At 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, Dennis J. Skillicorn is to be executed for his role in the murder of Richard Drummond, a businessman who had offered help to Mr. Skillicorn and two others when he saw their car broken down on the side of a road one night in August 1994....[W]hile he participated in robbing Mr. Drummond and was convicted of murder, another man (now also awaiting execution) was the one who fired the gun that killed Mr. Drummond....“He is not the one who actually killed the person, and that just says to me: ‘Whoa! Let’s take a step back,’ ” said State Representative Steven Tilley, the Republican leader [of the Missouri House of Representatives]. “Look, I’m not soft on crime, but we can’t redo this once we’ve executed this person"....[Mr. Skillicorn] said he was sorry for his drug-addled behavior of years past, but that he considered his death sentence arbitrary in a way, and said that he was not the worst of the worst. “I was there,” he said, “But in my case, I didn’t kill anybody."
Some might be surprised that this situation – the non-triggerman receiving a death sentence even though he didn't kill the victim directly – is permissible. This is true even though in many cases the non-triggerman's culpability is limited.
In fact, it's not at all unusual for the less culpable party to murder to receive a harsher sentence (though in Skillicorn's case both he and the triggerman received death). The factor that often most influences a defendant's relative punishment for a multiple-perp murder is not the relative culpability or individual characteristics of the defendant, but whether that defendant cooperates with prosecutors and testifies for the state.
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