April 21, 2024
In 2021, the State of Oklahoma’s judiciary approved a plan to execute 25 death-row inmates over the course of the ensuing three years, thereby reducing the population on death row by one-half.
Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, and Steven Harpe, the director of the Department of Corrections, want to slow down the pace of the upcoming executions, moving from a 60-day to a 90-day interval between each of them. They contend that doing so is necessary so that those who actually perform the executions can deal with the trauma, and to ensure that future executions will not be botched. “Adjusting the execution schedule,” they maintain, “will allow ODOC to carry out the court-ordered warrants within a timeframe that will minimize the disruptions to normal operations. This pace also protects our team’s mental health and allows time for them to process and recover between the scheduled executions.”
To amend the schedule, however, the state needs approval from the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, and at least one judge on the panel is not convinced.
Slate reports that, at the hearing on the state’s request, Judge Gary Lumpkin told Drummond and Harpe that the correctional officials involved in the execution process need to stop complaining, “suck it up,” and stick to the current execution schedule.
He wasn’t finished.
Lumpkin insisted that he would not buy into arguments about the traumatic effects of participating in executions, which he derisively labeled “sympathy stuff.” He chastised correctional officers, telling them they needed to “man up.” “If you can’t do the job,” he continued, “you should step aside and let somebody do it that can.” The judge made clear that he had run out of patience with the state’s hesitation about moving forward with executions. “We set a reasonable amount of time to start this out,” Lumpkin noted, “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.”
Fun fact: There is powerful empirical evidence that corrections officers engaged in executions suffer long-standing psychological and emotional harm from their involvement. Says Allen Alt, a longtime criminal justice and correctional professional, executions “leave behind a fresh trail of victims, largely hidden from public view. These are the correctional staff harmed by the execution process. I know from my own firsthand experiences, supervising executions as a state director of corrections, that the damage executions inflict on correctional staff is deep and far-ranging. Carrying out an execution can take a severe toll on the well-being of those involved.”