The detainee was hanged in the United States despite the Pope’s plea for clemency

Washington | Despite calls for Pope Francis’ mercy, the US state of Missouri on Tuesday executed three convicted murderers, according to his supporters, with significant intellectual disabilities.

Ernest Johnson, a 61-year-old African-American, was pronounced dead at Bon Terre Prison at 6:11 p.m., shortly after his death, Missouri Prison Services announced.

In 1994, he brutally murdered three employees of a gas station in a robbery.

After his death sentence, his lawyers multiplied appeals, relying on the Supreme Court’s ruling against the constitution to hang people with mental disabilities.

According to them, there was a lot of “evidence” for his cognitive impairment: Ernest Johnson was born with fetal alcoholism, and his mother was drunk during pregnancy; During his lifetime, IQ tests were always very low (with an average of 67); At the age of 15, he could not draw a straight line by a ruler …

But the courts in Missouri rejected their arguments.

Based on their findings, Republican Gov. Mike Parson on Monday asked Mr. Johnson refused to apologize, demanding more than 23,000 people, including one of his ancestors and two Congress-elected officials.

The sovereign pope, through his representative in the United States, sought to persuade the governor to “suspend” the death penalty.

“This request is not based solely on doubts about Mr. Johnson’s intellectual abilities,” wrote the Apostolic Nun Christophe Pierre in the name of Pope Francis.

It is, above all, based on “his humanity and the sanctity of all life,” he added, according to a copy of a letter posted online by Catholic activist Sister Helen Breeze.

In 2017, the head of the Catholic Church engraved in the cataclysm a definite opposition to the death penalty, which tolerated a few more exceptions.

Although he openly campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty, his interventions in certain cases were not generally publicized.

After the clemency petition failed, only the Supreme Court, which was hastily arrested on Monday, could impose an extremist ban on Mr Johnson. But she refused to take this file.

In 2015, he avoided him for the last time because he was suffering from a brain tumor and dangerous injection would cause him “inhumane” suffering, prohibited by the Constitution.