An appeals court judge in Oklahoma reportedly told state execution schedulers to “suck it up” and “man up” after they requested a 90-day period between executions in an effort to combat trauma, accommodate staff shortages and reduce the potential for errors.
The state plans to execute 25 prisoners whose appeals are exhausted in less than three years, about 58% of the inmates on death row in Oklahoma. At a hearing last Tuesday, Judge Gary Lumpkin responded to a request to slow Oklahoma’s execution schedule.
The state had requested the gap between executions to be increased from 60 to 90 days to reduce strain on department of corrections staff. In a letter to the court filed in January, Steve Harpe, executive director of the department, said the existing schedule was “too onerous and not sustainable”.
In the motion, co-signed by the Oklahoma attorney general’s office, Harpe said the department had carried out 11 executions since 2021, “exhibiting superior work ethic, professionalism, and concern for the victim’s families throughout”.
Under an order that year, Oklahoma ordered that the execution of death row inmates be divided into phases. Phase one and two scheduled executions four weeks apart, but that was increased to six weeks after a January 2023 request by Oklahoma’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, to slow the pace.
That came after a series of what were described as “botched” executions, including one man who writhed and moaned during his execution for 43 minutes before dying of a heart attack; a man who said his “body was on fire” after being injected with drugs; and a third who convulsed and vomited after executioners used midazolam, a Valium-type sedative, as the first of a three-drug cocktail.
In the letter, Drummond cited concerns of another botched execution if the state didn’t slow down. Last year, Drummond appealed for clemency on behalf of Richard Glossip, who has already come within hours of being put to death three times since he was convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese.
In that case, Drummond acknowledged the extraordinary circumstances of his position. “I’m not aware of any time in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency,” he said.
With the initiation of phase three, Harpe wrote of a “tremendous burden” that executions placed on the staff who perform them. There are eight teams, who are required to perform mock executions within earshot of staff offices, visiting rooms and prisoner’s cells ahead of an execution date; and on the day of the execution Oklahoma’s state penitentiary “goes into a near complete lockdown until the execution is completed”.
Judge Lumpkin, according to the the non-profit Oklahoma paper the Frontier, was unimpressed by arguments for spacing out the execution schedule, describing them as “sympathy stuff”.
“Man up. If you can’t do the job, you step aside and let somebody do it that can,” Lumpkin said at the hearing. “We set a reasonable amount of time to start this out, and y’all keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it.
“Who’s to say next month you won’t come in and say I need 120 days? This stuff needs to stop, and people need to suck it up, realize they have a hard job to do, and get it done in a timely, proficient, professional way,” Lumpkin added.
He said 30 days was more than enough time between executions, according to the Frontier.
Lumpkin’s court staff denied a request for comment and a transcript of the hearing.
The hearing related to the scheduling of six death row inmates: Richard Norman Rojem, convicted of raping and murdering his seven-year-old stepdaughter in 1984; Emmanuel Littlejohn, convicted for his part in a fatal robbery; Kevin Underwood, convicted in the murder of 10-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin; Wendell Grissom, convicted of murder in a 2005 robbery of Amber Matthews; Tremane Wood, convicted for his part in a fatal robbery; and Kendrick Simpson, convicted in 2007 of murdering Glen Palmer and Anthony Jones after a fight at a nightclub.
At the hearing Drummond cited interviews with corrections staff who said they barely had time for a break between executions before they had to start practicing for the next. Citing botched executions in 2015 and in 2014, he said that as the chief law officer he did not want to oversee a failed execution.
“I am present with every execution. I look the defendant in the eye as he dies,” Drummond said. “I look the men and women that administer those lethal injections in the eye after they’ve administered it, and I have sympathy for the strain on them.”
