Vol. 78/No. 20       May 26, 2014

Lockett is at least the second botched execution in the U.S. this year. On Jan. 16 Dennis McGuire was executed by lethal injection in Ohio. His ordeal lasted 26 minutes.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin appointed Michael Thompson, her cabinet secretary for public safety, to investigate why the execution didn’t go as planned.

U.S. prison officials have been experimenting with new drug concoctions since last year when U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies stopped selling a standard three-drug “cocktail” in the face of opposition to the death penalty.

Lockett was given a sedative, then drugs to stop respiration and the heart, the first time the new three-part poison had been used in the state.

“The investigation is a political move to try to wash the blood off her hands,” Rev. Adam Leathers, co-chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said in a phone interview May 12.

“From my standpoint even if the death penalty were perfect, flawless and painless and only done on terribly guilty people, I would still oppose it,” Leathers said. “Why do we want to find the right way to do the wrong thing?”

Of the 54 people currently on Oklahoma’s death row, 21 — 39 percent — are Black, 3 are Latino and 27 are Caucasian. Blacks make up less than 8 percent of the state’s population. Nationally 34 percent of death row inmates are Black, and 56 percent are Caucasian.

“The system does not work fairly, justly for all people,” Garland Pruitt, president of the Oklahoma NAACP, told the Militant, noting the disproportionate number of Blacks facing execution.

Oklahoma legislator Mike Christian, a supporter of the death penalty, told News9 that he doesn’t care whether inmates are executed by injection, electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or “being fed to the lions.”

President Barack Obama told the press May 2 that he still supports the death penalty in cases such as “mass killings, the killings of children,” but said there are “significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied.”

Governor Fallin staged the April 29 execution as a major press event to win support for the death penalty. She had planned a double execution of men accused of heinous crimes, with Charles Warner scheduled to follow Lockett. Lockett was convicted of shooting a teenage girl and burying her alive.

It took 51 minutes for a phlebotomist to find a vein to hook up the intravenous line to Lockett. Finally they decided to hook the tubes to a vein in his groin.

“Let the execution begin!” announced prison warden Anita Trammell after the curtain to the death room was raised so that the witnesses could watch from an adjoining room.

It was soon clear things were not going right and Lockett began twitching, mumbling and writhing. According to CNN, Lockett got out the words “Man,” “I’m not,” and “something’s wrong” before Trammell ordered the blinds lowered 16 minutes later. Prison officials said Lockett died of a heart attack 43 minutes after the first injection. Warner’s killing was then suspended.

The conditions of imprisonment of death row inmates are themselves a form of cruel and unusual punishment, Lydia Polley, a former co-chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, told the Militant. She has been visiting Donald Grant, who has been on death row for the last eight years.

“The people on death row are never allowed any physical contact with visitors,” Polley said. “I visit him through a very thick plate glass. It’s cold in the winter, hot in the summer.”

“They are in total isolation 23 hours a day, five days a week. On weekends they are isolated 24 hours a day,” she said. “When they’re on suicide watch, they wake them up every hour.”

“The exercise yard is really just a small cell with plexiglass at the top, so if they’re out between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., they might get some sunshine,” Polley said. “But for Donald Grant, he’s usually allowed in only before 5 a.m. He never sees sunlight.”
 
 
Related articles:
UK authorities ban inmates from receiving books, parcels
Defend prisoners’ rights! No book ban!  
 
 
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