Oklahoma has a notorious reputation for its frequent use of the death penalty and for the excruciating and drawn-out deaths that numerous executions have resulted in there, leading to a suspension of the practice since October 2015.
Oklahoma was the first jurisdiction in the world to adopt lethal injection as a form of execution. The United States Supreme Court ruled the death penalty, as it was implemented at the time in 1972, was unconstitutional, though left the death penalty open to new legislation to allow it to continue. In the wake of the ruling, Oklahoma and other states began legislative processes to reinstate the death penalty, which passed overwhelmingly in the Oklahoma state legislature in 1976.
Republican State Rep. Bill Wiseman voted in favor of re-enacting the death penalty at the time due to political pressure, though he staunchly opposed it as a form of capital punishment. Wiseman helped develop a bill in 1977 to establish lethal injection in hopes of making the death penalty “more humane” than electrocution. In interviews preceding his death in 2007, Wiseman expressed profound regret for the bill, which wound up facilitating the death penalty in the state rather than mitigating its impact.
Since 1976, Oklahoma has had the third-highest number of executed prisoners at 112 individuals, and the highest rate of state executions in the country. Meanwhile, 10 prisoners on Oklahoma’s death row have been exonerated of all charges against them.
The state’s death penalty system has come under scrutiny in the past several years, not only for its frequent use, but for a flawed system that led to the horrific lethal injections of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner that caused the prisoners to endure a heart attack and excruciating pain for 43 and 18 minutes before death, respectively, in 2015. The issues pushed the state of Oklahoma to issue a moratorium on its executions in October 2015 until the issues were fixed. An April 2017 report published by the Oklahoma…