Death Penalty News

State officials have been working to replace lethal injection with nitrogen gas now going on 4 years. As time has gone on and inmates continue to wait questions are mounting about the process and whether Oklahoma will even have another execution. Oklahoma has been working to start using nitrogen hypoxia, the process of replacing oxygen with nitrogen until an inmate dies. Executions have been on an indefinite hold since 2015 following the problematic executions of Clayton Lockett, Charles Warner and Richard Glossip, which became national news and a statewide embarrassment. The executions of Lockett and Warner, while completed, are generally considered to have been botched. Lockett writhed in the execution chair for nearly 45 minutes, moaning and straining against his restraints. Warner could be heard saying his body felt as if it were on fire. It was later discovered the wrong drug was used as a part of the lethal 3-drug cocktail to execute Warner. Glossip, who was sent t...

Undeterred by a shortage of drugs used for lethal injections and capital punishment’s waning popularity, states that still practice the death penalty are seeking alternative ways to kill death row inmates. The latest suggestion? Death by nitrogen gas, a method that has never been used before. After several international drug companies decided to stop sending drugs to prisons  if they were to be used in executions, state officials began scrambling to find alternatives. Several states have mulled bringing back older methods such as the electric chair or firing squads. Recently, Nebraska and Nevada suggested fentanyl , a powerful opioid responsible for thousands of deaths in the United States. And in the last several months, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Alabama have authorized nitrogen gas for executions.  But there may be a problem. “Nitrogen hypoxia, whatever that might be, is not a medical act,” Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor of anesthesiology at Emory University, told M...

Oklahoma holds one of the busiest death chambers in the US, but for the third year in a row, it has not carried out an execution. The state—one of more than 30 in the US that has the death penalty—isn’t dialing back on the number of inmates it condemns to death.  Instead, prison officials and state attorneys are trying to fine-tune its execution procedures after a series of blunders. A number of botched executions resulted in 2014 being dubbed the worst year in history for the lethal injection.  In 2015, Oklahoma used a wrong drug in its lethal-injection cocktail to execute Charles Warner—the first known instance of such a mix-up in the US.  That same year, an inmate was moments away from execution before officials realized its lethal injection also had the wrong formula. In a statement given to the Associated Press, Republican governor Mary Fallin said the “most solemn responsibility for a state is the taking of a life.” “The state needs to...

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma, a state with one of the busiest death chambers in the country in recent decades, will enter its third year without an execution in 2018 while prison officials and state attorneys fine tune its procedure for putting condemned inmates to death. Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter said last week he was planning to meet with top prison officials and that he expected more clarity on the state’s new lethal injection protocols “in the next two or three weeks.” “We need to feel some urgency, but we also need to get it done right,” Hunter said. “I’d say both of those things are equally important.” Republican Gov. Mary Fallin said she has confidence in Hunter and Department of Corrections Director Joe Allbaugh to develop new protocols, but acknowledged the challenge the state faces in acquiring the lethal drugs. “The most solemn responsibility for a state is the taking of a life,” Fallin said in a statement Friday. “The state needs to be certai...

Okalhoma Governor Mary Fallin It has been a hard year for law enforcement in Oklahoma. "In the state of Oklahoma this year alone we've had 4 officers die in the line of duty, 2 of which have been murdered by suspects in the last 90 days. 2 of them have been murdered in less than two months," said Jerad Lindsey, chairman of the Tulsa Fraternal Order of Police. Governor Mary Fallin has now signed into law the Blue Lives Matter in Oklahoma Act of 2017, which now ensures that it is a capital crime to kill a police officer. Not always the case before. "That's a big part of the punishment is people have to understand what the outcomes are. Right now, it's a bit ambiguous in the law. Sometimes it is a capital offense to kill an officer in the line of duty, sometimes it's not," said Lindsey. The bill now effectively turns it into a death sentence, offering either the option of the death penalty or life in prison without parole.  The ...

