Oklahoma carries out execution for 1992 murder

 The 17th Execution of 2024

Oklahoma executed a man on Thursday for his role in the 1992 fatal shooting of a convenience store owner.

Emmanuel Antonio Littlejohn, 52, was sentenced to death for his role in the shooting death of 31-year-old Kenneth Meers, the co-owner of of the Root-N-Scoot convenience store in southeast Oklahoma City.

Littlejohn was declared dead at 10:17 a.m. after receiving a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, the Associated Press reported.

Littlejohn had looked toward his mother and daughter, who witnessed the execution, while strapped to a gurney and with an IV line in his right arm.

"Mom, you OK?" Littlejohn asked, according to the AP. "I'm OK," his mother, Ceily Mason, replied.

Emmanuel Littlejohn in February 2023. Littlejohn was executed on Thursday for his role in the 1992 fatal shooting of a convenience store owner. Oklahoma Department of Corrections/AP

"Everything is going to be OK. I love you," he said.

The execution began shortly after 10 a.m. Littlejohn's breathing became labored before a doctor declared him unconscious at 10:07 a.m., the AP reported. He was pronounced dead 10 minutes later.

Littlejohn was one of five inmates executed over the past week, including Alan Eugene Miller who was put to death using nitrogen gas in Alabama on Thursday. Their deaths bring the U.S. to 1,600 executions since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), despite support for the death penalty declining nationwide over the past two decades.

Littlejohn was executed after Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, a Republican, rejected a recommendation from the state's parole board to spare his life.

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Oklahoma's Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 to recommend clemency in August after Littlejohn's lawyers raised questions about whether he or a co-defendant fired the shot that killed Meers. Littlejohn acknowledged his role in the robbery but denied killing Meers.

Those "who prosecuted Mr. Littlejohn also prosecuted his co-defendant and alleged that they were both were the shooter, so they used inconsistent theories, arguing to each of those juries that the person on trial was the actual shooter," Robin Maher, the executive director of the DPIC, recently told Newsweek. "And so Mr. Littlejohn has basically been convicted of a crime that someone else has been convicted of."

In a statement, Stitt stated why he declined to commute Littlejohn's sentence to life in prison without parole.

"These decisions are very difficult and I do not make them lightly," he said. "Mr. Littlejohn murdered an innocent man 32 years ago while robbing a convenience store. A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death. The decision was upheld by multiple judges. As a law and order governor, I have a hard time unilaterally overturning that decision. Today, justice for this life lost was carried out. I hope this brings closure to the families impacted by this murder."

Stitt has only once granted clemency to an inmate out of the five times that the parole board has recommended it during his time in office when he commuted Julius Jones' sentence just hours before he was set to be executed in 2021.

Oklahoma has carried out 14 executions under Stitt, after resuming capital punishment following a six-year hiatus in 2021. Littlejohn was the third inmate put to death in Oklahoma this year.

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