Oklahoma on Thursday carried out the execution of convicted murderer Jemaine Cannon.
Cannon was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 10:13 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. He was 51. Opponents of the death penalty gathered outside the Governor's Mansion in Oklahoman City to protest Cannon's execution.
A Tulsa County jury convicted Cannon of murdering Sharonda White Clark, a 20-year-old mother of two, in 1995 at her Tulsa apartment after escaping from an Oklahoma Department of Corrections community work center in southwest Oklahoma.
Prior to his escape, Cannon was serving a 15-year sentence for a 1990 attack on an 18-year-old woman who spurned his advances.
That woman was beaten in the head with an iron, a toaster and a hammer, and left permanently disfigured.
Clark’s body was discovered Feb. 5, 1995. She was reported missing after she failed to pick her children up from a day care center. Her injuries included three stab wounds in the neck from a butcher knife. Her carotid artery was severed, and her jugular vein was cut.
Authorities captured Cannon two days later in Flint, Michigan.
His case drew anger from former Gov. Frank Keating, who at the time blasted the state Corrections Department classification system that allowed Cannon to serve his 15-year sentence for a violent crime in a community setting.
After entering the prison system, Cannon was assigned to a minimum-security prison. Two years later, he was assigned to the Walters Community Work Center.
Corrections officials acknowledged that Cannon should have been at a higher security level but said space in such facilities already was filled.
Investigators said Cannon had been staying with Clark since his escape from the Walters work center.
In June, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted against recommending clemency for Cannon.
State Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who urged the board to deny clemency, called Clark’s murder “shocking” and a “horrific loss.”
“Justice was finally served this morning for Sharonda Clark with the execution of her murderer," Drummond said in a statement Thursday. "My hope is that today’s action can bring some measure of peace for Sharonda’s two daughters, as well as her other family members and friends who loved her.”
Cannon's execution was the second in Oklahoma this year. It was the ninth execution in Oklahoma since the state resumed the practice in 2021.
Protestors call for the end of death penalty in Oklahoma
Some who opposed Cannon's execution argued that his declining health made the lethal injection unnecessary.
“Jemaine Cannon was nearly blind and nearly deaf and was likely to die in less than a year of an auto-immune disease," the Rev. Don Heath, chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said in a statement. "Executing a sick and dying man is not justice, it is cruelty.”
Cannon's attorney, Mark Henricksen, also told the panel that Cannon's trial and appellate attorneys were ineffective. His trial attorneys presented no witnesses or exhibits and rested after prosecutors presented their case, Henricksen said.
In a statement sent to The Associated Press this week, Henricksen said the state's decision to proceed with Cannon's execution amounts to "historic barbarism."
"Mr. Cannon has endured abuse and neglect for fifty years by those charged with his care," Henricksen said. "He sits in his cell a model prisoner. He is nearly deaf, blind, and nearing death by natural causes. The decision to proceed with this particular execution is obscene."
Cannon becomes the 2nd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Oklahoma, and the 121st overall since the state resumed capital punishement in 1990. Scott Eizember was executed on Jan. 12.
Cannon becomes the 14th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,572nd overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.
: The Associated Press, Staff, July 20 2023
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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
