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Thread: Earl Mitchell Forrest II - Missouri Execution - May 11, 2016

  1. #11
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Missouri Attorney General Koster has requested an execution date for Forrest.

    http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/missouri...dles-1.2648436

  2. #12
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Missouri Supreme Court sets execution date for Earl Forrest

    ST. LOUIS (AP) — The Missouri Supreme Court has set a May execution date for a man convicted of killing a deputy and two other people 13 years ago.

    The court on Thursday issued a warrant of execution for 66-year-old Earl Forrest. His execution on May 11 would be the first this year.

    Forrest was convicted of killing Harriett Smith, Michael Wells and Dent County Deputy JoAnn Barnes in December 2002. Smith was killed at her Salem home in a drug dispute, and Wells was visiting her. Barnes died in a shootout when officers went to Forrest's home to investigate the killings.

    Missouri executed 10 men in 2014 and six last year, but the pace is expected to slow because most of the remaining death row inmates still have court appeals pending.

    http://www.timesunion.com/sports/art...or-6775072.php
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  3. #13
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    He is the last warrant ready inmate in Missouri, right?

  4. #14
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Unless Ernest gets his appeals denied then yes. Forrest is the last guy for now.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #15
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Forrest remorseless in face of impending execution

    Earl Mitchell Forrest II is due for execution by lethal injection May 11 for the meth-fueled 2002 murder spree which claimed the lives of Michael Wells, Harriett “Tottie” Smith and Dent County Deputy Sheriff JoAnn Barnes.

    The incident is one of the darkest chapters of Dent County’s history, and Forrest in every way embodies the unleashed demons which still haunt our community.

    In a 2013 interview with A&E’s The Killer Speaks, Forrest spoke brazenly of the incident. He declared he was a fallen kingpin, and Smith was ultimately to blame for the triple homicide. Forrest claimed Smith didn’t hold up her end of a drug deal in which he would connect her with a meth supplier in exchange for a riding lawnmower. Smith never delivered on the promise. That betrayal, Forrest says, is what led him to get drunk the morning of Dec. 9, 2002, drive to her home and gun her down in cold blood.

    Wells was also killed at Smith’s residence, for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Forrest then left with the meth and injected it back at his place on Dent County Road 2313. After shooting up, Forrest killed Barnes when she arrived on scene with Sheriff Bob Wofford to investigate the two murders. Wofford was shot but not fatally injured in the ensuing gunfire. Forrest was apprehended after being shot twice during the ensuing standoff with authorities and has been incarcerated ever since.

    Many people believe Forrest doesn’t deserve any more attention than he’s already gotten. He was selfish in his substance abuse and greedy in his dealing. At the height of the meth epidemic he conspired to import pounds of the drug. Worst of all he was reckless with violence, and willing to kill if it meant protecting his macho image.

    Every story has an end, and the burden of ending this dark tale has fallen on those sharing this moment in time. The Salem News went to speak with Forrest in April to find out whether his years on death row had blunted the brazenness of his tone, and if the looming specter of death had changed his soul.

    •••••

    Earl Forrest, 66, was interviewed deep within the Potosi Correctional Center, past three separate security check points. Forrest remained shackled throughout the conversation. He walked into the visitors room hobbled with a cane. His eyes were sunken. His arms pockmarked and purple with lentigo. He was already dying with heart disease.

    “Hey, look, it’s done, you know, I’m just being honest, it’s done, and I never saw the point in beating myself up over it,” Forrest said when asked if he now had any remorse for the killings.

    He went on to say he still blames Smith for the murders.

    “She knew what the deal was,” he said. “I was really mad about having to go over and do that. I’m still mad about it. She knew better.”

    The killing was about more than not getting his end of a deal, Forrest said.

    “It wasn’t even about a lawnmower, it was about that fact that I felt she was disrespecting me in the worst way, you know, to get something from me and think, ehh, he ain’t going to do nothing,” Forrest said. “I got fed up with being pissed. It’s like I turned 50 years old, and she decided I was a punk.”

    As to the motive for killing Wells, Forrest said it was “because he was there.”

    Barnes was shot because she “wore a badge and was paid to carry a gun.”

    Forrest spoke at length about his life and gave insight into how it came to its impending demise. He began dealing drugs in high school when he wanted to be the popular renegade. By his early 20s, he’d graduated to selling speed and meth up and down the West Coast.

    “I sold drugs for a lot of years, the money is really good and you’re your own boss,” Forrest said. “It fit me. It put me around the kind of people I liked to be around.”

    The violence of the drug war never fazed him.

    “It always seemed to work,” Forrest said. “The people who do this kind of business, they know what time it is.”

