McALESTER, Okla.—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.
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Littlejohn was 20 when prosecutors say he and co-defendant Glenn Bethany robbed the Root-N-Scoot convenience store in south Oklahoma City in June 1992.
During video testimony to the Pardon and Parole Board in early August, Littlejohn apologized to Meers’s family but denied firing the fatal shot. Littlejohn’s attorneys pointed out that the same prosecutor tried Bethany and Littlejohn in separate trials using a nearly identical theory, even though there was only one shooter and one bullet that killed Meers, 31.
But prosecutors told the board that two teenage store employees who witnessed the robbery both said Littlejohn, not Bethany, fired the fatal shot. Bethany was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
A state appellate court on Wednesday denied a last-minute legal challenge from Littlejohn’s attorneys to the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection method of execution. A similar appeal filed in federal court also was rejected Thursday.
