Oklahoma prepares to execute man for 1995 slaying of Tulsa girl

McALESTER, Okla. — Oklahoma is making 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 will likely 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 residing at an residence 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 final-minute enchantment looking for a keep of execution through which Cannon claims, amongst different issues, that he’s Native American and never topic to Oklahoma jurisdiction was pending late Wednesday in a federal appeals court docket, data present.

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’m deeply disheartened that the act of defending my life and the acts that she initiated in opposition to me ever occurred,” Cannon advised the board by way of a video feed from the state penitentiary. “The ending of human life was by no means desired, deliberate or premeditated.”

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

In a press release despatched to The Related Press this week, Henricksen mentioned the state’s determination to proceed with Cannon’s execution quantities to “historic barbarism.”

“Mr. Cannon has endured abuse and neglect for 50 years by these charged together with his care,” Henricksen mentioned. “He sits in his cell a mannequin prisoner. He’s practically deaf, blind, and nearing dying by pure causes. The choice to proceed with this specific execution is obscene.”

However prosecutors from the lawyer basic’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 by no means given my mom,” she mentioned. “Even nonetheless right this moment he factors the blame at my mom 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 eventually potassium chloride, which stops the guts. 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 acquired the incorrect deadly drug. It was later realized that the identical incorrect drug had been used to execute an inmate in January 2015.

The drug mix-ups adopted a botched execution in April 2014 through which 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.