High court rejects appeal of inmate on death row
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined, without comment, to hear the appeal of Emmanuel Littlejohn, who was sentenced to death for the 1992 murder of an Oklahoma City convenience store owner.
Littlejohn has now exhausted his appeals and is eligible for execution. Eighteen inmates on Oklahoma’s death row are eligible for execution, though no execution dates have been set as the state crafts a new execution protocol using nitrogen gas.
Littlejohn, 46, had asked the high court to consider whether his death sentence was unconstitutional because jurors did not hear that Littlejohn’s brain damage, the result of severe drug and alcohol abuse by his mother during pregnancy, could have explained his criminal acts.
“Lack of impulse control and organic brain damage well explained how the homicide transpired as Mr. Littlejohn was leaving the store having shot no one,” wrote Randy Bauman, Littlejohn’s public defender, in a brief to the Supreme Court in May.
“Mr. Littlejohn was then suddenly confronted with a man charging him with a broom. If one or more jurors believed, as they likely did in convicting him of first-degree murder, that Mr. Littlejohn fired the fatal shot, it would have been very valuable for them to know how Mr. Littlejohn’s brain would have betrayed him in that sudden moment,” Bauman wrote.
Littlejohn was 20 years old when he and Glenn Bethany robbed the Root ‘n’ Scott at 532 SE 15 in Oklahoma City. During the robbery, Kenneth Meers, 31, was killed while approaching the robbers with a broom.
Bethany was sentenced to life in prison, and Littlejohn was sentenced to death. Littlejohn admits taking part in the robbery but denies firing the single shot that killed Meers.
“Although I share part of the blame for this crime, I am not the one who shot and killed Mr. Kenneth Meers,” Littlejohn wrote to The Oklahoman on Jan. 18 of this year.
Littlejohn said he is sorry for committing a robbery that led to the death of an innocent man and agrees he deserves to be punished for the robbery — but doesn’t deserve to die.
“I am not the shooter. The state knows this, the witnesses have said it. Yet I sit on death row facing a state-sponsored, state-endorsed execution,” Littlejohn wrote. “What’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong with this system of justice? Have we become so law-and-order that we are willing to kill someone who has not killed?”
The state of Oklahoma opposed Littlejohn’s request for Supreme Court review. Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Crabb told the court in June that Littlejohn had presented “no compelling reason for this court to review the Tenth Circuit’s decision” upholding Littlejohn’s sentence last year.
A federal court in Oklahoma City determined Littlejohn has attention deficit disorder and an impulse control disorder, along with mixed dramatic personality traits, which do not account for his criminal behavior, Crabb told the Supreme Court. Jurors, had they learned of Littlejohn’s “manipulative, self-centered, violent personality,” would not have sentenced Littlejohn to life in prison instead, Crabb wrote.