Oklahoma Prepares to Kill Another Man Who Says He’s Innocent

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 planning a gubernatorial run in 2026, and his willingness to disrupt the state’s death penalty system has already cost him. He has especially enraged Oklahoma’s elected district attorneys by going out of his way to save the life of Richard Glossip, most recently filing a brief in his favor before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Drummond’s concern over Glossip’s innocence claim has not extended to others on death row. The same has often been true of people who have been outspoken about the state’s system as a whole. State Rep. Kevin McDugle has decried Oklahoma’s “sad history of pushing cases through the full judicial process and declaring them final and over, only to have many convicted men later exonerated.” Yet he is also firm that sex crimes against children keep him from rejecting the death penalty altogether. “If we have somebody who rapes a baby and slices the baby’s throat and outs him in a shallow grave,” he said at a press conference in 2019, “that person should be put to death immediately.”

The revulsion and outrage surrounding crimes against children make it easier to ignore red flags in a case like Rojem’s. Although prosecutors point out that his conviction has repeatedly been upheld in state and federal court, that is hardly the whole story. In Oklahoma as in the rest of the country, daunting procedural barriers stand in the way of revisiting the evidence in a given death penalty case. In Rojem’s case, the available record reveals significant problems that were either ignored or waved away by appellate courts and that were not brought up at the clemency hearing. Although Rojem’s resentencing trials provided a chance to present mitigating evidence that his original jury did not hear, courts refused to grant an evidentiary hearing to consider evidence that may have challenged the state’s theory of the crime but which his trial attorneys never investigated.

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Some of the problems in Rojem’s case reflect the era in which he was tried. At the time of his conviction, Oklahoma’s death penalty had only recently been reinstated following a landmark Supreme Court ruling that forced states to rewrite their death penalty statutes. Although Oklahoma lawmakers were quick to pass a new death penalty law, they did not provide an infrastructure for the wave of indigent defendants who would soon go on trial for their life.

Rojem’s court-appointed defense attorneys were a husband-wife team who had never handled a felony case, let alone a death penalty trial. Like other private lawyers appointed to represent indigent defendants during the 1980s, their pay had been set by the state legislature, which allotted a maximum of “$200.00 for services rendered before the preliminary hearing, $500.00 for services rendered during the preliminary hearing,” and “$2,500.00 for services rendered from the time the defendant is bound over until final disposition in the trial court.” Attorneys who wished to hire an investigator or experts to examine the evidence in the case had to seek permission from the trial court, which routinely denied such requests. In Rojem’s case, not only did the court refuse to provide such funds, post-conviction requests to access the state’s case file were also denied.

The need for Rojem’s defense to investigate the case was especially crucial given law enforcement’s immediate focus on Rojem. Although the state today insists that all leads pointed directly to him, others close to the case felt strongly that this was not true. Among them was Cummings’s own father, who “apparently did not believe that his daughter was murdered by [Rojem],” as a federal court wrote in 1999. Donald Cummings suspected that it was a man on his ex-wife’s side of the family who was the true perpetrator and sought to share his suspicions with law enforcement. “In fact, Mr. Cummings apparently conducted some sort of investigation on his own into the case,” the court found. Just over a year after his daughter’s murder, Donald Cummings took his own life.

Easy Scapegoat

The story of how Rojem became a suspect is told in a 1985 article in the Detroit Free Press, which framed the case as the product of Michigan’s overly lax parole system. Violent people left prison too early, free to wreak havoc across the country. “Every state turns its problems loose on someone else,” one Oklahoma rancher told the paper. “That’s just what old Fidel did with his problems — put ‘em on boats to Florida.”

In fact, Rojem had arrived in Oklahoma to be with Cummings’s mother, whom he’d met inside a Michigan prison, where she was visiting her brother. “She was taken with Rojem, a young prisoner who seemed determined to turn his life around,” according to the paper. They got married shortly after, while Rojem was still incarcerated. He was released in 1982 and went to work in the oil fields in the western part of the state.

But things quickly went downhill. Rojem lost his job, drank heavily, and in 1983 was arrested while drunk driving. According to Cummings’s mother, Rojem was in jail following the arrest when her daughter accused him of abusing her. Nevertheless, she took Rojem back and the couple stayed together until splitting up in May 1984. After that, Rojem continued to see his ex-wife and her kids. Just a few days before Cummings disappeared, Rojem took her and her brother out for ice cream.

After Cummings was found, investigators searched Rojem’s home and took hair samples. Tire tracks at the scene were reportedly matched to his car. But there was no direct physical evidence linking him to the crime. Washita County District Attorney Steve Suttle, who prosecuted the case, conceded to the Detroit Free Press that the evidence was “circumstantial to be sure,” but promised there was much more to come. At trial he introduced condom wrappers found near the child’s body, linking them to a used condom found in Rojem’s home.

Rojem’s roommate swore to the Detroit Free Press that he was incapable of such a grisly crime. “They’re trying to build a case that a warped, twisted, pervert rapist from Michigan killed this little girl in a field. … I don’t believe it, not for a minute. Those kids loved Rick Rojem and Rick Rojem loved those kids.” Yet Cummings’s brother, who was 9 years old when his sister was killed, became a key witness for the prosecution. Although he’d told investigators that he did not see the man who took his little sister, on the stand he testified that he had seen Rojem — a fact that surprised prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.

