Abnormal brain and child abuse make a 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 affects his judgment, according to a clemency petition filed on his behalf .

Christopher Collings, 49, is scheduled to die Tuesday evening at the state prison in Bonne Terre from a pentobarbital injection. It would be the 23rd execution in the U.S. this year and the fourth in Missouri.

Collings was convicted of killing 9-year-old Rowan Ford, a fourth-grader from the small southwest Missouri town of Stella, on Nov. 3, 2007. Six days later her body was found in a hole in the ground. She had been strangled. Collings confessed to the crimes.

Republican Gov. Mike Parson was still considering the clemency request Monday, but history is not on Collings’ side: Parson, a former county sheriff, oversaw 12 executions and never granted a clemency request.

Collings’ attorney, Jeremy Weis, said another appeal is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, but various courts have rejected several of his previous appeals.

The clemency petition states that the abnormality in Collings’ brain causes him to suffer from “functional deficits in consciousness, judgment and deliberation, behavior, appropriate social inhibition and emotional regulation.” It also states that he suffered frequent and often violent abuse as a child.

“The result was a damaged human being with no guidance on how to grow into a functioning adult,” the petition states.

The petition also questions the fairness of Collings’ execution since another man accused of the crime, Rowan’s stepfather David Spears, also confessed but was allowed to plead to lesser crimes. Spears served more than seven years in prison before his release in 2015.

According to court documents, Collings told authorities that he had been drinking heavily and smoking marijuana with Spears and another man in the hours before the attack on Rowan. Collings said he picked up the sleeping child from his home and took him to the mobile home where he lived, where he attacked him. He said he strangled the child with a rope when he realized she recognized him.

Collings told investigators that he took the girl’s body to a hole in the ground. He burned the rope used in the attack, as well as the clothes he was wearing and his bloodstained mattress, prosecutors said.

According to court documents and the clemency petition, Spears was also implicated in the crimes. A transcript of Spears’ statement to police, cited in the petition, says he told police that Collings gave him a string and killed Rowan.

“I’m suffocating 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 hole in the ground where her body was found.

No phone record could be found for Spears.

Both the clemency petition and the Supreme Court appeal call into question the reliability of the key law enforcement witness in Collings’ trial, a police chief from a neighboring town who was convicted four times of unauthorized absence from work while serving in the military. Weis claims that Collings’ due process rights were violated by his failure to disclose details about his criminal history at trial.

“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 9th, David Hosier on June 11th and Marcellus Williams on September 24th. Only Alabama, with six, and Texas, with five, have carried out more executions in 2024 than Missouri.