The clemency hearing for Donald Grant is approaching as the parole board struggles with questions

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Another clemency hearing will take place before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole board on Tuesday.

The 45-year-old Donald Grant admitted killing two women at a hotel in Del City in 2001. He was not tried until 2005 because, according to a record of doctors and his attorney, he was seriously mentally ill. .

“It is undisputed that the state set his incapacity in late 2003 after their own expert Dr. John Call diagnosed Mr. Grant with schizophrenia and found that he was incapable of facing trial. , ”said federal public defender Emma Rolls.

When Grant was finally tried, Rolls said his thinking worsened to the point that even the prosecution said he spoke “gibberish” when he stood up in his own defense.

In a 150-page packet submitted to Rolls ’parole board, there is a string of reports from doctors confirming Grant’s mental illness. Dr. Barbara Hewitt, who interviewed Grant at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 2006, wrote that at first she thought she might be “crazy about religious talk” but over the course of the approximately 90-minute interview it “became remarkably obvious. his pockets. Contact with reality is deeply penetrated by psychotic thinking. “

Rolls said Grant’s difficulties began before he was even born. Grant’s mother, Mary Robinson, drank when he was in utero. In 1989, Grant was removed from his mother’s care by New York state for negligence. At the time, Robinson was addicted to crack cocaine. But Grant reunited with Robinson after the couple fled foster care for North Carolina where his mother moved.

Grant’s long involvement in the criminal justice system began in North Carolina where he was arrested at 14 for car theft. In a report written by a court counsel, Grant was described as a “very anxious, troubled young man.”

Emma Rolls

An excerpt from a report from Donald Grant’s court counsel in North Carolina

Grant had two brothers who were also convicted murderers. In 2010, Lenox Grant was arrested for shooting a 7-year-old boy and his father. Joseph Grant was convicted of second-degree murder after a fight in a bar.

“I think all of this activity shows that none of these kids came out of their childhood unscathed. They all suffered from massive abuse and genetic loading for severe mental illness,” Rolls said. .

Lenox Grant was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Joseph Grant served 25 years in prison and was released.

Joseph Grant is expected to testify at Donald Grant’s clemency hearing, as is Donald Grant himself.

The hearing will come at a complicated time for the parole board. At its final clemency hearing, a majority of the board voted to recommend clemency for death row inmate Bigler Stouffer.

Stouffer spoke on his own behalf at the hearing and insisted he was innocent of the 1985 murder of teacher Linda Reaves. The board unanimously rejected that claim, but still voted for clemency because of concerns over Oklahoma’s deadly drug injections.

The drugs, which the Department of Corrections refused to provide records, were used in the “crooked” murder of John Marion Grant in October. Grant vomited and was convulsed on the gurney at Oklahoma State Penitentiary before he died.

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