https://www.thenation.com/article/society/jemaine-cannon-execution-oklahoma/

The Painfully Blithe Business of Modern Executions
I witnessed the death of Jemaine Cannon. I was horrified.

J.C. HALLMAN
n the morning of the execution, I woke up in a crappy motel room in McAlester, Okla., and although the day before I’d thought frequently about what I would be doing if I knew this would be my final day, I now found myself wordless, affectless, calm. I did some pushups and crunches. I took a shower. And then I checked out and found some coffee before heading to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Except for that last part, the morning was unremarkable.

I had wanted to attend an execution for some time, because I believe that the growing normalization of a punishment that is inherently cruel and unusual—and wildly disproportionate in its application against people of color—is directly related to a growing reluctance to look at the evidence of barbarities inflicted on our society, and by it. And I believe the first step to changing any horror is to bear full witness to it.

But to attend an execution in Oklahoma, you have to get a little lucky. And you have to be a little pushy.

In early 2022, when I set out to attend the execution of Donald Grant—convicted of a 2001 double murder, executed January 27, 2022—I reached out to a man named Josh Ward, the public information officer for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC). PIOs come and go, but Ward would still be holding the position later in 2022, when Oklahoma announced a spate of 25 executions to be performed over a two-year period.

I was attempting to enter a kind of lottery—if that makes you think of Shirley Jackson’s horrific short story “The Lottery,” also about an execution, good—but I was too late to register.. Ward informed me that requests had to be received 14 days prior to the execution date, and media registration alerts to enter the drawings for five media witness spots were e-mailed 35 days prior. All I could do was ask to be placed on the media-registration list for the next execution, of Gilbert Postelle—convicted of a 2005 quadruple murder, executed February 17, 2022.

But I did not receive any notification about registering for the Postelle execution lottery. This time, Ward explained that my request had come in on January 24, at 4:01 PM. Notices had gone out on January 13, so even though I had been added to the list inside the registration period, I had not received the notification because by that point the notifications had already been sent out. I was late again.

I pointed out to Ward in an e-mail that this was more than a little Kafkaesque. Ward responded that media-registration rules were clearly described in OP-040301. He did not explain what OP-040301 was.

I found OP-040301. From it, I quoted to Ward p.22/VII/F/2/a, which said, “Reasonable efforts shall be made to accommodate the representatives of the news media before, during, and after a scheduled execution.” I indicated that there was nothing in OP-040301 about a registration period at all.

Ward responded with p.20/VII/C/2/c (sic): Fourteen days prior to the execution, the agency director will send “the completed list of approved witnesses to the warden.” With that, Ward considered the matter closed.

I did receive e-mail notices for the next several executions, but the registration hyperlink didn’t work. Then it did work, I registered, and heard nothing more.

Then I got another e-mail. I could enter the lottery for the execution of Richard Glossip—convicted of ordering a 1997 murder.

I drove from my home in Tulsa to Oklahoma City to attend the lottery live. I met a new PIO, Kay Thompson, who represented a sea change at the DOC. She was a former journalist and feared that the DOC was the stepchild of enforcement in Oklahoma. To be fair, the Oklahoma DOC, in the wake of botched executions in 2014, 2015, and 2021, has borne the brunt of global scrutiny of drug protocol decisions that are politically motivated, rather than attributable to specific individuals at a single state agency.

I did not win a media witness spot for Glossip, who is white. Anyway, Glossip had his execution stayed within days, perhaps because he has become a cause célèbre and has famous champions like Kim Kardashian, Sister Helen Prejean, and Dr. Phil. I did learn a secret of the execution lottery process, however. Multiple individuals from a single media outlet can enter the lottery, and if one of them is selected they can give their spot to the outlet’s chosen representative. Who was empowered, I wondered, to decide whether this ballot-stuffing practice constituted cheating?

I registered for the next execution—Jemaine Cannon, convicted of murder after escaping an Oklahoma work camp where he was serving time for a separate violent attack.

This time, I watched the lottery on Zoom. Kay Thompson drew out the first name, a Tulsa reporter. The next name was mine.

My partner was standing beside me. She gave a little cheer—but then she crumpled a bit. What exactly had I won?

