Clemency denied for Oklahoma man on death row

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. (KSWO) - The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted Tuesday to deny clemency to a man on death row.

John Marion Grant is scheduled to be executed on October 28, and would be the first person executed in the state since Charles Warner in 2015.

Grant was sentenced to death in 1998 for a deadly stabbing of a Dick Conner Correctional Center employee.

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted three to two against clemency.

Grant’s attorney released the following statement after Tuesday’s decision.

“John Grant never had a chance. His mother neglected and abandoned him. Beginning when he was just twelve years old, the State of Oklahoma sent him to notoriously vicious juvenile facilities where he experienced unspeakable horrors. At seventeen, Oklahoma placed him in an adult prison, where he was further victimized, and where he never received the mental health care he so obviously needed. And when he eventually committed a tragic crime, Oklahoma provided him with incompetent lawyers, who failed to give the jurors information some of them now say might have changed their decision. Allowing Mr. Grant to be executed is a final injustice in this tragic case.”
Sarah Jernigan