Oklahoma executed a man on Thursday who claimed he acted in self-defense when he shot and killed two men in Oklahoma City in 2001.
Phillip Dean Hancock, 59, received a three-drug lethal injection at the Oklahoma state penitentiary and was declared dead at 11.29am. His execution went forward once the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, declined to commute his sentence, despite a clemency recommendation from the state’s pardon and parole board.
“By unnecessarily stringing out his decision-making process for weeks, he has left the families of the victims in this case, all of Phil’s advocates and loved ones, the prison workers, and Phil himself, waiting for the news,” Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of the anti-death penalty group Death Penalty Action, said in a statement.
A spokeswoman for Stitt did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the governor’s decision to deny clemency or why it was delayed until shortly after the execution was originally scheduled.
Hancock had long claimed he shot and killed Robert Jett Jr, 37, and James Lynch, 58, in self-defense after the two men attacked him inside Jett’s home in south Oklahoma City. Hancock’s attorneys claimed at a clemency hearing this month that Jett and Lynch were members of outlaw motorcycle gangs and that Jett lured Hancock, who was unarmed, to Jett’s home.
A female witness said Jett ordered Hancock to get inside a large cage before swinging a metal bar at him. After Jett and Lynch attacked him, his attorneys said, Hancock managed to take Jett’s pistol from him and shoot them both, claiming to the parole board that “they forced me to fight for my life.”
Hancock’s lawyers also have said his trial attorneys have acknowledged they were struggling with substance abuse during the case and failed to present important evidence.
But attorneys for the state argued that Hancock gave shifting accounts of what exactly happened and that his testimony did not align with physical evidence.
Hancock is the fourth incarcerated person in Oklahoma to be executed this year and the 11th since Oklahoma resumed executions in October 2021 following a nearly six-year hiatus resulting from problems with lethal injections in 2014 and 2015. Oklahoma has executed more people per capita than any other state since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty.
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