Oklahoma’s Horrific Botched Execution Could Have Been Prevented

Last night, a horrific scene played out at the
Oklahoma State Penitentiary as prison officials attempted to carry
out the first of what was supposed to have been a double
execution. 

At 6:23 p.m., the execution began for Clayton Lockett,
convicted in 1999 of killing 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman.

Five minutes after a cocktail of lethal drugs was injected,
Lockett began shivering, breathing deep, blinking, and gritting his
teeth. Seven minutes into the execution, Lockett alerted prison
officials that he was still conscious. Ten minutes into the
execution, prison officials announced that he was finally
unconscious. Thirteen minutes in, Lockett moved his head from side
to side and then lifted it off of the bed. Fifteen minutes in,
Lockett was mumbling, breathing heavily, and appeared to be
struggling. Sixteen minutes in, Lockett said “man” out loud, and
tried to get up. Following this, a female prison official told
horrified eyewitnesses, “We are going to lower the blinds
temporarily.” The blinds were never lifted.

Minutes after the blinds went down, the director of prisons told
eyewitnesses there had been a “vein failure” and that he was using
his authority to issue a stay of execution. Less than a half hour
later, after the director of prisons admitted the execution had
been botched, Lockett was pronounced dead from what officials said
was a heart attack.

Shortly after Lockett’s grisly death, Oklahoma Governor Mary
Fallin (R) issued an executive order granting a 14-day stay for
stay of execution for Charles Warner, the inmate who was scheduled
to be executed two hours after Lockett. Warner’s execution is now
scheduled for May 13.

In her
press release, Governor Fallin said that she had asked the
Oklahoma Department of Corrections “to conduct a full review of
Oklahoma’s execution procedures to determine what happened and why”
during Lockett’s botched execution.

Executions in other states have been botched before, but what
makes what happened in Oklahoma last night so particularly
grotesque is that it could have, and should have, been
prevented.

Over the past several months, questions had been raised over the
constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection secrecy law,
which allowed state officials to prevent the disclosure of any
information about the drugs used in lethal injections. Lawyers for
condemned inmates argued that without being able to know even the
most basic information about these drugs, it would be impossible to
verify whether or not the executions carried out would comport with
the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and
unusual punishment.

On April 21, the Oklahoma Supreme Court stayed the executions of
Lockett and Warner, which were scheduled to take place on April 22
and April 29, so that the justices could evaluate the legality of
Oklahoma’s secrecy law.

In an unprecedented move, Governor Mary Fallin proclaimed on
April 22 that Oklahoma’s executive branch would not honor the state
Supreme Court’s stays of execution, and issued an executive
order that granted a seven-day stay of execution for Clayton
Lockett. 

Even more shocking, a Republican state representative, Mike
Christian, introduced
impeachment proceedings on April 23 against the five state
Oklahoma Supreme Court justices who had voted for the stays of
execution, stating that the justices had used “unsupportable
arguments regarding constitutional rights.”

On April 24, the Oklahoma Supreme Court caved to political
pressure, and declared that the state’s injection secrecy law was
constitutional, allowing the botched execution to proceed on April
29 as Governor Fallin ordered.

Besides the questions over the constitutionality of the state’s
secrecy law, concerns had also been raised over the state’s
essentially experimental three-drug execution cocktail, which
included the drugs midazolam, vecuronium bromide, and potassium
chloride.

This drug combination has only been used once before – in
Florida. However, Florida’s protocol called for five times more
midazolam than Oklahoma’s, which led some to predict the execution
might not be effective. Because these drugs were obtained through
secret means and information about them was protected under the
state’s secrecy law, there was no oversight from experts on the
quality of the drugs.

Medical experts warned Oklahoma officials of the possibility of
a botched execution, and defense attorneys asked them to open up
the lethal injection process to review by the courts, doctors, and
the public because of the dangers of this untested drug
combination. It really should come as no surprise that this
execution played out as it did.

If the state wasn’t obsessed with killing these inmates so
quickly and recklessly, and instead allowed the process to be
transparent and open for review, Clayton Lockett’s botched
execution could have been prevented.

Instead, the state elevated an unsympathetic killer to a symbol
of what the death penalty has become in states that are adopting
secretive and experimental execution methods: a reckless
abandonment of the rule of law.