It was two days before Christmas in 2006 and 34-year-old Brian Dorsey was in trouble: Two drug dealers were at his apartment, demanding money.

Despite repeatedly seeking addiction treatment, Dorsey had been drinking daily for years and routinely binged crack cocaine, a drug that caused him to experience psychosis and left him feeling deeply ashamed.

And now he was in a position where he had to call several family members and ask them for cash. They declined but went to Dorseys apartment and convinced the drug dealers to leave. Dorseys cousin, Sarah Bonnie, and her husband, Ben Bonnie, invited Dorsey to spend the night at their place. He took them up on the offer, and spent the evening drinking and playing pool with his relatives.

The next morning, Sarah Bonnies parents found her and Ben Bonnie dead in their bedroom. Their 4-year-old daughter sat on the couch in the living room. Dorsey turned himself into the police two days later. Following the advice of his appointed counsel, he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder without securing any deal from prosecutors to take the death penalty off the table. After a two-day sentencing trial, a jury sentenced him to death. On April 9, the state of Missouri plans to execute Dorsey, using a lethal injection of pentobarbital.

Like most people on death row, Dorsey couldnt afford to hire a lawyer for the resource-intensive work of a death penalty trial. Instead, the Missouri State Public Defenders Office, which has faced chronic underfunding , contracted with two private attorneys, Christopher Slusher and Scott McBride. They were each paid a flat fee of $12,000 to represent Dorsey. Between 1998 and 2004, defense lawyers for people facing the death penalty spent an average of 3,557 hours per trial, according to a 2010 report . If Dorseys lawyers had put in that much time on his case, they would have been paid about $3 per hour.

Had counsel investigated and completed an expert evaluation of their client, they would have learned that Mr. Dorsey was not guilty of first-degree murder, as he was neurologically incapable of deliberation, Dorseys current lawyers wrote in a petition for writ of habeas corpus , asking the state supreme court to either overturn his death sentence or order evidentiary development on his claim.

Yet, Brian Dorsey was sentenced to death because counsel was laboring under a financial conflict-of-interest, and pressuring Mr. Dorsey to plead guilty to a crime he could not have committed was a sound financial strategy for counsel, the petition continued.

Former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Michael Wolff, one of the judges who upheld Dorseys death sentence during his direct appeal, described it as a rare case where those of us who sit in judgment of a man convicted of capital murder got it wrong.

At the time, none of us on the Court were aware of how compromised and ineffective his trial lawyers were, Wolff wrote in a letter to Gov. Mike Parson (R), urging him to grant Dorsey clemency.

In a separate letter to the governor recommending clemency, Missouri Public Defender director Mary Fox noted that her office no longer uses flat fees in death penalty cases because it incentivizes spending a minimal amount of time on a case. The American Bar Associations guidelines describe the use of flat fees as improper in death penalty cases.

Slusher declined to comment. McBride did not respond to a request for comment.