ABSTRACT
By the end of 2016—even after two United States Supreme Court cases had upheld separate lethal injection protocols—states had carried out the fewest number of executions the country had recorded in 25 years, and juries put forth the lowest number of death sentences in 45 years. Likewise, about 40% of the American public was against the death penalty, the largest such percentage in over four decades. Lethal injection was considered a potential execution method in the United States as early as 1888. The New York governor's appointed commission rejected it, in part because of the medical profession's belief that, with injection, the public would begin to link the practice of medicine with death. In May 1977, one year after Gregg v. Georgia, Oklahoma became the first state to adopt lethal injection. The two key legal players in the development of Oklahoma's lethal injection statute were then-Oklahoma State Senator Bill Dawson and then-Oklahoma House Representative Bill Wiseman.