    The black market’s violence came to define Forrest’s life and identity. His allegiance to the felon’s code, and vain loyalty to a macho image, mixed with the gall and gore of substance abuse to unleash the rash of death which erupted 13 years ago.

    “I just got too hung up with being in the fast lane, the girls, the money. It just seemed like that’s where I belonged,” Forrest said. “Those who know me, they understand, people from the old times, they get it, why this happened. She owed me, and she didn’t do what she was supposed to do. Selling marijuana and LSD, that fuels a completely different person than meth. You’re supposed to do what you say.”

    When asked if killing Smith to uphold this outlaw code was worth sacrificing his own life, Forrest said, “I guess so, I don’t know.”

    He also said he thought execution was an appropriate punishment for his crime.

    “For the time and place, yeah, I guess so. I’m not going to say the death penalty is wrong because I’m not in a position to judge.”

    Forrest said he’s accepted that he’ll soon no longer be living.

    “It gets closer and closer every day. I think I’m good with it,” Forrest said. “That date (May 11) pops up all the time in my head. I’ve accepted it. As a matter of fact from the day I woke up in the hospital, I knew I screwed up, and what was going to happen, and I pretty much accepted it then.”

    Forrest said he doesn’t know what his last words will be and doesn’t care what people will think of him after he’s gone.

    “They’ve already come to the conclusions they want, and probably most of them are right,” Forrest said.

    When asked if he felt there was anything that could be learned from his execution, Forrest said, “don’t let your kids do drugs.”

    •••••

    For more than 13 years Forrest has awaited execution behind concrete walls. On May 11, he will be transferred for the last time to the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre. The end will come in its execution chamber when a needle, not unlike the many others he’s used in his life, will be inserted into the same veins from which he once mainlined meth.

    Forrest lived his life wanting to be called a kingpin and getting respect for his tough attitude to the world. His goal was for others to label him “a badass,” and he was willing to kill to uphold that persona. If there is any hope to be found with this story’s end it’s in not fulfilling this desire of his. Forrest must be recognized for what he truly was, a punk, too simple and too stupid to know right from wrong. As long as our society embraces the spectacle of violence, and spotlights its purveyors as worthy of awe, Forrest and people like him will continue to haunt fringes of our community, taking the lives of people guilty of nothing more than desperation, being at the wrong place or trying to protect their neighbors.

    http://m.thesalemnewsonline.com/mobi...34f251960.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  6. #16
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Attorneys ask U.S. Supreme Court to block Missouri execution of Earl Forrest

    It’s up to the U.S. Supreme Court whether Missouri will carry out the execution of a man convicted of 13 years ago killing three people, including a Dent County Sheriff’s Earl Forrest is scheduled to die by lethal injection at the state prison in Bonne Terre between 6 p.m. Wednesday and 5:59 p.m. Thursday. His attorneys, including Lance Sandage, have asked the Court to block the execution based on their argument that the death penalty is unconstitutional.

    Forrest does not deny killing Chief Deputy Sharron Joann Barnes, Harriett Smith or Michael Wells in December 2002, but Sandage says the jury that sentenced him to die didn’t hear information about a brain injury he suffered years before.

    “PET scans that were conducted showed that. That has really been the thrust of Mr. Forrest’s claim through post-conviction, was trial counsel’s failure to properly litigate that in the penalty phase of his trial,” Sandage told Missourinet.

    The appeal to the Supreme Court, however, is solely that the death penalty violates the 8th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. A request for clemency from Governor Jay Nixon (D) has also been filed. Other appeals for a stay have already been denied.

    Prosecutors said Forrest had gone to home of Smith to demand she keep her end of a deal in which he introduced her to a source of methamphetamine. He killed her and Wells at her home and killed Deputy Barnes in a shootout with law enforcement at his own home. He also shot his then-girlfriend and then-Dent County Sheriff Bob Wofford, both of whom survived. He was sentenced to death for each of the three murders.

    http://www.missourinet.com/2016/05/1...-earl-forrest/

  7. #17
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    SCOTUS filings :

    No. 15A1080
    Title:
    Earl Forrest, Applicant
    v.
    Cindy Griffith, Warden

    Docketed:
    Linked with 15-9000
    Lower Ct: Supreme Court of Missouri

    Case Nos.: (SC95479)


    ~~~Date~~~ ~~~~~~~Proceedings and Orders~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Apr 13 2016 Application (15A1080) for a stay of execution of sentence of death, submitted to Justice Alito.
    Apr 28 2016 Response to application from respondent Cindy Griffith, Warden filed.



