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The state of Missouri killed Johnson by lethal injection Tuesday night, punishing him for killing Kirkwood police Sgt. William McEntee in 2005. Johnson was 19 at the time. There was never a debate about whether Johnson did the dastardly crime. He did. In his dying days, Johnson sought redemption.

In the weeks leading to Missouri’s latest state-sanctioned killing, the debate over whether Johnson would spend the rest of his days in prison or die focused on race — Johnson was Black; McEntee was white — and the appropriateness of the death penalty.

But that’s not what Jackson’s dissent was about.

It’s about respect for the law, and the Missouri Supreme Court’s lack of it.

The justice argued that Missouri judges refused to follow “prescribed procedures” that allowed a chance for a new review of Johnson’s case. Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent, which was published Wednesday. The other justices voted to not intervene in the case and halt the execution.

To understand what many Missouri judges got wrong about Kevin Johnson’s case, it’s important to remember the history of Lamar Johnson, a Black man from St. Louis who was convicted of murder.

In 2019, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner sought a new trial for Lamar Johnson, based on evidence of innocence. A St. Louis judge, and later the Missouri Supreme Court, wouldn’t allow her action. They argued that unlike many other states, there was no mechanism in Missouri law allowing a prosecutor to try to right a past wrong. They said that included a case where a defendant was innocent, or his or her conviction was tainted by constitutional violations.

So in 2021, the Missouri Legislature passed a new law that specifically allows prosecutors to seek to vacate a conviction. The law requires a hearing in which evidence is presented to a judge. The law already has been used to free Kevin Strickland of Kansas City, who spent 43 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

Gardner has now cited the new law in a move to vacate Lamar Johnson’s conviction. A hearing is scheduled for later this month. Washington County Prosecuting Attorney Josh Hedgecorth is similarly trying to vacate the murder conviction of Michael Politte, whose attorneys have produced evidence of innocence.

Unlike those two men, nobody is suggesting Kevin Johnson was innocent. But a St. Louis special prosecutor in the case, using the law passed by the Legislature, filed a motion to vacate the conviction because of alleged racial bias by the prosecutor who sought the death penalty. St. Louis County Presiding Judge Mary Ott declined to provide a hearing in the case.

In an appeal of that ruling, brought by Special Prosecutor Edward Keenan, a majority of the Missouri Supreme Court — Judges Patricia Breckenridge and George Draper dissented — shrugged at the failure to follow due process. They suggested the motion was destined to lose.

That’s not how the law is supposed to work, Jackson wrote in her U.S. Supreme Court dissent.

“No Missouri court here has disputed that this hearing is mandatory or that it was not provided to Johnson,” she wrote. “The Missouri Supreme Court turned this straightforward procedural statute on its head.”

By skipping over a hearing for Johnson, she continued, the Missouri Supreme Court “flouted the plain language of a statute.”

Jackson’s dissent relies on the sort of argument that lawmakers used to make against “judicial activism.”

It’s the job of judges to recognize the words in laws passed by legislatures for what they mean, not twist them to accomplish a particular purpose. Ironically, it’s similar to the argument the Missouri Supreme Court once relied upon to keep Lamar Johnson in prison, the very ruling that spurred the new law that court is now ignoring.

Apparently, procedures matter when a prosecutor is trying to free an innocent man, but not so much when the state is rushing to kill a guilty one.