MCALESTER, Okla. – Oklahoma is getting ready to execute a person Thursday for stabbing a Tulsa girl to dying with a butcher knife in 1995 after his escape from a jail work middle.

Jemaine Cannon, 51, is scheduled to obtain a deadly injection at 10 a.m. on the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It is going to be the second execution in Oklahoma this yr and the ninth because the state resumed deadly injections in 2021.

Cannon was convicted of killing 20-year-old Sharonda Clark, a mom of two with whom Cannon had been dwelling at an house in Tulsa after his escape weeks earlier from a jail work middle in southwest Oklahoma. On the time, Cannon was serving a 15-year sentence for the violent assault of one other girl who suffered everlasting accidents after prosecutors say Cannon raped her and beat her viciously with a claw hammer, iron and kitchen toaster.

A federal appeals court docket late Wednesday denied Cannon’s last-minute attraction looking for a keep of execution wherein Cannon claims, amongst different issues, that he’s Native American and never topic to Oklahoma jurisdiction.

Cannon’s execution was scheduled on the identical day that Alabama deliberate to execute James Barber for the 2001 beating dying of a lady. It could be Alabama’s first deadly injection after a pause in executions following a string of issues with inserting the IVs.

Cannon claimed at a clemency listening to earlier than the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board final month that he killed Clark in self-defense.

“I am deeply disheartened that the act of defending my life and the acts that she initiated against me ever happened,” Cannon advised the board through a video feed from the state penitentiary. “The ending of human life was never desired, planned or premeditated.”

Cannon’s legal professional, Mark Henricksen, additionally advised the panel that Cannon’s trial and appellate attorneys had been ineffective for not presenting proof that supported his self-defense declare. His trial attorneys offered no witnesses or displays and rested after prosecutors offered their case, Henricksen stated.

In an announcement despatched to The Related Press this week, Henricksen stated the state’s choice to proceed with Cannon’s execution quantities to “historic barbarism.”

“Mr. Cannon has endured abuse and neglect for fifty years by those charged with his care,” Henricksen stated. “He sits in his cell a model prisoner. He is nearly deaf, blind, and nearing death by natural causes. The decision to proceed with this particular execution is obscene.”

However prosecutors from the legal professional normal’s workplace and Clark’s grownup daughters have urged the state to execute Cannon.

Clark’s eldest daughter, Yeh-Sehn White, advised the Pardon and Parole Board final month that Cannon had by no means in 28 years expressed any regret for his actions and urged the board to reject clemency, which it did on a 3-2 vote.

“Mercy was never given my mother,” she stated. “Even still today he points the blame at my mother for his actions.”

Oklahoma presently makes use of a three-drug deadly injection protocol starting with the sedative midazolam, adopted by the paralytic vecuronium bromide and at last potassium chloride, which stops the center. The state had one of many nation’s busiest dying chambers till issues in 2014 and 2015 led to a de facto moratorium.

Richard Glossip was simply hours from being executed in September 2015 when jail officers realized they obtained the flawed deadly drug. It was later realized that the identical flawed drug had been used to execute an inmate in January 2015.

The drug mix-ups adopted a botched execution in April 2014 wherein inmate Clayton Lockett struggled on a gurney earlier than dying 43 minutes into his deadly injection — and after the state’s prisons chief ordered executioners to cease.

Copyright 2023 The Related Press. All rights reserved. This materials might not be revealed, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed with out permission.