A 19-year-old has asked a federal court to allow her to witness her father's death by lethal injection, despite Missouri law prohibiting anyone under 21 from witnessing an execution.
Kevin Johnson is scheduled to be executed on November 29 for the 2005 murder of Kirkwood police officer William McEntee, although legal proceedings are still pending.
Johnson requested that his daughter, Khorry Ramey, attend the execution, and she wants to do so.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed an emergency motion on Monday before a federal court in Kansas City, alleging that the ban on assisting minors under 21 years of age has no security purpose and violates the young woman's constitutional rights.
Kevin Johnson. Missouri Department of Corrections via AP
In a court deposition, Ramet called Johnson "the most important person in my life."
“If I were dying in the hospital, I would sit at his bedside holding his hand and praying for him until his death, as a support for him, and for me as a necessary part of my grief and reassurance process,” she said. .
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Johnson, now 37, has been incarcerated since Ramey was 2 years old.
The ACLU said the two have been able to build a bond through visits, phone calls, emails and letters.
Last month,
she took her newborn son to the prison to meet her grandfather.
ACLU attorney Anthony Rothert said if Ramey is unable to attend the execution it will cause him "irreparable harm."
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Johnson's lawyers have also filed appeals to stop the execution.
They do not dispute his guilt, but claim that racism influenced the decision to seek the death penalty and the jury's decision to sentence him to death.
Johnson is black and McEntee was white.
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Johnson's lawyers have also asked the courts to intervene on other grounds, including a history of mental illness and his age — he was 19 at the time of the crime.
Courts have moved further away from sentencing adolescents to death since the Supreme Court in 2005 prohibited the execution of minors under 18 at the time of committing a crime.
In a brief filed last week with the Supreme Court, the Missouri Attorney General's Office stated that there were no grounds for court intervention.
“The surviving victims have waited long enough for justice to be served, and every day they wait is one day they are denied the chance to finally come to terms with their loss,” their petition stated.
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McEntee, married with three children, was one of the officers sent to Johnson's home on July 5, 2005, to serve an arrest warrant.
Johnson was on probation for assaulting his girlfriend, and police believed he had broken the rules.
Johnson saw the officers arrive and woke up his 12-year-old brother, Joseph
Long, who ran to his grandmother's house.
While there, the boy, who suffered from a congenital heart defect, collapsed and began having a seizure.
Johnson testified at trial that McEntee prevented her mother from entering the house to help her brother, who died shortly after at a hospital.
Later that night, McEntee returned to the neighborhood to check on unrelated reports of fireworks going off.
It was then that he met Johnson.
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He pulled out a gun and shot the officer.
He then approached the wounded and kneeling agent and shot him again, killing him.
The execution would be the first of three in the coming months in Missouri.
The state plans to execute convicted murderers Scott McLaughlin on January 3 and Leonard Taylor on February 7.
Sixteen men have been executed this year across the country.
Alabama inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith was scheduled to die Thursday for killing a preacher's wife in a murder-for-hire plot, but the execution was halted because state officials could not find a suitable vein to inject the lethal drugs.