Q: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Attorneys for a condemned Missouri man and several former judges on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt his upcoming execution, saying a mistake by his former attorneys cost him the chance to appeal his case through the federal courts. 
  
 In this April 21, 2014 photo provided by the Missouri Department of Corrections is Mark Christeson who is scheduled to die by injection for killing a south-central Missouri mother and her two children... (Associated Press) 
  
 Mark Christeson is scheduled to die at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday for the killing a southern Missouri woman and her two children in 1998. He would be the ninth person put to death in Missouri this year. 
  
 Christeson's attorneys and 15 former judges filed a brief Friday with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals claiming Christeson was denied federal court review because the court-appointed attorneys who took over his case after the trial missed the deadline to file a federal appeals petition by four months. 
  
 The 8th Circuit refused the request, prompting the appeal to the Supreme Court. 
  
 Sarah Turberville, an attorney for The Constitution Project, a Washington-based organization working with the former judges, said it is rare for anyone to face execution without having appealed the case in federal court. 
  
 She said Christeson's court-appointed attorneys, who took over his case in July 2004, had until April 2005 to file the petition seeking federal court review. The petition was filed 117 days late, and a U.S. District Court in Missouri refused to hear the case, Turberville said. 
  
 "Not having federal court review means there's been no independent examination regarding the fairness of the trial and the appropriateness of the death sentence," Turberville said. "No federal court has been able to address these issues at all." 
  
 The judges behind the friend-of-the-court brief are former state appellate and federal judges who had no role in the case, Turberville said. 
  
 Several Missouri religious leaders have asked Gov. Jay Nixon to grant clemency and stop the execution, citing concerns about the missed deadline and that Christeson isn't mentally competent to be executed. Scott Holste, a spokesman for Nixon, said the governor is still reviewing the case. 
  
 Nanci Gonder, a spokeswoman for Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, declined to comment. 
  
 In 1998, Christeson was 18 years old and his cousin Jessie Carter was 17, and they were living with a relative about a half-mile from where Susan Brouk lived with her 12-year-old daughter, Adrian, and 9-year-old son Kyle. 
  
 On Feb. 1, the cousins broke into the Brouk home and used shoelaces to tie up the kids. Christeson raped Brouk in a bedroom. When they went back into the living room, Adrian said Carter's name. 
  
 Knowing they were identified, Christeson said, "We've got to get rid of 'em." 
  
 The cousins took the family to a nearby pond. Brouk and Kyle were stabbed and thrown into the pond to drown. Adrian suffocated when Christeson pressed on her throat while Carter held her. 
  
 Christeson and Carter were captured Feb. 9 in California. Both were convicted of three counts of first-degree murder. Carter was sentenced to life in prison without parole. ||||| Fifteen former federal and state judges have called for a stay of execution for Mark Christeson, a Missouri death row inmate who is set to be executed on Wednesday, arguing that the prisoner has in effect been abandoned by his own court-appointed lawyers. 
  
 Christeson, 35, will be judicially killed by lethal injection at 12.01am on Wednesday, barring a last-minute stay of execution. He is the only death row inmate in Missouri to have been denied a habeas review of his case – a crucial stage in the legal process that allows a prisoner to challenge his death sentence in the federal courts. 
  
 The legal record shows that the two public defense lawyers who have represented Christeson at the federal review stage missed a key deadline to file his petition. As a result, the prisoner was told he was not entitled to have his case looked at again because his request had been made in an “untimely” manner – thus destroying his last major hope of having his sentence overturned before execution. 
  
 The spotlight is now falling on his two Missouri-based lawyers, Eric Butts from St Louis and Philip Horwitz from Chesterfield. Not only did they file the petition 117 days late, they only met the prisoner for the first time more than a month after the April 2005 deadline had passed. 
  
 In a brief filed with the US eighth circuit appeals court, the judges, who come from 10 different states including Missouri, accuse Butts and Horwitz of “apparent abandonment and misconduct”. They say the lawyers were “clearly not up to the task before them” and compounded their mistake by refusing to withdraw as Christeson’s attorneys. 
  
 “Counsel appear never to have entertained the possibility that by confessing their malpractice, they might have aided their client’s case,” the judges argue. As a result, the judges go on, the two lawyers, who remain Christeson’s official legal representatives to this day, have put themselves in a conflict of interest whereby they cannot argue that the prisoner should be given a new federal review because to do so would implicitly involve an admission of their own misconduct. 
  
 The judges are scathing about the decision, upheld by several courts, to refuse to grant Christeson a habeas review, despite evidence that his legal representation was seriously flawed. “Cases, including this one,” the judges write, “are falling through the cracks of the system. And when the stakes are this high, such failures unacceptably threaten the very legitimacy of the judicial process.” 
  
