{"id":370056,"date":"2018-07-19T14:50:04","date_gmt":"2018-07-19T13:50:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/oklahoma-could-execute-potentially-innocent-prisoners-with-nitrogen-gas\/"},"modified":"2018-07-19T14:50:04","modified_gmt":"2018-07-19T13:50:04","slug":"oklahoma-could-execute-potentially-innocent-prisoners-with-nitrogen-gas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/oklahoma-could-execute-potentially-innocent-prisoners-with-nitrogen-gas\/","title":{"rendered":"Oklahoma Could Execute Potentially Innocent Prisoners With Nitrogen Gas"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Oklahoma was the first jurisdiction in the world to <a href=\"https:\/\/deathpenaltyinfo.org\/part-i-history-death-penalty\">adopt<\/a> 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<a href=\"https:\/\/www.history.com\/this-day-in-history\/supreme-court-strikes-down-death-penalty\"> open to new legislation <\/a>to allow it to continue. In the wake of the ruling, Oklahoma and other states began legislative processes to reinstate the death penalty, which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.okhistory.org\/publications\/enc\/entry.php?entry=CA052\">passed <\/a>overwhelmingly in the Oklahoma state legislature in 1976.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cmore humane\u201d than electrocution. In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2005\/09\/guilty-man\/\">interviews<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Since 1976, Oklahoma has had the third-highest number of executed prisoners at <a href=\"https:\/\/deathpenaltyinfo.org\/number-executions-state-and-region-1976\">112 individuals<\/a>, and the highest rate of state executions in the country. Meanwhile,<a href=\"https:\/\/deathpenaltyinfo.org\/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row\"> 10 prisoners<\/a> on Oklahoma\u2019s death row have been exonerated of all charges against them.<\/p>\n<p>The state\u2019s 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2015\/06\/execution-clayton-lockett\/392069\/\">of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner<\/a> that caused the prisoners <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/2015\/10\/an-oklahoma-execution-done-wrong\/409762\/\">to endure<\/a> 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.courthousenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/OklaDeathPenalty.pdf\">report<\/a> published by the Oklahoma&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/truthout.org\/articles\/oklahoma-could-execute-potentially-innocent-prisoners-with-nitrogen-gas\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-370056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}