Mr. McDugle and Mr. Humphrey have received support from various secular and religious groups, including the Oklahoma Coalition To Abolish the Death Penalty.
According to the Rev. Don Heath, the group’s chair, most people in Oklahoma believe that the end point of justice is retribution for violence. He traces it back to the Calvinistic idea that humans are wretched and deserve to suffer eternal torment unless they accept Christ.
“I think that’s an embedded theology in a lot of people, whether or not they go to church,” says Mr. Heath, a leader at Edmond Trinity Christian Church.
The progressive-leaning minister hopes Oklahoma will move beyond what he calls the “primitive levels of justice” toward restorative justice. As part of his ministry, Mr. Heath regularly visits people in prison, including those on death row.
“You have to see them as, this is a beloved child of God, too, not ‘the other,’” he says. “We have built this prison system where we can separate them from society. And as long as people still have that idea that that’s where criminals belong … you haven’t changed the way people think about them.”
Mr. McDugle is still a proponent of holding criminals accountable. But a personal experience helped shape how he views those in the criminal justice system.
After three tours of combat, the former Marine sergeant suffered post-traumatic stress disorder for decades. He tried prescription pills. He tried psychological counseling. He’s been divorced three times.
Mr. McDugle says the message he was hearing from doctors was, “You’ll never be fixed. You’ll never be well.” In desperation, Mr. McDugle enrolled in a weeklong veteran recovery program by the faith-based Mighty Oaks Foundation in Texas.
“I stood in front of men that I trusted because they’d been on the same battlefields I’d been on, and all they did was point at the Word of God and said, ‘You’re not broken,’” says Mr. McDugle, his voice cracking. He pauses for 25 seconds, head bowed, struggling not to tear up. “Those five days changed my life. Because the PTSD is gone.”
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“You have to see them as, this is a beloved child of God, too, not ‘the other.’” – Don Heath, chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and leader at Edmond Trinity Christian Church
His experience convinced him that people can change.
“Being a Baptist, I can say this: We are some of the most judgmental people around,” says Mr. McDugle, whose lustrous hair, curling at the nape of his neck, is a sharp contrast to when, as a Marine, he had it sheared within millimeters of the follicles. He says he’s now more empathetic and compassionate. He muses that perhaps this is how Christ wants us to look at other people.
“I know people in jail right now who’ve murdered people when they were under a drug-induced state at 17 years old, and they’re now 30-some years old and they’re extremely sorry,” he says. “If you let them out today, they’re not going to hurt another soul. … But we have no mechanism for them to be able to rehabilitate.”
Three years ago, Craig Blankenship went through an experience that shook his faith in the criminal justice system. It also led him to believe that the death penalty is entirely warranted in instances of heinous crimes.
Sitting in a hotel lobby in downtown Oklahoma City, the oil entrepreneur recounts the story of his former daughter-in-law, Andrea Blankenship.
On Feb. 12, 2021, he was driving home from work in the dark when his wife called.
“She said, ‘Craig, you’re not going to believe this.’ And I said, ‘What?’ … And she said, ‘Andrea has been murdered.’”
As he recounts those words, he still sounds surprised.
Andrea Blankenship married Mr. Blankenship’s oldest son, Curt, on a Hawaii beach in 2004. They had two children, but the marriage foundered. Following the divorce, Mr. Blankenship paid Andrea’s rent and bills for several years. In 2021, Andrea moved to Chickasha, not far from Oklahoma City. By then, her son, John Hayden, had grown up. Her daughter, Haylee, was a freshman at Oklahoma State University. Andrea was living at her mother’s house.
In early February 2021, an attacker broke down her door.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation told the family that Andrea had been repeatedly stabbed. But they didn’t share further details other than to say her death was gruesome. In fact, the murderer had committed an act of cannibalism.
“You know how Andrea’s kids found out about it? On. The. Television. … The OSBI didn’t even have the courtesy to call and tell them,” says Mr. Blankenship.
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“They think that everybody should be given a second and a third and a fifth chance. Are you willing to bet your own family members on it?” – Craig Blankenship, whose daughter-in-law was murdered
The details of the homicide were all over the news. Not just in Oklahoma, but around the world.
Even more horrifying details emerged. The killer, Lawrence Paul Anderson, had been visiting his older aunt and uncle, who lived across the road. After killing Andrea, he returned to their home. He attacked both of them and killed his uncle, Leon Pye. Delsie Pye survived by playing dead. But her injuries included the loss of an eye. Their 4-year-old granddaughter, Kaeos Yates, had been dropped off for a visit earlier that day. He killed the little girl, too.