Richard Glossip and Sister Helen Prejean The Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission after more than a year of work has recommended that a moratorium on carrying out capital punishment in the state be continued indefinitely. "It is undeniable that innocent people have been sentenced to death in Oklahoma," the report concludes. The bipartisan commission's findings span nearly 300 pages, covering every stage of the state's death penalty system. It addresses such issues as the problematic interrogation of suspects, overworked defense attorneys in capital cases, and an execution process with a disastrous track record. Headed by former Gov. Brad Henry, former federal magistrate Judge Andy Lester, and Judge Reta Strubhar, the 1st woman to sit on the states Court of Criminal Appeals, the commission urges the state to correct the "systemic flaws" in its death penalty system before seeking to restart executions, or sentencing any new defendants to death row...

"A protocol that would use a clinical plastic face mask connected by tubing to a canister of nitrogen gas." OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma officials would be wise to develop an execution protocol that uses nitrogen gas, Attorney General Scott Pruitt said Tuesday. Pruitt said states across the nation, including Oklahoma, have found it difficult to obtain drugs to administer lethal injections because manufacturers put restrictions on the use of the drugs. “It will be a continuing problem,” he said. As a result, the state should develop a protocol for the use of nitrogen gas, Pruitt said. In 2015, lawmakers passed and Gov. Mary Fallin signed House Bill 1879 following the state’s use of a new, three-drug protocol in the execution of Clayton Lockett, who spent 43 minutes on the death chamber gurney between the time of the injections and his death. His execution has been called a “procedural disaster.” Later it was learned that the state had used the wrong drug ...

Oklahoma Death Chamber Scathing report on botched execution underscores a ‘failed’ system rife with ‘negligence’ and raises the question of whether the state can be trusted On 10 October 2014, the state of Oklahoma threw open the doors of its maximum-security McAlester prison to reporters – the Guardian among them – to show off its brand-new, state-of-the-art death chamber. The corrections department had invested $106,000 to create the perfect killing machine that deployed the latest advances in technology and science – ultra sound, heart and blood pressure monitors, digital intercom and cameras – to ensure painless and foolproof executions. It was an important moment for Oklahoma, which had much to prove. Six months previously the state had conducted one of the most revolting executions in recent history. It had strapped Clayton Lockett, a convicted murderer and rapist, to a gurney and over the next 43 minutes, proceeded to jab needles into him during which time he was w...

Google it! The governor of Oklahoma's top lawyer is out of a job after insisting that a state execution proceed despite prison officials receiving the wrong drug for carrying it out, while telling a deputy attorney general alerting him to the problem to "Google it." A grand jury report found that when a deputy attorney general learned that potassium acetate would be used in the September 30, 2015 execution of Richard Glossip instead of potassium chloride, she contacted the governor's general counsel for further instruction. The deputy attorney general was then assured that "potassium chloride and potassium acetate were basically 1 in the same drug, advising deputy attorney general to 'Google it,'" the grand jury report said, according to the Associated Press. Fallin's general counsel, Steve Mullins, also told the deputy attorney general that she could not request a stay of vacation, because "it would look bad for the state o...

A grand jury on Thursday sharply criticized state officials charged with carrying out executions in Oklahoma, describing them as responsible for a litany of failures and avoidable errors. The grand jury’s 106-page report , released Thursday, paints these officials as careless and, in some cases, reckless. The missteps described by the grand jury include a pharmacist ordering the wrong drug for executions, multiple state employees failing to notice or tell anyone about the mixup and a high-ranking official in the governor’s office urging others to carry out an execution even with the incorrect drug. “There is no more serious exercise of state authority than carrying out a death sentence,” Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said in a statement accompanying the report’s release. He said the grand jury report made clear that “a number of individuals responsible for carrying out the execution process were careless, cavalier and in some circumstances dismissive of establis...

Richard Glossip and Sister Helen Prejean This is an account of the campaign to save the life of Richard Glossip. It provides both a timeline of the events over the past year when Richard came close to being executed not once but three times, and also an insight into our work at the Ministry Against the Death Penalty. In January 2015 Sister Helen received a letter from Richard Glossip. He was on death row in Oklahoma, convicted of the murder for hire of Barry van Treese. The man who committed the actual murder, Justin Sneed, had escaped the death penalty and earned himself a life sentence by claiming that Richard had paid him to do it. There was little other evidence. Richard had received a stay of execution in October 2014 after the state had severely botched the execution of Clayton Lockett. He told Sister Helen his execution had now been rescheduled for January 29, that he had put her name down as his spiritual advisor and “would she mind” being there as a witness at his...