‘Like slavery and lynching:’ Cleaver, Bush urge Parson not to execute Ernest Johnson
Missouri’s Democratic members of Congress called on Gov. Mike Parson to prevent the execution of Ernest Lee Johnson, a last ditch effort to prevent the state from killing its second prisoner in two years.
In a letter sent to Parson’s office Friday, U.S. Reps. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City and Cori Bush of St. Louis compared the death penalty to slavery and lynching while calling on Parson to commute Johnson’s sentence.
“The fact of the matter is that these death sentences are not about justice,” Cleaver and Bush wrote. “They are about who has institutional power and who doesn’t. Like slavery and lynching did before it, the death penalty perpetuates cycles of trauma, violence and state-sanctioned murder in Black and brown communities.”
Johnson’s 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 someone in 2020 and one of only 11 in the past five years.
Parson has remained silent about the execution in the face of written appeals and rallies. His office did not respond to a request for comment.
Johnson, 61, is set to die by lethal injection Tuesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
In 1995, Johnson was convicted of first-degree murder for killing three people the year before during a closing-time robbery at a Casey’s General Store in Columbia: store manager Mary Bratcher, 46; Mable Scruggs, 57; and trainee Fred Jones, 58.
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.
Cleaver and Bush reiterated that argument in their letter, saying that executing Johnson would be a “grave act of injustice.” They also said Johnson may have seizures from the chemical the state will use to kill him, called pentobarbital, causing a painful death.
During a rally Wednesday in the Missouri Capitol’s rotunda in Jefferson City, several dozen people and the leaders of groups including the ACLU of Missouri and the state chapter of the NAACP called for Parson — a Christian, some noted — to spare Johnson’s life.
On Friday, calls for Parson to stop the execution grew.
In a commentary in the Missouri Independent, former Missouri Gov. Bob Holden — a Democratic who supports capital punishment and noted that 20 men were executed while he was governor — urged Parson to use his clemency power in Johnson’s case.
“Nothing excuses what Johnson did,” wrote Holden, who said he privately submitted a letter to Parson before penning the public opinion piece. “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.”
Pope Francis also called on Parson to grant clemency, saying his request was not solely based on Johnson’s “doubtful” intellectual capacity. Instead he wished to “place before you the simple fact of Mr. Johnson’s humanity and the sacredness of all human life,” according to a letter by Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S., which was posted on Twitter by Sister Helen Prejean, a prominent death penalty opponent.
Before Johnson carried out the 1994 killings, his life history showed his intellectual disability, according to his clemency application before Parson. His mother and brother were intellectually disabled — his brother so much so that he “had to be institutionalized,” it said.
The application detailed Johnson’s traumatic childhood: he was physically abused and his father would “chase and shoot at his own children with a gun,” it said. His mother also prostituted him when he was a teenager to older women for money or alcohol, his lawyers wrote.
Now, he uses a cane and has been described by a correctional caseworker as “very childlike and unintelligent.” His attorneys also say he accepts responsibility for the murders.
“His growth over the past 30 years demonstrates he is not the man the jury thought they were sentencing to death and he is deserving of mercy,” his attorneys wrote.
Johnson’s initial death sentence was overturned because his lawyers did not offer testimony about his upbringing and his drug addiction. His second death sentence 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.
In 2015, ahead of Johnson’s previous execution date, one of the victim’s daughters told the Columbia Missourian she and her siblings planned to attend the execution to honor her mother.
“The only peace I’m going to get is to stop having to wait for the next step in the legal process,” Bratcher’s daughter, Carley Schaffer, told the newspaper. “It’s not bringing my mom back. ... It doesn’t change that I’m going to grieve for her for the rest of my life.”
Johnson has exhausted most of his options to stop the execution.
Last month, the Missouri Supreme Court refused to halt it, ruling that he is not intellectually disabled in part because he planned the murders in advance. His attorneys have asked the court to reconsider the case and said its decision was filled with “legal and factual errors.
As of Thursday, 1,535 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.
There are 20 people sentenced to die in Missouri, most of whom are at the end or near the end of their appeals, advocates say. It means there could be five executions next year, said Lauren Sobchak, organizer for Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Nozicka reported from Kansas City.
This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 11:44 AM with the headline "‘Like slavery and lynching:’ Cleaver, Bush urge Parson not to execute Ernest Johnson."