State officials reverse course, will end 5-year death penalty hiatus with return to lethal injection

Oklahoma will use the same drugs as in previous lethal injection executions when it resumes the death penalty, possibly — though unlikely — as soon as later this year, state officials said on Wednesday.
Gov. Kevin Stitt, along with Attorney General Mike Hunter and Department of Corrections Director Scott Crow, announced an updated death penalty protocol that puts the state one step closer to resuming executions.

More than five years have passed since the last execution, where convicted child killer Charles Warner, 47, was executed with the wrong drug. State officials have touted in recent years a switch to a new form of execution, nitrogen hypoxia, in which an inmate would have their oxygen replaced with an inert gas, rendering them unconscious and quickly dead.

The state hasn’t abandoned the nitrogen hypoxia process, Hunter said. But state law required DOC to use nitrogen hypoxia only if the requisite drugs were not available for lethal injection.

And they became available.

However Hunter offered no hints at where the drugs — midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride — had been found. State law exempts officials from having to disclose who is providing the lethal mixture, as officials have argued that identifying the source of the drugs could put those who sell the state the drugs at risk of public reprisal. Before he resigned as DOC director, Joe Allbaugh complained often of the difficulty of locating the drugs necessary for lethal injections, and once told reporters he had been on the phone with “seedy individuals” in the “back streets of the Indian subcontinent” in attempts to find the drugs.

Read more: https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/state-officials-reverse-course-will-end-5-year-death-penalty-hiatus-with-return-to-lethal-injection/