GIST: "On Oct. 5, the state of Missouri intends to execute Ernest Lee Johnson, 61, in what can only be described as the culmination of a lifetime of tragedy, neglect, and act of inhumanity.
As much as this nation proclaims itself as having progressed beyond the oppression and degradation of the chattel slavery and subsequent Jim Crow eras of the past, we are reminded on a daily basis that this is not, in fact, the case. Rather, it is only what society repeats to itself in an effort to soothe a collective guilty conscience.
In actuality, despite the efforts of many advocates to bring actual justice into our criminal legal system, many states and the federal government continue to impose the death penalty. All of these acts are horrific reminders that what is supposed to be an advanced and compassionate civilization is still far from it. Yet even more egregious is the reality that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities continue to be sentenced to the death penalty and executed despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision ruled that such acts are unconstitutional and violate the tenants of the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual” clause.
Johnson, who is Black, is among the population of the most vulnerable, targeted, and neglected in our society. Every unbiased medical professional who has evaluated him has determined him to be intellectually and developmentally disabled. We know that the death penalty disproportionately affects people of color with intellectual disabilities.
A recent analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center found that 80% of people who have their death sentences overturned due to constitutional violations are people of color. Two-thirds of intellectually disabled people sentenced to death are African American.
There is no question the system is broken beyond repair.
Since his conception, Johnson’s entire life was filled with tragedy. He was born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. He grew up in extreme poverty, having been abandoned by his parents, physically abused by his caretakers, sexually abused and exploited. He struggled in school with no support from educators. Johnson was born to parents who were poor and a generation removed from enslavement. His father was born on a plantation in Luka, Mississippi, where it was believed that his father was the white owner of the land. Johnson’s paternal grandmother moved her children to Mississippi County, Missouri, where his father grew up to be a sharecropper. Economic hardship, illiteracy, alcoholism and other realities of poverty created an existence for Johnson that afforded him zero opportunity or help for his intellectual disabilities.
The legacy of Missouri’s long history of racism, violence and Jim Crow is apparent throughout our criminal legal system today. A report by the Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America,” explores the ways in which the systems of mass incarceration and racially biased capital punishment were shaped by the “terror era.” In Missouri, there is a direct correlation between counties with a high number of acts of racial terror and counties that impose death sentences today.
Mississippi County, where Johnson grew up, had four documented racial terror lynchings. In 2017, the Mississippi County jail was a home to the extrajudicial execution of Tory Sanders, a Black man whose car broke down when he was traveling home through Missouri. He died the same way as George Floyd, with a knee on his neck. No one was ever prosecuted for that.
Selective prosecutions for murder in Missouri have been the rule for a long time. Black defendants typically end up not only being prosecuted but wind up receiving the worst of punishments. The idea that people are assigned a different value in the legal system simply because of their skin tone is alive and well in Missouri. This is precisely why the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP placed a travel advisory on the state in 2017.
As much as society wants to move beyond our past, the vestiges of racial injustice, institutional marginalization and systemic dehumanization linger on through systems like the death penalty. Even though these things are endeavored to be hidden and silenced behind the concrete walls and steel bars of prisons, the barbarism and cruelty of executing a Black man with an intellectual and developmental disability illustrate these horrors clearly. Ernest Johnson deserves mercy, compassion and, most importantly, he deserves recognition of his constitutional protections against the cruel and unusual punishment.
On Oct. 5, the state of Missouri intends to execute Ernest Lee Johnson, 61, in what can only be described as the culmination of a lifetime of tragedy, neglect, and act of inhumanity.
As much as this nation proclaims itself as having progressed beyond the oppression and degradation of the chattel slavery and subsequent Jim Crow eras of the past, we are reminded on a daily basis that this is not, in fact, the case. Rather, it is only what society repeats to itself in an effort to soothe a collective guilty conscience.
In actuality, despite the efforts of many advocates to bring actual justice into our criminal legal system, many states and the federal government continue to impose the death penalty. All of these acts are horrific reminders that what is supposed to be an advanced and compassionate civilization is still far from it. Yet even more egregious is the reality that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities continue to be sentenced to the death penalty and executed despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision ruled that such acts are unconstitutional and violate the tenants of the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual” clause.
Johnson, who is Black, is among the population of the most vulnerable, targeted, and neglected in our society. Every unbiased medical professional who has evaluated him has determined him to be intellectually and developmentally disabled. We know that the death penalty disproportionately affects people of color with intellectual disabilities.
A recent analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center found that 80% of people who have their death sentences overturned due to constitutional violations are people of color. Two-thirds of intellectually disabled people sentenced to death are African American.
There is no question the system is broken beyond repair.
Since his conception, Johnson’s entire life was filled with tragedy. He was born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. He grew up in extreme poverty, having been abandoned by his parents, physically abused by his caretakers, sexually abused and exploited. He struggled in school with no support from educators. Johnson was born to parents who were poor and a generation removed from enslavement. His father was born on a plantation in Luka, Mississippi, where it was believed that his father was the white owner of the land. Johnson’s paternal grandmother moved her children to Mississippi County, Missouri, where his father grew up to be a sharecropper. Economic hardship, illiteracy, alcoholism and other realities of poverty created an existence for Johnson that afforded him zero opportunity or help for his intellectual disabilities.
The legacy of Missouri’s long history of racism, violence and Jim Crow is apparent throughout our criminal legal system today. A report by the Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America,” explores the ways in which the systems of mass incarceration and racially biased capital punishment were shaped by the “terror era.” In Missouri, there is a direct correlation between counties with a high number of acts of racial terror and counties that impose death sentences today.
Mississippi County, where Johnson grew up, had four documented racial terror lynchings. In 2017, the Mississippi County jail was a home to the extrajudicial execution of Tory Sanders, a Black man whose car broke down when he was traveling home through Missouri. He died the same way as George Floyd, with a knee on his neck. No one was ever prosecuted for that.
Selective prosecutions for murder in Missouri have been the rule for a long time. Black defendants typically end up not only being prosecuted but wind up receiving the worst of punishments. The idea that people are assigned a different value in the legal system simply because of their skin tone is alive and well in Missouri. This is precisely why the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP placed a travel advisory on the state in 2017.
As much as society wants to move beyond our past, the vestiges of racial injustice, institutional marginalization and systemic dehumanization linger on through systems like the death penalty. Even though these things are endeavored to be hidden and silenced behind the concrete walls and steel bars of prisons, the barbarism and cruelty of executing a Black man with an intellectual and developmental disability illustrate these horrors clearly. Ernest Johnson deserves mercy, compassion and, most importantly, he deserves recognition of his constitutional protections against the cruel and unusual punishment."
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