The U.S. Supreme Court has granted a stay of execution for a Missouri death row inmate who has argued that a hole in his brain could cause him to have seizures, pending the convicted killer’s appeal before a lower court.
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Updated 8:05 p.m. November 3 with court ruling – The U.S. Supreme Court has hit pause on Tuesday night’s scheduled execution of Ernest Lee Johnson.
U.S. citizen Ernest Lee Johnson, convicted of committing a triple homicide in 1994, will be executed by lethal injection in the state of Missouri despite suffering intellectual disability, a USA advocacy group said in a press release. He cut Jones’ face and his brain, broke and fractured his skull, and left his body in the cooler. However, as that method hasn’t been used in the United States since 1999, Missouri no longer has a functional gas chamber.
The Missouri Supreme Court last month issued an execution order, which triggered the latest appeal, this one based on Johnson’s physical health.
According to Johnson’s attorney, Jeremy Weis, Johnson was raised in a troubled home and he had an IQ of 63 while still in elementary school.
A second appeal, to the Missouri Supreme Court, claims Johnson’s life should be spared because he is mentally disabled. The three victims were all killed at a Casey’s General store in Columbia, where they were employed at the time. Testing after his conviction measured the IQ at 67, still a level considered mentally handicapped.
Johnson’s death sentence for the Missouri convenience store killings has been overturned twice over his mental competency.
He suffers from a slow growth brain tumour that was partially removed in 2008.
An operation carried out in 2008 was meant to remove Johnson’s tumor, unfortunately, the doctors could not remove the entire tumor.
The Missouri Supreme Court on Monday turned down Johnson’s request that it appoint a judge to consider evidence that he is intellectually disabled and it would be unconstitutional to execute him, local newspaper the Columbia Tribune said.
Weis cites a medical review by Dr. Joel Zivot, who examined MRI images of Johnson’s brain and found “significant brain damage and defects that resulted from the tumor and the surgical procedure”, according to court filings. The case was sent back to U.S. District Court, but remains unresolved.
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Efforts to halt executions in Missouri have been met with mixed results before: for instance, Cecyl Clayton invoked a sawmill accident that caused him frontal lobe damage, but he was still put to death in March.
