Oklahoma executes a man for a 1992 murder despite the board’s recommendation that his life be spared

McALESTER, Okla. (AP) — Oklahoma executed a man Thursday for his role in the 1992 shooting death of a supermarket owner after the governor rejected a recommendation from the state’s parole board to spare his life.

Emmanuel Littlejohn, 52, received a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and was pronounced dead at 10:17 a.m. His execution came after Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt refused to commute his sentence to life in prison without parole.

“A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death,” Stitt said. He added: “As a law and order governor, it is difficult for me to unilaterally overturn this decision.”

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected a last-minute legal challenge to the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection method of execution. A similar appeal filed in federal court was also rejected Thursday.

Littlejohn is the third Oklahoma inmate executed this year and the 14th since the state resumed executions in 2021 after a more than six-year hiatus. If another execution takes place, scheduled for Thursday evening in Alabama, it would be the first time in decades that five death row inmates would be executed in the United States within a week.

The five executions would also mark another grim milestone – 1,600 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Littlejohn was 20 years old when prosecutors say he and co-defendant Glenn Bethany robbed the Root-N-Scoot convenience store in south Oklahoma City in June 1992. The store’s owner, Kenneth Meers, 31, was killed.

During video testimony before the Pardon and Parole Board last month, Littlejohn apologized to Meers’ family but denied firing the fatal shot. Littlejohn’s lawyers pointed out that the same prosecutor tried Bethany and Littlejohn in separate trials on a nearly identical theory, even though there was only one shooter and one bullet that killed Meers.

However, prosecutors told the agency that two teenage store employees who witnessed the robbery said Littlejohn, not Bethany, fired the fatal shot. Bethany was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Littlejohn’s lawyers also argued that robbery-related killings are rarely considered death penalty cases and that prosecutors would not have pursued the maximum sentence today.

“It is obvious that Emmanuel would not have been sentenced to death if he had been tried in 2024 or even 2004,” lawyer Caitlin Hoeberlein told the panel.

Littlejohn was prosecuted by former Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy, who was known for his zealous pursuit of the death penalty and secured 54 death sentences in more than 20 years in office.

Because of the panel’s 3-2 recommendation, Stitt had the option of commuting Littlejohn’s sentence to life in prison without parole.

Stitt has granted clemency only once during his nearly six years in office, in 2021, when he commuted Julius Jones’ death sentence to life without parole just hours before Jones was set to receive a lethal injection. Stitt rejected the panel’s clemency recommendations in three other cases: Bigler Stouffer, James Coddington and Phillip Hancock, all of whom were executed.

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