Last week, Arkansas Governor, Asa Hutchison, rushed to end the lives of seven people on death row, over a span of 11 days, ironically because the shelf life of the drug being used to kill them was about the end.
In 2014, our own Oklahoma Governor, Mary Fallin, had a similar inmate “death experience” when she ordered the use or a lethal drug to kill.
As governor, she defied the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s attempt to stop the use of a secretly obtained drug. She publicly said she would not abide by a court ruling and insisted the dug be administered to the inmate on death row. How perverse! Perverse because the governor is duty bound to enforce the law, not disobey the court’s interpretation of the law.
He died in excruciating pain. His cry was heard around the world but not before state lawmakers rushed to governor’s aid threatening impeachment of the justices. How perverse! The legislators make the law and should respect the judges, who interpret the law, not try to intimidate them.
Since that time, Oklahoman’s amended its Constitution declaring the death penalty not cruel and unusual punishment and the state legislature has allowed the use of another killer drug or any other method allowed by law.
Oklahoma is the first jurisdiction in the world to adopt lethal injection as a method of execution. Next to Texas, Oklahoma and Virginia tie in having executed the largest number of felons in the United States.
Following the botched execution during Fallin’s command in 2014 and two prison drug mixups in 2015, Attorney General Scott Pruitt, now the head of the EPA, said he would not request any inmate execution date in Oklahoma until he was confident that the death penalty could be carried out without any problems. Since that time, an Oklahoma bipartisan blue-ribbon commission has been established to conduct an independent review of Oklahoma capital punishment system.
Support for the death penalty has been falling in recent years, in part due to the large numbers of death row inmates who’ve turned out to be completely innocent row inmates – including three from Oklahoma since 1998.
Since 1973, 158 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. And lethal injection has been under attack for almost a decade because of all the botched executions that have happened.
The U.S. Supreme Court has excluded juveniles and people with intellectual disabilities from the death penalty. The United States was one of the last countries around the world that allowed the death penalty for offenders under 18. Seven of our states have repealed the death penalty.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the financial costs in prosecuting death penalty cases for exceeds the costs of maintaining an inmate serving life without parole.
Why then does Oklahoma still desire to kill people – people who do evil, God forsaken, heinous acts to other people?
Is it because of an eye for and eye, revenge, the need for retribution? What is it?
Is it a need to inflict greater suffering on people who cause great suffering?
Is it because family members of the victims are looking for closure after decades of waiting for the executions to move forward?
Or is it that the boundaries in our judicial system that once seemed to provide discernment, that seemed to set things right, that brought to bear fair judgment to our judicial system, has turned on itself?
Is this perversion becoming so pervasive that a greater light is bursting forth proving that the death penalty is not only wrong at its core, but is obsolete.
Protests from anti-death penalty groups, legal challenges from pharmaceutical makers, petitions from religious leaders and former corrections officers as well as celebrities and the voters are moving in the same direction to end the death penalty. In unison, they know the death penalty is coming to its end. Is it? You must also decide.
Let your voices be heard too.
