Calling Oklahoma “the notorious home of ‘Hang ’Em High’ executions,” conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin (pictured) has urged the state to adopt sytemic reforms to address its “wretched record on wrongful convictions.” Malkin says that despite 35 exonerations in the last 25 years—including 7 death-row exonerations—and a “reign of prosecutorial terror and forensic error by the late Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy and rogue Oklahoma City police department crime lab analyst Joyce Gilchrist,” the state has failed to create a forensic science commission to investigates errors and professional misconduct by crime labs and forensic analysts and “not a single Oklahoma district attorney’s office has established an official mechanism to review tainted convictions.” In an August 8, 2018 commentary for the Creators Syndicate, Malkin warns that “‘Frontier justice’ costs too many citizens of all races, creeds, and backgrounds their freedom and their lives.” She says, “In the old days of the Wild West, vigilantes worked outside the judicial system to punish rivals regardless of their guilt or innocence. Today, outlaws operate inside the bureaucracy to secure criminal convictions at all costs.” In her commentary, Malkin highlights the death-penalty exonerations of Curtis McCarty and Robert Lee Miller, Jr., and current appeals attempting to free death-row prisoner Julius Jones. Notorious former Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy withheld evidence from McCarty’s attorneys, and crime lab analyst Joyce Gilchrist, implicated in at least 11 wrongful convictions, falsified and destroyed forensic evidence. Gilchrist’s false testimony in the case included claims that hairs found at the crime scene matched McCarty’s and that his blood type matched the semen found on the victim’s body. They didn’t. Miller’s case was also tainted by bad forensics and a coerced false confession. Malkin points to the case of Julius Jones—recently featured in the documentary series The Last Defense—as emblematic of some of the ongoing problems in Oklahoma cases. Jones, who is seeking appellate review of evidence that supports his innocence claims, filed motions for discovery and a request for an evidentiary hearing in December 2017. Under instructions of a court clerk, they placed supporting evidence in a sealed envelope labeled “protected material.” That crucial evidence was not presented to the court and disappeared for six months until Jones’ investigator was able to uncover them herself in the clerk’s office. The court initially rejected Jones’ appeal, but will now reconsider, due to the clerk’s “mismanagement of the exhibits.” Another Oklahoma County death-row prisoner, Richard Glossip, was convicted and sentenced to death based on solely on the testimony of a 19-year-old who confessed to the murder and then implicated Glossip in exchange for a reduced sentence. No physical evidence linked Glossip to the crime, the teen gave investigators multiple contradictory descriptions of the murder before adopting police suggestions that Glossip was involved, and two witnesses who have come forward with evidence of Glossip’s innocence say they have been subjected to retaliation and intimidation by prosecutors. Oklahoma, Malkin says, “stands out for its decades of trampling due process, subverting public disclosure, perpetuating forensic junk science, manufacturing false accusations and enabling official misconduct.” She says that, given the state’s record and its recent “chilling” history of “horrific botched executions,” permitting the state to resume executions poses a “human rights crisis.” Silence in the face of that crisis, she says, “is complicity.”

The Florida Supreme Court has halted the execution of Jose Antonio Jimenez (pictured), scheduled for August 14, 2018. The unanimous one-page order issued by the court on August 10 did not explain the reasons the justices granted the stay. However, Jimenez’s motion for a stay referenced 80 pages of police records that, Jimenez’s lawyer said, had not previously been provided to the defense. Those records—which were part of 1,000 pages of documents turned over to the defense two weeks before the scheduled execution—included hand-written notes by the investigating detectives that appear to contradict pre-trial testimony police had given in the case. The motion, filed by Jimenez's lawyer, Marty McClain, said the “previously unseen notes" contained "surprising and downright shocking information” that the lead detective (identified as a Detective Ojeda) and a second police investigator (identified as Detective Diecidue) gave “false and/or misleading” testimony “in order to facilitate Mr. Jimenez’s conviction” when they were deposed by Jimenez’s trial counsel. McClain told The News Service of Florida, “[t]he new documents show dishonest cops,” which has added significance in this case because Jimenez has maintained his innocence “and the conviction is premised on Ojeda telling the truth.” Jimenez also sought a stay pending the United States Supreme Court’s disposition of a Missouri death-penalty case, Bucklew v. Precythe, that could clarify the standard for determining when a state’s lethal-injection protocol is unconstitutional. Jimenez has argued that Florida’s use of the drug etomidate as a sedative during three-drug executions creates an unconstitutional risk of a torturous death. During Florida’s last execution, Eric Branch screamed when the execution drugs were administered. McClain said that expert testimony in another case had indicated that a quarter of executions using etomidate could result in prisoners screaming in pain. “Is it OK to have your condemned people scream 25 percent of the time?,” McClain said. “And what about the torture to those who are next, who know that 25 percent of the time people are in pain and screaming? Are they going to be the one?” The Florida Supreme Court has set a schedule for briefs to be filed in the case, with briefing concluding on August 28. The court will then decide whether it will hear oral argument in the case.

