The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

I am not a religious person, my objection is not based on religion. I am not a bleeding heart that is just out to save lives. Nor do I think we are usually executed innocent people. I also acknowledge that society is better off without certain people in it and can agree that they deserve to die (including Clayton Lockett).

However:

- the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime,
- the death penalty is more expensive than life without parole (to preempt: No. We can't just get rid of appeals. Pesky Constitution guarantees rights),
- the death penalty will inevitably result in executing innocent people from time to time, and
- Oklahoma is not capable of competently executing its own citizens. In the last eighteen (18) months we have tried to execute three people. We have messed them all up. I'm tired of hearing about my state for negative thinks.

1) Lockett - botched the execution so bad he died of a heart attack after they aborted the execution. Tons of protocols were not followed leading up to, during, and while aborting the execution. Excuses were made and lawsuits followed. The cost of executing Lockett

Every major new source in the country, and most in the world carried the story. Forbes, The Atlantic, the Guardian in the UK ran expose follow ups on the botch. None were flattering. And to be clear, I don't care about Lockett's feelings - but by law We The People owe him a death free of cruel and unusual punishments, because we are better than he is.

We also owe his family a bunch of money. On top of the money spent on the investigation and press management. Which is on top of the legal fees and inmate costs we have already spent - about $5.5mil plus whatever the botched execution cost us. Call it $7mil to kill this guy, vs. about half of that to let him rot in jail.

2) Charles Warner - we successfully killed  him. But it turns out we used unauthorized drugs to do it. The Supreme Court was clear on what drugs we can use. There are arguments that the drug used is "essentially the same" as the one mandated by protocol and approved by the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, drug retailers and jailers don't get to make that call - and apparently no one else bothered to check. This is not good, and I heard a national news story on it over lunch (it was discovered by reviewing autopsy results).

3) Glossip - still not dead. Initially delayed because of some issues with the police interrogation (Cop: "listen murderer, you keep saying no one else was involved. We arrest Glossip and think he hired you. If you tell us that, we will give you a deal." Murderer: "Glossip totally hired me." Cop: Thank you! We will execute him instead of you." Murderer: "cool!"), but not enough to exonerate Glossip. So they picked on the drug protocol, which the Supreme Court OK'd and the execution of Warner proceeded (with a different drug). At the zero hour, after Glossip's third final meal, Fallin issues a Stay and claims she had no idea...

Somehow, no one caught the mistake the first time. But they caught it this time and decided to bring attention to it. On the one with national media attention and a certain follow up coming on the execution, they catch it. The governor didn't know about it. The Attorney General didn't know about it. The execution team apparently didn't know about it. Of course more national news each mess up along the way.
- - - - -

What are we gaining? We gain vengeance, we feel good for killing the bad guy. That's it. I don't think its worth it.

If we, as a state, decide that it is worth it - lets bring back the firing squad. Seriously, its effective, its quick, and its hard to mess up. No doubt we can find plenty of CLEET certified executioners to participate. The only downside is it sounds barbaric and its messy... but we are executing someone. Why should it be neat and clean? All it has to be is quick and painless.

Or hook an IV up and pump them full of morphine until their heart stops.

If we are going to keep the death penalty, in spite of the cost/benefit, can we please find a way to do it right? But I say we just give up.


Death row stats for Oklahoma:
http://www.ok.gov/doc/Offenders/Death_Row/

If you can picture Glossip sitting naked on the concrete floor of his completely empty cell (except for the shorts the DOC allowed him to keep) while the prison officials (with the smell of the new paint on the extensively-remodeled death chamber wafting under their nostrils) open the box of drugs just an hour or two before they were supposed to be used, and discover just then its the wrong order, you can better understand some of the points CF is making.

This is a cause I’ve been championing for about five years now.  Prior to reading “An Innocent Man”, John Grisham’s first non-fiction novel, I was an ardent supporter of the death penalty.

Not only is there little doubt we have put innocent people to death, the death penalty is an absolute rip off to the tax payers.

There is plenty of evidence that the average Life Without Parole sentence costs taxpayers about $1.2 million.  The average death penalty case costs three times that. 

Take our current death row census of 49 inmates and multiply that by $2.4 million per inmate.  That’s $117,000,000 in needless costs to taxpayers which could be better spent elsewhere.

An LWOP sentence prevents the worst of society from harming anyone on the outside ever again.  Just like the death penalty but at 1/3 the cost.

How is justice not just as equally-served by LWOP?

