MCALESTER, Okla.  — A 50-year-old Oklahoma death row inmate was executed a day after Gov. Kevin Stitt rejected a clemency recommendation.

The Associated Press reported that James Coddington was executed by lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 10:16 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

The news outlet reported that Coddington, then 24, was convicted of the 1997 murder of 73-year-old Albert Hale, who he beat to death with a hammer.

During his trial, the news outlet reported, Coddington killed Hale because he didn't give him money to buy cocaine.

Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that during his clemency hearing, Coddington apologized to the Hale family, telling the five-member Pardon and Parole Board that he was a changed man.

“I’m clean, I know God, I’m not ... I’m not a vicious murderer,” Coddington said, the AP reported. “If this ends today with my death sentence, OK.”

The five-member board voted 3-2 to recommend Coddington for clemency, the Associated Press reported.

However, on Wednesday, Stitt declined his clemency recommendation that would have changed his sentence to life in prison without parole, The Oklahoman reported.

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-1 to recommend clemency for Julius Jones in a hearing on Monday.

They also recommended Jones’s sentence be commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole. The issue will now go to Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt for his decision.

“Governor Stitt is aware of the Pardon and Parole Board’s vote today," Stitt's office said in a statement to KJRH on Monday.

"Our office will not offer further comment until the Governor has made a final decision,” the governor's office added.

Jones is currently serving time and has been sentenced to death for the 1999 killing of an Edmond man, Paul Howell. Over the two decades since his sentencing, Jones and his supporters have long advocated that he is innocent.

In September, with three out of five votes, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted to approve a recommendation to commute the death sentence for Jones. Approval of commutation would downgrade Jones's sentence to life in prison.

However, despite the board's vote, Jones was set an execution date in the month of November. Attorneys for Jones filed objections saying that setting an execution date is "inappropriate" without a decision from the governor.

Stitt has since stated that he won't make a decision on commuting Jones's death sentence until after a clemency hearing is held.

According to the Associated Press, inmates on death row, including Jones, had their execution dates put on hold after a botched lethal injection left an inmate writing in pain on a gurney in 2014 and a mix-up in drugs in 2015.

After a six-year hiatus, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections announced in October they would continue with executions in the state. But many are questioning the agency's execution process when John Marion Grant "convulsed" and vomited after receiving the first lethal injection drug on Oct. 28.

This story was originally published by Emily Farris at KJRH.

MISSION, Kan. —

A Kansas woman was executed Wednesday for strangling an expectant mother in Missouri and cutting the baby from her womb, the first time in nearly seven decades that the U.S. government has put to death a female inmate.

Lisa Montgomery, 52, was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. after receiving a lethal injection at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. She was the 11th prisoner to receive a lethal injection there since July when President Donald Trump, an ardent supporter of capital punishment, resumed federal executions following 17 years without one.

As a curtain was raised in the execution chamber, Montgomery looked momentarily bewildered as she glanced at journalists peering at her from behind thick glass. As the execution process began, a woman standing over Montgomery’s shoulder leaned over, gently removed Montgomery’s face mask and asked her if she had any last words. “No,” Montgomery responded in a quiet, muffled voice. She said nothing else.

She tapped her fingers nervously for several seconds, a heart-shaped tattoo on her thumb, showed no signs of distress, and quickly closed her eyes. As the lethal injection began, Montgomery kept licking her lips and gasped briefly as pentobarbital, a lethal drug, entered her body through IVs on both arms. A few minutes later, her midsection throbbed for a moment, but quickly stopped.

Montgomery lay on a gurney in the pale-green execution chamber, her glasses on and her grayish brown hair spilling over a green medical pillow. At 1:30 a.m., an official in black gloves with a stethoscope walked into the room, listened to her heart and chest, then walked out. She was pronounced dead a minute later.

“The craven bloodlust of a failed administration was on full display tonight,” Montgomery’s attorney, Kelley Henry said in a statement. “Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should feel shame.”

“The government stopped at nothing in its zeal to kill this damaged and delusional woman,” Henry said. “Lisa Montgomery’s execution was far from justice.”

It came after hours of legal wrangling before the Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to move forward. Montgomery was the first of the final three federal inmates scheduled to die before next week’s inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who is expected to discontinue federal executions.

File video: Lisa Montgomery's sister hopes there will be a stay of execution

But a federal judge for the District of Columbia halted the scheduled executions later this week of Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs in a ruling Tuesday. Johnson, convicted of killing seven people related to his drug trafficking in Virginia, and Higgs, convicted of ordering the murders of three women in Maryland, both tested positive for COVID-19 last month.

Montgomery killed 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore in 2004. She used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, and then cut the baby girl from the womb with a kitchen knife. Montgomery took the child with her and attempted to pass the girl off as her own.

An appeals court granted Montgomery a stay of execution Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted an Indiana judge’s ruling that found she was likely mentally ill and couldn’t comprehend she would be put to death. But both appeals were lifted, allowing the execution of the only female on federal death row to go forward.

As the only woman on federal death row, Montgomery had been held in a federal prison in Texas and was brought to Terre Haute on Monday night.

Montgomery’s legal team says she suffered “sexual torture,” including gang rapes, as a child, permanently scarring her emotionally and exacerbating mental-health issues that ran in her family.

At trial, prosecutors accused Montgomery of faking mental illness, noting that her killing of Stinnett was premeditated and included meticulous planning, including online research on how to perform a C-section.

