The state of Oklahoma is set to execute one inmate a month on average for the next 29 months, according to non-profit death penalty research organisation Death Penalty Information Center.
Fox News reports that the scheduled executions work out as roughly one per month, with the first set for 25 August this year before continuing through to the end of 2024.
The 25 inmates due to die within this period account for more than half of the 42-plus inmates currently on death row.
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The first person to be executed will be James Coddington on 25 August, followed by Richard Glossip – whose whose first conviction and death sentence was overturned, and has now been rescheduled to 22 September.
Dates for the inmates including Benjamin Cole, Richard Fairchild, John Hanson and Scott Eizember have also been set.
According to Fox News, Oklahoma had ‘one of the nation’s busiest death chambers’ until issues surrounding botched executions arose, which in turn led to a de facto moratorium.
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In April 2014, inmate Clayton Lockett died 40 minutes after the state first administered a new lethal injection protocol, having struggled on the gurney for a prolonged time.
In September 2015, Richard Glossip was just hours away from his execution when officials realised they had been given the wrong lethal drug – later discovering that the same drug had also been used to execute someone earlier that year in January.
Executions in Oklahoma returned last October with the death of John Grant, who was strapped to the gurney and began convulsing and vomiting after the first drug, midazolam, was administered. He was declared unconscious 15 minutes later, before being declared six minutes after that.
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The method used to carry out execution in the state is now lethal injection, while the original death penalty law in Oklahoma called for executions to be carried out by electrocution – the last by this method took place in 1966.
Charles Troy Coleman was the first Oklahoma inmate executed by lethal injection on 10 September 1990, having been convicted in 1979 of Murder-First Degree in Muskogee County.
Between 1915 and 2022, a total of 196 men and three women have been executed at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary – 82 by electrocution, one (a federal prisoner) by hanging and 116 by lethal injection.
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Topics: US News
Jess Hardiman