But- if we absolutely had to have the death penalty, carbon monoxide seems to be a pretty humane and painless death.  Personally, I’d rather we do away with it.  It’s obvious it is no deterrent.

I am a big fan of the death penalty - and in general, I couldn't give a rat's backside about the guy being executed having to sit in a cesspool for a week, let alone in clean shorts on a bare floor.  The fate and circumstances of death of the victims of anyone who earns that penalty trumps ANY consideration.  Beaten to death with a baseball bat.  There are numerous videos and baseball game highlights that show someone being hit - often fairly hard - ONE time with a bat.  Most times not even loss of consciousness ensues.  If hit repeatedly on the head, it might be fairly quick, but if there are body shots, then it will be very prolonged.  So to get hit enough times, hard enough to kill someone...well, that is particularly heinous!

They deserve anything and everything that could be done to them, even outside of the current interpretation of law.  But I agree with CF that Oklahoma should not be doing the executing since they bungle it way too often, and are probably executing way too many innocent people - not as bad as Baja Oklahoma (aka Texas) or Ohio - but too much!

Having said that, I have a huge issue with the Glossip episode that puts me solidly against death penalty in this circumstance.  There is NO remaining sanity or even a hint of justice in the system that would kill a guy for convincing/paying someone to commit the act of murder, but let the actual perpetrator have a dramatically reduced penalty - life without parole.  Just because he testified/implicated!!  That is a bizarre, psychotic, deranged view of justice that should have no place in any society.

I don't think it's worth it.




If we are going to do this, we should just go ahead and do to the murderer what he did to the victims.  That might be an actual deterrent - if one knew you were gonna get what you gave....

What is/are the best argument(s) for continuing executions in Oklahoma?

"That's the way we have always done it...."

I think, as a father, this speaks for itself.

Death row inmate Charles Frederick Warner was convicted Monday night of raping and murdering his live-in girlfriend's 11-month-old baby in 1997.

That's the thing.  It doesn't speak for itself.

Something like that deserves horrible punishment.

It doesn't give an argument to continue the death penalty in Oklahoma. 

"Oklahoma should continue capital punishment because..."

You are correct.   Unfortunately, unlike Mary Fallin, I don't want to reword the Constitution (specifically the 8th Amendment) for my own personal beliefs.    Instead, the best I can do is make sure that the criminal will never again see the light of day, and can for the rest of his short life only look forward to meeting his maker.

I can understand you don't have the stomach for it.   It's a good thing for Oklahoma that there are people in this state that do.

It's not that I don't have the stomach for it. 

Any time I hear someone had been put to death the night before I go about my business without much thought to it.

It's not something I spend much time on.   My alarm clock goes off, I get up, I go about my day, my day ends.  The person's death doesn't change that for me.

"Oklahoma should continue capital punishment because..."

Is it "it's what we've always done"?  Old testament?  Is there a large sum of money going to someone who continues to lobby for it?

"Because it's not legal for me to nail his testicles to a stump and set him on fire."

Strangely, what I often think should be done, isn't.    I applaud people like Gary Plauche and Joe Horn.   They found shortcuts to the justice system.

So you lobby to make that legal.  You'll have some hurdles.

It still doesn't explain why Oklahoma should continue capital punishment.

Do to him what he did.  Using tools appropriately scaled in size.

Here is what the hospital observed on the baby;

Her skull, jaw and ribs were fractured. Her liver was lacerated, her spleen and lungs were bruised.


That is the list to follow/fulfill when executing him.  He got off way too easy.

My dad back in the 90s was the Chief Psychologist at McAlester and he had a second office right in the death row building. Part of his job was to sign off that the condemned was sane enough to execute.  Another was to make sure that the condemned's belongings were given after the execution to whoever they chose. Belongings were things like a toothbrush and shoes. Finally, his job was to try to find someone to accept the body, but rarely found anyone.

According to my dad most of the men on death row were at least mildly mentally impaired with IQs below 80 and acted like children. Most were black. All had been abused as children. Most had little education and were poor. In almost all cases it was not the heinousness of the crime that decided if a convicted man got a life sentence vs death, it was his color, social status and ability to defend himself mentally. He said that many were actual monsters and psychopaths that deserved death, but a lot of them also were just an easy target for cops to blame a crime on and probably not even capable of the crime they were convicted of. 

So far, the passionate arguments FOR the death penalty can be reduced to one word: vengeance.

