Who Is John Marion Grant? First Inmate Set to Be Executed by Oklahoma Since 2015

John Marion Grant is set to become the first inmate to receive a lethal injection in Oklahoma since 2015.

The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals on Monday scheduled seven executions for October through March.

Grant, 60, was convicted of killing prison worker Gay Carter in November 1998 while serving sentences for four armed robberies.

According to court documents, Grant dragged Carter into a mop closet and stabbed her numerous times in the chest with a homemade knife after she removed him from a job in the kitchen of Dick Conner Correctional Center in Hominy.

Grant's attorneys have argued that he was sentenced to death after receiving ineffective assistance from counsel during his trial and that mitigating evidence about abuse he suffered as a child was never presented to jurors.

His attorney Sarah Jernigan, an assistant federal public defender, says Grant has also expressed remorse for his crime and apologized to his victim's family. "John Grant is far from the worst of the worst," Jernigan said in a statement to Newsweek.

"He has taken full responsibility for his crime and has apologized to his victim's family. Had the jury learned of the horrific victimization he experienced in State-run institutions when he was just a child, there is at least a reasonable probability he would not have been sentenced to death."

Jernigan added: "Rather than killing him now, the State should extend him the mercy he was denied as a vulnerable child in its custody."

Oklahoma's death chamber was once among the busiest in the country. But executions were paused following the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014 and after Charles Warner was executed using the wrong lethal drug and Richard Glossip was almost executed before a drug mix-up was discovered in 2015.

Concern Over Drugs

Grant's execution was initially scheduled for October 28, 2015, but he and two other inmates, including Glossip, were granted stays over concerns about the execution drugs.

Grant's execution is now scheduled for October 28 after Oklahoma's Attorney General John O'Connor asked the court to set execution dates for seven inmates who aren't part of a legal challenge to the state's execution protocols.

The six other scheduled executions are: Julius Jones on November 18; Bigler Stouffer on December 9; Wade Greely Lay on January 6; Donald Anthony Grant on January 27; Gilbert Ray Postelle on February 17; and James Allen Coddington on March 10.

"We are concerned that the court set these dates when it knows that unresolved questions about Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol remain pending in the federal district court," said Dale Baich, an attorney representing inmates in the lawsuit.

"To allow executions to proceed when there is a chance the federal court could find a constitutionally unacceptable risk that a person could suffer because of the drug combination used, is deeply troubling."