That reports The Washington Post. Ernest Lee Johnson, 61, died by lethal injection. Just before his death, Johnson expressed regret for killing three people in 1994 and thanked those who supported him.
Applications for leniency
On Monday, Missouri Republican Governor Michael Parson said he would not stop the execution, despite clemency requests from the Pope and two black congressmen from Missouri. When the US Supreme Court also rejected a request for a postponement from Johnson’s lawyer on Tuesday, the state proceeded to execution.
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Johnson, who is black, was sentenced to death in 1995 for murdering three people in a supermarket robbery a year earlier in Columbia, Missouri. According to prosecutors, he beat his victims with a claw hammer and then hid their bodies in a cooler.
In doing so, according to the Missouri Supreme Court, Johnson had demonstrated the ability to “plan, devise strategies and solve problems.” That finding would contradict that Johnson has “substantially substandard intelligence.” For those reasons, the court refused a request to stop the execution in May.
Signs of an intellectual disability
Johnson’s advocates have argued for years that he has shown signs of intellectual disability since birth. In addition, his disability is said to have become more severe since he had a brain tumor partially removed in 2008, including 20 percent of his brain tissue. According to his lawyer, Johnson had an IQ of between 67 and 77, which should classify him as mentally retarded.
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Most executions in China and Iran
The death penalty is being carried out in an increasingly smaller number of countries, in the period 2013-2015 there were more than twenty. Most executions in those years took place in China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United States. More than 1,000 executions have been carried out in the US since 1976.
Source: Amnesty
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Contrary to the constitution
The US Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that it is against the Constitution to execute people with intellectual disabilities regardless of the crime. However, the court left the determination of the intellectual disability threshold to the states, causing disagreement over the definition and criteria.
A Pew Research Center survey in June found that 60 percent of American adults support the death penalty for people convicted of murder, a slight drop from two years earlier.
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