Please expand that concept into a pragmatic argument. I'm not being obtuse, is it just that it makes you feel good to know we killed a bad person? Do you disagree with any of the assertions about deterrence or cost?

To be frank, most of it just seems like tough guy talk. "He deserves worse." "Staple his balls." "You don't have the stomach for it."  I'm not trying to garner flippant clichés, I want pragmatic, logical, articulate discussion on the topic.

How are we better off with the death penalty?

An attorney representing several Oklahoma death row inmates says the state cannot be trusted to tell the truth about its executions.
Dale Baich is representing inmates who are challenging Oklahoma's lethal injection protocols. On Thursday, The Oklahoman newspaper reported that the state used a drug not included in its protocols — potassium acetate — when it executed inmate Charles Warner in January.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/10/08/us/ap-us-oklahoma-executions.html

The Tulsa World reported today that the vial used to execute the last inmate was labeled POTASSIUM CHLORIDE. The notes from the execution say the potassium chloride was administered. The DOC confirmed in statements that it administered potassium chloride - as the protocol instructs.

However, the actual vials of drugs are logged as potassium acetate. The autopsy reveals that he was actually injected with potassium acetate.

Gross incompetence or willful deceit?

Either way.... not good.

So...  A person's crimes are so heinous that you no longer ever trust them in society.

But, you trust them socialize and be around other people.  (Some of whom have admitted mental issues.)  With the outcome being somehow better than isolating them and putting them to death?

I guess I just don't see the downside of the death penalty.   Or rather, I don't see why we would be better off without it.

Not much socializing being done with prisoners in for life. And life in prison is cheaper. And fixable if a mistake was made. How exactly is putting people to death better, other than to satisfy our bloodlust for criminals.

But they will be able to socialize with other prisoners that will be released.   Some of these people (the Manson's, Bundy's, etc.) probably should not be allowed to espouse their gospel to people who have a deviant background and will soon be reintegrating to the public.


If you count only the incarceration part of a healthy inmate, it isn't that much cheaper.   Plus, that doesn't include the medical costs as the prisoner ages and needs advanced and end of life care.

A 2014 study out of Kansas reported that a death row prisoner costs $49,380 to house per year, whereas a general population prisoner costs $24,690.

versus

The average cost of housing federal inmates nearly doubles for aging prisoners. While the cost of a prisoner in the general population is $27,549 a year, the price tag associated with an older inmate who needs more medical care, including expensive prescription drugs and treatments, is $58,956, Justice Department officials say.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/05/02/the-painful-price-of-aging-in-prison/

I understand that it may be some flaws in the system, but it is the best system we have.  From my experience, (albeit limited) it is the best system out there.  


Again, who does it benefit from keeping these people alive?   Some weird sense of pity that they should be locked in a box for the rest of their lives versus humanely executed?

How RWRE of you.  Might even show some Murdochian tendencies.

All of Big Mac is a Super Max prison, all prisoners are locked down 23 hours a day and are marched outside in chains for that one single "other" hour a day. The prison workers are from a medium security prison next door. McAlester is no Shawshank. My dad talked about units at the prison for problem prisoners where the lifers would toss feces and urine at the guards just for the hell of it. The prison even has cell within a cell units like from Silence of the Lambs.

Then there is death row which is kind of a ultra-super max prison within the prison. It's a separate unit and building, buried underground with windows in the ceiling. The inmates already have no contact with other prisoners. He said death row was always completely silent, very different from the larger prison.

I’ve never understood that about endless appeals to keep from being put to death.  I’d rather be dead than live like that.

This has always been a rather tough subject for me. I lost my younger sister when I was 10 years of age to a babysitter high on drugs. It took me years to come to grips with losing a sister, but I moved on along with my two brothers and another sister. As the oldest I always felt it was my duty to protect, and the anger I felt towards the woman and of course myself lasted a very long time. I had always thought she should have died in the exact same manner that my sister did. Now this woman is out of prison after 31 years and married with grown step children. I am older now, all grey now and I hope much wiser, but my opinion has not changed. That one moment in time changed my life and the lives of everyone in my family. My father drank himself to death by the age of 45 due to this which meant the remaining 4 of us were left to a mother struggling to provide and deal with the heart ache alone. Having this woman put to death would not have changed these facts, they were a result of her actions, her death would have meant nothing to us.

Revenge, eye for an eye, doesn't change what happened, it just changes who you are down deep. I don't think I would have had any satisfaction looking back.

