USA | Execution still planned for Thursday in Oklahoma City double-murder case

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections was preparing Wednesday to carry out the state's 11th execution since lethal injections resumed two years ago.

Phillip Dean Hancock was set to be executed Thursday morning for fatally shooting two men in Oklahoma City in 2001.

The execution was set for 10 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester unless Gov. Kevin Stitt intervened.

The governor could commute Hancock's sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. No decision had been announced as of 11:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommended clemency for Phillip Dean Hancock

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 on Nov. 8 to recommend clemency after Hancock again insisted he acted in self-defense.

"I was in a life-or-death situation," Hancock, 59, told the board via a video link from prison. "They forced me to fight for my life."

The board has recommended clemency only three other times since executions resumed in 2021. The governor has granted clemency only once, to Julius Jones.

That decision was announced at noon on Nov. 17, 2021. The execution had been set to begin at 4 p.m.

The governor in 2021 denied clemency to death row inmate Bigler Jobe "Bud" Stouffer II a week before the execution. Last year, he denied death row inmate James Coddington clemency the day before execution.

Death penalty opponents have not rallied behind Hancock as much as they have behind those death row inmates who claim they didn't kill anyone. His attorneys also did not seek any last-minute stays from the U.S. Supreme Court.

At his clemency hearing, Hancock admitted again that he fatally shot Robert Lee Jett Jr. at the biker's home in Oklahoma City early April 27, 2001, after being told to get into a cage.

He also admitted he fatally shot James Vincent "J.V." Lynch.

He told the parole board Jett, 38, was bludgeoning him with a metal tool while Lynch, 57, held him down in an armbar chokehold. He said he shot the men after getting control of Jett's pistol.

"Please understand the awful situation I found myself in," he said.

An Oklahoma County jury rejected his self-defense claim in 2004, found him guilty of first-degree murder and chose death as punishment.

Afterward, the trial judge wrote in a report that Hancock attacked both victims without provocation and at no time expressed any remorse.

Source: oklahoman.com, Nolan Clay, November 29, 2023

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California | Becerra vows to extend moratorium despite past support for capital punishment

SACRAMENTO—Democrat Xavier Becerra defended the death penalty while serving as California’s attorney general, a punishment his office actively sought in the case of a gunman convicted of an Orange County mass shooting, but as the front-running candidate for governor, he has vowed to block executions if elected in November. Becerra said he will extend the blanket reprieve for all death row inmates that Gov. Gavin Newsom enacted by executive order in 2019, saying he supported “moving our state away from a costly, flawed system that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities and too often gets it wrong.”

Iran | Afghan Citizen Executed in Wheelchair Due to Severe Mobility Disability

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He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next?

23-hour solitary confinement. 115-degree heat. Jimmie Duncan is haunted by the decades he spent in Louisiana’s Angola Prison—and how, even after being released, he still isn’t truly free. Jimmie “Chris” Duncan wiped the sweat off his forehead as he assessed his temporary home from the parking lot of a rundown motel in central Louisiana. Sure, there’s drug dealing and prostitution, he said on a recent summer afternoon. And he suspected his neighbors were cooking meth on a floor below the room he paid $350 a week to rent.

Hanging, confinement and the sentencing debate India won’t have

Ask anybody what a “death sentence” in India actually means, and the honest answer is that it can mean three quite different things. It can mean the noose—hanging by the neck until death; it can mean permanent confinement in jail—a term the courts now call imprisonment for the remainder of one’s natural life, and, far more often than either of the first two, it can simply mean delay in delivery of justice—a death sentence that is neither carried out nor commuted, waiting for completion of investigation, trial before the sessions court, hearing of a confirmation proceeding in a high court, appeal against conviction in the Supreme Court, or hearing of a mercy petition nobody has decided for years, sometimes for decades, until age or illness does what the state never got around to doing itself.

California | He spent 19 years on death row. His conversion to Judaism helped him endure

Johnny Morales struggled to find sleep. He dozed off for a few moments, but officers came to his death row cell and woke him a little after midnight. They needed to inventory and box up his belongings. He was leaving San Quentin. Hands cuffed behind his back, he walked across the empty upper yard in the dim gray hours before daylight. An officer walked alongside him step for step, black latex-gloved fingers holding onto Morales’s arm. For almost 20 years, Morales could only experience the world outside his 4-by-11 foot cell in the condemned housing unit like this—chained and escorted by officers. Security protocols required all death row residents be handcuffed or shackled any time they were out in open space with staff.

Arizona AG seeks execution date for man convicted in 1995 trooper killing

Trooper Bob Martin was killed during a traffic stop on the Beeline highway; execution for his killer could be as soon as January PHOENIX (AZFamily)—The Arizona Attorney General is asking for an execution date to be set for a man convicted in the killing of an Arizona State Trooper over 30 years ago. On Aug. 15, 1995, Trooper Bob Martin was shot and killed while performing a traffic stop along the Beeline Highway.

Ex-corrections officials urge governor to commute Kansas death sentences

Former Kansas corrections officials are urging Governor Laura Kelly to grant clemency to the state's death row inmates. Former Kansas Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz has several reasons why he thinks the state should abolish the death penalty. Werholtz, who served as secretary from 2002 to 2010 and returned on an interim basis in 2019, uses his discussions with peers and family members of victims as well as experiences of seeing wrongly convicted people getting exonerated as his guiding points.

Florida executes Harold Gene Lucas

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Florida set to carry out 14th execution this year in the nation's busiest death chamber

MIAMI (AP) — A Florida man convicted of fatally shooting a 16-year-old girl who rejected his romantic advances and wounding two of her friends is set to be executed Tuesday in the first of three lethal injections scheduled this month in the state. Harold Gene Lucas, 74, is set to receive a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke starting at 6 p.m. He would be the 14th prisoner put to death this year in Florida, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has already signed death warrants for two more executions set for later this September.

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