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The Alabama Solution
Join us for an important screening of The Alabama Solution, followed by a community conversation around detention conditions in Oklahoma. The Alabama Solution is a powerful documentary that exposes the realities of Alabama’s prison system and centers the voices of those living within it. The brutality shown in the documentary is not unique. In a way, it shows every prison because of the violence and oppression that prison breeds. The film invites us to confront the human cost of incarceration, the forces that allow injustice to persist, and the urgent need for accountability and systemic change. Join advocates working across issues of incarceration, immigration detention, and the death penalty in Oklahoma for a community conversation after the screening that discusses how the film relates to what is happening in Oklahoma and actions you can take to fight injustice in our state.
Hosted by the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, the Julius Jones Institute, and the ACLU of Oklahoma, this event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served, and we will be joined by local community organizations who will provide free resources and ways to stay involved in advocacy efforts.
ACLU Official Praises Execution Stays
“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.”
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Fallin Stays Execution, Cites Problems With Execution Drug
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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