Last Updated on October 28, 2021, 6:02 PM | Published: October 28, 2021
OKLAHOMA CITY (Free Press) — The State of Oklahoma executed John Marion Grant, 60, by lethal injection Thursday for the murder of Gay Carter in 1998. He was declared dead by prison officials at 4:21 p.m.
Gay Carter, 58 at the time of her death, was an employee in the Dick Conner Correctional Center in Hominy working in the kitchen where Grant was on work detail. He was serving a 130-year sentence at that time.
“At least we are starting to get justice for our loved one,” Pam Carter, daughter of Gay Carter said in a prepared statement after the execution.
Sean Murphy, an AP reporter, was a witness Thursday. He said after the execution that he saw “vomiting” and “convulsions” similar to the Clayton Lockett execution that Murphy also witnessed six years ago.
Lockett’s execution brought into question Oklahoma’s three-drug protocol. The same three drugs were used Thursday to execute Grant.
After a stay of execution was granted by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday, Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor appealed the stay to the U.S. Supreme Court that lifted the stay in a 5-3 decision around 2 p.m. Thursday.
The execution was the first in Oklahoma since several flawed executions over six years ago.
The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied Grant’s request for clemency twice which included a 3-2 vote this month.
Grant’s attorneys had argued before the Pardon and Parole Board that Grant had grown up without a father in abject poverty and had started getting arrested at the age of 12. Grant’s attorneys argued that he was upset about being fired from the kitchen detail and the prospect of losing the only true adult relationship with a woman he had ever had.
But, Carter’s daughter, Pam Carter, tearfully addressed the Pardon and Parole Board saying that she believed the sentence “is just.”
“He did kill her, and it had to be planned because you can’t just go and find a shank. He had time to calm down and not carry out what he was going to do,” The AP reported her saying to the Board.
About 30 other death row inmates along with Grant complained in a lawsuit that the lethal injection method of execution violates the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
That challenge will be heard by a federal judge next year.
But, both Julius Jones and Grant were no longer a part of that lawsuit.
Both Grant and Jones were kicked out of the lawsuit in August by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals after declining “to propose an alternative method of carrying out their sentence of death.”
Julius Jones is scheduled to be the next death row inmate to be executed on November 18. His clemency hearing is set for Monday, Nov. 1.
Founder, publisher, and editor of Oklahoma City Free Press. Brett continues to contribute reports and photography to this site as he runs the business.
