McALESTER, Okla. (AP) — Oklahoma executed a man Thursday for his role in the fatal shooting of a store owner in 1992, after the governor again rejected a recommendation from the state’s parole board to save the life of a death row inmate .
Emmanuel Littlejohn, 52, received a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and was pronounced dead at 10:17 a.m
“A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death,” Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement about why he declined to commute Littlejohn’s sentence to life in prison without parole. “As the law and order governor, it is difficult for me to unilaterally overturn this decision.”
During Stitt’s nearly six years in office, he has only granted a pardon once of the five times the parole board has recommended it. Oklahoma has carried out 14 executions under Stitt and resumed them in 2021 after a more than six-year hiatus.
When the committee voted 3-2 last month to recommend clemency, the question raised by Littlejohn’s lawyers appeared to be about whether he or a co-defendant fired the shot that killed Kenneth Meers. Littlejohn’s lawyers also said the jury was unclear about whether a life sentence without parole would guarantee someone would never be released.
His lethal injection came just two days after the execution of Marcellus Williams in Missouri, where advocates insisted Williams was innocent.
Strapped to a stretcher and with an IV tube in his right arm, Littlejohn looked at his mother and daughter who were witnessing the execution.
“Mom, are you okay?” Littlejohn asked.
“I’m fine,” his mother, Ceily Mason, replied.
“Everything will be fine. I love you,” he said.
Mason sobbed quietly and clutched a cross necklace during the lethal injection, which began shortly after 10 a.m. Littlejohn’s breathing became labored before a doctor declared him unconscious at 10:07 a.m. He was pronounced dead ten minutes later.
Littlejohn’s spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeff Hood, was in the death chamber praying for him.
Steven Harpe, director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, said the lethal injection went smoothly.
If an execution scheduled for Thursday evening in Alabama goes ahead, it would be the first time in decades that five death row inmates would be put to death in the United States within a week. The five executions would also mark another grim milestone – 1,600 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Littlejohn was 20 years elderly when prosecutors say he and co-defendant Glenn Bethany robbed the Root-N-Scoot convenience store in south Oklahoma City in June 1992.
During video testimony before the Pardon and Parole Board in early August, Littlejohn apologized to Meers’ family but denied firing the fatal shot. Littlejohn’s lawyers pointed out that the same prosecutor tried Bethany and Littlejohn in separate trials on a nearly identical theory, even though there was only one shooter and one bullet that killed the 31-year-old Meers.
However, prosecutors told the agency 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 lawyers also argued that robbery-related killings are rarely considered death penalty cases and that prosecutors would not have pursued the maximum sentence today.
“It is obvious that Emmanuel would not have been sentenced to death if he had been tried in 2024 or even 2004,” attorney Caitlin Hoeberlein told the panel.
Littlejohn was prosecuted by former Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy, who was known for his zealous pursuit of the death penalty and secured 54 death sentences in more than 20 years in office.
Stitt had previously asked Adam Luck, one of his parole board commissioners, to resign after Luck repeatedly voted to recommend clemency.
The only time Stitt granted clemency was in 2021, when he commuted Julius Jones’ death sentence to life without parole, just hours before Jones was set to receive a lethal injection. Stitt rejected the panel’s clemency recommendations in three other cases: Bigler Stouffer, James Coddington and Phillip Hancock, all of whom were executed.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected a last-minute legal challenge filed by Littlejohn’s lawyers to the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection method of execution. A similar appeal filed in federal court was also rejected on Thursday.
