ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Gov. Mel Carnahan is being asked by the Vatican to spare the life of another condemned prisoner, six weeks after he commuted the death sentence of a convicted killer following a plea from the pope.
Roy Roberts, 46, is scheduled to die by injection at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday at the Potosi Correctional Center for killing prison guard Tom Jackson during a 1983 riot. A spokesman for the governor said Carnahan is considering Roberts' clemency request.Carnahan last month refused to halt the execution of convicted killer James Rodden, who became the first Missouri inmate to be put to death since Pope John Paul II's January visit to St. Louis. Immediately following that visit, the governor reduced Darrell Mease's sentence to life in prison.
Roberts said in a phone interview Monday that he was scuffling with another guard during the riot and was nowhere near where Jackson was killed.
"I never saw Mr. Jackson," he said. "I didn't even know nobody had been killed until the next day."
Other guards say Roberts held the guard while two fellow inmates stabbed the 62-year-old Jackson to death.
Defense attorneys questioned why eyewitnesses -- two guards and an inmate -- didn't name Roberts in initial reports. They also asked why Roberts had no blood on him after the slaying and say he passed a lie detector test denying involvement in the murder.
Religious leaders are asking Carnahan to intervene.
In a letter to Carnahan on Saturday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson wrote that without clemency, Missouri faces "the troubling prospect of taking the life of a man for a crime he may not have committed."