[2] Though his case had gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,[1] opponents of capital punishment claimed that Duty had manipulated the system to be executed as a method of escape from life imprisonment.

[8][9] According to Duty, he lost an eye due to an accident in the third grade and suffered a head injury from a collapsed brick wall; the latter incident led him to be hospitalized for scarlet fever.

[8] On February 16, 1978, Duty and Anthony Trombitas, whom he had met about four to five days earlier, robbed the Jiffy Mart convenience store on Falcon Road in Altus, north of the border with Texas.

[8] In July 1978, Duty, represented by Clyde Amyx and John Wampler, was placed on trial in the Jackson County Courthouse before Judge Weldon Ferris.

[11] Judge Ferris sentenced Duty to serve concurrent life terms for the charges of robbery, rape and shooting with intent to kill, and 20 years for kidnapping.

At his arraignment at the District Court of Pittsburg County on June 4, 2002, Duty asked Judge Steven Taylor to enter a guilty plea to the murder and requested the death penalty, against the advice of his defense counsel.

On October 28 of that year, Duty was deemed competent to enter the plea after court-ordered evaluations by the Carl Albert Community Mental Health Center and Eastern Oklahoma State Hospital.

While testifying on his own behalf,[5][16] Duty declined to present any mitigating evidence and said that he preferred death over spending a life sentence in lockdown 23 hours day.

Mary Wise pleaded to the court to sentence Duty to life in prison without the possibility of parole, stating: "I don't believe he ought to have a choice.

He cited the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Ring v. Arizona, arguing against the constitutionality of his "continuing threat" being used as an aggravating circumstance for his death sentence.

[16] In 2010, a nationwide shortage of the lethal injection drug, sodium thiopental, led the Oklahoma Department of Corrections to instead consider pentobarbital, which is commonly used for animal euthanasia.

[2] In a hearing before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, the professor of anesthesia from Harvard Medical School testified for the defense that pentobarbital might not succeed in preventing "severe, excruciating pain".

However, the professor of anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst countered in a deposition for the state that 5 grams of pentobarbital would be sufficient to cause unconsciousness and death in minutes.

[2][18] Representatives from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections and the Death Penalty Information Center both testified that no other state had used pentobarbital and that they believed Duty would be the first person to be executed by the drug.

[4] At noon, Duty was granted his last meal request,[1] which included a double cheeseburger with mayonnaise, a foot-long hot dog with cheese, mustard and onions, a cherry limeade, and a banana shake.

[7] The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty used Duty's case to argue that capital punishment had actually set a dangerous precedent of encouraging a murder, rather than deterring it.

Though the group never questioned Duty's guilt, they cited his premeditation in killing Wise, followed by his guilty plea and request for the death penalty, as an example of exploiting the system to effectively turn the state into "an agent of suicide".