In the robbery attack, all three workers were beaten to death with a claw hammer.
Advertisement
Johnson was a frequent customer at a Casey’s General Store in Columbia.
After 21 years of the attack, Johnson, who is now 55, will be executed on Tuesday evening at the state prison in Bonne Terre.
BREAKING: #SCOTUS grants stay of execution to Ernest Johnson in Missouri.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday night halted a scheduled execution in Missouri, saying that the lethal injection should be delayed until after a lower court rules.
Leading up to the scheduled execution, Johnson’s lawyers have turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the gas chamber would be a viable alternative to lethal injection.
However, the Missouri Attorney General’s office said that both claims are without merit.
Johnson was convicted of bludgeoning to death Mary Bratcher, Mabel Scrubbs and Fred Jones using a hammer, a screw driver and a gun, according to court records. It was later reported that the reason for the robbery was because Johnson wanted money to buy drugs. He cut Jones’ face and his brain, broke and fractured his skull, and left his body in the cooler.
After obtaining a search warrant for Johnson’s girlfriend’s house, Columbia police found a pair of tennis shoes with a logo that matched bloody footprints at the scene, along with cash, coin wrappers and a receipt from the convenience store. Testing after his conviction measured the IQ at 67, still a level considered mentally disabled. Johnson was again sentenced to death in 2003. In 2006, Johnson was sentenced to death for a third time.
He suffers from a slow growth brain tumour that was partially removed in 2008.
A portion of the benign tumor was removed in 2008, but a few of it remains.
Missouri has a one-drug execution protocol that uses pentobarbital.
Other death row inmates have had mixed success in pursuing claims that medical conditions should preclude them from execution.
“In the now pending appeal, the Court of Appeals will be required to decide whether petitioner’s complaint was properly dismissed for failure to state a claim or whether the case should have been permitted to progress to the summary judgment stage”. The case was sent back, and is still pending in U.S. District Court in St. Louis.
Advertisement
Missouri executed 74-year-old Cecil Clayton in March after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected claims that Clayton had diminished mental capacity due to a 1970s sawmill accident that cost him part of his brain’s frontal lobe.
