Missouri Exacts Revenge on Mentally Impaired Black Man

 

by Pa Rock

Missourian

Yesterday evening just before dark the state of Missouri put 61-year-old Ernest Lee Johnson to death for three brutal murders that he admitted committing in a Columbia, Missouri, convenience store more than a quarter-of-a-century earlier.   Mr. Johnson's impending execution had drawn international attention based primarily on the fact that he had serious intellectual disabilities and had even undergone brain surgery in recent years.  His lawyers argued that executing a person with mental disabilities was a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution.

Missouri's governor, a former rural county sheriff by the name of Mike Parson, was asked by lawyers for the convicted man as well as two Missouri members of Congress and Pope Francis, to grant him clemency and change the sentence to life in prison, but Parson, who describes himself as a strong "pro-life" politician, declined to intercede.  

(Mike Parson had been quick to pardon a St. Louis husband and wife pair of lawyers after the white couple a few weeks earlier had put on a show in the yard of their expensive home by waving weapons at a Black Lives Matter march that was occurring peacefully in a street that went past their gated community.)

The Pope asked Governor Parson to show respect for the prisoner's humanity and the sacredness of life.  The congressmen, the only two black members of Missouri's congressional delegation, had requested mercy for the prisoner based on his obvious impaired mental condition, and they also referenced the historical inequity of capital punishment being used far more frequently on black prisoners than on those who are white.

Some could argue that if Johnson had been a rich white boy instead of a poor black one with serious mental impairments when he committed those heinous crimes, he would have been bounced into a mental hospital quicker than you could say "John Hinckley, Junior."

But Parson sat on his hands - as did the nation's Supreme Court, an emerging bastion of conservative intolerance, which also declined to intercede on a mentally impaired black man's behalf.

And so this morning Ernest Lee Johnson is dead.  He was willfully killed by the state of Missouri and politicians who were far more interested in throwing red meat to their conservative base and exacting revenge than they were in achieving any semblance of justice.

Sadly, it was just another day of politics-as-usual in the "show-me" state.