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| Seal of Oklahoma. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Clayton Lockett, convicted of kidnap, murder, rape and burying a teenaged girl alive was clearly a bad dude with significant psychopathology and a less than zero chance of meaningful rehabilitation. That he died and no doubt, a painful and agonizing death some 43 minutes after the first drug, Midozalam (Versed) was administered is perhaps regrettable. A second execution, that of Charles Warner, who raped and murdered his girlfriend's 11 month old baby girl was stayed for two weeks as a result of the botched execution of Clayton Lockett. That these guys are shit on the shoes of the state where they reside is indisputable. That they were lower than snakes on snowshoes is a fact that is incontavertable. That they deserve to die for their offenses does not appear to be is dispute.
However, the fact that government botched the Oklahoma execution shortly after the debacle in Ohio is unsurprising. Equally unsurprising is the fact that 4% of all US executions are carried out on the INNOCENT! Now, 3-5% chance of error is acceptable when we are talking about science experiments. It is not acceptable that the government kills four innocent people for every one hundred executions performed! Does everyone not know that if you want something fucked up, mismanaged or otherwise bungled, you must entrust it to government? On the other hand, if you indeed want efficiency, good judgement and cost-effective procedurally correct operations, you MUST NEVER COUNT ON GOVERNMENT TO DO ANYTHING RIGHT!
So what happened with Clayton Lockett? He was wheeled into the death chamber, intravenous in place at 06:23. Sometimes within the next ten minutes, witnesses stated he moaned, sat bolt upright, mumbled unintelligably and tried to move off the stretcher it seemed. At 06:33 a doctor declared him unconscious. At 06:39 he was said to convulse and ten minutes later the execution was halted when it was found that that the intravenous catheter had slipped out of the vein and 'gone interstitial', meaning that the drugs were not being delivered to the bloodstream but into the tissues. At 07:06, Clayton Lockett expired due to a heart attack.
I believe that the death sentence is on death row in America as evidenced by many factors and that the dozen or so states that still support the death penalty will find it increasingly difficult to execute prisoners. According to Arthur Kaplan, Medical ethicist, "You can't have prison staff cooking up some witches brew of medications in some backroom saying, 'Well we never tried this combo before, let's see if it works!', because people are not guinea pigs or have doctors and nurses involved in processes and procedures that place them in an ethical dilemma." US pharmaceutical companies are not expanding the supply of the medications commonly used for "death by lethal injection" and now, European pharmaceutical companies are not exporting medications they believe might be used in executions.
So what on earth are the Americans to do with the likes of a Clayton Lockett or a Charles Warner. Madeline Cohen, defense attorney for Charles Warner has vowed that she will fight tooth and nail to see that her client's temporary stay becomes a permanent stay of execution. Are we to house them indefinitely in state prisons. For many of these offenders that could amount to many decades of "three hots and a cot"...arguably a better life than the law-abiding homeless.
Perhaps consultation with other nations who enact the death penalty is in order...North Korea and Iran come readily to mind...........
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