A couple of days later, I received a document titled “Media and Media Witness Overview” that carefully delineated the protocols for arrival at the prison. Reporters covering the execution would register between 6 and 7:30 AM on July 20, and we would remain in the main prison’s visiting room for a couple of hours before those of us who had been selected as witnesses would be escorted to the H-Unit, which houses people under disciplinary segregation and is home to the prison’s death row and execution chamber. The execution would take place at 10 AM. I arrived at about 6:20 AM. I didn’t want to be first, and I wasn’t. A Fox 23 film crew was already outside, prepping a shot, and inside I relinquished my ID and sat at a long table where another reporter was sitting cross-legged, scribbling on a notepad. I examined a sign on a wall listing rules of conduct for visitors. Sexual activity—defined as excessive kissing, placing of “hickeys,” touching genitals/vagina/breasts, and straddling of legs—was strictly prohibited.

Rules of dress for the media witnesses were similarly proscribed. We could wear nothing colored blue chambray, periwinkle, or orange. Many regulations were about women: no wrap-around skirts, crop-tops, halters, or spandex. No exposing of the midriff, shoulder, or any part of the breast. All were required to wear “appropriate underclothing for his/her gender.”

That last one generated some discussion after the visitors’ area filled in with reporters, most of whom were setting up equipment for the press conference that would follow the execution. Journalists who knew one another exchanged greetings. There was a little gallows humor—was it Jemaine or Jermaine Cannon? Who knows!—and then they opened laptops to peck away at stories that they would file as quickly as possible after the execution. In contrast to me, the journalists knew exactly what they wanted to say and how to say it. In fact, they’d already said it—they were revising. Given Oklahoma’s recent history of executions, if they weren’t literally cutting and pasting from earlier stories, then emotionally they were doing the same thing, because that’s what everyone was doing at that point.

Someone called out a question to a toweringly tall reporter out of Oklahoma City, a man who for several years has been the Associated Press’s go-to journalist for its automatically allocated witness seat. “How many of these is this for you, Sean?” The man replied that at this point he wasn’t even sure. Later, he told me it was around two dozen.

A spritely blond TV anchor, cameraman in tow, entered the visitors’ area just before the 7:30 registration cutoff. She sat down beside me, and admitted that she had a problem. She hadn’t read the wardrobe guidelines until the last minute, and in haste, seized a pair of appropriate shoes from her collection. But she grabbed the right shoe from two identical pairs of black closed-toe pumps. Like me, the anchor was a media witness, and she would be wearing two right shoes into the witness room outside the execution chamber.

I heard the AP reporter announce that Cannon’s final plea for clemency had been denied by the 10th Circuit. Filed pro se—Cannon acted as his own attorney—the plea hinged on a claim that he had Native American ancestry. The argument was news to the AP reporter, but it wasn’t news to the courts. A couple years earlier, a Tulsa firm had been assigned to represent Cannon in a motion based on McGirt v. Oklahoma, a Supreme Court case that raised jurisdictional doubts about the criminal convictions of persons with tribal affiliations. The lawyers who handled Cannon’s McGirt motion told me that they had built a fairly strong case, only to have the effort foiled when the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that McGirt could not be applied retroactively.

In general, I was surprised at how little the journalists knew about Jemaine Cannon. In this, I include myself. In the two weeks after I’d won the lottery, I’d retrieved about 500 pages of material from the cavernous Tulsa County Warehouse; I’d communicated with several of the public defenders who handled the trial; and I’d interviewed Cannon’s final attorney, who was engaged by the federal government less than 60 days before Cannon’s official clemency hearing. But I still knew very little about the case. I hadn’t been able to find the original trial transcript—trial recordings belong to the state, but transcripts belong to the court reporter who creates them—and I didn’t have a copy of the thick binder of clemency materials prepared for journalists (passages judged relevant having been highlighted by officials). The truth was, after nearly three decades, no one knew the full story of Jemaine Cannon. The attorneys, the judges, the politicians, the journalists, we all knew pieces of the story, and we had all played a role in the system that condemned him, a system that was becoming more complacent, more willfully blind to inconvenient facts and unsavory details. And now that system was blithely putting Cannon to death.

>J.C. HALLMAN

>the journalists knew exactly what they wanted to say and how to say it.

>In general, I was surprised at how little the journalists knew about Jemaine Cannon.

This is the essence of present-day journalism, boiled down to two
sentences.

David Carson