It was two days before Christmas in 2006 and 34-year-old Brian Dorsey was in trouble: Two drug dealers were at his apartment, demanding money.
Despite repeatedly seeking addiction treatment, Dorsey had been drinking daily for years and routinely binged crack cocaine, a drug that caused him to experience psychosis and left him feeling deeply ashamed.
And now he was in a position where he had to call several family members and ask them for cash. They declined but went to Dorsey’s apartment and convinced the drug dealers to leave. Dorsey’s cousin, Sarah Bonnie, and her husband, Ben Bonnie, invited Dorsey to spend the night at their place. He took them up on the offer, and spent the evening drinking and playing pool with his relatives.
The next morning, Sarah Bonnie’s parents found her and Ben Bonnie dead in their bedroom. Their 4-year-old daughter sat on the couch in the living room. Dorsey turned himself into the police two days later. Following the advice of his appointed counsel, he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder without securing any deal from prosecutors to take the death penalty off the table. After a two-day sentencing trial, a jury sentenced him to death. On April 9, the state of Missouri plans to execute Dorsey, using a lethal injection of pentobarbital.
Like most people on death row, Dorsey couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer for the resource-intensive work of a death penalty trial. Instead, the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office, which has faced chronic underfunding, contracted with two private attorneys, Christopher Slusher and Scott McBride. They were each paid a flat fee of $12,000 to represent Dorsey. Between 1998 and 2004, defense lawyers for people facing the death penalty spent an average of 3,557 hours per trial, according to a 2010 report. If Dorsey’s lawyers had put in that much time on his case, they would have been paid about $3 per hour.
“Had counsel investigated and completed an expert evaluation of their…
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