The pope’s appeal was made in a letter to Mr. Parson from Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States. It came two years after Francis changed church doctrine by declaring that executions were unacceptable in all cases because they are “an attack” on human dignity.
In the letter, which was reported by Vatican News, Francis said his appeal was not “based solely upon Mr. Johnson’s doubtful intellectual capacity.”
“His Holiness wishes to place before you the simple fact of Mr. Johnson’s humanity and the sacredness of all human life,” Archbishop Pierre wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing intellectually disabled people is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The last time Missouri carried out an execution was in May 2020, when Walter Barton was put to death by lethal injection for fatally stabbing an 81-year-old woman in 1991.
Using a hammer as a weapon, Mr. Johnson killed three convenience store employees — Mary Bratcher, 46; Fred Jones, 58; and Mabel Scruggs, 57 — in Columbia, Mo., in February 1994 as he was robbing the store for money to buy drugs, court documents say. A jury in Boone County, Mo., convicted him in 2005 on three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death, the documents say.
After several court challenges over the years centering on Mr. Johnson’s intellectual tests and abilities, the state Supreme Court ruled in August that his recollections of details of the crime showed he was able “to plan, strategize, and problem solve — contrary to a finding of substantial subaverage intelligence.”
Mr. Johnson was born in Steele, Mo., in 1960 and grew up in Charleston, Mo., Ms. Bush and Mr. Cleaver wrote in their letter. His father was a sharecropper, they said, and he was raised primarily by his grandmother.
