Missouri Scheduled to Execute Man Despite Evidence of Intellectual Disability

Ernest Johnson (pic­tured) is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed in Missouri on November 3, despite strong evi­dence that he is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled and there­fore inel­i­gi­ble for execution. 

Johnson has shown signs of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty through­out his life: he walked and talked much lat­er than his sib­lings, he was twice held back a grade in school, aca­d­e­m­ic test scores placed him in the bot­tom 1 – 2% in math and read­ing, and his sib­lings say he strug­gled with basic skills like using a knife and fork. His IQ scores have con­sis­tent­ly fall­en around or below 70, a com­mon IQ mark­er for indi­vid­u­als with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. Despite all this evi­dence, Johnson faces exe­cu­tion because, in the words of for­mer U.S. Attorney John N. Gallo, ​“the facts of Johnson’s dis­abil­i­ty were cloud­ed in court by the prosecutor’s inflammatory rhetoric.” 

A pros­e­cu­tor argued that Johnson was not ​“a weak, lit­tle skin­ny, men­tal­ly retard­ed kid” and told his jury, ​“To decide it’s more like­ly true than not that this guy is men­tal­ly retard­ed is an insult, an insult to these vic­tims.” The pros­e­cu­tor also accused Johnson of inten­tion­al­ly low­er­ing his IQ scores, based upon the opin­ion of a tech­ni­cian who lacked any train­ing in admin­is­ter­ing IQ tests or mak­ing clin­i­cal obser­va­tions about them. 

In an op-ed for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Gallo urged Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to com­mute Johnson’s sen­tence to life with­out parole, say­ing, ​“to allow this exe­cu­tion to go for­ward would be to sanc­tion a gross injustice.” 

[UPDATE: The U.S. Supreme Court stayed Johnson’s exe­cu­tion, but not as a result of his intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. The Court ruled that Johnson was enti­tled to pur­sue an appeal to deter­mine whether Missouri’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols are uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly cru­el and unusu­al as applied to a per­son with Johnson’s par­tic­u­lar med­ical con­di­tion. Johnson has a brain tumor, lesions, and scar­ring that his experts say cre­ate a sub­stan­tial risk of seizures and extreme pain if exe­cut­ed by lethal injec­tion with pentobarbital.]

A num­ber of Missouri’s six exe­cu­tions so far this year have also raised seri­ous legal issues. On March 17, the state exe­cut­ed Cecil Clayton, a man with an IQ of 71 who suf­fered from demen­tia and was miss­ing part of his brain as a result of a sawmill acci­dent that occurred before his crime. On April 14, it exe­cut­ed Andre Cole amid con­cerns about racial bias and his men­tal com­pe­ten­cy. Cole, a black man, was sen­tenced to death by an all-white St. Louis County jury. Richard Strong was exe­cut­ed on June 9 over the protests of four Supreme Court jus­tices, who would have stayed the exe­cu­tion in order to hear a chal­lenge to Missouri’s secre­tive lethal injec­tion process. Strong was also severe­ly men­tal­ly ill, but his tri­al coun­sel failed to present evi­dence of his men­tal ill­ness to the jury.