[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website] on Tuesday halted [text, PDF] the execution of Mark Christeson, a Missouri man convicted of killing a woman and her two children, pending the determination of whether the 35-year-old received effective legal counsel. Christeson’s attorneys, along with 15 former judges, on Monday asked [JURIST report] the Supreme Court to block his execution, claiming that mistakes were made by his former attorneys, which led him to lose his opportunity to appeal his case to the federal courts. Christeson was scheduled to be executed by injection at 12:01 AM Wednesday for the three murders in 1998. Prior to appealing to the Supreme Court, Christeson’s attorneys and the former judges filed an amicus brief with US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit [official website], claiming that he was unable to appeal his case to the federal courts because his former attorneys missed a deadline by four months in 2005. The appellate court refused to stay the execution and rejected his appeals. However, the Supreme Court halted the execution late Tuesday evening based on concerns of ineffective assistance of counsel, after ordering [text, PDF] supplemental briefs be submitted by his attorneys. The court denied [text, PDF] Christeson’s second appeal against the planned execution drug.

Use of the death penalty [JURIST backgrounder] has been a controversial issue throughout the US. Earlier this month the brother of Clayton Lockett, whose prolonged execution last April caused Oklahoma to suspend its death penalty to review procedures, filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] against the state of Oklahoma. The lawsuit contends that the execution [JURIST report], which lasted nearly 45 minutes, was a violation of Lockett’s Eighth Amendment rights. In July a judge for the US District Court for the Central District of California struck down [JURIST report] California’s death penalty, finding that it violated the Eighth Amendment. In April the Supreme Court of Oklahoma ruled [JURIST report] that inmates’ constitutional rights were not violated by keeping the sources of lethal injection drugs secret. Earlier that month a judge for the US District Court for the Western District of Missouri allowed the continuation [JURIST report] of a lawsuit challenging a bill that would conceal the identities of individuals involved in the administration of the death penalty.