Oklahoma Judge Tells Execution Staff to “Suck It Up” After Trauma-Break Request

Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, and Steven Harpe, the director of the Department of Corrections, want to slow down the pace of their state’s upcoming executions, moving from a 60-day to a 90-day interval between each of them. They contend that doing so is necessary to deal with trauma to those who carry them out and to ensure that future executions will not be botched.

To reschedule the pending executions, the state needs permission from the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, which, in 2021, had approved a plan to execute 25 death row inmates in less than three years. That plan would have cut the state’s death row population by more than half.

However, in January 2023, Drummond asked for a change in the plan so that the state could wait 60 days between executions. At that time, he said: “The current pace of executions is unsustainable in the long run, as it is unduly burdening the DOC and its personnel.”

The court agreed to that revised schedule.

Now, together with Harpe, Drummond wants to revise the schedule again. Last week, the Court of Criminal Appeals held a hearing to consider their request.

During that hearing, Judge Gary Lumpkin, a former prosecutor who has been on the five-person court for more than 30 years, displayed a surprising callousness about the well-being of the correctional officials involved in the execution process. He said that they need to stop complaining, “suck it up,” and stick to the current execution schedule.

Such callousness is bad enough when it is directed at people who are condemned to die. It is genuinely shocking when directed at the state officials and employees who preside over, and carry out, the grim task of putting those people to death.

But Lumpkin wasn’t done.

He insisted that he would not buy into arguments about the traumatic effects of participating in executions, which he derisively labeled “sympathy stuff.”

He said that Drummond and Harpe needed to “man up.” “If you can’t do the job,” Lumpkin continued, “you should step aside and let somebody do it that can.”

The judge made clear that he had run out of patience with the state’s hesitation about moving forward with executions. “We set a reasonable amount of time to start this out,” Lumpkin noted, “and y’all keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. Who’s to say next month you won’t come in and say ‘I need 120 days?’ ”

Making clear where he will come out on the request for a revised schedule, Lumpkin concluded that “this stuff needs to stop, and people need to suck it up, realize they have a hard job to do, and get it done in a timely, proficient, professional way.”

Timely, proficient, and professional all sound fine in the abstract, but they have little to do with the situation that Oklahoma’s attorney general and director of the Department of Corrections are facing.

Harpe captured that situation when he said that “the previous model put a massive strain on ODOC to carry out daily operations due to the time the employees spent away from their primary posts to perform the required number of drills.”

“Adjusting the execution schedule,” he continued, “will allow ODOC to carry out the court-ordered warrants within a timeframe that will minimize the disruptions to normal operations. This pace also protects our team’s mental health and allows time for them to process and recover between the scheduled executions.”

Telling people to “suck it up” or “man up” will hardly win Lumpkin plaudits from people who understand how trauma works and how to respond to it. And, however Lumpkin sees it, the trauma experienced by people taking part in executions is not simply an Oklahoma problem, or an issue of “manning up.”

Distinguished psychologist Robert Lifton has documented the “corrosive effect of the death penalty” on prison wardens, chaplains, and others involved in the death penalty process.

In 2019, Allen Alt, a longtime criminal justice and correctional professional, published a piece in the Washington Post in which he argued that executions:

“All these devastating effects,” Alt contended, “are made much worse when executions are carried out in rapid succession. … [That] precludes any attempt to return to normalcy following an execution.”

A 2022 National Public Radio investigation confirmed Lifton’s and Alt’s observations. Death penalty workers across the country “reported suffering serious mental and physical repercussions.” NPR quotes Jeanne Woodford, a warden who oversaw four executions in California: “People think that it would be so easy to go up and execute someone who had committed such heinous acts. But the truth is, killing a human being is hard.”

Lumpkin didn’t deny any of this. It just didn’t seem to matter to him.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising coming from a judge who has not been a model of judiciousness or sensitivity. For example, in a 2017 decision, he repeatedly included the N-word (fully spelled out). As Judge David Lewis, the only Black person on the Court of Criminal Appeals, pointed out at the time, Lumpkin’s “use of the ‘n’ word in this opinion was unnecessary to the reader’s understanding of the language used by the appellant, and unnecessary to the court’s resolution of this case.”

But whatever we might say about Lumpkin, the callous indifference he showed in last week’s death penalty hearing is not just his problem. It is the product of a system that invites some judges, jurors, correction officials, and citizens to ignore, or forget, the damage the death penalty does to the humanity of everyone it touches.

That system, what Justice Harry Blackmun once called “the machinery of death,” makes it possible to speak and act as inhumanely as Lumpkin did. In Blackmun’s words, it “lessens us all.”

That is one among many reasons why we should have nothing to do with it.