A convicted double killer from mid-Missouri has been executed by lethal injection, about 23 years after he killed two Randolph County jailers in Huntsville.
Michael Tisius was executed at the state’s maximum-security prison in southeast Missouri’s Bonne Terre on Tuesday evening. The Associated Press (AP) reports Tisius breathed hard a few times as the drug was administered, then fell silent. The AP reports Tisius’ spiritual adviser was in the execution chamber with Tisius.
In his final statement, Tisius says he tried hard to become a better man and expressed remorse for the killings. “I am sorry. And not because I am at the end. But because I truly am sorry,” the AP quotes Tisius as writing.
The 42-year-old Tisius was convicted and sentenced to death for shooting jailers Jason Acton and Leon Egley to death in Huntsville in June 2000. Missouri Governor Mike Parson denied a clemency request from Tisius.
“Missouri’s judicial system provided Mr. Tisius with due process and fair proceedings for his brutal murders of two Randolph County jail guards,” the governor says, in a written statement.
Attorneys for Tisius had urged the U.S. Supreme Court to block the execution, alleging that a juror at a 2010 sentencing hearing was illiterate, in violation of state law.
