Over the next few weeks, two very different sets of events could be set in motion that will determine the lives of seven prison inmates on Oklahoma’s death row.
If the state succeeds and has its way, the men – John Marion Grant, Julius Jones, Bigler Jobe Stouffer, Wade Greely Lay, Donald A Grant, Gilbert Ray Postelle, and James Allen Coddington – will be killed at regular intervals, as planned at regular intervals between this month and next spring. Their death will mark Oklahoma’s first execution in more than six years, one of the nation’s most prolific death knells after a series of devastating botched murders caused one of the country’s most prolific death chambers to go quiet.
However, most of these men are part of a massive lawsuit from death-row prisoners challenging Oklahoma’s lethal injection process as unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment – torture, in other words. The suit argues that even after a multi-year moratorium and extensive investigation, the state hasn’t changed its ways since it graphically executed multiple people with the wrong drugs. The Oklahoma Attorney General’s office previously promised to halt executions while the case went forward, only to seemingly change course in 2021 when a new AG came to power.
If the prisoners’ lawsuit is successful, their executions could be delayed well into 2022, pending the results of a trial that will put the state’s execution record under renewed scrutiny and could change the Oklahoma death penalty forever. Along with a growing awareness of the problems with the criminal justice system in America, and a burgeoning innocence movement to free the states most famous death row inmate, Julius Jones, the halting of Oklahoma’s main execution method would be a sign that the state’s decades of smooth, popular executions could be coming to an end. Otherwise, the prisoner-plaintiffs begin dying on 28 October.
If the prisoners’ lawsuit is successful, their executions could be delayed well into 2022, pending the results of a trial that will put the state’s execution record under renewed scrutiny and could change the Oklahoma death penalty forever. Along with a growing awareness of the problems with the criminal justice system in America, and a burgeoning innocence movement to free the states most famous death row inmate, Julius Jones, the halting of Oklahoma’s main execution method would be a sign that the state’s decades of smooth, popular executions could be coming to an end. Otherwise, the prisoner-plaintiffs begin dying on 28 October.
“Injustice does not even describe what would result if these plaintiffs are executed and the federal court later decides that the current Oklahoma protocol is unconstitutional,” federal public defender Dale Baich, who is spearheading the appeal, told The Independent. “The executions could not be undone.”
His team has moved in federal court to pause the killings at least until the trial can play out.
The wide-ranging case has been ping-ponging through the state and federal legal system since 2014. Its main claim is that Oklahoma’s three-drug execution cocktail of midazolam, a short-acting sedative; vecuronium bromide, which stops breathing; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart, doesn’t do enough to put prisoners out before they are executed.
Instead, the suit argues, autopsy evidence suggests the drugs make prisoners feel like they’re being drowned via a “flash pulmonary edema” as well as “burned alive”. It’s a combination so cruel it violates the Eighth Amendment and produces “severe pain, needless suffering, and a lingering death”, the original lawsuit claims. More than 30 death-row inmates are now a part of the action.
The case has taken on new urgency in recent months, thanks to several dueling developments. In August, a federal court found that the trial could go forward, but scrapped the claims of six men because they hadn’t selected an alternative way to die. Less than two weeks later, the Oklahoma attorney general moved to advance the death penalty process, and the group got their execution dates. However, in September, something wholly unexpected happened in Oklahoma, the state that’s executed the third most people in modern American history.
On 13 September 2021, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommended 3-1 that the governor commute the death sentence of Julius Jones. Jones has claimed for the last 20 years he was wrongfully convicted as a 19-year-old for a 1999 murder of a white man in the Oklahoma City suburbs. A growing body of evidence suggests the conviction of Jones, who is Black, was tarred with police and prosecutorial misconduct as well as systemic racism. The commutation recommendation, the high point of a growing “Justice for Julius” movement so far, was the first of its kind in Oklahoma history.
Photo Credit: Independent
