The State of Oklahoma will not execute any inmates in 2017.
As KOKH reports, this year marks the third straight year that the death chamber has remained quiet in the state.
The death penalty was halted in Oklahoma in 2015 after the botched execution of inmate Clayton Lockett. Due to mistakes made in the administration of the drug IV during Lockett’s 2014 execution, it took Lockett 43 minutes to die.
As of this year, new procedures have not been adopted and there are still no pending changes to execution procedures in Oklahoma, according to a spokesperson for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. A 2016 grand jury reports issued a scathing indictment of the Department of Corrections’s protocols for executing criminals, finding the system to be riddled with failures and errors.
