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Oklahoma Report Blames Intravenous-Line Woes For Problematic Execution

Oklahoma Report Blames Intravenous-Line Woes For Problematic Execution

By Michael Muskal, Los Angeles Times

Problems with using and monitoring an intravenous line carrying a deadly cocktail of drugs were responsible for the lengthy execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, according to a state report that recommended some changes but found that corrections officials had substantially complied with existing protocols for capital punishment.

The report prepared by the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety noted that medical personnel were forced to insert the IV line, carrying the execution drugs, into a vein in Lockett’s groin after failing to find a viable vein in the more usual places such as legs or arms. The IV site was covered with a sheet and not monitored until the physician saw swelling larger than a golf ball, the report released online Thursday said.

“The physician and paramedic made several attempts to start a viable IV access point. They both believed the IV access was the major issue with this execution. This investigation concluded the viability of the IV access point was the single greatest factor that contributed to the difficulty in administering the execution drugs,” according to the report.

The report called for some changes including making the IV site visible to officials throughout an execution, better training for contingencies during an execution, and making additional supplies available during an execution. Overall, however, the report says officials acted properly during the April 29 execution of Lockett even though it took 43 minutes for him to die and he was said by witnesses to be writhing in pain.

“Regarding whether DOC correctly followed their current execution protocols, it was determined there were minor deviations from specific requirements outlined in the protocol in effect on April 29,” according to the report. “Despite those deviations, it was determined the protocol was substantially and correctly complied with throughout the entire process. None of the identified deviations contributed to the complications encountered during this execution.”

The report was the result of an investigation ordered by state officials into Lockett’s execution, one of several executions that raised questions about how states administer the death penalty without violating Constitutional bans against cruel or unusual punishment. Officials have scheduled a news conference for later Thursday to discuss the findings.

State prisons director Robert Patton originally said the cause of death was a heart attack, but autopsy results released last week said he died from the execution drugs: midazolam, vercuronium bromide, and potassium chloride.

Lockett, 38, was convicted of shooting Stephanie Nieman, 19, with a sawed-off shotgun and watching as two accomplices buried her alive in 1999.

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

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Private Autopsy Blames Oklahoma For Botched Execution

Private Autopsy Blames Oklahoma For Botched Execution

By Michael Muskal, Los Angeles Times

A preliminary autopsy, carried out by a pathologist retained by Oklahoma death row prisoners, rejects the state’s explanation of a blown vein as the reason an inmate writhed in pain during a botched execution and puts the blame on Oklahoma officials for the problems.

The autopsy of Clayton Lockett, by Dr. Joseph I. Cohen, was released on Friday. State officials said they could not comment until their own investigation is completed in the next several weeks.

Lockett writhed, groaned and attempted to speak during the execution by lethal injection on April 29. He died 43 minutes after the execution began of what state officials said appeared to be a “massive heart attack.”

The botched execution, along with another troubled execution in Ohio, set off a national debate on the types and quality of the drugs used in the lethal injections. In Oklahoma, it also raised questions on the procedures. State officials have said Lockett’s veins had been blown, making it difficult to insert an intravenous line for the drugs to enter the bloodstream and do their work properly.

But Cohen’s examination found that “Lockett’s veins, both surface and deep, were in excellent shape ‘for the purpose of achieving venous access.”’ The Oklahoma execution team attempted to place the intravenous line for the lethal injection execution into Lockett’s femoral vein in the groin area, which Cohen said “is riskier, more difficult and more painful to place.”

“Contrary to statements by the state, Mr. Lockett’s veins did not collapse or ‘blow out,”’ according to Cohen’s findings. “Rather, despite the excellent condition of Mr. Lockett’s veins, the execution team made numerous failed attempts to set an IV, eventually setting an improperly placed and ineffective IV in Mr. Lockett’s femoral vein.”

