OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – The Oklahoma Attorney General is asking the Court of Criminal Appeals to set execution dates for 25 death row inmates.
Attorney General John O’Connor filed the motion Friday. He began the request by asking that the state move forward in setting an execution date for death row inmate Richard Fairchild.
Fairchild, who lived in Del City, was sentenced to die for the brutal 1993 beating death of his girlfriend’s three-year-old son, Adam Broomhall.
“Fairchild has exhausted his appeals, and the State has prevailed in his federal lawsuit challenging the execution protocol. There are now no impediments to Fairchild’s execution and a date should be set,” O’Connor said in the request.
Western District of Oklahoma Court Judge Stephen Friot ruled on Monday that the state’s three-drug lethal injection method is constitutional. The decision enabled the state to request execution dates for the more than two dozen death row inmates who were plaintiffs in the case, according to the Associated Press.
“There are no longer any legal impediments to the execution of Fairchild and it is time for the stay to be lifted,” O’Connor said in the request. “
The attorney general also requested execution dates be set for 24 other death row inmates.
O’Connor’s requests in the motion – made after he consulted with the Department of Corrections and Pardon and Parole Board – include the following:
- Each execution be carried out on a Thursday.
- Executions be no less than four weeks apart.
- That the first of the 25 executions be carried out no less than 35 days from the date that the court sets execution dates.
- That the first execution date be set no earlier than Aug. 25, 2022.
- That the Pardon and Parole Board have one clemency hearing per month during the board’s regularly scheduled monthly meeting.
O’Connor concluded his requests by suggesting that the 25 death row inmates be executed in the following order:
- James A. Coddington
- Richard E. Glossip
- Benjamin Robert Cole
- Richard Fairchild
- John Fitzgerald Hanson
- Scott James Eizember
- Jermaine Cannon
- Anthony Sanchez
- Phillip Dean Hancock
- James Ryder
- Michael Dewayne Smith
- Wade Greely Lay
- Richard Rojem
- Emmanuel Littlejohn
- Kevin Underwood
- Wendell Grissom
- Tremane Wood
- Kendrick A. Simpson
- Raymond E. Johnson
- Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez
- James D. Pavatt
- Clarence R. Goode
- Ronson Kyle Bush
- Alfred Brian Mitchell
- Marlon D. Harmon
Oklahoma has a controversial history when it comes to using drug cocktails to carry out death sentences. Executions that caused death row inmates to suffer excruciating pain before dying led to executions being put on hold in 2015.
State officials adopted a plan to use nitrogen gas to execute inmates, but jettisoned that idea and decided to resume executions using the same three-drug lethal injection protocol used during flawed executions in 2014 and 2015. The cocktail consists of midazolam, a sedative, vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart, according to the Associated Press.
The state executed convicted murderer John Grant in October 2021. It was the first execution the state carried out in several years. Grant convulsed and vomited as the lethal drug cocktail was being administered. Multiple death row inmates have been executed since then.
