Oklahoma governor issues stay in execution of Richard Glossip

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin has issued a temporary, 37-day stay in the execution of a man over concerns about a drug the state planned to use during the procedure.

Just hours before Richard Glossip was scheduled to be put to death, Fallin said her administration had received potassium acetate, a drug the Oklahoman reports the state is not authorized to use for lethal injection.

“This stay will give the Department of Corrections and its attorneys the opportunity to determine whether potassium acetate is complaint with the execution protocol and/or to obtain potassium chloride,” Fallin said in her statement.

In January, the Supreme Court issued a stay of Glossip’s execution to hear a case involving lethal injection drugs. Glossip’s case also had to be retried after the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his first conviction, finding his lawyer’s “conduct was so ineffective that we have no confidence that a reliable adversarial proceeding took place.”

And as the New Yorker‘s Lincoln Caplan writes, Glossip was convicted based on the testimony of the confessed murderer, Justin Sneed, who accused Glossip of paying him to bludgeon the victim, hotel owner Barry Van Treese, to death with a baseball bat.

In a separate Facebook post, Falling said the state still intends to execute Glossip:

America executes someone approximately every nine days.

Rob covers business, economics and the environment for Fusion. He previously worked at Business Insider. He grew up in Chicago.