Supreme Court gives last-minute death penalty reprieve to Oklahoma trio

A death row prisoner was been granted a stay of execution on Thursday, the day before he was due to be killed by lethal injection. Richard Glossip and two other prisoners in Oklahoma were given temporary reprieves by the United States Supreme Court amid concerns about a drug used in executions. Midazolam is a sedative administered prior to a paralytic that prevents a prisoner flailing around, while a third drug stops their heart.

We should not use these human beings as lab rats for Oklahoma’s attempt to find a constitutionally acceptable death penalty protocol, and that’s why we’re suing.

Richard Glossip’s attorney, Mark Kenricksen,

ast year, there was an outcry when problems administering the lethal cocktail led to a prisoner, Clayton Lockett, writhing in pain for 43 minutes before he died of a heart attack. The Glossip case is highly unusual, because he is the only one of the 49 prisoners on Oklahoma’s death row who did not actually kill anyone. He was accused of paying an accomplice to murder the owner of a motel where they worked. The actual killer, Justin Sneed, was offered a plea deal. He escaped the death penalty in return for testifying against Glossip, and is serving a life sentence with no hope of parole.

If it got to the point where we didn’t have the technological advancements to have lethal injections, I would support hanging or beheading or whatever it would take to make sure that person, in the end, meets his justice.

State Senator Ralph Storey

Richard Glossip Americas