys like him, but frequently find him not to be in his right mind. Both the federal courts and the Missouri State Public Defender System have denied them funding for an independent mental-health expert to render a scientific opinion on his competence to be executed. If he could afford this professional help on his own, it is highly unlikely he would have been charged with a capital offense.

MADP and its supporters are calling on a statewide moratorium on executions while a legislatively appointed commission studies how our death penalty system operates. If Missouri is going to be in the business of taking lives, we owe it to the condemned and their families as well as victims and their families to examine our death penalty system so we know exactly what the death penalty does to Missourians.