Abnormal brain and childhood abuse make Missouri man unfit for execution, his lawyers say
ST. LOUIS — A Missouri man facing the death penalty for sexually assaulting and killing a child was a frequent victim of physical and sexual abuse in his youth and has a “structurally abnormal” brain that impairs his judgment, according to a pardon petition filed on his behalf submitted.
Christopher Collings49, will die Tuesday evening from an injection of pentobarbital at the state prison in Bonne Terre. It would be the 23rd execution in the US this year and the fourth in Missouri.
Collings was convicted of killing 9-year-old Rowan Ford, a fourth-grader from the small southwestern Missouri town of Stella, on November 3, 2007. Her body was found in a sinkhole six days later. She had been strangled. Collings confessed to the crimes.
Republican Governor Mike Parson was still working on the clemency request on Monday, but history is not on Collings’ side: Parson, a former county sheriff, has overseen 12 executions and has never granted clemency.
Collings’ attorney, Jeremy Weis, said an appeal is still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, but several courts have rejected several of his previous appeals.
The clemency application states that Collings’ brain abnormality causes him to suffer from “functional deficits in the areas of consciousness, judgment and deliberation, behavior, appropriate social inhibition, and emotional regulation.” It is also noted that he was frequently and often violently abused as a child.
“The result was a damaged human being with no guidance on how to grow into a functioning adult,” the petition said.
The petition also challenges the fairness of Collings’ execution when another man accused of the crime, Rowan’s stepfather, David Spears, also confessed but was allowed to plead guilty to lesser crimes. Spears served more than seven years in prison before being released in 2015.
Collings told authorities that in the hours before the attack on Rowan, he drank heavily and smoked marijuana with Spears and another man, according to court records. Collings said he picked up the sleeping child from a home and took her to the RV where he lived, where he attacked her. He said he strangled the child with a rope when he realized she recognized him.
Collings told investigators he took the girl’s body to a sinkhole. He burned the rope used in the attack, along with the clothes he was wearing and his blood-stained mattress, prosecutors said.
Spears also implicated himself in the crimes, according to court documents and the clemency application. A transcript of Spears’ statement to police cited in the petition stated that he told police that Collings had handed him a cord and that he had killed Rowan.
‘I’ll strangle her with it. I realize she’s gone. She’s… she’s really gone,” Spears said, according to the transcript. According to court documents, it was Spears who led authorities to the sinkhole where her body was found.
No phone listing could be found for Spears.
The pardon petition and Supreme Court appeal both challenge the reliability of the key law enforcement witness at the trial of Collings, a police chief from a neighboring city who had four AWOL convictions while serving in the military. Not disclosing details about that criminal history during the trial was a violation of Colling’s right to a fair trial, Weis believes.
“His credibility was really at the heart of the entire case against Mr. Collings,” Weis said in an interview.
Three men were executed in Missouri this year – Brian Dorsey on April 9 David Hosier on June 11 and Marcellus Williams on September 24. Only Alabama, with six, and Texas, with five, have carried out more executions than Missouri in 2024.