27 June 2024 :
June 27, 2024 - Oklahoma. Richard Rojem, 66, White, was executed.
Rojem was pronounced dead at 10:16 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary after a lethal injection. He did not seek any last-minute stay.
He had been on death row in Oklahoma longer than any other inmate, according to the state Department of Corrections.
He also was one of the nation's longest-serving death row inmates, largely because he twice successfully challenged his punishment. He was resentenced in 2003 and 2007 and did not exhaust his appeals until 2017.
Rojem also was the latest death row inmate in Oklahoma to insist to the end that he was innocent despite substantial circumstantial evidence against him.
Rojem was sentenced to death for kidnapping, raping, and murdering his seven-year-old, former stepdaughter Layla Dawn Cummings in 1984 and leaving her body in a field.
The victim, Layla Dawn Cummings, was 7. She was abducted late July 6 or early July 7 in 1984 from an Elk City apartment while her mother was at work. Her brother, then 9, said "Rick" was in the apartment at the time she was taken, according to testimony from his 1985 trial.
A farmer found her body on the morning of July 7 in a field near Burns Flat. She had been raped and stabbed.
Rojem, then 26, had 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 Mindy Cummings had been divorced for about two months at the time of the murder. He had been seeking a reconciliation.
The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 5-0 on June 17 to deny Rojem clemency.
Rojem is the second person executed in Oklahoma this year, the 125th overall since the state resumed capital punishment in 1990, the 9th prisoner executed in the U.S. this year, and the 1,591st overall since the country resumed executions in 1977. On his case see also HoC March 31, 2001, February 25, 2006, and June 7, 2007.
