Oklahoma will soon begin executing about one death row inmate per month, with plans to put to death 25 prisoners over the next two years despite cries by critics and experts who point not only to outstanding questions of the mental fitness or possible innocence of some on top of state's history of botched lethal injections, CNN reports. "It's just yet one more reckless move by Oklahoma," said Fordham University law Prof. Deborah Denno about the state's scheduled execution timetable, which she said is in line with its staunch, decades, long record of capital punishment. "If there was going to be any state that was going to do something so obviously irresponsible and unjust ... it would be the state of Oklahoma, given the history."
James Coddington is the first scheduled to be executed, this Thursday. He would have been followed about a month later by Richard Glossip, who has maintained his innocence and has received a 60-day stay of execution so an appeals court can complete its review of his petition for a new hearing. Twenty-three more men are set to be executed through 2024. When the executions are complete, more than half the 43 inmates sentenced to death in Oklahoma are due to have been killed. Oklahoma's proposed series of executions follows similar sprees in Arkansas in 2017 and by the U.S. government under the Trump administration. Experts say these are anomalies, standing in contrast to the continued decline of the death penalty in the U.S. in recent years.
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