to set a new execution date. Around January 4, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered the state of Missouri to execute Mercer two days later, at midnight on January 6. Even after having this execution date scheduled, Mercer continued to file legal motions in an attempt to delay his execution; meanwhile, a spokeswoman for then-Missouri Attorney General William L. Webster said, "We'll oppose any attempts to get a stay of execution." Then-governor of Missouri John Ashcroft also indicated that if he received a formal request to delay Mercer's execution, he would reject it. Mercer was the first inmate on Missouri's death row to exhaust his appeals, but he was not the first to ever have a concrete execution date set in the post-Gregg v. Georgia era of executions. Gerald Smith, another Missouri death row inmate who waived his appeals, had three execution dates set prior to Mercer's being set in October. He received an indefinite postponement from a December 20, 1988, execution date when he indicated that he wanted to resume his appeals. On January 18, 1990, Smith would become the second person executed in Missouri after the resumption of executions in the United States. Execution Mercer was executed by lethal injection just after midnight on January 6, 1989, in the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. His wife Christie was an official witness to the execution; Mercer was allowed to invite witnesses to his execution, so he selected Christie and a friend from a motorcycle gang. The majority of the witnesses were media representatives and prison officials. Prison officials requested 19 people to watch the execution, but only 12 of them showed up. Warden Bill M. Armontrout claimed that Mercer thanked him before he died, shook his hand, and said, "Look out for my shipmates down here." The lethal injection began at 12:03 a.m., and witnesses claimed that Mercer coughed three or four times while straining against the straps on the gurney before he lost consciousness at 12:05 a.m.; an attending physician pronounced Mercer dead at 12:09 a.m. The execution took place in Missouri's former gas chamber, which had been converted to accommodate a lethal injection gurney. Prior to Mercer's execution, the most recent execution in Missouri had taken place on February 26, 1965, when Lloyd Leo Anderson died by gas inhalation for the murder of a delivery boy during the robbery of a St. Louis drugstore. Mercer was the