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As supporters of Oklahoma death-row prisoner Julius Jones submitted more than six million signatures supporting his petition for clemency, new evidence emerged that another man had committed the killing that sent Jones to death row.
On February 25, 2021, Jones’ supporters joined members of his family and Oklahoma City faith leaders for a rally and march to the offices of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, where they delivered boxes containing petitions signed by more than 6 million people urging the board and Governor Kevin Stitt to grant Jones clemency and commute his death sentence. “It is a beautiful day,” said Rev. Cece Jones-Davis, founder of the Justice for Julius Coalition. “It is part of a dream being realized in a very long and arduous journey to bring Julius Jones home to his family. Knowing that the pardon and parole board will review his application beginning March 8 and start a process of determining whether he lives or dies, we are hopeful, we are cautiously optimistic.”
Jones’ clemency petition and his claim of innocence gained additional factual support on March 1, when his defense team released a letter and a video from a prisoner in Arkansas, Roderick Wesley (pictured), who said that Jones’ co-defendant, Chris Jordan, had admitted to Wesley that he had killed a man and that someone was doing time on death row for his crime. In a letter to Jones’ lawyers, Wesley wrote that Jordan told him: “my co-defendant is on death row behind a murder I committed.” Wesley said that Jordan had made the admission when they were in prison together in 2010, but that he did not know to whom Jordan was referring until he saw a picture of Jordan featured on a documentary about Jones’ case, The Last Defense, that aired on ABC on July 14, 2020.
“If this man is wrongfully executed, by continuing to conceal this information, I feel as if I would have had a hand in putting this man to death and I can’t live with that on my conscience,” Wesley wrote.
Frustrated by the inability to put prisoners to death, legislators in two states are seeking to jumpstart the execution process by changing the laws that govern how executions may be conducted. After gaining little traction in prior legislative sessions, a bill to make electrocution the default method of execution is moving forward in South Carolina, which is approaching ten years since its last execution. In Montana, after a court ruled in 2015 that the drugs in the state’s proposed execution protocol did not comply with Montana’s death penalty statute, legislators have proposed a measure to broaden the types of drugs that can be used in lethal injections.
The South Carolina bill, which has advanced out of committee in both chambers of the legislature, would allow the state to carry out executions in the electric chair if lethal-injection drugs are not available. South Carolina law currently permits prisoners to designate either lethal injection or electric chair as the manner of execution, but lethal injection is the default method if a prisoner declines to make an election. Prisoners cannot be executed by electrocution unless they have expressly selected that method.
The Montana legislation would amend the state’s execution law to remove the requirement that the state carry out executions using an “ultra-fast-acting barbiturate.” Instead, it would permit execution by “an intravenous injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause death.” The proposal comes in the wake of a state court decision that pentobarbital, the state’s proposed execution drug, was not an “ultra-fast-acting barbiturate.”