Ultimately, the denial of funding to investigate Rojem’s case was devastating to his defense. There was no expert witness who could challenge the state’s key forensic evidence: a mangled plastic cup that had been found in the parking lot of the Cummings’ apartment, which allegedly came from a bar where Rojem had been spotted the night of the murder. A partial fingerprint was found on the inside of the cup and, despite its poor quality, matched to Rojem. “What better evidence in the world is there than a fingerprint?” the prosecutor asked the jury. Nor was there anyone to testify about numerous hairs that had been found on Cummings’s body, which were not matched to Rojem, and which Suttle himself conceded were “strange.” The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals would later conclude that the hairs had been deliberately planted “in an apparent attempt to lead investigators” to the wrong suspect.

In his own interview with the Detroit Free Press, Rojem’s lead attorney said his client was an easy scapegoat. “He has a poor record in Michigan and that was enough.”

Failure to Mitigate

Rojem had been on death row for almost 15 years when a federal district court overturned his death sentence. Although the court upheld his conviction, it found that Rojem’s constitutional rights had been violated when the trial judge failed to properly instruct the jury on the need to consider mitigating evidence before sentencing him to death. Rojem’s jury, it found, seemed to be under the impression that they only needed to find at least one aggravating factor and that weighing mitigating factors was optional.

A resentencing trial took place in 2003. By then, Rojem’s appellate attorneys had gotten a chance to test evidence from the case for DNA. They made a significant discovery. Scrapings from underneath Cummings’s fingernails had produced an unknown male profile that excluded their client. At the resentencing trial, Rojem’s lawyers were granted permission to call as a witness the state DNA analyst who did the testing. Despite the powerful evidence, the jury decided that Rojem should die.

But that outcome, too, was reversed on appeal when the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found that the presiding judge had failed to dismiss prospective jurors who were unfairly biased against Rojem. Defense attorneys had been forced to use their limited peremptory challenges to remove jurors with inappropriate connections to the case, such as a man who had discussed the case with the local sheriff, whom he knew from church. The result was a jury that was skewed against Rojem, the court concluded, sending the case back for resentencing.

The third and last sentencing trial took place in 2007. Rojem’s lawyers presented 15 witnesses, many of whom spoke about Rojem’s positive traits. Among them were Rojem’s death row case manager, who highlighted his good behavior behind bars; a Buddhist minister who described Rojem’s religious conversion and deep faith; and a former Oklahoma state representative who favorably described how Rojem had pushed to win the right for the condemned to donate their organs after being executed.

Unlike the previous resentencing trial, Rojem’s attorneys were barred from introducing the DNA evidence, a major blow. But perhaps just as detrimental was the failure to present evidence of serious childhood trauma that might have led Rojem’s jury to spare his life, regardless of their belief in his guilt. An investigation into Rojem’s early life had revealed that he had been repeatedly molested and raped by a stepbrother beginning when he was 7 years old; the abuse lasted until he was 9. Rojem’s attorneys had planned to present this evidence through an expert who had prepared a PowerPoint presentation. The slides included bullet points describing the abuse. But the presiding judge refused to allow the presentation — and Rojem’s attorneys did not ask the expert any questions to elicit such testimony. Instead, the expert alluded to the abuse briefly during his time on the stand, referring to “other things that happened” to Rojem that had shaped who he’d become as an adult. He was sentenced to death for a third time.

Even if such evidence had not been persuasive to a jury, there is reason to believe that Rojem’s history of childhood trauma might have swayed at least one member of the Pardon and Parole Board to cast a vote to spare his life. The board had previously recommended clemency for a man based in part on the horrific abuse he’d endured as a child. But there was no mention of this history during last week’s hearing. Rojem’s life before and after his conviction was not described at all. 

Instead, the lawyers sought to persuade the board that the forensic evidence in Rojem’s case, which was weak to begin with, was even weaker 40 years later. Fingerprint evidence, like many other forensic practices, has been shown to have little basis in science, attorney Paul McCausland explained: “The infallibility of fingerprint evidence is a myth.” While this is certainly true and highly relevant to Rojem’s case, challenging the validity of longstanding forensic practices has been an uphill battle within the legal system for decades. He was unlikely to persuade the board within a half-hour. And he was no match for the victim’s side, powerfully represented by Cummings’s aunt. “The Cummings family has been forced to endure Mr. Rojem’s depravity for 40 years,” she said. “Layla and Don have both gone on and I have grown old. Nevertheless, it is my hope that through me you will see their suffering.”

Rojem’s attorneys did not respond to interview requests from The Intercept. Many of those who were involved in the original trial are now deceased, including his defense lawyers. Suttle, the original prosecutor, died earlier this year. In a phone message responding to a request for an interview, his widow said it was “a damn shame because he would have been gratified to see the completion of his case.”

Three days after the clemency hearing, Rojem was moved to death watch, the prison cell where he will stay until he is escorted to the execution chamber. In a message to an advocate, he said he was grateful to have had a chance to say his goodbyes. “I’ll neither confirm/deny the presence of mistiness in the ocular region,” he wrote, adding a smiley face.

Rojem’s advocates don’t claim to know the truth of his guilt or innocence. But they insist that his life has value regardless. Most of them call him Daiji, his Buddhist name, and describe him as more concerned with their well-being than his own. In my own brief correspondence with Rojem last year, he seemed at peace with his circumstances, joking wryly about his lack of confidence that state officials would be able to carry out so many executions without messing up. He described a lunch tray that had consisted of instant rice, improperly prepared: “So, if you can’t follow the instructions on the instant rice bag…”

He wrote about a former cellmate who had recently been executed. Rojem considered him to be a good, decent man even though he was regarded as a monster by the rest of the world. He knew this was how he was seen, too. “I’ve lost many friends since 1985.”

Update: June 27, 2024
Richard Rojem Jr. was executed by lethal injection on June 27. His time of death was 10:16 a.m. CT. Asked if he had any last words, Rojem said, “I don’t. I’ve said my goodbyes.”