source: Equal Justice Initiative

first published: 6 October 2023

Image Credit: sakhorn38 at www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

An expert panel told Oklahoma lawmakers on Thursday that the state should pause executions until fundamental problems in its death penalty system are addressed. “Whether you support capital punishment or oppose it, one thing is clear,” Judge Andy Lester testified. “From start to finish, the Oklahoma capital punishment system is fundamentally broken.”

Mr. Lester, a former federal magistrate judge and general counsel for state lawmakers, chaired an independent, bipartisan review commission that investigated capital punishment in Oklahoma after a series of botched executions led to a court-ordered moratorium in 2015.

In a nearly 300-page report, the commission unanimously recommended that the moratorium should stay in place until problems ranging from faulty evidence, false testimony, unreliable eye witnesses, withholding of exonerating evidence, and the misuse of jailhouse informants to failed execution protocols are addressed.

But none of the commission’s more than 40 recommendations has been followed, Mr. Lester told lawmakers, and the system remains badly broken, even as executions have resumed.

“It is so broken that we cannot know whether someone who has been condemned is actually deserving of the ultimate penalty the state can impose,” he said.

Read the full article >