Missouri case shows that even people sentenced to death can be rehabilitated  

From the time he was sentenced, Brian Dorsey’s story was a powerful antidote to despair. It calls on all of us not to give up hope, even for those who commit horrible crimes.   

Brian Dorsey is awaiting execution in Missouri for killing Sarah and Ben Bonnie in 2006. The Bonnies were Dorsey’s cousins who offered to help him at a time when Dorsey had a serious drug problem. 

As The New York Times reports, “The Bonnies invited Mr. Dorsey to spend the night at their home near New Bloomfield, Mo., in the central part of the state. After the couple went to bed that night, the authorities said, Mr. Dorsey took a shotgun and fatally shot each of them. Prosecutors also said that Mr. Dorsey sexually assaulted Ms. Bonnie.” 

Dorsey pled guilty to the murders but has no memory of the sexual assault. Missouri plans to execute him tonight. 

But in a truly unprecedented show of support, 72 current and former corrections officers, including those who personally know Dorsey, asked Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Parson to commute his sentence to life in prison without parole. But to no avail. 

Parson refused to spare Dorsey’s life. A news report in The Independent noted he is a former sheriff who “hasn’t blocked an execution since taking office in 2018.” 

The correctional officers who supported Dorsey were joined by a former Missouri Supreme Court judge, five of the jurors who served at Dorsey’s penalty phase trial, several Republican members of the Missouri legislature, and members of the victims’ family. 

These people all contended that, as the corrections officers put it in their letter to the governor, Dorsey “doesn’t deserve to be executed.” 

The Dorsey case is a reminder that people under a death sentence can be, and sometimes are, rehabilitated, reformed and redeemed. In such cases, the usual arguments for capital punishment run up against the stark reality of a human life transformed after being sentenced to death. 

In such cases, execution serves no purpose. As Supreme Court Justice Byron White argued more than 50 years ago, the Constitution prohibits executing someone when doing so would be “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.” 

The Republican legislators who urged Parson to grant clemency drove that point home.“[G]iven who Mr. Dorsey is today and that he is not a risk if allowed to live out the rest of his life in prison, while giving back to society and providing a service to the state as the staff barber, we strongly believe that a commutation to life without the possibility of parole is now the just result.” 

At times, the Supreme Court and others have questioned whether it makes sense to think of the death penalty as a rehabilitative punishment. In 1980 the court said “(T)he penalty of death differs from all other forms of criminal punishment, not in degree but in kind. … It is unique in its rejection of rehabilitation of the convict as a basic purpose of criminal justice.” 

Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet agrees that rehabilitation is “irrelevant ... in the death penalty debate.” 

But Dorsey is not the only example of how lives can change after a death sentence. In fact, law professor Meghan Ryan argues that “Rehabilitation was one of the primary reasons that capital punishment was imposed in early America.” 

Ryan notes that “death was imposed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to encourage an offender to repent and rehabilitate himself. … Repentance was key because it was thought to be a significant factor in determining the individual's ‘eternal fate after death.’ … And little provoked repentance like the scheduled death of capital punishment. The citizenry considered this practice as having a ‘unique’ ability to ‘facilitate repentance.’”  

Ryan offers several modern examples of rehabilitation on death row. One of them was the case of Paul Crump who was sentenced to death for the brutal murder of a security officer at a Chicago meat packing plant in 1953.  

While he was on death row, Crump “transformed himself — from an ‘animalistic and belligerent’ creature to a compassionate man who developed a deep friendship with the warden who kept him imprisoned. The warden attributed the transformation to…  ‘reduc[ing] the emphasis on punishment, listening to prisoner complaints, providing education and group counseling, and sharing words of love.’ Treating Crump as a human being in this way allowed Crump to discover his conscience and his humanity and positively contribute to prison life.”  

“While on death row Crump began reading and writing, and he authored a novel entitled Burn, Killer, Burn… Some,” Ryan observes, “viewed this as even further evidence that Crump had been rehabilitated. … In other words, Crump had transformed his character.” 

In 1962, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner commuted Crump’s sentence to 199 years in prison without the possibility of parole. Fourteen years later, Gov. Dan Walker removed the parole prohibition and Crump was paroled in 1993. 

Perhaps the most famous example of rehabilitation on death row was the Texas case of Karla Faye Tucker. In 1983, Tucker and her boyfriend broke into the home of their acquaintance, Jerry Dean, and brutally murdered him and the woman who was spending the night with him with a pickaxe. 

She was sentenced to death in 1984. 

As Ryan says, “While in jail awaiting trial, Tucker freed herself from drugs, which had been a lifelong companion, and also accepted responsibility for her crimes and became a born-again Christian. Tucker regularly attended Bible classes and concentrated on improving her education. In one commentator's words, ‘a remarkable change ... had taken place.’” 

However, unlike Crump, Faye’s death row transformation was not enough to convince Texas Gov. George W. Bush to commute her sentence. Tucker was put to death in 1998. 

In a striking recognition of the possibility of change among people sentenced to death, the state of California recently dismantled its death row and committed to offering inmates “opportunities such as employment, rehabilitation programs, and avenues for restitution to victims.” Participation in that program, in itself, will not lead to commutation of those sentences. 

In Dorsey’s case, the Republican legislators who supported clemency argued that “Brian Dorsey… is uniquely deserving of mercy and should not be executed.” They point to his “impeccable record over seventeen years of incarceration, and the overwhelming support for clemency from over 70 correctional officers and the former warden of the prison….” 

They concluded that “Mr. Dorsey is a rehabilitated man.” 

The correctional officers agreed. They told Gov. Parson of Dorsey’s remarkable transformation of death row.   

“Every one of us,” they wrote, “believe that Brian is a good guy, someone who has stayed out of trouble, never gotten himself into any situations, and been respectful of us and of his fellow inmates.” They note that Dorsey “is a barber at Potosi Correctional and cut hair for many of us…. Being a barber is considered a high-level job for an inmate, and he could not have gotten a job as a barber if he had any disciplinary problems.”  

Dorsey, they said, is “housed in No. 5 unit, an ‘honor dorm.’ To be housed there, inmates have to be well behaved. Brian never presented any problems, either inside the institution or outside during recreational time. If all the inmates were like Brian, there would never be a problem in the institution.”  

While they reiterated their support for capital punishment, the correctional officers told Gov. Parson, “(W)e are in agreement that the death penalty is not the appropriate punishment for Brian Dorsey...  We know that he was convicted of murder, but that is not the Brian Dorsey that we know.” 

“Not the Brian Dorsey we know” is a reminder that the person we punish years after the crime has been committed may be substantially different in their character and beliefs than they were when they committed their crime. This is as true in capital cases as it is in less serious offenses.  

Thirty years ago a Washington Post opinion piece observed  that “Because capital punishment eliminates forever the chance that offenders will redeem themselves, it is society's concession to despair and failure.”  

In the end, Brian Dorsey’s execution seems to prove that point.  

But, from the time he was sentenced, Brian Dorsey’s story was a powerful antidote to despair. It calls on all of us not to give up hope, even for those who commit horrible crimes.   

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor Jurisprudence & Political Science at Amherst College.