28 October 2020 :

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has overturned a grant of habeas relief for Missouri death-row prisoner Carman Deck and reinstated the death sentence imposed in his third capital sentencing trial. The appeals court ruled that Deck could not receive federal review of his claim that the passage of a decade between his original trial and his third sentencing trial had caused critical mitigation witnesses to become unavailable, making it impossible for him to receive a fair resentencing. The Eighth Circuit held that Deck’s claim was procedurally defaulted because his post-conviction lawyer had failed to raise the issue in state court. It further ruled that because the law on the issue was not settled at the time of Deck’s resentencing, post-conviction counsel’s failure to raise the issue was not ineffective and Deck therefore could not establish grounds to excuse the procedural default.
Deck was convicted and sentenced to death in Columbia County, Missouri in 1998. The Missouri Supreme Court overturned his death sentence in 2002, finding that his trial lawyer had submitted a prejudicially deficient jury instruction on mitigating evidence that failed to explain what evidence the jury could consider as grounds to spare his life and that jurors did not need to unanimously agree that a mitigating circumstance was present before they could take that evidence into consideration in their sentencing decision. The United States Supreme Court overturned Deck’s second death sentence, imposed in 2003, because the trial court had violated his right to due process by requiring him to appear before the jury shackled with leg irons, handcuffs, and a belly chain. He was resentenced to death in a third sentencing hearing in November 2008, which was the subject of the April 2017 U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri decision reversed by the Eighth Circuit.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/capital-case-roundup-death-penalty-court-decisions-the-week-of-october-19-2020