On October 28th, Oklahoma carried out its first execution since January 2015. According to media witnesses, John Grant experienced full-body convulsions and vomited on himself multiple times after being injected with Midazolam, the first drug in Oklahoma’s injection protocol.
While this was horrifying, it was not surprising.
Oklahoma has botched every execution it has attempted in the past seven years.
In April 2014, Clayton Lockett tried to get up off the execution gurney after an IV line was set incorrectly. He eventually died, after an excruciating length of time on the execution gurney, of a heart attack.
Charles Warner was executed with a food preservative chemical in January 2015 after the Oklahoma Department of Corrections purchased the wrong drug.
In September 2015, Oklahoma tried to execute Richard Glossip twice with the same incorrect drug. It was only the white hot glare of global attention that made them halt that execution.
And then Oklahoma stopped executing people. The Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission stepped in to examine every aspect of the state's capital punishment system.
Its 272-page report contained 46 recommendations. A few hours after the Commission's report was published, then Oklahoma AG Mike Hunter announced that he'd not be following any of its recommendations. Instead, the state went looking for new ways to kill its citizens, including an experimental use of nitrogen gas.
Finally, Oklahoma gave up on alternative methods and decided to return to the method it new best: its failed lethal injection cocktail. (It should be noted that the Supreme Court played a major role in allowing such failed protocols to be used, with its decision in Glossip v. Gross.)
In response to the latest botched execution, Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections says that it will continue carrying out executions exactly as before. In fact, the DOC said that John Grant’s execution went “in accordance with protocol and without complication.”
This is Orwellian doublespeak. What they mean by "without complication" is that (for once) they used the correct drugs according to the protocol and the end result was John Grant's death. Oklahoma has not only perfected the botching of executions, it has perfected the language to mask their own cruel incompetence.
Hope for Julius Jones
After a years-long fight, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommended on Monday that Julius Jones should receive executive clemency and that his death sentence should be commuted to life with the possibility of parole.
The vote was 3-1. Julius’s fate is now in the hands of Gov. Kevin Stitt, who appointed a majority of the pardon board’s members.
Take action for Julius!
An execution date remains scheduled for November 18th. Meanwhile, Julius sits in a solid concrete death watch cell feet away from the execution chamber where John Grant was killed in a gruesome botched execution last week.
Gov. Stitt should act quickly and end the psychological torture that Julius has already had to endure. It is hard to imagine the torment he must be going through.
Source: Death Penalty Discourse, Sister Helen Prejean, November 5, 2021
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
