Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond and Department of Corrections Executive Director Steven Harpe are asking the state Court of Criminal Appeals to set the execution dates for the next six people it plans to kill at 90-day intervals.
The state had scheduled 12 executions for 2024.
“The present pace of executions, every 60 days, is too onerous and not sustainable,” DOC ED Harpe stated in the joint motion https://www.oag.ok.gov/sites/g/files/gmc766/f/documents/2024/in_re_execution_dates_1.30.24.pdf to the state’s High Court.
The six men whose execution dates will be rescheduled include Richard Rojem, Emmanuel Littlejohn, Kevin Underwood, Wendell Grissom, Tremane Wood, and Kendrick Simpson.
Not only does each execution involve a “series of tasks that must be completed by DOC staff,” the motion states, but “the day of an execution affects not only those directly involved in the execution, but the entirety” of the whole prison, “which goes into a near complete lockdown until the execution is completed.”
This is the second time Drummond has asked the court to slow down its frenzied pace of executions. Early last year, soon after he was elected, Drummond asked the state to modify its plan to execute seven men in seven months between February 16 and August 3, 2023, to one execution every 60 days. The court agreed, and four people were executed in 2023.
