Oklahoma was preparing for the execution of a death row inmate on Thursday as Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt deliberated whether to grant clemency following an uncommon recommendation from the state’s parole board.
Emmanuel Littlejohn, 52, faced lethal injection for his involvement in the 1992 shooting death of a convenience store owner during a robbery.
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Since becoming governor six years ago, Stitt has granted clemency only once, despite recommendations from the state’s Pardon and Parole Board in three other cases. On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Stitt confirmed that the governor had met with both prosecutors and Littlejohn’s legal team but had yet to make a final decision.
The execution was scheduled for 10 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. If carried out, Littlejohn would become the 14th individual executed under Stitt’s tenure.
Later on Thursday, Alabama was also scheduled to carry out an execution, marking the first time in decades that five death row inmates in the U.S. would be executed in a single week.
On Wednesday, an appellate court in Oklahoma rejected a last-minute challenge to the state’s lethal injection method, clearing the way for Littlejohn’s execution.
Littlejohn would be the third Oklahoma inmate executed this year. At the time of the crime, he was 20 years old. Prosecutors claimed that in June 1992, he and his co-defendant, Glenn Bethany, robbed the Root-N-Scoot convenience store in south Oklahoma City, where the owner, Kenneth Meers, 31, was fatally shot.
During a recent testimony before the Pardon and Parole Board, Littlejohn expressed remorse to the Meers family but denied being the one who fired the fatal shot. His attorneys emphasized that the same prosecutor used nearly identical arguments in separate trials for both Littlejohn and Bethany, despite only one shooter and one bullet causing Meers’ death.
Prosecutors, however, cited statements from two teenage store employees who witnessed the robbery, both of whom claimed Littlejohn was the shooter. Bethany was sentenced to life without parole.
Littlejohn’s defense team argued that robbery-related killings are rarely prosecuted as capital punishment cases and that, if tried today, Littlejohn likely wouldn’t face the death penalty.
“Emmanuel would not have been sentenced to death if he were tried in 2024 or even 2004,” attorney Caitlin Hoeberlein argued before the board.
The case was prosecuted by former Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy, who was known for aggressively pursuing the death penalty, securing 54 death sentences during his career.
With the board’s 3-2 vote in favor of clemency, Stitt had the authority to commute Littlejohn’s sentence to life without parole. Three members of the board were appointed by the governor himself.
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In 2021, Stitt granted clemency to Julius Jones, commuting his sentence to life without parole just hours before Jones’ scheduled execution. However, the governor denied clemency in the cases of Bigler Stouffer, James Coddington, and Phillip Hancock, all of whom were subsequently executed.
If the executions in Oklahoma and Alabama proceed, they will bring the total number of executions in the U.S. to 1,600 since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
