Oklahoma on Thursday morning carried out the nation’s final execution of 2024, putting to death a former grocery store stocker convicted of murdering a 10-year-old girl in 2006.
The execution of Kevin Ray Underwood by lethal injection, which was conducted on his 45th birthday, came after the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board unanimously rejecting his request for clemency last week in the death of his young neighbor, Jamie Rose Bolin. The decision, although expected, was notable: This year marks the first since 2016 without any state granting clemency to an individual sentenced to death, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
In an annual report on death sentence and execution trends released Thursday, the center underscores how expanding frontiers among death penalty use this year have unfolded amid a pivotal political moment for President Joe Biden, who last week granted the most commutations and clemencies in a single day for nonviolent offenders. A coalition of anti-death penalty advocates has sent letters urging him to commute the sentences of all 40 federal death row inmates before President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House.
Biden, who had campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty, placed a moratorium during his term; Trump has said he would expand the federal death penalty.
“All eyes are on President Biden right now,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
“The commutation issue is not necessarily whether you think the death penalty is a good thing or a bad thing,” she added. “You can support the death penalty but have serious issues with the ways these men were sentenced to death, some during a time of superheated political and overzealous prosecutorial policies.”
While a recent Gallup poll indicates national support for the death penalty has fallen to its lowest level in decades, in large part because of shifting attitudes among millennials and Gen Z, the practice has not subsided in a handful of states — Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas — that carried out the majority of the 25 executions in 2024.
In September, capital punishment in the United States reached a milestone when Alabama inmate Alan Eugene Miller became the 1,600th person executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Miller, a former delivery driver who was convicted in 2000 for a workplace shooting spree, was put to death using nitrogen gas — one of three inmates executed by Alabama this year by way of the novel method.
After many death penalty states have struggled to source lethal injection drugs in recent years, as manufacturers impose restrictions on allowing their products to be used in executions, there was a resumption in 2024 among some: Indiana on Wednesday executed its first inmate in 15 years, following Utah and South Carolina, which each put people to death for the first time in over a decade. Idaho in February also attempted its first execution in 12 years but halted the procedure when prison staff members were unable to locate a viable vein.
Other states have indicated they are planning to dust off their death chambers, including Louisiana, which has not executed anyone since 2010, and Arizona, which has not done so since 2022 after Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, initiated a review.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said this month her office would resume seeking a death warrant against an inmate in a 2002 murder: “This is not a decision that I have made lightly, but the death penalty is the law in our state, and it is my job to uphold it.”
She added that it would be “justice” for the victim, Ted Price, who was murdered in a domestic-related dispute.
Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, echoed that the death penalty is meant to give victims’ loved ones closure after the state pardon board rejected Underwood’s clemency request.
“Jamie’s family has waited 18 excruciating years for justice that finally will be carried out when this murderer is executed,” Drummond said in a statement, also referring to Underwood as an “evil monster.”
Gentner, however, has also not exclusively sided against death row inmates, highlighting how officials, too, may find nuance amid the larger dispute over the death penalty.
In the high-profile case of Richard Glossip, whose 2004 murder conviction in a 1997 murder-for-hire plot was reviewed this year by the U.S. Supreme Court after claims of innocence, Gentner made the rare decision to speak in favor of a condemned inmate. Gentner told the high court in a filing that “justice would not be served by moving forward with a capital sentence that the State can no longer defend because of prosecutorial misconduct and cumulative error.”
The Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether Glossip, whose had execution dates set nine times over the years, is due a new trial.
Maher stressed that the debate occurring now is much more localized than in years past, given that just 10 of the 27 states with the death penalty still on the books sentenced people to death this year with nine states actually administering executions.
“It’s no longer a story about how America uses the death penalty,” she said. “It’s a story about how a very few number of states use the death penalty, and even within states, it’s certain counties that are imposing use of the death penalty.”
Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, an independent research program, sought to understand whether the use of capital punishment can serve as a deterrent to crime in states where executions still occur versus those states without the death penalty or that instituted moratoriums.
After analyzing more than three decades worth of FBI homicide data, Dunham concluded that states that never had the death penalty had the lowest murder rates, and “moreover, the states that are now most actively carrying out executions are among the least safe for the public and the most dangerous for police,” according to his study released last month.
The death penalty, Dunham said, “has become a pointless exercise in cruelty.”
Dunham testified this month before an Ohio legislative committee considering whether to abolish the death penalty in a state that hasn’t held an execution in six years. Prosecutors also testified, arguing capital punishment is still owed in serious crimes.
“Ohioans have time and time again supported capital punishment for serial killers, mass murderers and child killers,” said Saleh Awadallah, an assistant prosecuting attorney in Cuyahoga County, adding that “if the death penalty is abolished, the next movement will be to eliminate life without parole as a sentencing option.”
But Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, said the death penalty process is already tainted, in part, because of the racial disparities among who is sentenced to death and executed, and how questions have lingered over innocence claims of some put to death.
She points to bipartisan efforts in states such as Oklahoma and Texas as examples of renewed thinking about the impact of the death penalty. Its use by a select number of states “very much feels like these are last gasp efforts,” Stubbs said.
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