    No. 15-9000 *** CAPITAL CASE ***

    Title:
    Earl Forrest, Petitioner
    v.
    Cindy Griffith, Warden

    Docketed: April 19, 2016
    Linked with 15A1080
    Lower Ct: Supreme Court of Missouri

    Case Nos.: (SC95479)
    Decision Date: January 21, 2016


    ~~~Date~~~ ~~~~~~~Proceedings and Orders~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Apr 13 2016 Petition for a writ of certiorari and motion for leave to proceed in forma pauperis filed. (Response due May 19, 2016)
    Apr 13 2016 Application (15A1080) for a stay of execution of sentence of death, submitted to Justice Alito.
    Apr 28 2016 Brief of respondent Cindy Griffith, Warden in opposition filed.
    Apr 28 2016 Response to application from respondent Cindy Griffith, Warden filed.
    May 3 2016 Reply of petitioner Earl Forrest filed.

  8. #18
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Missouri man scheduled to die for killing deputy, 2 others

    ST. LOUIS - A man convicted of killing two people in a drug dispute and a sheriff's deputy in a subsequent shootout is scheduled to be put to death Wednesday in what could be Missouri's last execution for some time.

    Earl Forrest, 66, is set to die for the December 2002 deaths of Harriett Smith, Michael Wells and Dent County Sheriff's Deputy Joann Barnes.

    Forrest's attorney, Kent Gipson, is seeking a stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster countered that the Supreme Court has already resolved that debate. A clemency request also is pending before Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon.

    According to court documents, Forrest had been drinking when he went to Smith's home in the southern Missouri town of Salem and demanded that she fulfil her promise to buy a lawn mower and mobile home for him in exchange for introducing her to a source for methamphetamine. Wells was visiting Smith at the time. An argument ensued, and Forrest shot Wells in the face. He shot Smith six times and took a lockbox full of meth valued at $25,000.

    When police converged on Forrest's home, he shot Barnes and Dent County Sheriff Bob Wofford, according to court documents. Forrest was also shot in the exchange of gunfire, along with his girlfriend, Angela Gamblin. Wofford and Gamblin survived.

    Missouri has been one of the most prolific states for executions in recent years, second only to Texas. The state has executed 18 prisoners since November 2013, including six last year. Forrest would be the first in 2016.

    Missouri's death row population is dwindling. Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, said juries today are less likely to opt for capital punishment, in part because of greater awareness of how mental illness sometimes factors in violent crime. Just 49 people were sentenced to death nationally last year, the fewest since U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty as a possible punishment in 1976. No one was sentenced to death in Missouri in 2014 or 2015, Dunham said.

    "As these executions take place, fewer and fewer people are being sentenced to death, so the death penalty is withering on the other end," Dunham said.

    None of the 25 other men on Missouri's death row face imminent execution.

    Sixteen have yet to exhaust court appeals and aren't likely to do so anytime soon. Execution is on hold for nine others. Two were declared mentally unfit for execution. Two were granted stays because of medical conditions that could cause painful deaths during lethal injection. Two had sentences set aside by the courts due to trial attorney errors. One inmate was granted a stay while his innocence claim is reviewed. One case was sent back to a lower court to consider an appeal.

    And in one unusual case, inmate William Boliek was granted a stay by Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan in 1997. The case wasn't resolved before Carnahan died in a 2000 plane crash, and a court determined that only Carnahan could overturn the stay. Nixon's office has said Boliek will not be executed.

    Executions nationally are on the decline. In 1999, 98 people were executed. That fell to just 28 in 2015 — a 24-year low — and 13 so far in 2016.

    http://www.timescolonist.com/missour...hers-1.2251738

  9. #19
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Gov. Nixon denies clemency petition of Earl M. Forrest

    Jefferson City, MO - The Governor’s Office today released the following statement from Gov. Jay Nixon regarding his decision on the petition for clemency made on behalf of Earl M. Forrest:

    The clemency petition for Earl M. Forrest has been reviewed thoroughly, and I have subsequently received a final briefing from my counsel. After deliberate consideration to the merits of the petition and the facts of this case, I have denied this petition. This is a power of the Governor that I take very seriously, and great consideration is given to the specific facts of each case.

    Earl Forrest was convicted by a jury of murdering three people and sentenced to death on each count. Among his victims was Dent County Chief Deputy Sheriff Joann Barnes, whom Forrest killed after he had already murdered Harriett Smith and Michael Wells. During the shootout with law enforcement officers, Forrest also shot and wounded then-Dent County Sheriff Bob Wofford. My decision today upholds the decision handed down by the jury and upheld by the state and federal courts.

    As preparations are made to carry out the sentence, I ask that Missourians remember Chief Deputy Barnes, Harriett Smith and Michael Wells at this time and keep their families in their thoughts and prayers.

    http://governor.mo.gov/news/archive/...ce=twitterfeed
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  10. #20
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    SCOTUS has denied a stay of execution.

    https://www.themarshallproject.org/d...der#.jTMwABcAK
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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