A parole board recommended clemency for Emmanuel Littlejohn. Oklahoma executed him anyway

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Emmanuel Antonio Littlejohn has become the fourth US death row inmate to be executed in the last week, despite an Oklahoma clemency board voting to commute his sentence.

Littlejohn, 52, was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester at 10:17 a.m. Thursday. In August, the state’s Pardon and Parole Board voted in favor of granting clemency to Littlejohn — who has long claimed he didn’t commit the crime he was convicted of 22 years ago — but Republican Governor Kevin Stitt moved forward with the execution anyway.

Stitt had the power to commute his sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, something he’s done once before in the case of Julius Jones in 2021.

Littlejohn had been convicted of murdering Kenneth Meers, 31, during a convenience store robbery in Oklahoma City in 1992, but the case has been shrouded in doubt over whether Littlejohn was the one to pull the trigger.

“I didn’t kill Mr. Meers, but I was there,” he said in an NPR interview on Wednesday. “So why am I to be put to death for not killing nobody but just being there?”

The death row inmate has admitted to being one of the two robbers but said his accomplice, Glenn Bethany, fired the fatal shot that struck Meers in the face. Littlejohn was 20 at the time. Both men were charged with first-degree murder.

Bethany was given life in prison without the possibility of parole following his 1993 trial, while Littlejohn was handed a death sentence the following year, and then again in 2000, when he was retried because a “jailhouse snitch” gave improper testimony.

Attorneys filed last-minute attempts to spare Littlejohn’s life, but judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals voted against a stay of execution 5 to 0 on Wednesday.

Activists rallied to stop his execution in the days before it took place as part of a fierce clemency campaign. His attorneys also argued there were inconsistencies in how prosecutors handled charging the defendants.

During his clemency hearing in August, Littlejohn said: “I know that you have heard from a variety of people who think I deserve to die. They don’t know me. They were not there.

“I know that I didn’t kill Mr. Meers. I’ve admitted to my part. I committed a robbery that had devastating consequences. But, I repeat, I did not kill Mr. Meers.”

Still, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond and other state officials told the parole board Littlejohn admitted to killing Meers after the incident, claiming he told Meers’s brother: “He’s still dead. He ain’t coming back.”

After the clemency board’s ruling, Drummond said he remained “steadfast that the family of Kenny Meers has waited far too long for justice to be done.”

“My office intends to make our case to the governor why there should not be clemency granted to this violent and manipulative killer.”

At a news conference on Wednesday, the death row inmate’s sister, Augustina Littlejohn, described Littlejohn as a “big kid in a 52-year-old man’s body.”

“He is a son, he is a father, he is a brother, he is a grandfather, he is an uncle,” she said. “I am here to beg and plead for my brother’s life.”