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ACLU of Oklahoma, working with Telford Naidu, filed similar motions and other documents about both cases. Henderson said those cases were also dismissed because the parents were women.

“It’s heart breaking,” Rebekkah Newland said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to hug him. Every day spent waiting for a court ruling amounts to another day I haven’t seen my son.”

Newland said she always wanted to be a mother. Though she and her ex-partner had been together for several years, and even though both decided they wanted a child, their relationship proved difficult.

“We had been together for a couple of years, and we decided we wanted to have a child together. We had a friend who was willing to donate (sperm). So she became pregnant.”

Shortly after that, however, Newland and her partner separated.

“She became pregnant, then we parted ways,” she said. “She moved to Washington and I moved to Texas.”

A few months before her son was born, Newland said her ex-partner wrote a letter, seeking to reconcile. “She said, ‘this is our baby and I want to raise him with you.’”

Newland packed and moved to Washington. “I was devastated when we broke up,” she said. “So when I got the letter, I’m instantly packing my things. I wanted to be with her. This was our baby.”

For a while things were fine.

“We lived with her sister and brother-in-law until he was a few months old,” she said. “Then we got our own place.”

But before her son had celebrated his first birthday, Newland and her partner split for the second and final time.

They tried co-parenting. That arrangement—which lasted almost 10 years—seemed to work.

“For a majority of his life we co-parented,” Newland said. “We were only together for those first 10 months. That was the only time we were together.”

Newland’s desire to be near her son has taken her across the country. She moved from Texas to Washington, to Hawaii, then back to Texas, and eventually to Oklahoma, each time following her ex-spouse in attempt to be near her son.

But somewhere during the past two years and the thousands of miles traveled, the co-parenting stopped. Newland was shut out of her son's life.

“I haven’t seen him since last December,” she said. “It’s been horrible. I’ve been trying this whole time to hold it together, but it’s horrible. He is everything to me. I have no issue with picking up and moving, and quitting my job as long as I get to be with him. I don’t care where it’s at, I don’t care who I have to leave behind, just as long as I get to be with him.”

Jennifer's story

Jennifer Fleming and her partner Whitney had a child together in the fall of 2011. The baby was the child she had always wanted, Fleming said.

The couple went to counseling for year to prepare for the child. “There was a long, complicated series of steps just to get pregnant,” Fleming said. “We tried to have a child off and on for five years.”

Eventually they were successful.

“When she was born I cut the umbilical cord,” Fleming said. “Later we went home and started our family.”

Like so many other parents, Fleming juggled a job, doctor visits and the needs of her child against her relationship with Whitney and her own needs.

“I was there for ev

"We applaud the news that executions are on hold in Oklahoma until the Spring of 2016," Kiesel said. "For the next few months at least, we can be grateful that the state has put away its instruments of death."

However, Kiesel said the organization finds it "extremely difficult to imagine that during the next few months the state will be able to demonstrate that it should be trusted with the most awesome power a people can cede to its government."

"That becomes increasingly less likely with the continued insistence on secrecy and resistance to independent oversight," he said. "We hope during this sobriety from state sponsored murder the people of Oklahoma and their elected representatives will seize the opportunity to reflect on the unavoidable failure of any system capital punishment."

OKLA

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin stayed the execution of Richard Glossip late Wednesday afternoon, less than an hour after the United States Supreme Court denied Glossip's request for an emergency stay. The 37-day stay is the second in the past two weeks for Glossip. Late Wednesday afternoon, Fallin's office issued a brief statement:“Last minute questions were raised today about Oklahoma’s execution protocol and the chemicals used for lethal injection," Fallin's statement said. “After consulting with the attorney general and the Department of Corrections, I have issued a 37 day stay of execution while the state addresses those questions and ensures it is complying fully with the protocols approved by federal courts.”Gossip's new execution date has been set for Friday, November 6. Ryan Kiesel, Executive Director of American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma said Oklahoma's government wasn't doing much "to foster a sense of confidence that it can conduct an execution without botching it.""Today, the state has, once again, demonstrated its incompetence," Kiesel said. "That said, as much as this is evidence of the state’s incompetence, we are grateful Oklahoma has stepped away from the error, avoiding another potentially botched execution."Kiesel said it was "unfathomable that it took Department of Corrections officials nearly an hour after the scheduled time of execution to come forward and say there were problems with the drug protocol.""If Oklahomans had any doubt that their government can competently exercise its greatest authority over human life, then those doubts should be magnified ten-fold today," he said. "It’s difficult to imagine what was going through Mr. Glossip’s mind as he waited for his life to end for the third time. The psychological trauma inflicted upon the Glossip family may be, itself, the very type of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the United States Constitution. We fail to understand how anyone could say the events of the past several months resemble justice for the Van Treese family or the rest of Oklahoma."Oklahoma can, and must do better, he said.

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Story & Photographs by M. Scott Carter