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February 17, 2022
Oklahoma completes its second execution of 2022
As detailed in this local article, "Oklahoma on Thursday executed convicted murderer Gilbert Ray Postelle without any of the issues that led to condemnation of the state's lethal injection procedure in the past." Here is more:
"He didn't seem to be struggling at all with his breath," said one media witness, Dylan Goforth of The Frontier, an online news site. "It happened really quick. ... It didn't seem like he was having any trouble." Postelle was declared dead at 10:14 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He was 35.
He apologized at his clemency hearing in December for killing four people but made no final statement Thursday.
The execution was the fourth since the state resumed lethal injections in October after a hiatus of more than six years. It came just days before the start of a federal trial that will determine whether any more executions will be carried out this year.
Attorney General John O'Connor, whose assistants will represent the state at the trial, said the execution was carried out "with zero complications."...
Postelle was convicted of murdering four people on Memorial Day 2005 outside a trailer in Del City. He was sentenced to death for two of the murders and to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the other two. He was 19 at the time of the murders. He acted along with his older brother and their father in a blitz attack involving assault rifles.
Shot the most was the trailer's resident, Donnie Swindle. Postelle's father had accused Swindle of causing his motorcycle accident the year before. Also killed were Amy Wright, James Alderson and Terry Smith....
Swindle's sister, Shelli Milner, called Postelle a monster who stole four innocent people's lives. "To know that he will never walk this Earth again does give me a little more peace than I had yesterday, but I will never have peace knowing what he did to my brother Donnie, to Amy, to James and to Terry," she told reporters after the execution. "He got what he deserved today."
February 17, 2022 at 11:26 PM | Permalink