On Friday, Capt. George Brown of the state’s Department of Public Safety said officials have not seen the private autopsy results. DPS is the agency overseeing the state investigation.

“We can’t comment on any other findings until our work is done,” Brown told the Los Angeles Times. “In six weeks we have conducted hundreds of interviews and are waiting on autopsy results. We hope to have our report done in the next several weeks.”

Oklahoma has imposed a moratorium on executions until the issues raised by the Lockett execution are examined.

Cruel And Unusual Ways Of Execution

Cruel And Unusual Ways Of Execution

No species in nature kills its own kind more often or more creatively than humans do, yet we cannot seem to devise a reliably swift, painless method of capital punishment.

Oklahoma’s bungled execution of Clayton Lockett is the latest death-chamber debacle. After receiving a supposedly lethal injection, the convicted murderer began writhing and mumbling, and tried to rise off the gurney.

Officials later said that the procedure caused a “vein failure.” The executioner who was administering the fatal dose might have been unaware, since he was separated from Lockett by a wall.

That’s not standard procedure in hospitals and medical offices. Usually the person giving the injection is standing next to the patient, not hiding from him.

When Lockett squirmed back toward consciousness, the execution was stopped. Prison officers said he died of a heart attack 27 minutes later. By that time the blinds to the chamber window had been shut to prevent the witnesses from seeing Lockett’s continued suffering.

He had received the death penalty for a hideous crime, shooting a woman and burying her alive. Most of those who now say he didn’t suffer enough have never attended an execution. I have.

The faces of those who supervised Lockett’s final moments were ashen when they emerged. Torture is bad policy in capital cases because the Constitution outlaws “cruel and unusual” punishment. The underlying moral precept is that the state shouldn’t act as savagely as the person who committed the murder.

Every flubbed execution gives more weight and momentum to the legal challenges mounted by opponents of capital punishment. Not only are death sentences handed out inconsistently, and not only have many innocent persons been convicted (and later been exonerated after decades on Death Row), but the very act of execution clearly hasn’t be engineered to make it humane and instantaneous.

We’ve tried all kinds of ways to kill — firing squads, the gallows, gas chambers and electric chairs — with mixed and sometimes grisly results.

One of many nationwide nicknamed “Old Sparky,” Florida’s electric chair was retired in 2000 after several cinematic screw-ups. Real sparks and smoke came from the face mask of Jesse Tafero while he was being executed for the murder of a Highway Patrol trooper. Years later, inmate Pedro Medina’s head actually caught fire while he was strapped in the chair.

In both cases, prison officials said Old Sparky had functioned flawlessly, and they blamed the unexpected combustion on sponges that were placed beneath the inmates’ death caps. There was much debate about whether the men died before, during or after the scorching.

The chair was eventually rebuilt to support the bulk of Allen Lee Davis, a monster who had murdered a pregnant woman and her children in Jacksonville. In 1999 he became the last person to die by state electrocution in Florida.

Blood dripped from Davis’ nose during the procedure. An autopsy also revealed burns to his head, leg and groin, the gruesome death photos provoking such worldwide outrage that the state mothballed the electric chair and switched to lethal injection.

To a conflicted public it seemed like a better solution — just give the bad guy a shot and put him to sleep forever. Veterinarians do it all the time to ailing dogs and cats.

But lethally injecting humans hasn’t gone as smoothly as advocates of capital punishment had predicted. It’s difficult to find anesthesiologists and other medical professionals who will participate in the killings, and often lay persons are employed to administer the lethal doses.

In one of two incidents during 2006, a misplaced catheter prolonged for half an hour the consciousness — and agony — of Florida Death Row inmate Angel Diaz. Last January, an Ohio convict gasped audibly for more than 10 minutes before the injections began to work.

And yet another Oklahoma inmate moaned during his recent execution: “I feel my whole body burning.” You might believe he deserved that pain, and more, but the law of the land stands firmly against such emotions.

