"Summary judgment sought by both sides in Oklahoma death-row inmates lawsuit over lethal drugs," is the AP report by Bailey Elise McBride, via the Greenfield Reporter.
Lawyers for two Oklahoma death-row inmates who are suing for information about lethal injection drugs and lawyers for the state each have asked for the judge to rule in their favor without hearing arguments in court.
The state filed for summary judgment in Oklahoma County District Court on Thursday and responded to a motion for summary judgment filed last week by lawyers for inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner.
A hearing in district court is set for Wednesday in front of Judge Patricia Parrish on whether it's proper for the state to keep execution procedures behind a "veil of secrecy."
The Colorado Independent reports, "Democracy Now! and Susan Greene on Oklahoma’s ‘Team Pentobarbital’."
Colorado Independent Editor Susan Greene appeared on Democracy Now! Thursday morning to talk with hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez about the scramble in Oklahoma reported by Katherine Fretland for The Colorado Independent this week to find drugs to conduct prisoner executions.
The story of the drug scramble highlights the way drug manufacturers — many of them headquartered in Europe — have pulled back on supplying them to avoid fueling the U.S. system of capital punishment, which has been condemned by human rights groups for decades. Responding to the shortage of drugs, state officials around the country have turned to a shadowy market supplied by pharmacies that mix unregulated versions of the drugs. These products may or may not be working properly, subjecting prisoners to unknown effects and raising questions about whether the executions where they are used are running afoul of constitutional bans on cruel and unusual punishment.
Democracy Now posts, "'Team Pentobarbital': OK Officials Joked About Seeking Football Tix for Help with Execution Drugs." There is video and a transcript at the link. Here's one excerpt from the interview:
SUSAN GREENE: We exposed these flippant emails back and forth between assistant attorneys general, who felt—had felt thwarted by Texas. There’s a shortage in the country of lethal injection drugs, and so they’re all sort of scrambling to find them so they can kill people on time. And Texas had apparently not supplied Oklahoma with the drugs it needed in an earlier execution. And Texas, a few years ago, was asking for help from states all around the country for how to deal with the shortage. And so these attorneys general in Oklahoma, feeling a little embittered by the lack of help from Texas, were joking that, as you said, they wanted, in exchange for their help, 50-yard-line tickets to a football game between Oklahoma and Texas. And then another colleague said, "Actually, you know, we want more than that. They should—Texas should throw the game for four years, for four years, in exchange for our help." And then, they went on to say, "Yes, you know, we should be brought onto the field during halftime and sort of lauded and celebrated for our valor in helping Texas carry out its tradition of death penalty injections, lethal injections." And then they actually took it further and said, "You know, for this, we should actually get passes to tollways and other sort of roads that cost money in Texas."
Earlier coverage from Oklahoma begins with the preceding post. You can also jump to the Colorado Independent's reporting from earlier this week.
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