For more than a century, Oklahoma has used the death penalty as the ultimate punishment for some of the state’s most serious crimes. From electrocution in the early days of statehood to lethal injection in the modern era, Oklahoma’s history with capital punishment has included periods of frequent executions, legal challenges, controversial cases and lengthy debates over whether the punishment should continue.
According to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, the state carried out 212 executions from 1915 through 2025, including 209 men and three women. Of those executions, 82 were carried out by electrocution, one federal prisoner was executed by hanging and 129 were carried out by lethal injection.
The history of executions in what is now Oklahoma goes back even further. Historical records document executions in Oklahoma territory beginning in the 19th century. After statehood, Oklahoma adopted electrocution as its primary method of execution and the first execution by electrocution took place in 1915. The state's final electrocution occurred in 1966.
Oklahoma's death-penalty system changed significantly in the 1970s. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively halted executions nationde in Furman v. Georgia, finding that existing death-penalty procedures were being applied in an unconstitutional manner.
States were forced to reconsider how capital punishment was imposed. Oklahoma subsequently enacted a new deathpenalty law in 1976-77. The Legislature established lethal injection as the state's method of execution, making Oklahoma the first state in the nation, and the first jurisdiction in the world, to adopt lethal injection as its execution method.
The first person executed under Oklahoma's modern lethal-injection system was Charles Troy Coleman on Sept. 10, 1990. Coleman had been convicted of first-degree murder in Muskogee County.
Since the modern deathpenalty era began, Oklahoma has remained one of the nation's most active states when measured by executions per
See Death Penalty, Page Three