A 59-year-old American man sentenced to death for a double murder in 2001 was executed Thursday by lethal injection in Oklahoma, the prison administration of this state in the center of the country announced.
The execution of Phillip Hancock at the Oklahoma Penitentiary in the town of McAlester is the 24th in 2023 and the last planned in the United States this year. All of these executions, all by lethal injection, were carried out in five states, three in the South, Texas, Florida, and Alabama, and two in the middle of the country, Missouri and Oklahoma.
The next scheduled execution, on January 25, 2024 in Alabama, is to be carried out by nitrogen inhalation, which would be a world first.
Phillip Hancock was sentenced to death in 2004 for the April 2001 murders of Robert Jett and James Lynch, two members of a violent motorcycle gang.
The Oklahoma State Pardons Committee recommended on November 8 that his sentence be commuted to life in prison, but Republican Governor Kevin Stitt did not follow it, despite the support of several Republican elected officials for this request.
“We are deeply saddened that Oklahoma executed Phil for defending himself against a violent attack. This was clearly a situation of self-defense and the governor and the state ignored a series of evidence supporting that Phil was defending his life,” one of his lawyers, Shawn Nolan, lamented in a statement.
“He fought to stay out of a cage only to be caged and tragically killed by the state,” he added.
Phillip Hancock has always pleaded self-defense, claiming to have been lured into a trap at the home of Robert Jett, who was under the influence of methamphetamine and had tried with James Lynch to force him into a cage where he locked his victims to torture them.
According to his account, contested by the prosecution and which did not convince the jurors, he struggled, managed to seize Robert Jett’s pistol and shoot his two attackers before fleeing.
Oklahoma resumed capital executions in 2021 after a six-year moratorium due to botched executions in 2014 and 2015. That of Phillip Hancock is the fourth in 2023.
According to a recent Gallup Institute poll on capital punishment, a majority of Americans (50% versus 47%) believe that it is not fairly applied in the United States, a first since the launch of this monthly survey in 2000.
A majority (53%) nevertheless remains in favor of the death penalty, according to the same source.
Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 American states, while six others observe a moratorium on its application by decision of the governor.