With that said I still believe in a death penalty. I believe families and society has the right to put to death those that are guilty of crimes that warrant such a punishment. I do not believe it reduces crime and I don't think that's what its intent is anymore. It may could be if the penalty was carried out in a much swifter fashion, but that would never happen with appeals, and of course putting to death innocent people.

That decision isn't left to families or society.  It's left to a few people with power.

If it was left to society, capital punishment voting would be best held during other elections.  It'd flood the polls.

It is left up to society.   Much like medical marijuana.   If you can get enough support, you can ban/legalize it. 

I don't believe I said it was the decision of the family or society, I said they have the right to pursue that punishment. Both the family and society can supply pressure to put the death penalty on the table.

That pressure hasn't worked with liquor laws in Oklahoma. Or education funding. Or healthcare (if its related to the ACA). Or much of anything as long as the state legislature and the governorship are controlled by idealogues. It is indeed a few people with power. 

We don't have to abolish it completely. Death by Incarceration is still an option.

Good one!  I could get behind that!  ;D

And here I thought the Grand Jury was critical of the Moss Jail for just that.

Don't forget...I am also a Lifetime Member of the NRA!!   And I will never resign my membership, unlike that candy-a$$ flaming liberal George H W Bush did just due to a little uncomfortable politicizing.

How's that for politically incorrect?  Did I touch all the bases??

I guess at least of little of the early childhood Old Testament teaching "took"... eye for eye, etc.

Sorry to hear that....


We have a close family friend whose daughter was raped and murdered when she was very young - about 18 if memory is right.  The guy got prison WITH possibility of parole.  That was sick and twisted.  Now, she and all her friends have to go around every few years collecting signatures on a petition to present to the state parole board to prevent his release.   And she has to live through it all over again when testifying to the board.  And of course, there is no remorse.  In fact, he has made threats to the family about when/if he does get out.  Grotesque travesty of justice.

Anti-death penalty here mainly because a lot of innocent people (especially minorities) have been convicted of crimes and found to be guilty years later. Time spent in prison when innocent is awful enough, but once you have put someone to death, there's no turning back or reimbursing that person. I just personally don't believe that any of us have the right to take someone else's life and when we do, it makes us no better then the criminal who does it. (Yes, a bleeding heart here.)

Here is the biggest problem I have with giving up the death penalty.  Justice should be accurate, precise, and very much faster than it is today, though.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/08/25/a-girl-was-drugged-with-meth-sexually-assaulted-and-killed-one-of-the-suspects-her-mother/

What, so they can get 24 hour per day protection from the general population, unlimited appeals, and cost taxpayers 3-10 times what LWOP would cost?

In this case, it is much more likely to be able to ensure they were not putting the wrong people to sleep, but you have three people involved here.  Why waste millions on them over 20 years to finally allow “justice” to be done.

Putting these three D-bags on death row would not be any deterrent to keeping anyone else from committing murder, it has zero deterrent value.  Other people being put on death row apparently didn’t become any sort of deterrent to these three low-lives.

Does anyone even know what justice means anymore?

I was against the death penalty until Timothy McVeigh.

I changed on the spot. He murdered friends of mine and innocent children in a day care.

I get that - and the fact that is costs so much to administer is the main reason I am for life/no parole now.   But that is particularly unsatisfying to my desire for revenge on people who do things to kids!!   Adults doing things to adults happens way to often, and sadly it involves people who do have choices on whether to stay or go.   Kids don't have that option - they just have to sit there and take it for the most part.  This was not the first event in that baby's life - you can tell by the maggot who was her DNA donor that this had gone on for a while, 'cause "Mommy Dearest" has been that way for a while.

Pat Benatar was right...Hell is for children.

Makes me wanna puke and invoke Heavenly Wrath upon people who hurt kids!!  And I would volunteer to flip the switch or pull the trigger with no qualms.

You did happen to cite a really horrible recent case.  That is one of those you just wish the neighbors had gotten to the maggots before the cops did, but again, that is not what we call justice.

All it takes is one Criminology class to know the death penalty is immoral, inefficient and unjust. I'm surprised it still exist when it's a clear violation of the 8th Amendment.

Because we don't truly understand what justice is.   I could detail what justice would be for this case.  And it would be slow, inexorable, and exquisite in it's execution for those people.


These types of crime are where I not only agree with Sharia law - the same as the Old Law which Okies are so all about - but would take it several steps further.  Sometimes Sharia Law is way too liberal and 'soft'.