Less than a month after a Nevada court halted the execution of Scott Dozier in response to a lawsuit filed by generic-drug manufacturer Alvogen, another drug company has sued Nebraska, seeking to block the use of its medicines in an upcoming execution. The German-based pharmaceutical company Fresenius Kabi filed suit in Nebraska federal court on August 8, 2018 alleging that Nebraska intended to execute Carey Dean Moore on August 14 using drugs manufactured by the company that had been obtained "through improper or illegal means." The lawsuit said the company's distribution contracts with authorized wholesalers and distributors prohibit sales to departments of corrections, and it alleges that Nebraska obtained the drugs "in contradiction and contravention of the distribution contracts," most likely from an unauthorized supplier. Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson said the state's execution drugs “were purchased lawfully and pursuant to the State of Nebraska’s duty to carry out lawful capital sentences,” an assertion that cannot be verified because of the state's secrecy practices. The state has refused to identify the source of the drugs it intends to use in Moore's execution, but two of the drugs—the paralytic, cisatracurium, and potassium chloride, the drug used to stop the heart—are manufactured by Fresenius Kabi and only that company makes vials of potassium chloride in the size obtained by the state. 

Nebraska is one of fifteen death-penalty states that have joined in an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief in the Nevada Supreme Court on August 6, 2018 urging the court to overturn a restraining order that has prevented Nevada from carrying out executions using supplies of the drug, midazolam, produced by the pharmaceutical company Alvogen. Alvogen's suit alleges that Nevada had obtained the midazolam "by subterfuge" and “intentionally defrauded Alvogen’s distributor” by concealing its intention to use Alvogen’s medicine in Dozier‘s execution. The company's pleadings accused Nevada of “implicitly ma[king] the false representation that they had legitimate therapeutic rationale” for buying the drug and covering up its true intention by having the drug shipped to a state office several hundred miles away from the prison. In addition to issuing the restraining order, the Nevada trial court stayed Dozier's July 2018 execution. Like Fresenius Kabi, Alvogen alleges that the use of its products in executions would damage its corporate reputation and adversely affect investor and customer relations. The amicus brief was filed by 15 of the 30 other states that authorize capital punishment, all with Republican attorneys general—Arkansas, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. The nine death-penalty states with Democratic attorneys general did not join the pleading, nor did six other states with Republican attorneys general. The pleading claims, without providing any factual support, that Alvogen's lawsuit is the "latest front in the guerilla warfare being waged by anti-death-penalty activists and criminal defense attorneys to stop lawful executions." The state officials warn that, if the Nevada Supreme Court allows Dozier's stay of execution to stand, activists will "flood" the courts in other states with similar "meritless" challenges. In 2017, the drug distributor McKesson sued Arkansas to prevent the state from using a supply of the paralytic drug, vecuronium bromide, in executions, alleging that the state had deliberately misled the company to believe that the drug would be used for legitimate medical purposes. The brief asserts that "Alvogen’s meritless claims mirror those rejected by the Arkansas Supreme Court" in McKesson case. However, court records reflect that the Arkansas Supreme Court actually returned McKesson's case to the trial court for further evidentiary development and the case remained active until the expiration of the state's supply of vecuronium bromide rendered the case moot in the Spring of 2018.

Two servicemen—one a former airman on the U.S. military death row, another a decorated Vietnam veteran sentenced to death in Pennsylvania—have won relief from their capital convictions or death sentences. On August 1, 2018, the La Crosse Tribune reported that an Air Force court martial jury had imposed a life sentence on senior airman Andrew Witt (pictured, left) following a three-week capital resentencing trial. The verdict in Witt's case came two years after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces—the nation's highest military court—overturned his 2005 death sentence for murdering a fellow airman and his wife. On July 25, 2018, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvana granted death-row prisoner Robert Fisher (pictured, right) a new trial and sentencing hearing in the July 1980 murder of his girlfriend. If that case continues to a new capital trial, it will be Fisher's third trial and fourth capital sentencing hearing. Witt's conviction in 2005 marked the first time a U.S. airman had been sentenced to death since 1992. His death sentence was first overturned in August 2013, when the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals—an intermediate appellate court—ruled that his lawyers had been ineffective in failing to present mitigating evidence that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury four months before the murders. The military appealed that decision, and Witt's death sentence was reinstated by the Air Force Court of Appeals in July 2014. However, the Armed Forces appeals court agreed that Witt's penalty-phase lawyers had been ineffective and remanded the case for a new sentencing hearing. With Witt's resentencing, four prisoners remain on the U.S. military death row. Twelve other servicemen have had their military death sentences reduced to life in prison. In Fisher's case, the federal court granted a new trial after the trial judge misinstructed the jury on the meaning of "reasonable doubt." It reversed Fisher's death sentence because the prosecution had sought the death penalty based on an aggravating circumstance that did not exist at the time of his first trial and because his lawyer failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence related to Fisher's military service in Vietnam, where he received a Purple Heart from President Lyndon Johnson (also pictured). This was not the first time that one of Fisher’s trials was problematic. At his first trial, Fisher’s lawyer had him tell the jury about his military service and his Purple Heart medal but failed to investigate any problems related to Fisher’s military service. Additionally, no mental health expert testified at Fisher’s sentencing to explain his brain damage, the psychological after-effects of intense combat, or his other serious mental health impairments, drug usage, and adjustment difficulties after returning from Vietnam. His defense lawyer also failed to rebut the prosecution’s portrayal of Fisher as simply a bad soldier.