Missouri executed Ernest Lee Johnson on Tuesday after Governor Mike Parson granted clemency for the intellectually handicapped prisoner. The United States Supreme Court refused a final appeal on Tuesday afternoon.
Johnson was executed in the state prison in Bonne Terre via lethal injection. According to the Missouri Department of Corrections, he died around 6:11 p.m.
Johnson was convicted of first-degree murder for Mary Bratcher, 46, Mable Scruggs, 57, and Fred Jones, 58, during a robbery at a Casey's General Store in Columbia, Missouri, in 1995 when he was 61 years old.
Due to his intellectual handicap, Johnson's lawyers and anti-death penalty activists contended that his execution was unlawful and that his sentence should be commuted to life in prison. In Atkins v. Virginia, the US Supreme Court declared in 2002 that the use of the death sentence against people with intellectual disabilities (then known as mental retardation) violated the Eighth Amendment's restriction on cruel and unusual punishment.
As the execution date approached, Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty staged rallies across the state. Ernest Johnson has an intellectual disability, according to Elyse Max, the organization's executive director. "He is a wonderful person. He is a mentor to many individuals and a devout Christian... There is no logical basis for this, and there is no threat to public safety. He isn't a danger to anyone's safety in the future. It doesn't work as a deterrence. Taking someone's life in the sake of public safety is immoral."
Given that he still has part of a benign tumor in his brain, Johnson's lawyers claim that the medication employed by Missouri in its execution protocol could cause him to have painful and violent convulsions. To cure the problem, he had nearly 20% of his brain removed in surgery in 2008.
"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," Parsons, a Republican, said in a news release from the governor's office. Last month, the state's high court refused to postpone Johnson's execution, declaring that he was not intellectually impaired, in part because he plotted the murders.
Johnson's death sentence was reversed in 1995 after his attorneys failed to testify about his complex background and drug addiction. His second conviction was changed due to a US Supreme Court rule in 2002 prohibiting the execution of mentally disabled people.
According to his supporters, Johnson had suffered developmental problems since infancy, when he was born with fetal alcohol spectrum disease to a mother who struggled with addiction and drank heavily during her pregnancy. Since the age of 8, Johnson has regularly scored in the intellectually challenged range on standardized tests, rated as reading at a third-grade level.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Missouri's high court relied on "the opinion of a prosecution expert who was never called to testify and whose test results contradicted key opinions expressed in his own expert report." The court also dismissed defense evidence of Johnson's functional impairments, claiming absurdly that "Johnson failed to prove a causal connection between his [impairments in day-to-day function] and his alleged intellectual impairment."
Pope Francis and two Democratic members of the Missouri congressional delegation called for Johnson's sentence to be commuted in the days coming up to his execution. Governor Parson was petitioned by US Representatives Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver II to stop the execution. "The truth is that these death sentences aren't based on justice. They're about who has and doesn't have institutional power," they wrote. "Like slavery and lynching before it, the death penalty in Black and brown communities perpetuates cycles of trauma, violence, and state-sanctioned murder."
Former Missouri Supreme Court Justice Michael Wolff, who voted with the majority of the court to deny Johnson's appeal 13 years ago, and former Missouri Governor Bob Holden, a Democrat who presided over 20 executions while in office, have both urged Parson to award Johnson clemency.
"When the state, our state, does kill this man, as it almost certainly will, it will be yet another indictment of a system so bloodthirsty that it delights in vengeance against those who don't even know why they're being punished," the editorial board of the KansasCity Star said.
Although blacks and Latinos are disproportionately sentenced to death in the United States, Missouri's death row today has six blacks and 14 whites. The death sentence is disproportionately applied to laborers and the poor, many of whom have a poor legal case like Johnson.
The state-sponsored killing machine has not been put on hold in conformity with the ruling elite's murderous herd immunity policy in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the beginning of the epidemic in January 2020, 19 death row inmates have been executed, including 10 in states that still use capital punishment (Texas, Missouri, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia) and nine by the federal government. Before Trump departed office, the Trump administration and its fascist attorney general, Bill Barr, pushed through nine federal executions, overturning a two-decade halt on government executions.
Eight executions are planned for the rest of 2021, including four in Texas, one in Alabama, and three in Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is trying to recommence executions after a string of executions went catastrophically wrong, leaving the condemned writhing on the execution gurney due to untested lethal injection techniques designed when the deadly chemicals previously used were in short supply.
