Oklahoma Carries Out First of 11 Executions Scheduled for 2023

Oklahoma has car­ried out the first of eleven exe­cu­tions sched­uled for 2023, admin­is­ter­ing a lethal injec­tion to death-row pris­on­er Scott Eizember on January 12. The exe­cu­tion was a con­tin­u­a­tion of a 29-month exe­cu­tion spree between August 2022 and December 2024 in which the state intends to put 25 pris­on­ers to death — 58% of the state’s death row.

It was the third exe­cu­tion of 2023, fol­low­ing the January 3 exe­cu­tion of Amber McLaughlin in Missouri and the January 10 exe­cu­tion of Robert Fratta in Texas. Oklahoma has car­ried out 119 exe­cu­tions since the 1970s, sec­ond only to Texas.

Oklahoma has sched­uled one exe­cu­tion each month in 2023, with the excep­tion of September. The 11 men sched­uled for exe­cu­tion include sev­er­al who have severe men­tal ill­ness, intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, and/​or brain dam­age. The next exe­cu­tion, that of Richard Glossip, is sched­uled for February 16.

Stan Perry, who led an inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion into Glossip’s case com­mis­sioned by a bipar­ti­san group of state leg­is­la­tors, said in June 2022 that “[n]o rea­son­able jury, hear­ing the com­plete record and the uncov­ered facts detailed in [the inves­ti­ga­tors’] report, would have con­vict­ed Richard Glossip of cap­i­tal mur­der.” The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals in December denied Glossip an evi­den­tiary hear­ing to present the new evi­dence of his innocence.

In the days lead­ing up to Eizember’s exe­cu­tion, his case became the sub­ject of lit­i­ga­tion relat­ed to a deci­sion by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (ODOC) to bar his spir­i­tu­al advi­sor, Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood, from the death cham­ber. ODOC claimed at the time that Hood pre­sent­ed a secu­ri­ty threat because he had pre­vi­ous­ly been arrest­ed for an act of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence at an anti-death penal­ty protest. Hood’s con­vic­tion was lat­er expunged. Hood filed suit, not­ing that he had passed the back­ground check nec­es­sary to vis­it pris­on­ers and serve as their spiritual advisor.

Hood told Public Radio Tulsa, ​“Their argu­ment of course is that I’m an activist and I have a his­to­ry of social jus­tice work. My argu­ment is very much that social jus­tice work is what makes me a fol­low­er of Jesus. Jesus was an activist.”

Under an agree­ment reached on January 11, Hood was allowed to accom­pa­ny Eizember in the execution chamber.

The unprece­dent­ed sched­ule of 25 exe­cu­tions was request­ed by for­mer Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor, who lost the Republican pri­ma­ry to Gentner Drummond in June 2022. O’Connor and Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater came under scruti­ny for attempt­ing to under­mine the clemen­cy process in the case of Julius Jones in 2021, who had pre­sent­ed evi­dence of inno­cence to the Oklahoma Board of Pardons. Twelve of the pris­on­ers sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed, includ­ing Glossip, were pros­e­cut­ed in Oklahoma County.

In November 2022, Oklahoma County vot­ers elect­ed Vicki Behenna, the for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Oklahoma Innocence Project, to suc­ceed Prater. Though Behenna has not ruled out pur­suit of the death penal­ty, her elec­tion rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant shift in Oklahoma County, which has imposed more death sen­tences in the past fifty years than any oth­er coun­ty its size (pop­u­la­tion between 750,000 – 1,000,000), imposed more death sen­tences in the past decade than any oth­er coun­ty with a pop­u­la­tion under 2.25 mil­lion peo­ple, and car­ried out more than 2.5 times the num­ber of exe­cu­tions of any oth­er com­pa­ra­bly sized coun­ty. The coun­ty also has had more death-row pris­on­ers exon­er­at­ed than all but three oth­er U.S. counties