The Pope's appeals were also useless, as the prisoner Johnson was executed

The death sentence of Ernest Johnson, the 61-year-old African American detained in the Bonne-Terre prison in Missouri, was carried out. The various appeals for clemency also arrived from Pope Francis proved useless.

The man, who according to his lawyers had severe intellectual deficits, was killed by lethal injection. For the judges he had violently killed three employees of a gas station during a robbery in 1994. The Missouri court rejected all the defense's arguments, which also invoked a Supreme Court ruling that the death penalty cannot be carried out against those suffering from mental handicaps. Republican Governor Mike Person, however, refused to grant the pardon.

(Unioneonline / ss)