Case Explained: New Oklahoma law going into effect Thursday to streamline sentencing requirements – Legal Perspective

A new law going into effect January 1st, 2026, will streamline penalties and sentences for felony crimes here in Oklahoma.

It categorizes felonies in Oklahoma into groups, and the groups have their own sentencing ranges and minimum time served requirements.

One of the authors of the law says this is something they have been trying to do for several years, and it will make sure people will face the same consequences for the same crime regardless of what county they’re in.

WHAT IT SAYS

The Oklahoma Sentencing Modernization Act categorizes felonies based on how severe they are.

Class Y is reserved for murder, while Class A-D and their subsections are for all other violent and nonviolent crimes.

Class C and D both have their time served requirements and sentencing ranges laid out in this law.

Representative Mike Osburn of Edmond is one of the law’s authors, and says this aims to make sentencing clear, certain, and consistent. He gave a hypothetical example of how the grid works.

“Okay, this is the first time they committed this crime, and this is a C4 crim,e and so they get two to eight years or whatever,” said Osburn. “There’s more of a grid.”

He says this isn’t about making prison time longer or shorter- but instead, defining the requirements.

“Really, basically, all that happened was we made sentences match up with the real world and what was actually going on,” said Osburn.

Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler helped with the research that went into this law, which started back in 2018.

“There was an effort to just basically say, is there any way that we can kind of reclassify the majority of all these crimes we have in Oklahoma, where it makes a little bit more sense,” said Kunzweiler.

He says it can be confusing for both victims and offenders to calculate out prison time under the current system.

“The goal ultimately is to have a little more structure within the Department of Corrections and being able to track these people in a way that the public can say, ‘okay, I understand where that type of crime fits, and I understand that this person should be serving that amount of time,”’ said Kunzweiler.

NEXT STEPS

Lawmakers say the next order of business this session is standardizing the sentence ranges and time served requirements for the Y, A, and B classifications.

This is not a retroactive law, meaning it won’t apply to any felonies committed before January 1, 2026.

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