Mr. Anderson pleaded guilty to all three murders.
“I never was against the death penalty,” says Mr. Blankenship. “My attitude was, if you know for sure that they committed an act with malice and forethought, they should die. They should pay the price. Otherwise, you know, I didn’t think a whole lot about it.”
Mr. Anderson was tried in court last March.
“The judge asked if he had any apologies to offer,” Mr. Blankenship recalls. “And [he] stared straight ahead. … The judge said, ‘Please answer with a verbal response.’ He said, ‘Nope.’ He didn’t even apologize to the mother for killing that 4-year-old girl.”
As Mr. Blankenship stared at the impassive killer sitting 10 feet away from him, he wasn’t just mourning Andrea’s death. On July 4, 2021, he returned home from a round of golf. He had plans to smoke ribs on the barbecue. When Mr. Blankenship opened his garage door, he discovered that his son Curt had hanged himself. Mr. Blankenship rushed to help and checked his son’s pulse. But it was too late.
“Something you don’t ever want to see in your life,” he says.
It was four months after Andrea’s murder.
The victims’ relatives agreed to a plea deal that spared Mr. Anderson the death penalty. The reason? They couldn’t bear the idea of further court cases during the appeals that would inevitably follow a death row sentence. It would have entailed hearing about the horrors all over again. There would be more microphones thrust at them and cameras zooming in for close-ups.
Mr. Blankenship is sympathetic to the decision his two grandchildren made. But not in agreement with it.
“I said, ‘If that was my mother, I would go for 50 years to his appeals hearings.’”
The judge polled each of the victims’ relatives about the sentencing.
“I said, ‘He deserves death,’” Mr. Blankenship recounts.
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Khiet Nguyen, diocese chaplain for the prison ministry in Oklahoma, holds a prayer book outside the prison in McAlester, Nov. 30, 2023. At the vigil, people prayed for both victims and those executed.
Mr. Anderson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It was an earlier parole that enabled him to commit the murders in the first place.
Prior to the murders, Mr. Anderson’s rap sheet had numerous counts on it, including drug possession and sales, domestic abuse, and attempted armed robbery.
In January 2019, he applied for parole, but was turned down later that year. By law, Mr. Anderson should have been ineligible to apply again for three years. That August, he submitted another application. During the interim period, the application form was shortened from 28 questions to eight questions. The revised questionnaire no longer asked if petitioners committed offenses during incarceration.
“He had put two people in the hospital by beating them,” says Mr. Blankenship. “Caught with shanks three times. … Well, all of that stuff was removed from his application.”
This time, the Parole and Pardon Board granted his request, 3 votes to 1. In June 2020, Governor Stitt signed off on a commutation that reduced Mr. Anderson’s sentence to nine years. That made him eligible for release in 2021. In 2022, Delsie Pye and the victims’ relatives filed a lawsuit against Mr. Stitt.
Mr. Anderson was released the year after Governor Stitt announced the largest single-day commutation in U.S. history.
“He brought the prison population down by thousands,” says Mr. Blankenship. “One of the vehicles to be able to do it was just, ‘Hey, let’s give people a second chance.’ And people that are nonviolent offenders and low-level drug users and all that, I would be the first person to say, ‘Amen.’ I have no problem with that. The problem is they didn’t do their due diligence and they didn’t know who they were letting out.”
Mr. Anderson committed his murder spree three weeks after he got out of prison.
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The Oklahoma State Penitentiary on Nov. 30, 2023.
On social media, Mr. Blankenship regularly opines about the death penalty in Oklahoma. When a group of Christian leaders announced a press conference in 2022 to call for a moratorium on the death penalty, Mr. Blankenship chronicled what his family endured following Andrea’s murder.
“They think that everybody should be given a second and a third and a fifth chance,” Mr. Blankenship says between moments of silence as his eyes suddenly well with tears and his breathing comes out as quiet gasps. “Are you willing to bet your own family members on it?”
Mr. Blankenship points to several instances of people granted early release committing murders. Last May, a convicted rapist who had been granted early release shot and killed six people in Oklahoma.
Mr. Blankenship is rebuilding his life. He’s been caring for his wife after a cancer diagnosis. Today, the disease is in remission, and she is relearning how to walk.
He mentions a song called “A Long December” that constantly plays on his mental jukebox. It’s by the Counting Crows and begins, “A long December and there’s reason to believe / Maybe this year will be better than the last.” That mantra swirls around his head like a lighthouse beam.
