From [HERE] Despite the pendency of a trial on the constitutionality of the state’s lethal-injection protocol, newly appointed Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor has asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to set execution dates for seven prisoners on the state’s death row. If the court approves the execution dates, they would be Oklahoma’s first attempt to carry out executions in more than six years, ending a hiatus brought on by a series of botched executions.

On August 26, 2021, O’Connor filed a motion in the criminal appeals court seeking to execute seven men in a four-month period between October 7, 2021 and February 10, 2022. The motion came just two weeks after a federal district court ruled on August 11 that death-row prisoners had presented sufficient evidence to warrant a trial on their claim that Oklahoma’s execution protocol was unconstitutionally torturous. O’Connor asserted that the seven prisoners could be executed because six had been dismissed from the lawsuit for not identifying an alternative method by which they could be executed and the seventh is not a party to the lawsuit.

The seven men for whom the state is seeking execution dates are John Marion Grant (Oct. 7), Julius Jones (Oct. 28), Bigler Jobe Stouffer (Nov. 18), Wade Greely Lay (Dec. 9), Donald A. Grant (Dec. 30), Gilbert Ray Postelle (Jan. 20, 2022), and James Allen Coddington (Feb. 10).

“Oklahoma has a checkered history when it comes to carrying out executions,” said Assistant Federal Public Defender Dale Baich, who is representing death-row prisoners in the protocol lawsuit. “The drug protocol that was problematic seven years ago is the same one the state seeks to use again. Given that history and the unresolved questions about the constitutionality of the State’s execution protocol that are pending before the federal district court, Oklahoma should not move forward with any executions at this time. To allow executions to proceed when there is a chance the court could find a constitutionally unacceptable risk that a person could suffer because of the drug combination used, is just plain wrong.”