Supreme Court won't halt the execution of Missouri man missing part of his brain

Cecil Clayton's brain scan.

Late Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied a stay of execution to Cecil Clayton, a 74-year-old Missouri man convicted of the 1996 killing of a sheriff's deputy.

Part of Clayton's brain was removed following a sawmill accident in 1972, and his attorneys say because of that he is intellectually disabled and suffers from mental illness. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen G. Breyer would have granted the stay of execution in the request related to ongoing litigation over the state of Missouri's lethal injection process.

UPDATE: Clayton was executed at 9:13 p.m. and pronounced dead at 9:21 p.m., according to the Missouri Department of Corrections.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.