An African-American, sentenced to death for a double murder, received a lethal injection on Thursday in Oklahoma, becoming the first prisoner executed in 2022 in the United States.
The Southern State “executed Donald Grant without any complications at 10:16 a.m. this morning,” Attorney General John O’Connor wrote in a statement posted on Facebook.
In 2001, Donald Grant, then 25, robbed a hotel to steal bail for his imprisoned girlfriend.
Intellectual disabilities
During the attack, he opened fire on two employees of the establishment, killing one instantly and finishing the other with a knife, according to court documents. In 2005, a jury sentenced him to death for this double murder.
Since then, he has lodged numerous appeals to have his sentence overturned, citing intellectual disabilities in particular. In a petition posted on the Internet, his defenders claimed that he suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and brain trauma caused by violence inflicted in his childhood by an alcoholic father.
Three shots
His last appeal, relating to the method of execution chosen by Oklahoma (south of the country), was rejected on Wednesday by the Supreme Court of the United States. Donald Grant, 46, was therefore injected with three lethal substances in McAlester Penitentiary.
This cocktail is suspected of causing excruciating suffering to convicts, which the US Constitution prohibits. At the end of October, a convict had been shaken by convulsions and had vomited repeatedly after the first injection. The death penalty continues to decline in the United States, where eleven executions took place in 2021, the lowest in decades.