Oklahoma is preparing to execute Anthony Sanchez for the 1996 slaying of a 21-year-old ballerina.
Sanchez, 44, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester at 10 a.m. on Thursday.
He was sentenced to death for the killing of Jewell "Juli" Busken. Busken, from Benton, Arkansas, had just finished her final semester at the University of Oklahoma when she was abducted from her apartment complex in Norman on December 20, 1996. Her body was found that evening. Authorities said she had been bound, raped and shot in the head.
The slaying went unsolved for years until DNA recovered from Busken's clothes linked Sanchez to the crime.
Sanchez has always maintained his innocence. "I did not kill Juli Busken," he said in a telephone interview with Newsweek earlier this year.
Sanchez's attorneys this week filed an appeal with a federal circuit court after a federal judge denied a stay of execution.
Eric Allen, Sanchez's attorney, argued in the filing that he cannot say if any claims for relief exist until the boxes of material recently turned over by Sanchez's former counsel can be reviewed.
"This court has found that no further claims exist," Allen wrote. "Respectfully, current counsel does not know that until he or someone in his employ goes through the boxes, some of which are still sealed, to determine what exists. These sealed boxes could contain information leading to a claim that provides relief for [Sanchez]."
Allen told Newsweek: "My hope is that the courts will see fit to stop this execution.
"If not, I would call on Governor Stitt to grant a reprieve in this matter so that I may review some fifty boxes of case materials that only came into my possession last Friday. And sit in an office building in Oklahoma City. This will allow time to investigate further evidence of Anthony's innocence."
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals in April rejected a request from Sanchez's attorneys for an evidentiary hearing in which they claimed Sanchez's late father, Thomas Glen Sanchez, was the one who actually killed Busken.
His father's former girlfriend, Charlotte Beattie, told Newsweek that the elder Sanchez repeatedly admitted to committing the crime that sent his son to death row. And a private investigator hired to look into the case questioned the reliability of the DNA evidence.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has said the evidence is "overwhelming that Anthony Sanchez brutally raped and murdered" Busken.
"Instead of expressing remorse, he made the cowardly decision to try blaming the crime on his deceased father—a ludicrous allegation thoroughly discredited by DNA analysis," Drummond said in a statement to Newsweek.
Sanchez rejected his chance for a clemency hearing in June. He said it was unlikely that Oklahoma's Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt would spare his life even if the five-member Pardon and Parole Board recommended clemency.
"There is no greater danger than misplaced hope," Sanchez said. "For decades, I've watched the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board act as an instrument of approval for even the most significant of injustices," Sanchez wrote. "Such moments are regularly defined by close votes. However, the State always seems to come out on top. Even when it doesn't, Governor Stitt is more than willing to make sure that death wins in the end. Why would someone like me participate in such a process?"
The Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is planning to protest Sanchez's scheduled execution outside the governor's mansion in Oklahoma City from 9 a.m. on Thursday.
"There are lots of unanswered questions about the Sanchez case," said Rev. Don Heath, a minister and attorney who serves as the group's chair.
"A DNA match in a cold case is the only evidence the prosecutors had. I don't know whether Sanchez committed this crime. The prosecutors don't either, if they were being candid."
If Sanchez's execution goes ahead as planned, he will be the 10th inmate put to death in Oklahoma since the state resumed lethal injections in October 2021 after a series of flawed lethal injections led to an almost six-year pause on capital punishment.
Richard Glossip was hours away from being executed in September 2015 when officials realized they had received the wrong drug.
It was later learned that the same wrong drug had been used to execute Charles Warner in January 2015. The mix-ups followed the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014.
After a federal judge rejected a challenge to the state's lethal injection protocol last summer, Oklahoma's Court of Criminal Appeals set execution dates for 25 inmates, spaced about a month apart. Sanchez's execution was scheduled for April 6.
The court in January granted a request from Drummond to slow down the pace of executions, which pushed Sanchez's execution date to September.
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Khaleda Rahman is Newsweek's Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on abortion rights, race, education, ... Read more
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