As Oklahoma puts inmate to death in last US execution in 2024, 'all eyes' on Biden

Oklahoma carried out the last national execution of 2024 on Thursday morning, putting to death a former grocery store worker convicted of murdering a 10-year-old girl in 2006.

Kevin Ray Underwood's execution by lethal injection, which took place on his 45th birthday, came after the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board unanimously denied his request for clemency this week last for the death of his young neighbor, Jamie Rose Bolin. The decision, while expected, was notable: This year is the first since 2016 without a state granting clemency to a person on death row, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center .

In an annual report on death penalty and execution trends released Thursday, the center highlights how the boundaries on the use of the death penalty have widened this year, at a crucial political moment for the President Joe Biden, who last week granted the largest number of commutations and pardons in a single day. for non-violent offenders. A coalition of death penalty advocates sent him letters urging him to commute the sentences of 40 federal death row inmates before President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House.

Biden, who had campaigned on abolishing the federal death penalty, imposed a moratorium while in office; Trump announced he would expand the death penalty to the federal level.

“All eyes are on President Biden right now,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

“The issue of sentence commutation 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 you have serious problems with the way these men were sentenced to death, some in an era of political overheating and overzealous prosecution.”

Although a recent Gallup poll indicates that national support for the death penalty has fallen to its lowest level in decades, largely due to a shift in attitudes among millennials and Generation Z, the practice has not decreased in a handful of states like Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas which carried out the majority of 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 of a workplace shooting, was put to death using nitrogen, one of three inmates executed by Alabama this year thanks to to this new method.

After many states with the death penalty struggled in recent years to obtain supplies of lethal injection drugs and manufacturers placed restrictions on the use of their products in executions, a recovery took place in 2024 in some states: Indiana executed its first inmate in 15 years on Wednesday. , after Utah and South Carolina, which each put people to death for the first time in more than a decade. In February, Idaho also attempted its first execution in 12 years, but halted the procedure when prison staff failed to locate a viable vein.

Other states have indicated they plan to dust off their execution chambers, including Louisiana, which has not executed anyone since 2010, and Arizona, which has not done so since 2022 after Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has started a review.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said this month that his office would resume seeking a death warrant against an inmate involved in a 2002 murder: “This is not a decision I I took it lightly, but the death penalty is the law in our state. , and it’s my job to enforce it.”

She added that it would be “justice” for the victim, Ted Price, who was murdered in a domestic dispute.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, reiterated that the death penalty was intended to give victims' loved ones closure after the state's pardon board rejected the pardon request from Underwood.

“Jamie's family has waited 18 agonizing years for justice to finally be served when this murderer is executed,” Drummond said in a statement, also calling Underwood an “evil monster.”

However, Gentner also did not side exclusively against those on death row, pointing out that authorities too might find nuance in the broader conflict over the death penalty.

In the high-profile case of Richard Glossip, whose 2004 murder conviction as part of a 1997 murder-for-hire plot was reviewed this year by the U.S. Supreme Court after assertions of innocence, Gentner took the rare step of speaking out in favor of a convicted inmate. . Gentner told the high court in a filing that “justice would not be served by moving forward with a death sentence that the state can no longer defend due to prosecutorial misconduct and cumulative errors “.

The Supreme Court has not yet ruled whether Glossip, whose execution date has been set nine times over the years, should receive a new trial.

Maher pointed out that the current debate is much more localized than in years past, given that only 10 of the 27 states where the death penalty is still in effect have sentenced people to death this year, and nine states have actually carried out death sentences. executions.

“It’s no longer about how America uses the death penalty,” she said. “It's a story of a very small number of states that use the death penalty, and even within states, it's some counties that mandate the 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 could deter crime in states where executions still take place, compared to states without death penalty or who have instituted moratoriums.

After analyzing more than three decades of FBI homicide data, Dunham concluded that states that never had the death penalty had the lowest murder rates and that “furthermore, states that now do most actively involved in executions are among the least safe for the public.” and the most dangerous for the police”, according to his study published last month.

The death penalty, Dunham said, “has become an exercise in unnecessary cruelty.”

Dunham testified this month before an Ohio legislative committee that was considering whether to abolish the death penalty in a state that hasn't carried out an execution in six years. Prosecutors also testified, saying the death penalty was still required for serious crimes.

“Ohioans have repeatedly supported the death penalty for serial killers, mass murderers and child killers,” said Saleh Awadallah, deputy Cuyahoga County prosecutor, adding that “if the death penalty is abolished, the next step will be to eliminate life without parole as a sentencing option.

But Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project, said the death penalty process is already tainted, in part, because of racial disparities between those sentenced to death and executed, and because of persistent questions about people's claims of innocence. some put to death.

She cites bipartisan efforts in states like Oklahoma and Texas as examples of renewed thinking about the impact of the death penalty. Its use by a number of states “really makes it feel like a last-ditch effort,” Stubbs said.

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