Last week, the Oklahoma grand jury that was tasked with investigating the state’s ongoing lethal injection issues released its findings, and the Washington Post, Business Insider, Daily Mail, and Reason all covered the report.
Mark Berman from the Washington Post wrote,
A grand jury on Thursday sharply criticized state officials charged with carrying out executions in Oklahoma, describing them as responsible for a litany of failures and avoidable errors.
The grand jury’s 106-page report, released Thursday, paints these officials as careless and, in some cases, reckless. The missteps described by the grand jury include a pharmacist ordering the wrong drug for executions, multiple state employees failing to notice or tell anyone about the mixup and a high-ranking official in the governor’s office urging others to carry out an execution even with the incorrect drug.
A syndicated piece by Jon Herskovitz and Heidi Brandes read,
Three top officials who were called by the grand jury stepped down shortly after testifying: Anita Trammell, warden of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary; Robert Patton, director of the Department of Corrections; and Steve Mullins, general counsel to Governor Mary Fallin.
“Oklahomans should carefully consider the grand jury’s conclusions and ask themselves whether they should trust their state with the death penalty,” said Marc Hyden, national coordinator of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.
“Considering the state’s history of botched executions and wrongful convictions, Oklahoma’s track record suggests that it hasn’t adequately earned the people’s trust,” said Hyden, whose conservative group is pushing for an end to capital punishment.
Reason’s Stephanie Slade said,
The grand jury declined to hand down any indictments for now, but the report is, to put it mildly, scathing. “It is unacceptable for the governor’s general counsel to so flippantly and recklessly disregard the written protocol and the rights of Richard Glossip,” it reads in one place. “This investigation revealed that the paranoia of identifying participants clouded the Department’s judgment and caused administrators to blatantly violate their own policies,” it reads in another. “The Warden carelessly assumed others would fulfill [her] own oversight responsibility in ensuring that the proper drugs were procured,” blares a particularly critical subheading.