New DPIC Podcast: DPIC’s New Report on the Racial History of Oklahoma’s Death Penalty

In the October 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring dis­cuss DPIC’s 2022 report Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty. The report looks at the racial his­to­ry, present, and future of Oklahoma’s death penal­ty. Ndulue and Herring explore Oklahoma’s unique his­to­ry, the key find­ings of the report, its rela­tion­ship to DPIC’s ear­li­er work, and lessons from Oklahoma’s expe­ri­ence that are applicable nationwide.

Herring, the lead author of Deeply Rooted, explains how it was inspired by DPIC’s 2020 report Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty, authored by Ndulue. The report exam­ines how ​“Oklahoma’s death penal­ty sys­tem is, in many ways, a prod­uct of its long and trou­bled his­to­ry with com­mu­ni­ties of col­or.” Herring notes that the effect the race of vic­tim has on death sen­tenc­ing is one exam­ple of the per­sis­tence of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in Oklahoma: ​“We found in our report that, in cas­es with vic­tims of a sin­gle race, there were 19 Black defen­dants who had been exe­cut­ed for the mur­der of white vic­tims, while only two white defen­dants had been exe­cut­ed for the mur­der of Black vic­tims.… [T]his trend sug­gests a pref­er­en­tial valu­ing of white vic­tims that’s real­ly rem­i­nis­cent of what we see when review­ing cas­es from the hey­days of lynchings.”

The deci­sion to high­light Oklahoma was inten­tion­al giv­en recent devel­op­ments in the state. In July 2022, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals sched­uled 25 exe­cu­tions between August 2022 and December 2024. Oklahoma has also been the sub­ject of mul­ti­ple inves­ti­ga­tions, all of which point to sys­temic prob­lems with the state’s use of the death penal­ty. Ndulue explains that ​“it seems like Oklahoma is at a cross­roads. It can con­tin­ue to be the nation­al out­lier that it has been … or it can take a more delib­er­a­tive look. So, we thought that it was impor­tant to actu­al­ly shine that spot­light on Oklahoma.” 

Many issues with Oklahoma’s death penal­ty sys­tem mir­ror nation­al prob­lems, includ­ing racial dis­par­i­ties in death sen­tenc­ing and geo­graph­ic arbi­trari­ness. Oklahoma County and Tulsa County are death penal­ty out­liers in the state; no coun­ty out­side of Texas has exe­cut­ed more peo­ple than these juris­dic­tions. The pro­lif­ic use of the death penal­ty in these coun­ties has result­ed in half of death sen­tences in these coun­ties being reversed or result­ing in com­mu­ta­tion or exon­er­a­tion. Recognizing Oklahoma and Tulsa coun­ties’ roles in death penal­ty trends in the state is one of Herring’s key take­aways from the report. 

The report also explores Oklahoma’s par­tic­u­lar his­to­ry with Native Americans and the death penal­ty. After the Trail of Tears brought a large Native American pop­u­la­tion to Oklahoma, most of the state’s 19^th Century exe­cu­tions were of Native Americans. ​“Even today, Native Americans are unique­ly affect­ed by the death penal­ty in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has imposed the most death sen­tences on Native American defen­dants in the states, and is also respon­si­ble for a third of all exe­cu­tions of Native Americans since 1976,” Herring explains.

Ndulue sug­gests the myr­i­ad of prob­lems with Oklahoma’s death penal­ty chal­lenge the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the death penal­ty: ​“issues around the num­ber of exon­er­a­tions that have hap­pened, the dis­par­i­ties in the race of those exon­er­at­ed and the rea­sons for exon­er­a­tion, and just the gen­er­al ques­tions about how many cas­es have unread mud­died pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, real­ly put into ques­tion the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the death penal­ty and its admin­is­tra­tion in these coun­ties and in Oklahoma in gen­er­al.” Ndulue says oth­er states eval­u­at­ing their death penal­ty sys­tem can learn from Oklahoma by assess­ing ​“what the ties are to racial bias in the legal sys­tem, what poten­tial reme­dies are, and whether the use of the death penal­ty in out­lier coun­ties is rais­ing con­cerns about the over­all use of the death penal­ty in that state.”