Originally published on Oct. 26, 1993

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by death-row inmate Martsay Bolder late Tuesday, clearing the way for Bolder to be given a lethal injection early today.

Bolder, 35, was scheduled to be executed at 12:01 a.m. today at the Potosi Correctional Center, about 60 miles south of St. Louis. The only thing that stood between Bolder and the death sentence Tuesday night was last-minute action by Gov. Mel Carnahan. Bolder's execution would be the eighth since the state resumed executions in 1989 and the first in the 2-week-old administration of Carnahan and his newly named prisons chief, Dora Schriro.

Carnahan, who supports capital punishment, said Monday that he was reviewing Bolder's case.

"This is not one of those experiences you like, but it goes with the territory," he said.

Bolder was to be executed for the fatal stabbing in 1979 of a fellow inmate at the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, where Bolder already was serving a life term for another murder.

Tuesday afternoon, a three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals at St. Louis voted, 3-1, to reject Bolder's last minute appeal. The full appeals court then voted, 7-4, against giving Bolder a new hearing.

Bolder's lawyers had submitted an affidavit by another inmate claiming that the victim died as a result of poor medical care he got following the stabbing. But the appeals court panel said that even if malpractice was shown, there was "no reasonable probability that the result of the trial would have been different."

The panel cited Monday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Texas case, which said that innocence alone "is not itself a constitutional claim." It also cited a concurring opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that last-minute affidavits "are to be treated with a fair degree of skepticism."

Tuesday, Senior Judge Donald Lay of the appeals court dissented, saying a jury might not have given Bolder the death penalty if it had been shown that a faulty surgical procedure was responsible for the death.

Bolder is from a family of 10 children; he grew up in a housing project in Kansas City. He has an eighth-grade education but reads at a fourth-grade level.

Bolder has been imprisoned since he was 17. In 1973, he killed Louis Donovan, 69, a retired ambulance driver during a robbery attempt at Donovan's home in Kansas City. Bolder was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

On March 14, 1979, when Bolder was 21, he stabbed Theron King, 24, an inmate who was Bolder's former cellmate and with whom he had been feuding. King was hospitalized and died six weeks later from an infection.

A jury in Randolph County Circuit Court recommended the death sentence for Bolder, and Judge Samuel E. Semple concurred. He wrote: "In view of the evidence of a brutal and vicious assault by the defendant on an unarmed, defenseless fellow prisoner, the death sentence imposed appears to be appropriate."

Bolder's appeals were denied by Missouri courts. In 1989 he filed his first of three appeals in federal court.

U.S. District Judge Scott O. Wright of Kansas City overturned Bolder's death sentence in 1990. He said that during the penalty phase of the trial Bolder's attorney had failed to call witnesses who would have testified about Bolder's troubled childhood. Wright also said the jury should have been asked to consider Bolder's youth when recommending a sentence.

The same 8th Circuit panel that acted Tuesday reinstated the death sentence, saying Bolder's contentions should have been raised earlier. The full court deadlocked, 5-5, on rehearing the appeal. That meant the panel's decision stood.

A second federal motion claiming that Bolder's lawyers had been ineffective was rejected in December and denied by the Supreme Court on Tuesday. A third federal appeal, his new-evidence claim, was filed Friday.

The last Missouri inmate to be executed was Ricky Lee Grubbs, who died by lethal injection in October.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.