When the Death Penalty Turns Into Torture
When the Death Penalty Turns Into Torture
April 30 2014 5:22 PM
Oklahoma’s botched execution was the grim but predictable result of a state more concerned with vengeance than justice.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Tuesday night, the state of Oklahoma accidentally killed a man in the middle of trying to execute him. Clayton Lockett, 38, died of a heart attack about 40 minutes after the first drug in the state’s new, top-secret, three-drug lethal injection protocol was administered. According to press reports, after the first drug in the previously untried cocktail was administered, Lockett was briefly unconscious, then began “writhing and bucking” on the gurney. At that point, prison officials pulled a curtain to shield the witnesses (or themselves) from what soon became a disaster. Robert Patton, director of Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections, stopped Lockett’s execution about 20 minutes after the drug that should have immediately sedated him was administered. He later said there had been “vein failure.” Lockett’s lawyers dispute that. A second execution, scheduled for later that night, was stayed so that the state can perform an autopsy and figure out how it is they tortured a man to death.
Given that Oklahoma planned to kill Clayton Lockett Tuesday night, and that they managed to do it, you would be forgiven for thinking that nothing all that terrible happened, beyond making the experience far more unpleasant for Lockett, and for the witnesses in attendance. But we are a country that at least claims to care about how we execute people—we want it to appear medicalized, and painless, and clinical. And we’re also a country that values justice, an ideal sometimes at odds with another value: vengeance. The Lockett execution proves yet again that the two goals are not always perfectly aligned and that sometimes in the breakneck desire to get vengeance, it’s justice we murder.
How did we get here? While polls generally show that about 50 percent of Americans still support the death penalty, questions about the massive racial disparity in how it’s administered, the failures of the capital defense system, and tooth-rattling data from the Innocence Project about errors in whom we execute have led even the most stouthearted proponents to have doubts about how we punish by death. Several states have announced moratoriums and the raw number of executions has dropped. In the meantime, however, we have messed up the lethal injection system—used in all but one of the 32 states that have the death penalty—almost irreparably.
For years, a shortage of certain execution drugs has plagued American death penalty jurisdictions. The old lethal injection protocol required the administration of three drugs: The first is a sedative, sodium thiopental. Once an inmate is unconscious, the second drug, a paralytic, is administered. The third drug, potassium chloride, stops the heart. But the sodium thiopental suddenly dried up. In 2011 the American suppliers of sodium thiopental announced that due to liability concerns they wouldn’t make it anymore. European producers also stopped providing the drug to the states that allow for capital punishment. That left the states to troll around among so-called compounding pharmacies—extremely lightly regulated laboratories—which custom-mix drugs without Food and Drug Administration approval. Most importantly, departments of corrections in Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas then lowered a veil of secrecy over their new protocols, denying anyone—including in some cases the judicial branch—information about which drugs they planned to use, where they got them, and how they’ll work.
More:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/04/clayton_lockett_s_botched_execution_the_grim_but_predictable_result_of_oklahoma.html
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