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On this date, October 28,
2021, John Marion Grant was executed by lethal injection in Oklahoma. He was convicted
murdering Prison cafeteria worker, Gay Westbrook Carter in on November 13, 1998. [PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.kjrh.com/news/local-news/two-oklahoma-executions-delayed-for-appeal] |
On this date, October 28, 2021, John Marion Grant was executed by lethal injection in Oklahoma. He was convicted murdering Prison cafeteria worker, Gay Westbrook Carter in on November 13, 1998.
Please hear from the victim’s family member, Pam Carter and ignore the media where it wants to make the killer looks like a victim as Malcolm X was right when he said:
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“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to
make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power.
Because they control the minds of the masses. The press is so powerful in its
image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make
the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible
press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim
look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have
you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are
doing the oppressing.” - Malcom X http://victimsfamiliesforthedeathpenalty.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-message-from-america-to-swamp.html |
Oklahoma executes inmate who dies vomiting and convulsing
McALESTER,
Okla. (AP) — Oklahoma administered the death penalty Thursday on a man who
convulsed and vomited as he was executed for the 1998 slaying of a prison
cafeteria worker, ending a six-year execution moratorium brought on by concerns
over its execution methods,
John
Marion Grant, 60, who was strapped to a gurney inside the execution chamber,
began convulsing and vomiting after the first drug, the sedative midazolam, was
administered. Several minutes later, two members of the execution team wiped
the vomit from his face and neck.
Before
the curtain was raised to allow witnesses to see into the execution chamber,
Grant could be heard yelling, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” He delivered a
stream of profanities before the lethal injection started. He was declared
unconscious about 15 minutes after the first of three drugs was administered
and declared dead about six minutes after that, at 4:21 p.m.
Someone
vomiting while being executed is rare, according to observers.
“I’ve
never heard of or seen that,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the
nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center. “That is notable and unusual.”
Michael
Graczyk, a retired Associated Press reporter who still covers executions for
the organization on a freelance basis, has witnessed the death penalty being
carried out about 450 times. He said Thursday he could only recall one instance
of someone vomiting while being put to death.
The
Oklahoma attorney general and governor did not respond to questions about
Grant’s reactions to the drugs. In fact, Department of Corrections spokesman
Justin Wolf said by email that the execution “was carried out in accordance
with Oklahoma Department of Corrections’ protocols and without complication.”
A
statement from Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt referenced a section of the Oklahoma
Constitution in which voters overwhelmingly enshrined the death penalty.
“Today,
the Department of Corrections carried out the law of the State of Oklahoma and
delivered justice to Gay Carter’s family,” Stitt said.
Grant
was the first person in Oklahoma to be executed since a
series of flawed lethal injections in 2014 and 2015. He serving a 130-year
prison sentence for several armed robberies when witnesses say he dragged
prison cafeteria worker Gay Carter into a mop closet and stabbed her 16 times
with a homemade shank. He was sentenced to die in 1999.
“At
least now we are starting to get justice for our loved ones,” Carter’s
daughter, Pamela Gay Carter, said in a statement. “The death penalty is about
protecting any potential future victims. Even after Grant was removed from
society, he committed an act of violence that took an innocent life. I pray that
justice prevails for all the other victims’ loved ones. My heart and prayers go
out to you all.”
Oklahoma
moved forward with the lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-3
decision, lifted stays of execution that were
put in place on Wednesday for Grant and another death row inmate, Julius
Jones, by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The
state’s Pardon and Parole Board twice denied Grant’s request for clemency,
including a 3-2
vote this month to reject a recommendation that his life be spared.
Oklahoma
had one of the nation’s busiest death chambers until problems in
2014 and 2015 led to a de facto moratorium. Richard Glossip was just
hours away from being executed in September 2015 when prison officials
realized they received the wrong lethal drug. It was later learned the same
wrong drug had been used to execute an
inmate in January 2015.
The
drug mix-ups followed a
botched execution in April 2014 in which inmate Clayton Lockett struggled
on a gurney before dying 43 minutes into his lethal injection — and after the
state’s prisons chief ordered executioners to stop.
