page_title: John David Duty
section_title: Appeals
hierarchical_section_title: John David Duty / Background / Appeals
caption_attribution_description: English: The Byron White United States Courthouse in Denver, Colorado, used by the United States Postal Service and the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
context_page_description: John David Duty was an American who was executed in Oklahoma for first-degree murder. According to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, he is the first person in the United States to have been put to death with pentobarbital. A nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental led the state to incorporate the substitution into their protocol for lethal injections. Duty's case gained media attention because pentobarbital had typically been used to euthanize animals.
  Duty was sentenced to death for strangling a fellow inmate at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in December 2001. At the time, Duty had been serving a life sentence for a 1978 conviction of rape, robbery and shooting with intent to kill. He did not contest the murder charge and vowed that he would kill again if he was not executed.
  Duty later filed appeals that the change to the method of execution could be inhumane, but was denied. Though his case had gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, opponents of capital punishment claimed that Duty had manipulated the system to be executed as a method of escape from life imprisonment.
context_section_description: In 2004, Duty filed an appeal with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. He cited the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Ring v. Arizona, arguing against the constitutionality of his "continuing threat" being used as an aggravating circumstance for his death sentence. However, the court noted that the issue was not raised by Duty during trial and upheld his judgement on April 23, 2004.
  In 2010, a nationwide shortage of the lethal injection drug, sodium thiopental, led the Oklahoma Department of Corrections to instead consider pentobarbital, which is commonly used for animal euthanasia. Oklahoma state law is not specific in prescribing the use of a fast-acting barbiturate, allowing flexibility for such a substitution. Duty and two other inmates on death row filed a federal appeal that the new protocol would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. In a hearing before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, the professor of anesthesia from Harvard Medical School testified for the defense that pentobarbital might not succeed in preventing "severe, excruciating pain". However, the professor of anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst countered in a deposition for the state that 5 grams of pentobarbital would be sufficient to cause unconsciousness and death in minutes. Representatives from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections and the Death Penalty Information Center both testified that no other state had used pentobarbital and that they believed Duty would be the first person to be executed by the drug. On December 14, 2010, the Circuit Judges Jerome Holmes and Neil Gorsuch joined Chief Judge Mary Beck Briscoe in a unanimous decision upholding the use of the drug, citing that the state witness had demonstrated "substantially more clinical experience with the use of pentobarbital". A petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States over the constitutionality of the state's execution protocol was also denied.
caption: A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit unanimously upheld the use of pentobarbital for lethal injections.[18]
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