McALESTER, Okla. (AP) — Oklahoma executed a man Thursday for his role in the 1992 fatal shooting of a convenience store owner after the governor again rejected a recommendation from the state’s parole board to spare a death row inmate’s life.
Emmanuel Littlejohn, 52, received a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and was declared dead at 10:17 a.m.
“A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death,” Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement explaining why he declined to commute Littlejohn’s sentence to life in prison without parole. “As a law and order governor, I have a hard time unilaterally overturning that decision.”
Stitt has granted clemency only once out of the five times that the parole board has recommended it during Stitt’s nearly six years in office. Oklahoma has carried out 14 executions under Stitt, having resumed them in 2021 after a more than six-year hiatus.
In voting 3-2 last month to recommend clemency, the board appeared to be moved by questions Littlejohn’s lawyers raised about whether he or a co-defendant fired the shot that killed Kenneth Meers. Littlejohn’s attorneys also suggested the jury was unclear about whether a sentence of life 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 gurney and with an IV line in his right arm, Littlejohn looked toward his mother and daughter, who witnessed the execution.
“Mom, you OK?” Littlejohn asked.
“I’m OK,” his mother, Ceily Mason, responded.
“Everything is going to be OK. 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 10 minutes later.
Littlejohn’s spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeff Hood, was inside the death chamber and prayed over him.
Steven Harpe, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, said the lethal injection went without any problems.
If an execution set for Thursday evening in Alabama is carried out, it would mark the first time in decades that five death row inmates were put to death in the U.S. within one week. The five executions would also mark another grim milestone — 1,600 executions since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
