Charles Bradford Henry (born July 10, 1963)[1] is an American lawyer and politician who served as the 26th governor of Oklahoma from 2003 to 2011.Henry had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate, but declined to run in the 2014 special election to replace Tom Coburn.[4] After graduating from Shawnee High School in 1981, Henry attended the University of Oklahoma as a President's Leadership Scholar and earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1985.In the general election, he defeated former Republican Congressman Steve Largent, an NFL Hall of Famer, by just over one-half of one percent of the vote, in a race that also included Independent candidate Gary Richardson, a retired federal prosecutor.He has a mixed view of racial affirmative action, supporting it in college and graduate schools, but not in hiring for the bureaucracy.Henry supports expanding public healthcare and holding HMOs accountable for poor care; however, he also is in favor of upholding the death penalty and is against gun control.[16] After refusing the copy of the Quran, Republican State Representative Rex Duncan wrote a letter to his colleagues explaining, "Most Oklahomans do not endorse the idea of killing innocent women and children in the name of ideology."[17] In 2003, Henry signed bills into law that: made downloading child pornography a crime, strengthened the financial oversight of HMOs by the state, created a $300,000 cap on noneconomic damages for obstetric and emergency room cases except in wrongful death cases or if negligence is shown and made other changes to regulate medical liability actions, penalized predatory lending, authorized payday lending, and placed a moratorium on the sale of water from a sole source aquifer.As governor, Henry appointed 5 members of the Oklahoma Supreme Court and delivered the 2010 commencement address at the OCU School of Law.In 2013, supporters had asked Henry to run in the 2014 elections against incumbent Republican governor Mary Fallin, but he declined.