The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 on Wednesday to recommend clemency to death row inmate James Coddington, who iss on death row for the 1997 murder of his friend Albert Troy Hale in Choctaw.
A long-awaited trial was supposed to decide whether Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol was cruel and unusual punishment. But it was rigged from the start.
The rush to execution in Oklahoma comes despite clear evidence that executions have led to unconstitutionally torturous deaths. Autopsies of prisoners put to death with lethal injections including the sedative midazolam are subject to severe pulmonary edema, producing sensations of “doom, panic, drowning, and asphyxiation.”
OKLAHOMA CITY — A federal judge ruled Monday that a group of Oklahoma death-row inmates has fallen “well short” of proving that the state’s lethal injection protocols violate their constitutional