Date set for Columbia man’s execution appeal
The U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals set a date for a Columbia man’s argument against the death penalty.
A three-judge panel will hear arguments for Ernest Lee Johnson’s case on January 13 at the Thomas Eagleton Courthouse in St. Louis. A Boone County jury convicted Johnson twenty years ago for killing three convenience store employees in February 1994 in north Columbia. Three separate juries upheld the death penalty sentence since his conviction.
The U.S. Supreme Court halted his execution just hours before it was set to happen on November 3. Johnson’s attorneys claim pentobarbital, the drug the state of Missouri uses in its execution, will cause “severe, painful” seizures when reacting to the scar tissue in his brain, caused by a surgery to remove a tumor in 2008. The Supreme Court order sent the case back the Court of Appeals to reconsider Johnson’s claims that lethal injection would be “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.
Jeremy Weis, Johnson’s attorney, claimed Missouri could instead use lethal gas, the only other legal form of execution in the state. The Missouri Attorney General’s Office claims Johnson has no proof lethal gas would be any less harmful than lethal injection.
Circuit Judges Lavenski Smith of Little Rock, Steven Colloton of Des Moines and Raymond Gruender of St. Louis will hear oral arguments, scheduled for 2 p.m.