Henry balked at that idea, citing extensive testing and brain scans that supported the diagnosis of mental illness. She said the issue at the core of the legal arguments are not whether she knew the killing was wrong in 2004 but whether she fully grasps why she is slated to be executed now.

U.S. District Judge James Patrick Hanlon, who had halted Montgomery's execution before the stay was overturned on appeal, cited defense experts who alleged Montgomery suffered from depression, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Montgomery, the judge wrote, also suffered around the time of the killing from an extremely rare condition called pseudocyesis in which a woman’s false belief she is pregnant triggers hormonal and physical changes as if she were actually pregnant.

Montgomery also experiences delusions and hallucinations, believing God spoke with her through connect-the-dot puzzles, the judge said, citing defense experts. The government has acknowledged Montgomery’s mental issues but disputes that she can’t comprehend that she is scheduled for execution for killing another person because of them.

Details of the crime at times left jurors in tears during her trial.

Prosecutors told the jury Montgomery drove about 170 miles (274 kilometers) from her Melvern, Kansas, farmhouse to the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore under the guise of adopting a rat terrier puppy from Stinnett. She strangled Stinnett performing a crude cesarean and fleeing with the baby.

Prosecutors said Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend herself as Montgomery cut the baby girl from her womb. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up in the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas, telling him she had delivered the baby earlier in the day at a nearby birthing center.

Montgomery was arrested the next day after showing off the premature infant, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 years old and hasn’t spoken publicly about the tragedy.

Prosecutors said the motive was that Montgomery’s ex-husband knew she had undergone a tubal ligation that made her sterile and planned to reveal she was lying about being pregnant in an effort to get custody of two of their four children. Needing a baby before a fast-approaching court date, Montgomery turned her focus on Stinnett, whom she had met at dog shows.

Anti-death penalty groups said Trump was pushing for executions prior to the November election in a cynical bid to burnish a reputation as a law-and-order leader.

The last woman executed by the federal government was Bonnie Brown Heady on Dec. 18, 1953, for the kidnapping and murder of a 6-year-old boy in Missouri.

The last woman executed by a state was Kelly Gissendaner, 47, on Sept. 30, 2015, in Georgia. She was convicted of murder in the 1997 slaying of her husband after she conspired with her lover, who stabbed Douglas Gissendaner to death.

___

Hollingsworth reported from Kansas. Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama inmate has won a reprieve from a scheduled lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court said the state could not proceed without his pastor in the death chamber.

Thursday's planned execution of Willie B. Smith III was called off late at night when the U.S. Supreme Court maintained an injunction.

The state prison system said afterward that the execution would not proceed in light of the ruling.

Alabama has maintained that non-prison staff should not be in the room for security reasons.

The 51-year-old Smith was sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of 22-year-old Sharma Ruth Johnson in Birmingham, Alabama's largest city.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. —

A prolific serial torture-slayer dubbed "The Dating Game Killer" died Saturday while awaiting execution in California, authorities said. Rodney James Alcala was 77.

He died of natural causes at a hospital in San Joaquin Valley, California, prison officials said in a statement.

Alcala was sentenced to death in 2010 for five slayings in California between 1977 and 1979, including that of a 12-year-old girl, though authorities estimate he may have killed up to 130 people across the country.

Alcala received an additional 25 years to life in 2013 after pleading guilty to two homicides in New York.

He was charged again in 2016 after DNA evidence connected him to the 1977 death of a 28-year-old woman whose remains were found in a remote area of southwest Wyoming. But a prosecutor said Alcala was too ill to face trial in the death of the woman, who was six months pregnant when she died.

California's death row is in San Quentin State Prison near San Francisco, but for years Alcala had been housed more than 200 miles away at a prison in Corcoran where he could receive medical care around the clock.

Prosecutors said Alcala stalked women like prey and took earrings as trophies from some of his victims.

"You're talking about a guy who is hunting through Southern California looking for people to kill because he enjoys it," Orange County, California, prosecutor Matt Murphy said during his trial.

Investigators say his true victim count may never be known.

Earrings helped put him on death row, though Gov. Gavin Newsom has imposed a moratorium on executions so long as he is governor.

The mother of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe testified at his murder trial that a pair of gold ball earrings found in a jewelry pouch in Alcala's storage locker belonged to her daughter.

But Alcala claimed that the earrings were his and that a video clip from his 1978 appearance on "The Dating Game" shows him wearing the studs nearly a year before Samsoe died. He denied the slayings and cited inconsistencies in witness accounts and descriptions.

California prosecutors said Alcala also took earrings from at least two of his adult victims as trophies.

Two of the four women were posed nude after their deaths, one was raped with a claw hammer and all were repeatedly strangled and resuscitated to prolong their agony, prosecutors said.

Investigators said one victim's DNA was found on a rose-shaped earring in Alcala's possession and his DNA was found in her body.

He had been sentenced to death twice before in Samsoe's murder, but both convictions were overturned. He was charged in the slayings of the four adult women more than two decades later based on new DNA and other forensic evidence.

After the verdict, authorities released more than 100 photos of young women and girls found in Alcala's possession in hopes of linking him to other unsolved murders around the country.

"There is murder and rape and then there is the unequivocal carnage of a Rodney Alcala-style murder," Bruce Barcomb, the brother of 18-year-old victim Jill Barcomb, said as Alcala was sentenced to death.