Oklahoma’s plan to kill 25 men between next month and December 2024 has been met with outrage and disbelief.
Former Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry and former U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester, co-chairs of the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, which issued a 300-page report in 2017 detailing the myriad flaws in the state’s capital punishment system, weighed in with an editorial in the Oklahoman this week. They noted that the commission’s report suggested 46 recommendations to improve the system and wrote, “Before more executions occur, it is high time to implement the necessary reforms to make certain Oklahoma’s capital punishment system is beyond reproach.”
Nevertheless, Oklahoma plans to kill James Coddington next month, the first of 25 men scheduled to be executed between now and 2024.
Early this month, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals released the schedule for its killing spree in two parts, a list of the first six to be executed, from August 25, 2022, to January 12, 2023, and the remaining 19, beginning in March 2023 and ending in December 2024.
Those on the list include individuals with claims of innocence, severe mental illness, and intellectual disability.
The CCA set the dates in response to a request by Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor, who said he was acting “for the sake of the victims’ families, many of whom have waited for decades.” Despite troubling details about each case, the court seemed all-too-eager to comply.
The court chillingly detailed how the “execution schedule” will be “divided into [five] phases consisting of six inmates each being set for execution at least four weeks apart,” with “an open month [to] separate each phase…to accommodate rescheduling if needed.”
Coddington’s is set for August 25, with the next 24 taking place approximately once a month until December 5, 2024.
Coddington was sentenced to death for killing 73-year-old Albert Troy Hale in 1997. He was reportedly on a cocaine binge and had gone to Hale’s house to borrow money for more drugs. When Hale turned him down, Coddington killed him and stole $525.
His story is all-too-familiar. Born to alcohol and drug-addicted parents, Coddington was subjected to horrific abuse by his father from the time he was born. Now 50, his lawyer says he’s a changed man from the one who entered prison 25 years ago.
The Oklahoman reports that at a press conference last week, Coddington’s lawyer, Emma Rolls, said, “It would be profoundly unjust to execute him now.
“I have been representing people on Oklahoma’s death row a long time. I committed my career to that. And I can say without hesitation that James Coddington is the most deeply and sincerely remorseful person I have ever represented.”
In Coddington’s clemency petition, Rolls wrote, “Evidence of the seed of innate goodness James always possessed is buried in the records of his horrific childhood. The fact that seed flourished on death row reinforces the importance of clemency in the death penalty process. James exemplifies the principles of redemption.”
Richard Glossip is scheduled to be killed on September 22.
Glossip has been on death row since 1997, convicted of engineering the murder of Barry Van Treese, the owner of a motel where Glossip worked. The actual killer, Justin Sneed, serving a life without parole sentence, implicated Glossip as the crime’s mastermind. Glossip has always maintained his innocence, and in February, an ad hoc committee of state legislators asked the law firm, Reed Smith, to conduct an investigation. The result is a 343-page report concluding “Glossip’s “2004 trial cannot be relied on to support a murder-for-hire-conviction. Nor can it provide a basis for the government to take the life of Richard E. Glossip.”
The report was all Republican state representative Kevin McDugle, a death penalty supporter, needed to hear. He vowed that if the state goes ahead with its plans to execute Glossip, “I will fight in this state to abolish the death penalty simply because the process is not pure,” CNN reports.
Glossip’s clemency hearing is set for August 10.
