The Oklahoma Standard strikes again!
In yet another sad, dejecting and totally infuriating moment for a state that specializes in producing those types of moments, Oklahoma, once again, totally fucked up its latest effort to – irony alert – humanely execute another human being.
This time around, the not-so-innocent victim of this demented form of state-sanctioned torture was John Grant. In the late 90s, he brutally murdered an Oklahoma prison cafeteria worker, and according to a probably not so impartial judge and jury, deserved to die for the crime.
According to witnesses, the state administered the same three-dose lethal injection cocktail that's worked very poorly the last couple of times the state has killed someone. Not surprisingly, it worked very poorly again:
Geeze, for a state that takes so much pride in killing sometimes guilty murderers, you'd think we be better at the process. Then again, I guess a quick and relatively painless execution wasn't really what the state had in mind.
According to the DOC, the execution went off without a snap:
Yep, everything went according to plan and without complication. Vomit.
Since the execution, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt has stayed quiet, and so far, has failed to acknowledge the botched execution on social media. That's not very surprising. When he watched Squid Game, he probably thought it would be cool to be one of the VIPs, so I bet he was very satisfied with how the whole thing played out.
Obviously, Stitt's presumed opponent in the 2022 Gubernatorial election – State School Superintendent Joy Hofmeister – was appalled by the news, and quickly condoned it:
Just kidding. She hasn't issued a statement either.* I guess she was fine with how it all went down, too.
Anyway, like a lot of people, I have complex, nuanced thoughts on the death penalty.
Although I'm okay with the general concept of the death penalty as punishment for sick and heinous crimes, I'm anti-death penalty when it comes to how our incredibly flawed society and criminal justice system both determines and carries out the punishment. The risk of executing an innocent person is way too high, and as we were reminded yesterday, we can't even execute someone in a quick, painless, semi-humane way. Until issues like that are resolved, all future executions should be indefinitely postponed.
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Update: 3 hours after this published, Hofmeister left the following tweet:
