By Joshua Bi
On April 19th, 2014, death row inmate Clayton Lockett was wheeled on a gurney to Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s execution chamber and restrained, sentenced to die by lethal injection for the 1999 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman. The prison phlebotomist, a medical professional usually tasked with collecting blood for donations and tests, was unable to find a usable vein through which an experimental cocktail of drugs designed to cause death could enter Lockett’s neck, arms, or legs, so one on his groin was used instead. An hour after he was first wheeled in, the first of the drugs were administered in front of a small group of reporters and prison officials. However, 10 minutes later, Lockett began to writhe and convulse in pain and despite the protests of the reporters attending, the prison warden ordered that the shades between the viewing room and the execution be closed, leaving the reporters blind until 20 minutes later when officials returned to announce that Lockett had died.
Documents later released by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections later showed that Lockett’s blood vein had collapsed and that the drugs had “either absorbed into his tissue… leaked out, or both” (Oklahoma Dept. of Corrections) leaving him unconscious with a faint heartbeat. The warden immediately stopped the execution, but it was already too late for Lockett who died 10 minutes later from a heart attack.
Further reports revealed that on the day of the execution, Lockett had made a self-inflicted cut on his arm and had been tasered by prison security guards after he refused to cooperate, leading many to speculate that he had intentionally tried to sabotage his own execution.
In 2011, the pharmaceutical giant, Hospira, ceased to produce sodium thiopental, the drug previously used in lethal injection forcing states to find new and experimental drugs like those used in Lockett’s execution. Ironically, the attorneys Lockett and Charles Frederick Warner, another convict on death row in Oklahoma, had made headlines just weeks earlier after suing their way to the Oklahoma Supreme Court to demand that the state release the name of the pharmaceutical company producing the new drugs. The Court ruled against them, citing that revealing the names of the companies involved could damage them financially.
Lockett’s bungled execution provoked a backlash from advocates of abolishing capital punishment. Lawyers representing Warner, the other convict on death row, claimed “Clayton Lockett was tortured to death” and demanded that Warner’s execution be postponed until the state could investigate. The British embassy in Washington issued a statement saying “[the use of capital punishment] undermines human dignity, there is no conclusive evidence of its deterrent value, and any miscarriage of justice leading to its imposition is irreversible and irreparable.” The White House said in a statement that the execution “fell short of humane standards.”
The Oklahoma Department of Corrections has said that an investigation in to what went wrong will be conducted.