 In a separate report lodged with the federal district court for the western district of Missouri in June, Lawrence Fox, who teaches legal ethics at Yale law school, goes even further. He studied the case and concluded that “the conduct of Messrs Butts and Horwitz fell far beneath the bare minimum standard of care, let alone the standard applicable in a capital case; that they not only committed malpractice and breached multiple fiduciary duties, but also appear to have abandoned their client long before they did anything meaningful pursuant to their appointment by this court”. Fox adds that the duo should have withdrawn from representing Christeson “years ago to avoid perpetuating an unwaivable conflict of interest”. 
  
 The claim of conflict of interest has been raised by two outside lawyers who became involved in the Christeson case earlier this year, paradoxically at the invitation of Butts and Horwitz. When the outside attorneys, Joseph Perkovich from New York and Jennifer Merrigan from Pennsylvania, began looking into the case, they quickly became alarmed by what they found. 
  
 “We saw from the record that Christeson’s appointed lawyers didn’t meet him until six weeks after the [habeas] deadline had passed. There was no sign of any legal activity indicating that anything was going on up to and beyond the deadline,” said Perkovich, a capital punishment specialist who jointly leads a death penalty clinic at Saint Louis University law school. 
  
 Perkovich added that he and Merrigan had asked Butts and Horwitz repeatedly to hand over their files on the case. But even now, hours before the scheduled execution, the lawyers have shown nothing. 
  
 Christeson was put on death row for the January 1998 murders of Susan Brouk, 36, her daughter, Adrian, 12, and her son, Kyle, 9. He was 18 at the time of the crimes. His cousin Jessie Carter, then 17, was also implicated in the murders but was spared the death sentence after he agreed to give evidence for the prosecution against his relative. 
  
 The Guardian asked Butts and Horwitz to respond to the allegation that they abandoned their client and put themselves in a position of conflict of interest by refusing to withdraw from the case in which their own conduct had become a key issue. Butts did not immediately reply but Horwitz told the Guardian that “we were the ones who asked the outside attorneys to come in and take over the case, but the courts have denied that. The district court and eighth circuit appeals court are aware of all the facts and of our position in this case, and have decided not to allow the other attorneys to come in.” 
  
 Horwitz said he could not comment on any specific allegations about his or Butts’ conduct as “this is still in litigation”. In court submissions, the two lawyers have made no attempt to defend their late filing of the habeas petition, but have claimed that there was a difference of opinion about the date on which the deadline fell. “While counsel does not defend the late filing, counsel believes they had a legal basis and rationale for the calculation of the filing date. Counsel believed that they timely filed Mr Christeson’s petition for writ of habeas corpus.” 
  
 Perkovich and Merrigan on Monday made a last-ditch appeal to the US supreme court asking for a stay of execution on grounds that Christeson had suffered abandonment by his own court-appointed lawyers. Perkovich said that were the supreme court to agree that the prisoner was entitled to a proper federal review of the case even at this late hour that would allow the prisoner’s “unspeakable” personal history to be properly considered. “His brutal story of victimization and mental illness has never been meaningfully presented to any court and it would have made strong grounds to mitigate his death sentence.” 
  
 He added that “the tragedy is that the dismissal of the federal review occurred seven years ago and all this could have been avoided if the appointed lawyers who failed Mr Christeson had turned the case over. He has been denied his federal day in court.” |||||
A:
Mark Christeson is scheduled to die in Missouri at a minute after midnight tomorrow, but no fewer than 15 former state and federal judges are seeking a stay of execution on the basis that his lawyers were terrible. The two court-appointed public defenders who represent Christeson were 117 days late in filing a federal appeals petition, leaving him as the only death row inmate in Missouri who hasn't had a chance to challenge his sentence in federal court, reports the Guardian. In a brief filed with a federal appeals court, the ex-judges accused the lawyers of "apparent abandonment and misconduct," noting that the lawyers can't now seek a federal review without confessing their own misconduct. The appeals court declined to review the case and an appeal has now been made to the US Supreme Court. Religious leaders in Missouri are also seeking a stay of execution for the 35-year-old, who was sentenced to death for the 1998 murders of a Missouri woman and her two children. A spokeswoman for the Constitution Project organization tells the AP that it's highly unusual for anybody to be executed without having an appeal heard in federal court. "Not having federal court review means there's been no independent examination regarding the fairness of the trial and the appropriateness of the death sentence," she says. "No federal court has been able to address these issues at all." (This man died just 20 months after he was freed from prison, where he served 23 years for a crime he didn't commit.)