Mose Young was executed by the State of Missouri for a triple murder
According to court documents Mose Young would rob a pawn store and in the process would shoot and kill three employees: Kent Bicknese, 22, James Schneider, 33, and Sol Marks, 80
Mose Young would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Mose Young would be executed by lethal injection on April 25 2001
Mose Young Photos
Mose Young FAQ
When Was Mose Young Executed
Mose Young was executed on April 25 2001
Mose Young Case
A federal appeals court on Tuesday granted a stay of execution for convicted killer Mose Young just hours before he was scheduled to die by injection. The U.S. Supreme Court refused the state’s request to vacate the stay early Wednesday morning, postponing the execution indefinitely.
Young, on death row since 1984, had been scheduled to die at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday for killing three men inside a St. Louis pawn shop 17 years ago. After waking up alive Wednesday, Young told The Associated Press from the Potosi Correctional Center, “It’s a beautiful morning.” “I didn’t shed no tears. I didn’t cry because I know it’s never over with.” he said. “That was God’s will to have this one day, and it’s going to be God’s will to have whatever more days are remaining in my life.” The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled about six hours before the scheduled execution that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Dee Joyce-Hayes violated Young’s right to due process by interfering with a witness. The court ordered U.S. District Judge Jean Hamilton of St. Louis to reconsider Young’s appeal. Hamilton had rejected it Monday. Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon’s office said Nixon would appeal the stay so the state could move forward with the execution as early as Thursday morning. Young’s attorney, Joseph Margulies, argued that the witness, an attorney now working for Joyce-Hayes named Jane Geiler, wanted to offer information that could help Young receive clemency from Gov. Mel Carnahan. They alleged that Joyce-Hayes threatened to fire Geiler if she did so. “The Constitution of the United States does not require that a state have a clemency procedure, but, in our view, it does require that, if such a procedure is created, the state’s own officials refrain from frustrating it by threatening the job of a witness,” the court ruling said. “Indeed, there is reason to think that what the circuit attorney did here amounts to the crime of tampering with a witness,” the appeals panel wrote. “Such conduct on the part of a state official is fundamentally unfair.” Joyce-Hayes has denied threatening to fire Geiler. “I never threatened to fire her, and some of the things Mr. Margulies alleges she and I discussed were in fact never discussed by us,” Joyce-Hayes said Tuesday night. “It was never my intention to interfere with Mose Young’s due process of law.”
The state immediately appealed, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to set aside the ruling. The court had made no ruling by late Tuesday. A spokesman for Carnahan said the governor would not decide on clemency until after all appeals were exhausted. Margulies claimed that in Young’s 1984 trial the jury was racially stacked against him and his lawyer was ill-prepared. “My reaction was relief,” Margulies said in a telephone interview Wednesday from Minneapolis. “We are pleased and relieved the court saw the case the way we saw it.” Margulies said prosecutors moved to strike nine prospective jurors only because they were black. Eventually, the jury consisted of eight whites and four blacks. Young is black; all three victims were white.
Young told the AP in an interview Tuesday that he first met his attorney, Jack Walsh, four days before the trial began. Walsh warned the court that he hadn’t had time to prepare. Margulies also claimed that Geiler, an associate of Walsh’s at the time of the 1984 trial, would have been willing to describe how poorly Young was represented if not for the threat from Joyce-Hayes. Young spent Tuesday visiting with two nuns and talking on the phone with lawyers and well-wishers, hoping and praying the courts or Carnahan would halt the execution. “I believe in God — I’m holding up strong,” Young said. “I ain’t bitter.” The nuns were from a convent in Savannah, Mo. Young said they began corresponding with him about five years ago. Young, on death row longer than all but three of the 80 inmates awaiting execution at Potosi, maintained “from day one” that a man named “Mickey,” and not he, walked into Lee’s Pawn Shop on Feb. 8, 1983, and began firing. Killed were James Schneider, 33, a co-owner of the shop; Sol Marks, 80, who worked there part-time and was the grandfather of another partner; and Kent Bicknese, 22, a billboard salesman who had stopped by to lease space outside the store for a sign.
Authorities said the evidence was overwhelming against Young, a convicted drug felon who was suspected of several unsolved murders in a rough area of north St. Louis. “Mose Young is a brutal triple murderer who committed three heinous crimes and is an example of why juries in Missouri need to have the option of the death penalty,” Attorney General Jay Nixon said.
Young said that he had argued with the pawn shop proprietors over a gold-plated stickpin he had tried to pawn. Young wanted $1,800 for the pin, and planned to spend the money to buy his girlfriend a used Cadillac. The pawn shop owners thought it was worthless. Young left, then returned with a rifle, according to Ronnell Bennett, also a partner in the pawn shop. Bennett said he was the intended target, but the bullet struck Bicknese, who was taking the semester off from his aerospace engineering studies at the University of Missouri-Rolla to work for his brother’s billboard company. Bennett escaped to a basement and hid in a vault until police arrived. Police and Bennett found the three men shot to death.
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