Oklahoma News

Prosecutors can seek the death penalty against a former Marine charged with killing four people, including a prostitute featured on HBO’s “Cathouse” series, an Oklahoma judge ruled Thursday.

District Judge Glenn Jones rejected a request from David “Hooligan” Tyner, 30, to prevent prosecutors from seeking the death penalty when his case goes to trial next month.

House Democrats couldn’t muster enough Republican votes to override a veto by GOP Gov. Mary Fallin, even though the bill passed the House last month on a 92-0 vote.

Democratic Rep. Eric Proctor wrote the bill that would give owners of mobile home parks immunity from civil liability if they let residents take shelter in a park office during severe weather. Fallin vetoed the bill last week, citing concerns that it treats mobile home park owners differently than other business owners. It was the Legislature’s first vote to override a veto by Fallin.

A federal judge in Oklahoma City has stayed the execution of an inmate who was diagnosed with schizophrenia but found sane by a jury that considered whether he was eligible for the death penalty.

Fifty-six-year-old Garry Allen is scheduled to die by injection on Thursday. Allen pleaded guilty to capital murder after being shot in the head during his November 1986 arrest. He killed 24-year-old Gail Titsworth, with whom he had children, outside a daycare where she had picked up her sons days after she moved away from Allen. An officer shot Allen after he tried to shoot the officer.

A former Oklahoma prison warden’s wife who was convicted of helping an inmate escape after she was found a decade later living with the man was released from prison on Thursday after serving only about half of her sentence.

Bobbi Parker, 49, was convicted in September for helping Randolph Franklin Dial escape from the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite in 1994. They were discovered 11 years later, living as man and wife on a chicken farm in east Texas.

An Oklahoma judge has rejected as unconstitutional a state law that would have required women seeking an abortion to first view an ultrasound
image and listen to a doctor’s description of the fetus.

The Ultrasound Act was approved in 2010 when the Republican-controlled Oklahoma Senate overrode a veto issued by then-Governor Brad Henry, a Democrat. The law was immediately
blocked by a temporary injunction and never was enforced.

State lawmakers in Oklahoma yesterday took up a piece of legislation that would grant “personhood” status to human embryos. The measure, which was passed by the state Senate, advanced through the House Public Health Committee, despite warnings that it could endanger the lives of women.

Oklahoma Senate Bill 1443 would require that the laws of the state be interpreted and construed “to acknowledge on behalf of the unborn child at every stage of development all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”

This week’s rain is turning fields green, filling up Oklahoma creeks and making farmers across much of the state happy.

The rain also likely brought some areas out of drought conditions, Associate State Climatologist Gary McManus said. Improvements began in October, and the latest rainfall benefitted areas from the Interstate 44 corridor to northwestern Oklahoma.

An Oklahoma company that provides aircraft maintenance services agreed Wednesday to pay an $11.8 million criminal penalty for bribing officials in Mexico and Panama to obtain business.

The Justice Department said that BizJet, a Tulsa firm, had bribed officials at four Mexican state and federal agencies and the Panama civil aviation authority. It said top officials at BizJet “orchestrated, authorized and approved” of the payoffs.

Oklahoma voters may keep President Barack Obama from getting a unanimous renomination vote. Obama won Oklahoma’s primary with 57 percent of the vote, but Randall Terry, a pro-life activist and democratic candidate president, got 18 percent. That is enough for Terry to lay claim to one delegate.

Until Oklahoma voters headed to the polls, Obama had won all of the Democratic delegates awarded so far. As Obama boarded Air Force One Wednesday morning and head for North Carolina, insiders say it was the economy and not his possible opponents in November that was on his mind.

Narcotics agents and prosecutors in Oklahoma sought what they considered a seemingly simple way to better fight methamphetamine labs in the state — limit access to a key ingredient of the drug by requiring a doctor’s prescription to buy it.

Instead, this usually influential group found itself outmanned by a well-financed drug lobby that funded radio ads, lobbyists and a local public relations firm to resist the plan.