News Release
09/01/2010
Court Asked to Lift Matthews Execution Stay
Attorney General Drew Edmondson today asked a federal court to allow the execution of Cleveland County death row inmate Jeffrey David Matthews to proceed.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma last month stayed Matthews’ execution after the Department of Corrections (DOC) altered the drugs used in the execution process due to a nationwide shortage of the anesthetic sodium thiopental. In a motion to lift the stay, the state informs the court that DOC has acquired a sufficient quantity of sodium thiopental to proceed with the execution without deviating from its existing lethal injection protocol.
Matthews was convicted and sentenced to death for the January 1994 murder of 77-year-old Otis Earl Short during a robbery of Short’s home in Rosedale.
Should the stay be vacated, the attorney general would next ask the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to set an execution date.