While
the moratorium was in place, Oklahoma moved ahead with plans to use nitrogen gas
to execute inmates, but ultimately scrapped that idea and announced last year
that it planned
to resume executions using the same three-drug lethal injection protocol
that was used during the flawed executions. The three drugs are: midazolam, a
sedative, vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, and potassium chloride, which stops
the heart.
Oklahoma
prison officials recently announced that they had confirmed a source to supply
all the drugs needed for Grant’s execution plus six more that are scheduled to
take place through March.
“Extensive
validations and redundancies have been implemented since the last execution in
order to ensure that the process works as intended,” the Department of
Corrections said in a statement.
More
than two dozen Oklahoma death row inmates are part of a federal
lawsuit challenging the state’s lethal injection protocols, arguing that
the three-drug method risks causing unconstitutional pain and suffering. A
trial is set for early next year.
Dale
Baich, an attorney for some of the death row inmates in that suit, said
eyewitness accounts of Grant’s lethal injection show Oklahoma’s death penalty
protocol isn’t working as it was designed.
“This
is why the U.S. Supreme Court should not have lifted the stay,” Baich said in a
statement. “There should be no more executions in Oklahoma until we go (to)
trial in February to address the state’s problematic lethal injection
protocol.”
Those who allow violent
criminals the opportunity to kill, maim and rape, share the responsibility for
it and the tragedy such crimes produce. More, they allow these monsters to
create for all of us a world as dark and evil as their own.
|
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://quozio.com/quote/3wrd9cs77z9g/1269/those-who-allow-violent-criminals-the-opportunity-to-kill] |
Grant
and five other death row inmates were dismissed from the lawsuit after none of
them selected an alternative method of execution, which a federal judge said
was necessary. But a three-member panel of the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals determined that the inmates did identify alternative methods
of execution, even if they didn’t specifically check a box designating which technique
they would use. The panel had granted stays of execution on Wednesday for Grant
and Jones, whose lethal injection is set for Nov. 18.
Jones
— whose case has drawn national attention since being featured in 2018 on the
ABC television documentary series “The Last Defense” — has a
clemency hearing set for Tuesday. Jones, 41, has maintained his innocence
in the 1999 shooting death of an Oklahoma City-area businessman. The state
Pardons and Parole Board in March recommended
that Stitt, the governor, commute his death sentence to life imprisonment.
Stitt
has said he will
not decide whether to spare Jones’ life until the clemency hearing.
Grant
and his attorneys did not deny that he killed Carter.
“John Grant took full responsibility for the murder of Gay Carter,
and he spent his years on death row trying to understand and atone for his
actions, more than any other client I have worked with,” attorney Sarah Jernigan
said Thursday in a statement after the execution.
But
Grant’s attorneys argued that key facts about the crime and Grant’s troubled
childhood were never presented to the jury. They maintained that Grant
developed deep feelings for Carter and was upset when she fired him after he
got in a fight with another kitchen worker.
“Jurors
never heard that Mr. Grant killed Ms. Gay Carter while in the heat of passion
and despair over the abrupt end of the deepest and most important adult
relationship of his life,” his attorneys wrote in his clemency application.
Even if a civil society
were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people
inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world),
the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that
each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to
the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the
people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice. –
Immanuel Kant
Pamela
Carter, who also worked at the prison and was there the day her mother was
killed, rejected the idea that her mother and Grant had anything more than a
professional relationship and urged state officials to move forward with the
execution.
“I understand he’s trying to save his life, but you keep victimizing my mother with these stupid allegations,” she told the Pardon and Parole Board this month. “My mother was vivacious. She was friendly. She didn’t meet a stranger. She treated her workers just as you would on a job on the outside. For someone to take advantage of that is just heinous.”
___
Associated
Press writer Adam Kealoha Causey in Dallas contributed to this report
INTERNET SOURCE: https://apnews.com/article/us-supreme-court-prisons-executions-oklahoma-oklahoma-attorney-generals-office-6e5eedd1956a38f83db96187651f145c
 |
| Gay Carter |
Carter's daughter, Pam Carter, said in a statement the death penalty "is about protecting any potential future victims."
"Even after Grant was removed from society, he
committed acts of violence that took an innocent life," Carter said.
"I pray that justice prevails for the other victims' loved ones."
