Calls for halt to death penalty after botched execution

The latest botched execution in the United States, the second in four months involving a new cocktail of killer drugs, has death penalty opponents pressing for at least a temporary hold on any further use of lethal injections and strengthened their campaign for an end to capital punishment.

Eyewitnesses described Clayton Lockett (38) seizing violently, groaning and writhing in pain on Tuesday night after state officials in Oklahoma, one of 32 states that still have the death penalty, administered lethal drugs to him. He was convicted of shooting a teenager and watching her being buried alive by two accomplices in 1999.

The execution began at 6.23pm and he was declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of a new three-drug cocktail were delivered through a vein. Lockett, though, started breathing heavily three minutes later. The Associated Press reported that he then began clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow.

Shielded from the press
"Lockett grimaced and tensed his body several times over a three-minute period before the execution was shielded from the press," the Oklahoman, the local state newspaper, reported.

Lockett was declared dead of a heart attack 43 minutes after the execution began. Afterwards, Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections director Robert Patton said there was concern the drugs were not working and the vein line meant to deliver them into Lockett’s body had “exploded”.

“It was a horrible thing to witness,” Lockett’s attorney David Autry told reporters. “This was totally botched.”

Lockett, who was meant to have been the 20th person executed in the US this year, was the first death-row prisoner in Oklahoma to be administered with the drug midazolam as the first part of the execution cocktail.

European drug manufacturers have prohibited the use of their products in US executions leading to shortages that have forced states to experiment with new drugs and different drug combinations in lethal injections, a method first adopted by Oklahoma in 1977.

State Republican governor Mary Fallin ordered a 14-day stay of execution for Charles Warner (46), a murderer who was due to die two hours after Lockett. Warner, who has maintained his innocence, has a temporary reprieve while Oklahoma reviews its execution procedures.

Defence lawyers for Lockett and Warner had sued the state for refusing to disclose details of the drugs and where Oklahoma had sourced them. Missouri and Texas have also refused to say where they have obtained new lethal drugs they have already successfully used in executions.

In January, Ohio’s execution of convicted murderer Dennis McGuire lasted almost 25 minutes. He choked, gasped and struggled before dying after, like Lockett, being injected with midazolam.

The use of the death penalty along with support for capital punishment and the number of death sentences handed down has fallen sharply. The US killed an average of 72 inmates a year from 1997 to 2005, dropping to 44 a year between 2006 and 2013, though the country is among the five countries that executed the most people in 2013, according to a report from Amnesty International last month.

Even though 32 states have the death penalty on their statutes, a handful is responsible for most of the executions that take place in the US each year - Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio and Florida.

John Blume, a law professor at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project, said Oklahoma will "add fuel to the flame" that states cannot be trusted to execute prisoners humanely if, like Ohio after McGuire's execution, the investigation into Lockett's death is not independent.

Trust issue
"The spectacle of this latest execution is the kind of thing that could push people that are ambivalent or slightly pro-death penalty to say that we are not going to trust states to do this humanely," he said.

Doug Berman, professor of law at Ohio State University, said the Lockett killing could be a catalyst for a repeal of the death penalty or a moratorium on executions but it could also encourage states to consider other forms of killing such as hanging, firing squad or the gas chamber. "Any state that is truly interested in persisting with executions has to at least consider the possibility of looking towards older, traditional methods".