Like many states, Oklahoma had used a sequence of substances beginning with a heavy sedative. The drugs were made mostly in Europe, where capital punishment is banned in almost every country. Some of the drug manufacturers have taken steps to prevent their products from being used in American executions.

Consequently, Oklahoma has been experimenting with secret new intravenous combinations. Attorneys for defendants facing the death penalty have been trying to stop executions there until the mixture is revealed, and tested for its effects on humans.

Whatever toxic cocktail was shot into Clayton Lockett’s arms, it failed in a demonstrably cruel and unusual way to do the job.

The twisted irony is that officials halted his execution on the chance that he might fully awaken. Then his ruptured vein would heal and they could try to kill him again on another day, without screwing it up so badly.

What a system.

(Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for The Miami Herald. Readers may write to him at: 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132.)

Photo: Barclay C. Nix via Flickr

Capital Punishment Can Never Be ‘Humane’

Capital Punishment Can Never Be ‘Humane’

In a masterful exercise in understatement, the White House said last week that a botched Oklahoma execution was not carried out in a manner that meets the nation’s high standards for such dubious rituals. According to White House press secretary Jay Carney, “We have a fundamental standard in this country that even when the death penalty is justified, it must be carried out humanely.”

The ironies abound. When, exactly, is capital punishment “justified”? How does a civilized society carry out executions “humanely”? It’s for good reason that most of the modern world has abandoned the death penalty: It is simply not possible to be “humane” when killing another person — no matter what that person has done.

In the Oklahoma case, prison officials used an untested three-drug cocktail on April 29 to end the life of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett. But news media reports described an execution gone awry, a procedure that left Lockett grimacing, writhing and muttering. He died of a heart attack approximately 43 minutes later. Though prison officials closed the curtain to the viewing window — attempting to veil the hideous process in secrecy as it became apparent that something had gone wrong — witnesses were described as badly shaken by what they had seen.

I hold no grief for Lockett, a miserable thug convicted of shooting a young woman and burying her alive. But why does the state of Oklahoma wish to descend to the levels of barbarism that Lockett showed? How is justice accomplished when the state believes it should use the power of life and death to punish a man who believed he had that same God-like authority?

The brutality inherent in this form of punishment is just part of the problem. The other defect lies in our uncertainty about the guilt of those defendants we send to death row. A statistical study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that one in 25 death row inmates is innocent.

That means, the study notes, that several of the 1,320 defendants executed since 1977 were certainly not guilty of the crimes for which they were put to death. In killing them, then, we have been guilty of murder ourselves. We hide behind our legal processes and apparatuses — police, prosecutors, juries, judges — but we have empowered them to act on behalf of the citizens. So we are guilty all the same.

Think about it: Since 1973, 143 inmates have been exonerated and freed from death row — found not guilty of the crimes for which they were sentenced to die. It does not strain credulity to assume that some innocents were missed.

They were men you have never heard of, whose lives meant nothing to you. Many of them lived on the margins of society; some had been in and out of trouble with the law for much of their lives. Still, a society that prides itself on a pledge of equal justice for all ought to be torn apart by the notion that those men — were it not for good fortune and timely intervention — would have been wrongfully executed.

There are signs that the American public is beginning to see the injustice and inhumanity in capital punishment. Public opinion polls have shown declining support for the last two decades; while a majority of Americans — about 55 percent — still favor it, that’s down from about 78 percent in 1996, according to a 2013 Pew Research survey. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have already banned the death penalty; governors in Colorado, Oregon and Washington state have prohibited the practice while they are in office.

Indeed, the botched execution of Lockett points to hurdles that states face in carrying out lethal injections. Professional medical societies don’t want their members involved with executions; pharmaceutical companies don’t want their names associated with the death penalty. Several states have had to resort to lesser-known “compounding pharmacies” to try to find drug cocktails to do the job.

Those states ought to get out of this ugly business altogether.

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons