Edward Earl Johnson was a man convicted and executed by the U.S. state

U.S. state

A U.S. state is any one of the 50 federated states of the United States of America that share sovereignty with the federal government. Because of this shared sovereignty, an American is a citizen both of the federal entity and of his or her state of domicile. Four states use the official title of...

 of Mississippi

Mississippi

Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...

 for the murder of a policeman, J.T. Trest and the sexual assault of a 69-year-old woman, Sally Franklin. Throughout his eight years on death row

Death row

Death row signifies the place, often a section of a prison, that houses individuals awaiting execution. The term is also used figuratively to describe the state of awaiting execution , even in places where no special facility or separate unit for condemned inmates exists.After individuals are found...

 he continued to plead his innocence.

Case

His case came to international attention when he was featured in the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 documentary Fourteen Days In May

Fourteen Days in May

Fourteen Days in May is a documentary directed by Paul Hamann and originally shown on television by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1987. The program recounts the final days before the execution of Edward Earl Johnson, an American prisoner convicted of rape and murder and imprisoned in the...

. Broadcast in 1987, the documentary showed the last two weeks of Johnson's life. It starts on May 6, the day that Johnson learns the date of his execution. In interviews he says that his confession was made under duress, with police threatening him with death.

The book, Life on Death Row (Thomas, 1991) details the events leading up to and following the Johnson trial. Thomas shows the key witness for the prosecution to be unreliable, changing her story and identification of her assailant several times at the time of the event and in subsequent questioning.

Execution

In spite of British

British people

The British are citizens of the United Kingdom, of the Isle of Man, any of the Channel Islands, or of any of the British overseas territories, and their descendants...

 lawyer Clive Stafford Smith

Clive Stafford Smith

Clive Adrian Stafford Smith OBE is a British [see talk] lawyer who specialises in the areas of civil rights and the death penalty in the United States of America....

's attempts for a reprieve, Edward was executed (the documentary team were given access to him until minutes before the sentence was carried out). A follow up documentary by Stafford Smith claimed to prove conclusively that Johnson was innocent and had been framed.

He was pronounced dead at 12:06 a.m. on May 20, 1987 after being put to death in the gas chamber of what was then called Parchman Prison Farm

Mississippi State Penitentiary

Mississippi State Penitentiary , also known as Parchman Farm, is the oldest prison and the only maximum security prison for men in the state of Mississippi, USA....

.

It was the second execution by the state of Mississippi since the Gregg v. Georgia

Gregg v. Georgia

Gregg v. Georgia, Proffitt v. Florida, Jurek v. Texas, Woodson v. North Carolina, and Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 153 , reaffirmed the United States Supreme Court's acceptance of the use of the death penalty in the United States, upholding, in particular, the death sentence imposed on Troy Leon...

decision and the 72nd overall in the United States.