A 60-year-old man from Oklahoma who stabbed a prison cafeteria worker to death in 1998 is scheduled to receive a lethal injection.
The state continued with the deadly injection of John Marion Grant after the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-3 decision, lifted the execution suspensions imposed Wednesday on Grant and another death row inmate, Julius Jones, of the 10th district. to i US.
Grant was serving a 130-year prison sentence for several armed robberies at the Dick Conner Correctional Center in Hominy when witnesses said he dragged prison cafeteria worker Gay Carter, 58, into a cleaning closet and hit her 16 times. times with a homemade flute. He was sentenced to death in 1999.
The state pardon and parole board twice denied Grant’s pardon request, including a 3-2 vote this month to reject a life-saving recommendation.
Oklahoma applied a series of lethal injections in 2014 and 2015 led to a de facto moratorium. Richard Glossip was just hours away from execution in September 2015, when prison officials realized they had taken the wrong deadly drug. It was later learned that the same wrong drug was used to execute an inmate in January 2015.
The drug mix followed a failed execution in April 2014, in which prisoner Clayton Lockett fought to the death before dying 43 minutes after his lethal injection – and after the head of state prisons ordered the executors to stop.
While the moratorium was in effect, Oklahoma went ahead with plans to use nitrogen gas to execute prisoners, but eventually scrapped the idea and announced last year that it planned to resume executions using the same deadly injection protocol with the three drugs used. during executions. The three drugs are: midazolam, a sedative, vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
“Extensive estimates and redundancies have been implemented since the last execution, in order to ensure that the process works as intended,” the Department of Corrections said in a statement.
Many death row inmates in Oklahoma are part of a federal lawsuit that challenges deadly injection protocols, arguing that the three-drug method risks causing pain and suffering. A trial is set for early next year.
Grant and five other inmates sentenced to death were excluded from the lawsuit as neither of them chose an alternative method of execution that a federal judge said was necessary. But a three-member panel of the 10th Denver-based U.S. District Court of Appeals found that inmates identified alternative methods of execution, even if they did not specifically select a box that determined which technique would used. The trial panel had allowed the suspension of the execution on Wednesday for Grant and Jones, whose lethal injection is scheduled for November 18th.
Grant and his attorneys have not denied that he killed Carter, but argued that key facts about Grant’s crime and troubled childhood were never presented to the jury. They say Grant developed deep feelings for Carter and was upset when she fired him after he got into a fight with another kitchen worker.
Carter’s daughter, Pam Carter, who also worked in prison and was there the day her mother was killed, dismissed the idea that her mother and Grant had more than a professional relationship and urged state officials to continue the execution. .
“I understand he is trying to save his life, but you continue to victimize my mother with these blatant allegations,” she told the Pardon and Release Board this month. “My mother was alive. She was friendly. She did not meet a stranger. She treated her workers the way she would treat them in an outside job. It is simply disgusting for anyone to take advantage of this. ”
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