Oklahoma Watch (https://oklahomawatch.org/author/benbotkin/)
Oklahomans will soon be able to use medical marijuana, but it doesn’t extend to those serving time. The drug remains prohibited for inmates in Oklahoma and other states that have partially or fully legalized it.
Oklahoma officials say that using inhalation of nitrogen to carry out the death penalty will be safe and humane. But uncertainty surrounds the process, including how it will force inmates to inhale the gas and what will happen if they resist.
Tens of thousands of Oklahomans who have been convicted of felonies are unable to vote until their time in prison and on probation and parole has been completed. That often means they wait for years, even more than a decade, before they can cast a ballot. Some states are easing restrictions.
How long people stay in Oklahoma county jails on misdemeanor charges varies across the state, newly obtained data shows. In some counties, pretrial release programs allow defendants to get out immediately without having to post bail. In other counties, low-level defendants can remain locked up for days or weeks, creating job or family problems.
As the news rolled out Thursday that the Oklahoma State Department of Health never was insolvent, the reaction was a stunned disbelief. Then anger.
The daughter of a state House leader who pushed a bill to protect the right to sentence juveniles to life without parole is a district attorney who seeks such a sentence in a Custer County case. The bill, however, was killed by an appeals court ruling and a requested veto.
The 2018 session of the Oklahoma Legislature, which ended Thursday, was one of the most contentious in recent history. But lawmakers’ actions went well beyond teacher pay and tax increases. Here’s a look at how various groups will be affected by what the Legislature did, and didn’t do, this year.
The former director of a nonprofit charity has sued Oklahoma County Commissioner Brian Maughan, who founded the charity, accusing him and the group of failing to pay severance, berating the director publicly and making questionable deposits into Maughan’s personal bank account.
Reworked criminal justice reform bills fall short of what a blue-ribbon panel recommended was needed to curb incarceration rates and provide alternatives to prison. But advocates and district attorneys favor the legislation, some of which passed the Senate and some of which passed the House Tuesday.
Nearly 58 percent of Oklahoma’s suicides last year involved firearms. Mental-health experts say that so-called “red flag” laws, which allow police to even temporarily confiscate guns if a person poses a risk to themselves or others, could help lower the state’s stubbornly high suicide rate.