INTERNET SOURCE: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2098031847014842&id=1299628893521812
Pam Carter
Daughter of
Oklahoma death row inmate’s victim gives exclusive first television interview
to KFOR
Update:
Convicted murder John
Grant was executed by the State of Oklahoma on Thursday, Oct. 28,2021 after
the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay of execution.
OKLAHOMA CITY
(KFOR) – “You think you’re
finally going to heal and everything is finally going to settle down, and then
something opens that wound back up. So it’s been an emotional roller coaster,”
Pam Carter said. “And today was another one.”
On Friday the
13th in November 1998, inmate John Grant murdered Gay Carter. He stabbed her 16
times with a shank.
“Just when you
kind of think you’ve got a handle on your emotions, things come back up, and
the wound is opened back up,” Pam said.
This week has
been a whirlwind of emotion for Pam.
Her mother’s
killer was scheduled to be executed on Thursday. However, on Wednesday, the
U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay in Grant’s execution date.
Grant’s
attorneys argued that an agreement was previously made with former Attorney
General Mike Hunter that no executions would take place for the time being
because of an upcoming trial, which challenges whether Oklahoma’s execution
protocol, a three-drug cocktail, is legal.
The State of Oklahoma has since filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking that the stay of execution be vacated.
Gay Carter was an employee at the Dick Conner Correctional Center in Hominy and worked in the kitchen. Pam worked there, too. She says Grant got upset with her mother when he did not get a tray of food that he wanted. Within days, Grant stabbed her mother to death.
“I was working the day she was killed at Dick Conner Correctional Center,” Pam said. “I saw mom on the ground, but I got to say, ‘Mom, I love you.’ I got to say, I got to holler, ‘Mom, I love you,’ before I had to get out of the way.”
In the 23 years since that day, Pam Carter has never given a television interview until now.
“I hope she was gone, because he brutally stabbed her. The terror, how scared she must have been. How hurt she must have been. I hope she went quickly just so she wasn’t suffering, because he brutally stabbed her,” she said.
Department of Corrections says it is ready to resume executions in Oklahoma
Though nothing will bring back her mother, Pam will not leave.
“Why do you still work for the Department of Corrections?”
“Stubborn. Stubborn. I’m not going to let that run me off. Stubbornness and my coworkers.”
“Do you feel like you’re standing your ground for your mother?”
“Exactly.”
For the most part, Pam has ignored news reports, phones calls from reporters and the rumors she says Grant’s attorneys used as defense tactics earlier this month at his clemency hearing, claiming that her mother had been in a relationship with Grant.
“Do you believe any of that? This crime of passion?”
“No.”
“Does that anger you?”
“Yes. He’s trying to get his sentence reduced, and this is a tactic. I understand the tactic, but victim blaming? She did this so therefore she made me kill her? Really? You’re going to blame the victim?”
Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denies clemency for death row inmate John Grant
As difficult as it is to relentlessly face, Pam was going to face Grant one last time and watch his execution.
“My theory about the death penalty is there are some crimes that are so reprehensible that that is the ultimate option, because it is not about revenge. It is not about revenge. It is about keeping another person safe. I want to make sure that this does not happen to anybody else, that nobody has to go through what I and my family has had to go through,” she said. “The main thing it would have done for me, I think, is so I could say, ‘Mom, he’s not going to hurt anybody else,’ because that’s what this is about, not letting him hurt someone else.”
At the time of Carter’s murder, Grant was serving time for multiple robberies with firearms. In 2005, Grant attacked another inmate and also threatened prison workers in 2008 and in 2009.
INTERNET
SOURCE: https://kfor.com/news/local/daughter-of-oklahoma-death-row-inmates-victim-gives-exclusive-first-television-interview-to-kfor/
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2098043367013690&id=1299628893521812
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It diminishes the
victims when people burn candles and mourn someone who has committed a heinous
crime. People on death row are some of the worst individuals that appear on the
face of the earth. The abolitionists refuse to acknowledge that evil exists and
evil has to be put down. – Marc Klaas [PHOTO SOURCE: https://quozio.com/quote/kspp5czvzbmx/1011/it-diminishes-the-victims-when-people-burn-candles-and] |
RELATED LINKS:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/53109540/gay-carter
OTHER LINKS:
See also
- List of offenders
executed in the United States in 2021
- List of people
executed in Texas, 2020–present
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