Entries tagged with “Wade Lay”

Policy Issues

Mental Illness

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May 29, 2024

Recent Decisions in Capital Cases Reflect Growing Understanding of How Serious Mental Illness Affects Behavior and Culpability

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the impact of men­tal ill­ness is keen­ly felt on death row: at least two in five peo­ple exe­cut­ed have a doc­u­ment­ed seri­ous men­tal ill­ness, and research sug­gests that many more death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers are undi­ag­nosed. A nation­al major­i­ty, 60% of Americans, oppos­es exe­cut­ing peo­ple with seri­ous men­tal ill­ness. In the past two decades, sci­ence and med­i­cine have con­tributed to a much bet­ter under­stand­ing of how seri­ous men­tal ill­ness, which refers to…

Policy Issues

Mental Illness

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May 13, 2024

Oklahoma Judge Finds Wade Lay Mentally Incompetent to Be Executed

Oklahoma pris­on­er Wade Lay (pic­tured) will not be exe­cut­ed on June 6, 2024 as sched­uled because a Pittsburg County judge has found him men­tal­ly incom­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed. ​“The avail­able evi­dence demon­strates, by a pre­pon­der­ance or greater weight of the evi­dence, that Mr. Lay is cur­rent­ly incom­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed accord­ing to the gov­ern­ing legal stan­dards,” Judge Tim Mills wrote. Defense and state experts who exam­ined Mr. Lay found that, due to his schiz­o­phre­nia, delu­sions, and para­noia, he…

Executions

Lethal Injection

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Feb 10, 2022

Oklahoma is Paying Execution Doctor $15,000 Plus Training Fees for Each Execution

Oklahoma is pay­ing $15,000 per exe­cu­tion, plus $1,000 for each day of train­ing, to an unnamed doc­tor to par­tic­i­pate in the process of putting state pris­on­ers to death. Under the agree­ment, the doc­tor stood to receive an esti­mat­ed $130,000 over the course of the 19-week-peri­od between October 28, 2021 and March 10, 2022 in which the state had sched­uled the exe­cu­tions of seven…

Facts & Research

Clemency

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Upcoming Executions

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Botched Executions

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Lethal Injection

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Dec 07, 2021

Oklahoma Executes Bigler Stouffer After Governor Rejects Board Recommendation for Clemency, Federal Courts Deny Stay

Oklahoma exe­cut­ed Bigler Jobe Stouffer II (pic­tured, at his clemen­cy hear­ing) on December 9, 2021, after Governor Kevin Stitt reject­ing a par­dons board rec­om­men­da­tion to com­mute his sen­tence to life with­out parole and the fed­er­al courts denied his appli­ca­tions to stay his exe­cu­tion. Stouffer, 79, was the old­est pris­on­er put to death in Oklahoma. It was the eleventh and final execution of…

Policy Issues

Mental Illness

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Clemency

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Upcoming Executions

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Dec 03, 2021

Wade Lay Execution to be Stayed, as Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board Denies Clemency to Two Other Death-Row Prisoners

The Oklahoma Attorney General​’s office has agreed to a stay of exe­cu­tion for a severe­ly men­tal­ly ill death-row pris­on­er who may be incom­pe­tent to be exe­cut­ed, while the state’s Pardon and Parole Board denied clemen­cy to two oth­er pris­on­ers set to be put to death in Oklahoma​’s five-month scheduled execution…

Policy Issues

Innocence

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Mental Illness

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Representation

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Clemency

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Upcoming Executions

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Sep 21, 2021

Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals Sets Seven Execution Dates

After more than six years with no exe­cu­tions and with a tri­al pend­ing on the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the state’s lethal injec­tion process, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has issued death war­rants set­ting sev­en exe­cu­tion dates in a less than five-month peri­od between late October 2021 and mid-March…