But a consequence of his experience is that he is suspicious of death penalty abolitionists. He believes they’re too credulous of those proclaiming their innocence. “They’re saying, ‘We don’t want to execute people that aren’t guilty.’ And that’s a problem, you know,” he says. But does that mean “we should say now that nobody’s guilty?”
Before Justin Jones was appointed director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections in 2005, he had a meeting with then-Gov. Brad Henry.
“He asked me if I believed in the death penalty,” Mr. Jones recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t believe I do.’”
He says the governor responded that he, too, had doubts. But capital punishment is the law. And the U.S. is a country of laws. So until people changed it, could Mr. Jones carry out a death sentence?
“I said yes, I guess, because if I had said no, I probably wouldn’t have got the job,” says Mr. Jones.
He recalls the governor telling him to perform executions with dignity and as much respect as possible. And to make sure there were no mistakes.
Mr. Jones went on to oversee 28 executions before retiring in 2013. He’s one of several former public employees who have called for a moratorium of the death penalty because they’ve witnessed the inner workings of the system.
Mr. Jones retired after a state official demanded he strap a person on death row to a gurney long before the court of appeals rendered a decision. The sentence was commuted.
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A sign outside Edmond Trinity Christian Church protests the state’s death penalty, in Edmond, Oklahoma, Nov. 29, 2023, the day before Phillip Hancock’s execution.
Mr. Jones believed the command violated the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. He now runs a consulting business for cases of Eighth Amendment violations, specifically wrongful and preventable deaths in prisons, jails, and detention facilities.
Testifying before the statehouse last year, he warned lawmakers, “I’m guaranteeing you that you’re going to have other botched executions.”
He was referring to a horrific incident in 2014 and another in 2015.
When the state first changed its lethal injection cocktail mix, it resulted in excruciatingly painful deaths. Consequently, Mr. Glossip was spared the same fate. The U.S. Supreme Court accepted his case challenging the use of the drug midazolam. Oklahoma halted its executions until 2021.
Last year, Mr. Jones co-wrote a letter to Attorney General Drummond to warn that Oklahoma’s rate of executions takes a mental toll on correctional staff. A lethal injection execution has more checklists than a NASA rocket launch does. The corrections officers rehearse the timing of the entire procedure as though it’s a military drill; they even know how many steps it takes from each cell unit to the death chamber. Yet he observed mishaps.
The botched executions led to the creation of a bipartisan Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission co-chaired by Mr. Henry, the former Democratic governor, and former federal magistrate judge Andy Lester. Its 2017 report featured 46 recommendations for reforms. To date, none have been implemented. Both co-chairs favor a state moratorium.
When Mr. McDugle convened a hearing of the state House Judiciary Criminal Committee last year, Judge Lester declared, “Whether you support capital punishment or oppose it, one thing is clear: From start to finish, the Oklahoma capital punishment system is fundamentally broken.”
In one 2023 poll, a majority of Oklahomans said they favor life in prison over the death penalty, while 77% would support a moratorium so that reforms could be made. That was, however, just one poll.
At the same hearings, Adam Luck, former chair of the Oklahoma Board of Pardons, shared his own mistrust of the current system.
“In Oklahoma, we’ve exonerated 11 people off of death row – nationally, it’s over 190 people at this point,” says Mr. Luck in a phone call. “‘Is it possible to get it right every single time?’ So my answer to that question was ‘no.’ Because currently we are not. … So then the next question for me was, ‘How many innocent people am I OK with being executed to continue killing guilty people?’”
Oklahoma County accounts for the majority of the state’s executions. Former district attorney Robert H. Macy was responsible for 54 death row sentences between 1980 and 2001, including Mr. Glossip’s. It remains a U.S. record.
Today, the late Mr. Macy is often remembered for prosecutorial misconduct. One third of his death row cases were found to be flawed. As the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals put it in 2002, “Macy’s persistent misconduct … has without doubt harmed the reputation of Oklahoma’s criminal justice system.”
The same year that “Cowboy Bob” retired, the FBI investigated one of his allies, police chemist Joyce Gilchrist. The bureau concluded that Ms. Gilchrist often falsified DNA tests, committed perjury, and altered or destroyed evidence. Ms. Gilchrist was fired in 2001 but never charged with any crime. Before her death in 2015, she denied any wrongdoing. Ms. Gilchrist testified in 23 of Mr. Macy’s cases that resulted in a death sentence. Twelve have been carried out. Five people, two of whom were on death row, have been exonerated.
