Supreme Court Stays Execution of Missouri Killer

Only Texas, with 12, has performed more executions than Missouri in 2015.

The Court of Appeals will decide whether the petitioner’s complaint was dismissed for failure to state a claim. It was later reported that the reason for the robbery was because Johnson wanted money to buy drugs.

Ernest Lee Johnson is scheduled to die Tuesday evening and would be the seventh person put to death in Missouri this year.

Defense attorney Jeremy Weis said that a 2008 surgery to remove Johnson’s slow-growing tumour did not get all of it, and that he has had prior seizures.

Not long after the cruel attack, the police were able to trace the killer who was identified as Ernest Lee Johnson, a regular customer of the Columbia store.

Weis cites a medical review by Dr. Joel Zivot, who examined MRI images of Johnson’s brain and found “significant brain damage and defects that resulted from the tumor and the surgical procedure”, according to court filings.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling referred to clinical definitions of intellectual disability as a disability manifested before age 18 that is characterized by significant sub-average intellectual functioning, with limitations in two or more areas.

Johnson stabbed Bratcher’s hand with a screwdriver at least ten times and repeatedly struck her skull with a hammer, killing her in the store’s bathroom, according to court documents.

Johnson was convicted in 1995 of killing Bratcher, Jones and Scruggs, and was sentenced to death.

Attorneys have appealed the death penalty sentence on the grounds that his IQ of 67 is low enough that putting him to death is unconstitutional.

The lethal injection drugs midzolam and pentobrabital allegedly pose “a substantial and unjustifiable risk of inflicting violent and painful seizures”.

The execution will be carried out with drugs including pentobarbital, which numbs the central nervous system including parts of the brain.

Johnson’s appeal states that such an “uncontrollable” seizure would result in a “severely painful execution”, thereby violating the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

Other death row inmates have had mixed success in pursuing claims that medical conditions should preclude them from execution. The case was sent back, and is still pending in U.S. District Court in St. Louis. When that sentence was also thrown out by the Missouri Supreme Court, Johnson was again sentenced to death, in a 2006 sentencing hearing. The 74-year-old also suffered brain damage from a sawmill accident.