Executioners traumatized by killing Oklahoma’s death row prisoners asked a judge to slow down the pace of the procedures to help them deal with the emotional toll.
The judge responded that they needed to “suck it up.”
The request had been made by the state’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond and Steven Harpe, the director of the Department of Corrections. The pair asked that the current 60-day interval between executions be increased to 90.
“This pace also protects our team’s mental health and allows time for them to process and recover between the scheduled executions,” Harpe said.
To do so, they needed permission from the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, Slate reported.
“The current pace of executions is unsustainable in the long run, as it is unduly burdening the DOC and its personnel,” said Drummond.
But during a hearing last week, Judge Gary Lumpkin responded that he was done with “sympathy stuff” and that correctional officers needed to “suck it up” and “man up.”
“If you can’t do the job, you should step aside and let somebody do it that can,” he said, according to Slate.
He added, “We set a reasonable amount of time to start this out, and y’all keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. Who’s to say next month you won’t come in and say ‘I need 120 days?”
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“This stuff needs to stop, and people need to suck it up, realize they have a hard job to do, and get it done in a timely, proficient, professional way.”
Slate referenced a 2019 Washington Post column by criminal justice and correctional professional Allen Alt, who wrote the executions, “Leave behind a fresh trail of victims, largely hidden from public view. These are the correctional staff harmed by the execution process."
“I know from my own firsthand experiences, supervising executions as a state director of corrections, that the damage executions inflict on correctional staff is deep and far-ranging," Alt wrote. "Carrying out an execution can take a severe toll on the well-being of those involved. All these devastating effects are made much worse when executions are carried out in rapid succession. … [That] precludes any attempt to return to normalcy following an execution.”