Mr. Jones, former director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, can attest that the system isn’t infallible.
Early in his career, when he was a parole officer, an incarcerated person told him that he’d been sentenced to death for a crime he wasn’t party to. He eventually received a new trial. After the jury deliberated for 45 minutes, the former prisoner walked out a free man. “He said, ‘Hey, I’m glad you believed in me,’” says Mr. Jones. Because “‘nobody else did.’”
Another turning point was when his best friend was killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He felt that the perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, got off easy when he was executed.
Now a novelist, Mr. Jones says his latest book, “The Devil’s Smokehouse,” was inspired by an indelible memory of an execution. The young man was in his 20s. In the death chamber, he addressed the victim’s family on the other side of the glass. He told them how sorry he was and that he wasn’t the same person today. But he said he knew he deserved to die and, although he didn’t think his execution would help them, he hoped it would.
That ties in with another observation from Mr. Jones’ years of meeting the families of murder victims. “A lot of them were angry because their loved one had suffered and that person died rather peacefully,” he says. “Others felt like it had made no difference, and they were somewhat regretful because they didn’t feel any better. They don’t understand that that’s a chapter of your life, and it’s never going to go away.”
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“I don’t have a theological issue with the death penalty. What I don’t like about it is that victims’ families have to wait sometimes 20-plus years to finally see justice adjudicated.” – Jennifer Harmon, a member of the Grey Robed Benedictines, who advocates for families of people who were murdered
Outside the penitentiary in McAlester, Alan Knight awaits news of whether his friend will be spared the death penalty.
As police officers with bored expressions stand near a barrier on the road outside the prison, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Humphrey swap information with Mr. Knight. The execution is running behind schedule. To date, Governor Stitt has only stayed one execution: In 2021, he commuted Julius Jones’ sentence to life in prison without parole.
Mr. Knight, who seems impervious to the cold despite wearing a gray summer-weight suit, has known Mr. Hancock since childhood. He worries that the experience has led his friend of four decades – whom he describes as loving, gentle, and a sharp intellect – to abandon his faith. Mr. Knight has found himself interrogating his own position about capital punishment.
“It’s a difficult thing because I’ve always been in favor of the death penalty,” says the truck driver. “But … it makes me think like, you know, if there’s any chance of getting something wrong, maybe we should just stop and think about it a little bit longer.”
Mr. Knight joins the other anti-death penalty protesters in a prayer circle for the victims.
“We pray for the souls of Robert L. Jett Jr. and James V. Lynch, who were violently taken from us,” a priest, Bryan Brooks, intones.
Mr. Hancock claimed that those two men intended to kill him. The defense team argued that an argument broke out while Mr. Hancock was visiting Mr. Jett’s home. The duo tried to force him into a cage. Mr. Hancock said he got control of Mr. Jett’s gun and shot both men in self-defense. Prosecutors countered that Mr. Hancock was inconsistent in his accounts of events, and injuries to Mr. Jett’s back contradict claims of self-defense. During the 1980s, Mr. Hancock served time for killing another man, which he claimed was also in self-defense.
A woman with a crucifix hovers near the prayer group. Unlike others here, Jennifer Harmon has little sympathy for Mr. Hancock. Or Mr. Glossip. She believes that both men were correctly found guilty.
Ms. Harmon regularly comes here during executions because she says vigils on behalf of those on death row overshadow the original crimes. The people murdered and their families receive too little attention, she says.
Yet Ms. Harmon opposes the death penalty. In Oklahoma’s 2016 referendum, she was among the minority who voted no. Her reasoning: Death sentences result in appeals processes that drags on for years.
“I don’t have a theological issue with the death penalty,” says Ms. Harmon, who belongs to an ecumenical order called the Grey Robed Benedictines. “What I don’t like about it is that victims’ families have to wait sometimes 20-plus years to finally see justice adjudicated.”
Ms. Harmon also believes in the possibility of grace for those who own up to their crimes and sincerely atone for them.
At 11:15 a.m., word comes through social media that the execution is going to proceed.
The protesters gather in a circle again, this time to pray for Mr. Hancock.
After the execution, rain begins to fall. So do tears. Mr. Jackson consoles Mr. Knight. Protesters hug one another.
“We’ve had times in America where we were opposed to the death penalty,” says Representative Humphrey, sitting in his pickup truck. “And then you see something heinous that captures everybody’s attention. … And so you see it swing back. I would encourage everybody: Let’s find a balance.”
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