“I’ve sat in my cell and I’ve watched inmate after inmate after inmate get clemency and get denied clemency,” Sanchez mentioned.
“Either way, it doesn’t go well for the inmates.”
Sanchez cited the latest circumstances of Bigler Stouffer and James Coddington, each of whom have been executed after the board voted 3-2 for clemency that was later rejected by Stitt.
“They went out there and poured their hearts out, man,” Sanchez mentioned. “Why would I want to be a part of anything like that, if you’re going to sit there and get these guys’ hopes up?”
“Why wouldn’t I try to prove my innocence through the courts,” he added.
Stitt granted clemency to a condemned inmate as soon as, commuting Julius Jones dying sentence in 2021 to life in jail with out parole.
Jones’ case had drawn the eye of actuality tv star Kim Kardashian {and professional} athletes with Oklahoma ties, together with NBA stars Russell Westbrook, Blake Griffin and Trae Young, and NFL quarterback Baker Mayfield. All of them urged Stitt to commute Jones’ dying sentence and spare his life.
Sanchez, who maintains his innocence, mentioned he’s now not working along with his court-appointed attorneys, however Mark Barrett, who represents Sanchez, mentioned he was appointed by a federal decide.
“If we’d been hired and the client didn’t want us anymore, that would be the end of it,” Barrett mentioned.
“When there is an appointment, the judge has to release you from your appointment.”
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals in April rejected a request from Sanchez’s attorneys for an evidentiary listening to during which they claimed Sanchez’s late father, Thomas Glen Sanchez, was the precise killer of 21-year-old Juli Busken.
Busken, from Benton, Arkansas, had simply accomplished her final semester at OU when she was kidnapped on December 20, 1996, from her Norman condo complicated. Her physique was discovered that night. She had been raped and shot within the head.
The slaying went unsolved for years till DNA recovered from her garments linked Anthony Sanchez to the crime. He was convicted of rape and homicide and sentenced to die in 2006.
A non-public investigator employed by an anti-death penalty group contends the DNA proof could have been contaminated and that an inexperienced lab technician miscommunicated the energy of the proof to a jury.
But former Cleveland County District Attorney Tim Kuykendall has mentioned there was different proof linking Anthony Sanchez to the killing, together with ballistic proof and a shoe print discovered on the crime scene.
“I know from spending a lot of time on that case, there is not one piece of evidence that pointed to anyone other than Anthony Sanchez,” Kuykendall mentioned. “I don’t care if a hundred people or a thousand people confess to killing Juli Busken.”
Oklahoma resumed finishing up the dying penalty in 2021, ending a six-year moratorium introduced on by considerations about its execution strategies.
Oklahoma had one of many nation’s busiest dying chambers till issues in 2014 and 2015. Richard Glossip was hours away from being executed in September 2015 when jail officers realized they acquired the flawed deadly drug. It was later realized the identical flawed drug had been used to execute an inmate in January 2015.
The drug mix-ups adopted a botched execution in April 2014 during which inmate Clayton Lockett struggled on a gurney earlier than dying 43 minutes into his deadly injection and after the state’s prisons chief ordered executioners to cease.
Source: www.9news.com.au
