MCALESTER, Okla. – Oklahoma executed Jemaine Cannon at 10:13 a.m. Thursday.
Cannon, 51, was sentenced to death in 1996 after a Tulsa County jury convicted Cannon of the 1995 death of Sharonda White Clark.
He is the state’s second death row inmate executed in 2023 and the ninth person put to death by Oklahoma since the state resumed executions in October 2021 after a nearly seven-year moratorium.
Court records indicate Cannon escaped from a prison in southwest Oklahoma and was working as a school district custodian when he stole a pickup truck and drove to Tulsa and was being taken in by Clark.
Clark was found by Tulsa police dead on the bathroom floor of her residence with multiple stab wounds and a trail of blood in a bedroom.
Police went to Clark’s residence after her grandmother filed a missing person’s report after she failed to pick up her children from daycare.
Cannon fled Oklahoma and was arrested in Michigan for Clark’s murder and extradited back to face trial.
Cannon’s lawyers argued that he stabbed the woman in self-defense after a brief argument.
Cannon argued that it was Clark who first attacked him with a knife and that he suffered a cut on his hand and after a struggle, Cannon said he gained control of the knife and swung the knife at blind Clark
Police reports state that no defensive injuries were “noticed” on Cannon after his arrest.
The Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Paroles in June voted 3-2 to deny Cannon clemency.
Cannon’s lawyers told the Board that their client is suffering from stage three sarcoidosis which affects his eyes, lungs, liver, spleen and skin.
Cannon maintained to the board that his actions were in self-defense.
“I was defending my life,” Cannon said. “Even in law, there is no enjoyment or satisfaction in acting in self-defense. This is something no one should have to experience. The end result was not planned, it was not murder. I wish it never happened.”
Cannon was originally scheduled to be executed on March 9 before the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals accepted a motion filed by Drummond asking the court to set 60 days between executions instead of the state’s pace of every 30 days to reduce the workload of Department of Corrections staff. .
Oklahoma plans to carry out five more executions through June 2024 as part of the second of a five-phase plan to carry out 25 executions first scheduled in 2021.
