Missouri to execute man who killed three, including deputy

By Fiona Ortiz

(Reuters) - A man who killed three people, including a sheriff's deputy, in a dispute over drugs is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Missouri on Wednesday or Thursday, a spokeswoman for the state's Supreme Court said.

The execution, set to take place between 6 p.m. Wednesday and 6 p.m. Thursday at the state prison in Bonne Terre, comes as the rate of executions is falling steeply in the United States and even some conservative voices are advocating for abolition of the death penalty.

Earl Forrest, now 66, killed an acquaintance, Harriet Smith, and a visitor at her house, Michael Wells, in a dispute over methamphetamine, on Dec. 9, 2002. He shot both of them in the face, within a range of a few inches, according to court records.

Forrest and his girlfriend then fled Smith's house in the southern Missouri town of Salem, taking with them a lockbox containing an estimated $25,000 of methamphetamine. Later, he got into a shootout with law enforcement and shot and killed sheriff's deputy Sharon Joann Barnes, according to the records.

Forrest's appeals ran out on Wednesday. The U.S. Supreme court denied his application for a stay of execution, the only appeal that was pending in the courts. Earlier Missouri's Democratic Governor Jay Nixon rejected his petition to have his sentence commuted to life in prison.

During his trial the defense said Forrest had problems with alcohol and methamphetamine and that long-term substance abuse had impaired his judgment.

The jury unanimously recommended a death sentence for each conviction because of aggravating factors, including that part of his motivation was to obtain drugs and that he killed an officer who was on duty at the time.

Missouri has executed 86 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, making it one of the most prolific among the 31 states that use capital punishment.

But in recent years the state has seen very few new death penalties handed down by juries. There are 28 people on death row in Missouri, according to the Criminal Justice Project of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

States have struggled to secure drugs for lethal injections, after companies said they did not want to sell the substances for executions.

(Reporting by Fiona Ortiz in Chicago; Editing by Bill Rigby and James Dalgleish)