Nolan ClayThe Oklahoman
The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 5-0 Monday to deny clemency to death row inmate Richard Norman Rojem Jr.who insisted again in a brief statement that he is innocent.
Rojem, 66, is set to be executed June 27 for the murder of a 7-year-old girl in 1984.
Speaking for less than 90 seconds, Rojem told the board he rejected plea bargains in 1985 that would have spared him from a death sentence.
"An innocent man doesn't ever plead guilty to a crime he hasn't committed. And the reason for that is obvious. If there is justice to be had, it won't be had.
"I wasn't a great human being for the first part of my life," he also said. "And I don't deny that. But I went to prison. I learned my lesson. And I left all that behind."
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 McDonald's restaurant. A farmer found her body on 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 married the victim's mother, Mindy Cummings, while he was in prison in Michigan for sex offenses against two teenage girls, according to court records. She was the sister of his cellmate. He came to Oklahoma after being paroled in 1982.
He and his wife had been divorced for about two months at the time of the murder. He had been seeking a reconciliation.
The decision Monday means Gov. Kevin Stitt cannot change Rojem's death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In Oklahoma, a governor can commute a death row inmate's sentence only if the board recommends clemency.
He has been on death row for decades because he twice won challenges to his punishment.
Jurors at his 1985 trial in Wash*ta 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 in jury instructions. A new jury in Wash*ta 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 circ*mstantial evidence."
At the hearing Monday, his attorneys attacked the fingerprint evidence against him as flimsy and said male DNA found underneath the victim's fingernails was not his DNA.
Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Crabb pointed out at the hearing that there also was direct evidence against Rojem − from an eyewitness. The victim's older brother, Jason, said he saw "Rick" in the apartment at the time she was taken, according to trial testimony. He was then 9.
The victim's mother did not attend the hearing but urged the board in a May 28 letter to deny clemency.
Cummings told the board in the letter that her son has blamed himself despite assurances there was nothing he could have done.
"Rather, it is a miracle that he wasn't killed that night as well, to remove the possibility of him being a witness," she wrote.
She also told the board that a friend had asked her recently how old Layla "would be today."
"Through the years, my answer to this common question has always gently been the same," she wrote. "I cannot maintain a count of how old she would be each year, had she lived. For me, it is meaningless. Everything she might have been was stolen from her, one horrific night. She never got to be more than the precious seven year old that she was. And so she remains in our hearts − forever 7."
Wash*ta County District Attorney Angela Marsee reminded the board that Rojem was involved from death row in a murder-for-hire plot in 1986. "It is time for him to reap what he has sown," she said.
The execution is set to be carried out by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
Rojem had faced execution on Oct. 5, 2023, under a schedule released in 2022 for 25 inmates. That schedule was eventually scrapped.
