Johnson death row case headed back to lower court

The U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has sent the case of a death row inmate convicted of killing three people in Columbia back to a lower court for review.

The appeals court in an opinion issued Monday ruled a federal district court should rehear the case, saying the lower court was wrong to dismiss Ernest Lee Johnson’s claims that the state’s lethal injection method would constitute cruel and unusual punishment and that the state could instead use gas to execute him.

Missouri law allows for executions by gas and lethal injection, though the gas chamber has not been used in decades.

Johnson argues that use of pentobarbital, the state’s chosen drug for lethal injection, would cause him severe seizures after doctors removed a tumor from his brain in 2008. Johnson was first sentenced to death in 1995 for murdering Mabel Scruggs, Mary Bratcher and Fred Jones at a convenience store on Ballenger Lane the year before. Two juries upheld that decision after higher courts reversed the decisions.

Johnson’s case has been caught up in the courts for several years and the U.S. Supreme Court delayed his execution by lethal injection hours before it was scheduled to happen in November 2015.

The appeals court in its ruling Monday said the district court was wrong in granting the state’s motion to dismiss the case, which was the third complaint Johnson filed challenging the method of his pending execution. The lower court had ruled Johnson didn’t provide sufficient evidence to back his claim that injection would cause him unconstitutional pain and suffering and that he didn’t propose a feasible method of execution in its place.

The appeals court ruled Johnson provided enough evidence about his medical condition and pentobarbital to proceed and that execution by nitrogen gas was possible in Missouri.

No hearings have been set in the case.