(06/14/01) -- Governor Frank Keating should halt executions in his state, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to the governor released today. Recent reports that an Oklahoma City police forensic scientist may have offered misleading and improper testimony in a number of capital cases underscore the need to reconsider the death penalty.
There are serious questions about the administration of capital punishment, both in Oklahoma and across the nation. Oklahoma should stop imposing irrevocable death sentences, especially when the administration of justice is clearly in question.
Allyson Collins, Senior Researcher for Human Rights Watch
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In a separate letter to the McAlester Regional Health Center, which supplies the Oklahoma Department of Corrections with the pharmaceutical agents used for lethal injection, Human Rights Watch urged the center to end its involvement with the application of the death penalty. "Medical professionals should help to preserve life instead of supporting the state's flawed criminal justice system," said Collins.
Oklahoma leads the nation in executions this year, with thirteen people executed so far, and has already exceeded the number it performed in 2000. In the past two decades, at least seven men who had been sentenced to death in Oklahoma were subsequently exonerated and released from the state's death row.
