A Parole Board Said He Shouldn’t Be Executed — But Will The Governor Listen?
HuffPost
In an unusual move, Oklahoma’s Pardon and Parole Board recommended that Gov. Kevin Stitt commute Emmanuel Littlejohn’s death sentence to life without parole.
In June of 1992, 31-year-old Kenneth Meers was killed by a single bullet during a robbery at the convenience store he owned in Oklahoma City.
Prosecutors charged 26-year-old Glenn Bethany and 20-year old Emmanuel Littlejohn with robbery and first-degree murder. It was possible to charge two men with one murder committed by one person because of a legal doctrine called felony murder, which states that anyone involved in a felony that leads to a death is criminally responsible for that death, regardless of their role in the actual killing.
At Bethany’s trial, the prosecutor argued he was the sole gunman who shot and killed Meers. Bethany was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But when Littlejohn went to trial the following year, prosecutors flipped the script. This time they argued it was Littlejohn, not Bethany, who shot and killed Meers. Littlejohn was sentenced to death.
Littlejohn, who is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Sept. 26, admits his role in the robbery but denies shooting Meers. Last month, he made a final plea for mercy to Oklahoma’s Pardon and Parole Board. In an unusual move, the board voted 3-2 to recommend that Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt commute Littlejohn’s death sentence to life without parole.
Littlejohn’s case marks the fifth time the board has recommended clemency for people on death row since Oklahoma resumed executions in 2021. Of those, Stitt has granted clemency to only one person, Julius Jones, whose high-profile innocence claim attracted celebrity support. Thirteen others have been executed, some of whom showed signs of apparent suffering as they died. Oklahoma is responsible for some of the most infamous botched executions in the nation, and its lethal injection protocol has been the subject of extensive litigation.
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