Oklahoma executes man despite parole board recommending life be spared

A man has been put to death by the authorities in the US state of Oklahoma despite a parole board recommending that the life of Emmanuel Littlejohn be spared.

Littlejohn, 52, was executed by lethal injection on Thursday morning for the 1992 robbery of a shop owner that turned fatal. Reports said that as he lay strapped to the gurney with an IV line in his right arm, he looked towards his mother and daughter who were watching.

“Everything is going to be OK. I love you,” Littlejohn said.

The execution at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, 210 kilometres (130 miles) east of Oklahoma City, was the fourth in the US in less than a week and comes hours before the state of Alabama is set to use nitrogen gas to execute Alan Eugene Miller on Thursday evening.

If the execution in Alabama proceeds, it would be the first time in decades that five death row inmates were executed in the United States within one week, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The five executions would also mark another grim milestone: 1,600 executions since the death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1976.

Littlejohn was 20 when prosecutors say he and co-defendant Glenn Bethany robbed the Root-N-Scoot convenience store in south Oklahoma City in June 1992.

[Al Jazeera]

During video testimony to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board in early August, Littlejohn apologised to the family of Kenneth Meers, the convenience store owner who was killed during the robbery, but denied firing the fatal shot.

Littlejohn’s attorneys pointed out that the same prosecutor tried Bethany and Littlejohn in separate trials using a nearly identical theory, even though there was only one shooter and one bullet that killed Meers, 31.

But prosecutors told the board that two teenage store employees who witnessed the robbery both said Littlejohn, not Bethany, fired the fatal shot. Bethany was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Littlejohn’s attorneys also argued that killings resulting from a robbery are rarely considered death penalty cases and that prosecutors today would not have pursued the ultimate punishment.

“It is evident that Emmanuel would not have been sentenced to death if he’d been tried in 2024 or even 2004,” attorney Caitlin Hoeberlein told the board.

Battles for clemency

Littlejohn was prosecuted by former Oklahoma County District Attorney Robert Macy, who was known for his zealous pursuit of the death penalty and secured 54 death sentences during more than 20 years in office.

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican, previously asked one of his appointees to the parole board, Adam Luck, to step down after Luck voted several times to recommend clemency.

The only time Stitt has granted clemency was in 2021, when he commuted Julius Jones’s death sentence to life without parole just hours before Jones was scheduled to receive a lethal injection. Stitt has denied clemency recommendations from the board in three other cases: those of Bigler Stouffer, James Coddington and Phillip Hancock, all of whom were executed.

An Oklahoma state appellate court on Wednesday denied a last-minute legal challenge from Littlejohn’s attorneys to the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection method of execution. A similar appeal filed in US federal court also was rejected Thursday.

Earlier this week, officials in Missouri carried out the execution of Marcellus Williams, despite there being no DNA evidence to tie him to the crime for which he was convicted. The family of the victim had also appealed for clemency.

Augustina Sanders hugs Kim Ludwig, a paralegal in the US Federal Public Defender’s Office in Oklahoma City, after the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 to recommend clemency for Sanders’s brother, Emmanuel Littlejohn, August 7 [Sean Murphy/AP Photo]

Though Littlejohn admitted to his role in the Oklahoma robbery that killed Meers, he insisted until the very end that his accomplice was the one who pulled the trigger.

Convicted of Meers’s murder, Littlejohn repeatedly appealed for mercy to Stitt – and was refused.

“A jury found [Littlejohn] guilty and sentenced him to death. The decision was upheld by multiple judges,” Stitt said in a statement released after the execution. “As a law and order governor, I have a hard time unilaterally overturning that decision.”

Oklahoma has carried out 14 executions under Stitt, having resumed them in 2021 after a more than six-year hiatus.

Last month, a 3-2 vote in favour of clemency by the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board gave hope to Littlejohn’s supporters, his family and his lawyers.

But a state appellate court on Wednesday denied a last-minute legal challenge to the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection method of execution. A similar appeal filed in US federal court was also rejected on Thursday.

Steven Harpe, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, said the lethal injection went ahead without any technical problems.

During Littlejohn’s execution, which began shortly after 10am local time (15:00 GMT), his mother sobbed quietly and clutched a cross necklace.

Littlejohn’s breathing became laboured before a doctor declared him unconscious, and he was pronounced dead 10 minutes later.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies