Death row inmate Richard Rojem set for execution June 27
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals on Friday scheduled an execution date for a convicted child murderer who has been on death row almost 40 years.
Richard Norman Rojem Jr. is now set to be executed June 27 for the 1984 murder of a 7-year-old girl.
He has been on death row for decades because he twice won challenges to his punishment. Rojem, 66, claims he is innocent.
The execution is set to be carried out by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
The victim, Layla Dawn Cummings, was his former stepdaughter. She was abducted late July 6 or early July 7 in 1984 from an Elk City apartment while her mother was at work at a restaurant. A farmer found her body the morning of July 7 in a plowed field near Burns Flat.
She had been raped and stabbed.
Rojem, then 26, lived at the time in Burns Flat. He met the victim's mother, Mindy Cummings, while he was in prison in Michigan for sex offenses, according to court records. She was the sister of his cellmate. They had been divorced for about two months at the time of the murder. He had been seeking a reconciliation.
Jurors at a 1985 trial in Washita County District Court chose the death penalty as punishment after convicting him in only 45 minutes of kidnapping, rape and first-degree murder.
His first death sentence was thrown out in 2001 because of a mistake on jury instructions. A new jury in Washita County District Court went with the death penalty again at a resentencing trial in 2003.
His second death sentence was thrown out three years later because of a mistake in the jury selection process. A second resentencing trial was held in Custer County District Court in 2007. Jurors there also agreed to the death penalty.
Rojem exhausted the appeals of his third death sentence in 2017.
In upholding his conviction in 1988, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals noted he "was connected to the offenses by a significant amount of circumstantial evidence."
The court acted Friday after a Pittsburg County judge ruled convicted murderer Wade Lay may not be executed at this time because he is presently incompetent.
Lay, 63, was set to be executed June 6 for fatally shooting a Tulsa bank guard during an attempted robbery in 2004.
The last execution in Oklahoma was April 4. Attorney General Gentner Drummond on Monday asked the court to set Rojem's execution approximately 90 days from April 4 and on a Thursday.
The court on May 7 announced future executions will be set 90 days apart "unless circumstances dictate modification."
The attorney general had asked for 90 days between executions to reduce the stress on the volunteer execution teams. He was joined in the request by Steven Harpe, the executive director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
"The present pace of executions, every 60 days, is too onerous and not sustainable," Harpe said.
The date chosen Friday is actually 84 days since the last execution. Setting it closer to 90 days and on a Thursday would have put it on a holiday, Independence Day.
Rojem had faced execution on Oct. 5, 2023, under a schedule released in 2022 for 25 inmates. That schedule was eventually scrapped.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Rojem is set to be executed June 27
