Richard Rojem Jr. had 20 minutes to address the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. Wearing a maroon prison uniform, he raised his cuffed right hand and swore to tell the truth, then gave his pitch for why his life should be spared. It would take less than 90 seconds.

“This hearing didn’t have to take place,” he began. Prosecutors had offered a plea deal right up until the day of his 1985 trial; if he’d admitted to abducting, raping, and murdering his young stepdaughter, Layla Cummings, Rojem could have avoided a death sentence. But he refused: “An innocent man doesn’t ever plead guilty to a crime he hasn’t committed.”

Rojem spoke via video link from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It was June 17, and his execution was 10 days away. At 66, he’d been on death row for virtually his whole adult life. He’d survived for so long in part because appellate courts had deemed his original trial to be unfair, upholding his conviction but twice overturning his death sentence. Meanwhile, fingernail scrapings taken from Cummings revealed an unknown male DNA profile and nothing from Rojem. This was potentially powerful exculpatory evidence. But a third jury, unaware of the DNA testing, resentenced him to die.

Cummings was only 7 years old when she vanished from her mother’s small apartment overnight in the small town of Elk City, located on the border of Western Oklahoma. After a 10-hour search, her body was discovered in a wheat field in an adjacent county on July 7, 1984. Her underwear was stuffed in her mouth, and she had been stabbed to death. Rojem, who had recently divorced Cummings’s mother, quickly became the prime suspect. He had previously been accused of molesting the child, which he denied. Prosecutors said he’d brutally assaulted and killed Cummings out of revenge.

Forty years later, Rojem had no illusions of mercy. He’d seen 124 people escorted to the death chamber. Some had received clemency recommendations only to be rebuffed by the governor, who gets the final say. Since resuming executions in 2021, Gov. Kevin Stitt has overseen the killing of 12 people. He has rejected clemency recommendations from the board three times. Amid overwhelming public pressure, he commuted a single death sentence to life in prison: that of Julius Jones, whose case became a cause célèbre.

Unlike Jones, Rojem is virtually unknown outside Oklahoma. He believes it is due to the nature of the crime. “Nobody wants to talk about it, nobody wants to get involved, nobody wants to seriously help a guy like me because nobody wants to risk lending their credibility to helping a guy with a case like this and be wrong,” Rojem wrote in a message to anti-death penalty activists last year. Although a handful of supporters submitted letters to the board, no one spoke on his behalf at the hearing apart from Rojem’s longtime attorneys.

The hearing lasted two hours. Rojem’s attorneys argued that the case against him had been thin from the start. “I think it would be a travesty to execute him based on the evidence presented in this case,” veteran death penalty attorney Jack Fisher told the board. The state, led by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, rejected that characterization of the evidence while stressing one of the most damning strikes against Rojem. “While our focus here today is on Layla Cummings,” Drummond said, “past is prologue. In 1978, Mr. Rojem raped two girls in Michigan. The evidence was overwhelming. He even pled guilty to one of the charges. But he’s never accepted responsibility. He’s never said he’s sorry.”

Rojem did not claim to be innocent of these crimes. “I wasn’t a good human being for the first part of my life,” he told the board. “And I don’t deny that. But I went to prison. I learned my lesson. And I left all that behind. … My understanding is that this hearing is to decide my fate on only the case before us and nothing else. I did not kidnap Layla. I did not rape Layla. And I did not murder Layla.”

It took just a few minutes for the board to make its decision. The votes were unanimous: five votes to deny clemency. The June 27 execution would move forward.

An Insufficient Defense

If Rojem dies by lethal injection on Thursday, Drummond will almost certainly be in the front row. The attorney general has made it a point to attend each execution carried out on his watch, even as he has fought to slow down the state’s once-frenzied killing schedule, citing the burden on prison staff. Some of his maneuvering has undoubtedly been political: Drummond is widely understood to be........

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