Oklahoma Executes Prisoner After Supreme Court Overturns Stay

Oklahoma executed longtime death row inmate John Grant after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a stay execution for him and Julius Jones, whose release Kim Kardashian West has advocated for. An appeals court had issued a stay of execution for Grant and Jones on Wednesday, citing a lawsuit the state is facing challenging the use of one of the drugs in its lethal injection cocktail.

Grant, 60, who was sentenced to death in 1998 for murdering a prison worker, was executed on Thursday only hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Executions will go forward in Oklahoma despite significant questions regarding the constitutionality of the state’s execution protocol," Grant’s lawyer, Dale Baich said. Baich argued that by asking the prisoners to select the method they would be executed, the state violated their religious liberty by making them participate in their own death.