“I am holding tightly to my faith. It’s all I have left to take with me. I am sorry it had to come to this in this way. I wish I could have made things right while I was still here,” Michael Tisius wrote in his last statement before the state of Missouri killed him earlier this month.
Tisius was just 19 when he shot and killed two county jail guards, Leon Egley, and Jason Acton, in 2000, in a botched attempt to help his friend, Roy Vance, escape from the Randolph County Jail. CBS News reported that Tisius’ lawyers released a video before the execution in which Vance admitted to planning the escape attempt and “manipulated Tisius into participating.”
Vance and his girlfriend, Tracie Bulington, who participated in the attempted escape, are serving life sentences.
His supporters included six of his jurors who supported commuting his sentence to life without parole, Pope Francis, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the European Union, and the American Bar Association, which passed a resolution in 2018 calling on death penalty states to rule out sentencing or executing any individuals who were 21 years or younger when they committed the crime.
The international pleas for clemency went unheeded by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who declares on the state’s website that he “has a passion for Christ.”
This was Missouri’s third execution this year. The state plans to kill Johnny A. Johnson on August 1.
