Motion filed to dismiss convicted Columbia killer’s execution complaint

A motion has been filed to dismiss a complaint made by a convicted Columbia killer.

Ernest Johnson was previously convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, but last year, attorneys for Johnson filed a complaint in Missouri’s federal Western District Court to stop the state’s lethal injection.

Johnson’s legal team argued that remnants of his past brain tumor could pose a risk during lethal injection. The slow-growing tumor was found in 2008 and was removed in August of that same year. However, the entire tumor was not removed and Johnson’s defense team argued the scar tissue left behind from the “significant” portion of the brain removed in surgery could cause seizures during lethal injection.

Less than two weeks before his execution date, Johnson began these legal proceedings and was granted a stay of execution. However, new court documents state “Johnson fails to state a plausible claim that the State’s execution protocol is ‘sure or very likely’ to induce a seizure.”

“While Johnson has pled that pentobarbital can theoretically trigger seizures on account of his impaired brain, he has pled no facts establishing the probability that pentobarbital will do that,” the documents state. “He does not, for example, explain the effects of pentobarbital on seizures, on defective brains, on any brains, or on the body. He does not compare the rates of seizures in people given pentobarbital versus the rates of seizures in the public at large. Quite simply, there are no facts for the Court to draw any reasonable inference that the State’s execution protocol is sure or very likely to trigger Johnson’s seizures.”‘

Because there is no statute of limitations, Johnson now has 21 days to file another complaint.

A jury convicted Johnson of killing three people–Fred Jones, Mary Bratcher and Mable Scruggs–at the old Casey’s at the corner of Rice Road and Ballenger Lane in 1994.