Missouri Gov. Mike Parson confirmed the state on Tuesday will execute Ernest Lee Johnson for killing three people in 1994, amid calls for him to grant Johnson clemency.
“The state is prepared to deliver justice and carry out the lawful sentence Mr. Johnson received in accordance with the Missouri Supreme Court’s order,” Parson said in a statement Monday afternoon, effectively denying Johnson clemency.
Johnson, 61, is set to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
In 1995, Johnson was convicted of first-degree murder for killing Mary Bratcher, 46, Mable Scruggs, 57, and Fred Jones, 58, during a closing-time robbery at a Casey’s General Store in Columbia.
Johnson’s lawyers and anti-death penalty advocates say his execution would be illegal because he is intellectually disabled and because the drug Missouri uses to kill prisoners could cause him painful and violent seizures, given that he still has part of a benign tumor in his brain.
The Eighth Amendment — forbidding cruel and unusual punishment — prohibits executing intellectually disabled people.
Missouri’s Democratic members of Congress, Pope Francis and former Missouri Gov. Bob Holden — a Democrat who supports capital punishment and said 20 men were executed while he was governor — were among those who urged Parson to spare Johnson’s life.
“Nothing excuses what Johnson did,” Holden wrote in the Missouri Independent. “But if our state is to be guided by the rule of law, we must temper our understandable anger with reason and compassion for the most vulnerable among us, including Ernest Johnson.”
In a news release, Parson’s office described the murders as “brutal.” His office noted that three juries have sentenced Johnson to die.
Johnson’s initial death sentence was overturned because his lawyers did not offer testimony about his traumatic upbringing and his drug addiction. The second one was overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court determined it is unconstitutional to execute a person with a mental disability. In 2006, another jury, which was seated in Pettis County and was all white, recommended for a third time that Johnson, who is Black, die for his crimes.
Last month, the Missouri Supreme Court refused to halt the execution, ruling that Johnson is not intellectually disabled in part because he planned the murders in advance. His attorneys have said its decision was filled with factual errors and asked for a rehearing, which the state’s highest court denied.
Johnson’s attorneys, who say he has an IQ that in various tests has ranged from 67 to 77, on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution.
“This is not a close case — Mr. Johnson is intellectually disabled,” they wrote in their court filing.
More than 1,530 people have been executed in the U.S. since it reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Johnson would be the 91st person executed since then in Missouri.
The planned execution comes as the practice has slowed across the country.
Missouri would be just the second state, after Texas, to carry out an execution in 2021, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. It was one of five states to execute a prisoner in 2020 and one of only 11 in the past five years.
There are 20 people sentenced to die in Missouri, most of whom are at the end or near the end of their appeals. It means there could be five executions next year, according to organizers with Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
, Luke Nozicka, October 4, 2021
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
