Potosi, MO. – Inmate, Brian Dorsey, age 51, was scheduled for execution after being convicted of killing his cousin, Sarah Bonnie, and her husband, Ben, in 2006. In January, upwards of 60 Department of Correction workers had urged the governor to grant clemency and halt the execution. The Missouri Supreme Court wrote that, in a unanimous decision, they declined to halt the execution due to a lack of demonstration of Dorsey being innocent of the killings.
He had pleaded guilty to shooting Sarah and Ben Bonnie in 2008, but then he later claimed that he should have been sentenced to life in prison without parole instead of getting the death sentence. In the appeal by Dorsey, he stated that he was allegedly incapable of premeditation at the time of the killings due to drug-induced psychosis and that he had not slept in more than three days, had been drinking, and was withdrawing from cocaine usage, making him have paranoid delusions and hallucinations. Judge W. Brent Powell wrote that “attorneys cited significant evidence of premeditation” of the crime. Dorsey is scheduled to die by injection at 6 p.m. on April 9, 2024, at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
