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Oklahoma Prisons Chief Releases Timeline Of Botched Execution

Oklahoma Prisons Chief Releases Timeline Of Botched Execution

By Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times

After a botched execution this week brought national condemnation, the head of Oklahoma’s prisons called Thursday for a suspension of all executions in the state until its capital punishment policies could be reviewed.

Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton also revealed that inmate Clayton Lockett, whose death occurred over 43 troubled minutes Tuesday evening, had been defiant in his final hours. On the morning of his execution, he refused to submit to a routine X-ray until he was shot with an electric stun gun, and he was found to have apparently cut himself in his right arm.

Lockett also refused to see his attorneys and refused to eat, Patton reported in a timeline of his final hours, prepared for Republican Gov. Mary Fallin.

Lockett was restrained on the execution table at 5:22 p.m., but it would take almost an hour for a phlebotomist to examine his body to find an appropriate vein for the experimental mixture of three drugs that officials planned to pump into his body.

According to the report, the phlebotomist settled on a vein in Lockett’s groin area, which was then covered with a sheet.

A dose of midazolam at 6:23 p.m. took 10 minutes to put Lockett to sleep. Officials then injected him with vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride, according to the report.

According to witnesses, Lockett woke up and began clenching his teeth and thrashing. Executioners blocked the witnesses’ view with curtains at 6:42 p.m.

According to Patton’s report, “The doctor checked the IV and reported the blood vein had collapsed, and the drugs had either absorbed into the tissue, leaked out, or both.”

The doctor reported that there were not enough lethal drugs left to kill Lockett, who was by then unconscious again with a faint heartbeat.

At 6:56 p.m., Patton called off the execution. By 7:06 p.m., Lockett was dead of an apparent heart attack.

What happened in those 10 minutes after the execution was called off and before Lockett died is unclear and is now the subject of criticism by defense attorneys.

“It’s unclear if they were trying to revive him or give him more drugs to kill him,” said Madeline Cohen, the attorney for another inmate, Charles Warner, who had been scheduled to die the same night but whose execution has been put off pending an investigation into Lockett’s death. “It just looks like a scene of complete incompetence.”

Patton in his report called for a revision of policies that put decision-making burdens on prison wardens rather than on senior prison officials.

Patton also asked for an investigation out by someone other than the department’s own investigators, saying, “I believe the report will be perceived as more credible if conducted by an external entity.”

Fallin, who had strongly supported the execution, on Wednesday ordered an independent investigation into Lockett’s death but named one of her own political appointees, Department of Public Safety Commissioner Michael Thompson, to lead the inquiry.

Patton himself is an appointee of the state’s prison board, which is predominantly made up of Fallin appointees.

Fallin spokesman Alex Weintz said Thursday that the prison chief’s request for an “external” review referred to an inquiry outside his own department; Patton supports the governor’s selection of her public safety commissioner to handle the investigation, he said.

Cohen, the attorney for death row inmate Warren, said independence was necessary to ensure that the full details surrounding Lockett’s execution came to light — including questions of whether the IV was administered correctly, why the curtain shielding the execution from witnesses was drawn, and whether officials tried to save Lockett’s life after calling off the execution.

“An investigation being run by the governor’s Cabinet member is simply not independent,” Cohen said.

Photo: Ken Piorkowski via Flickr

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin Makes It Illegal To Establish A Minimum Wage

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin Makes It Illegal To Establish A Minimum Wage

In a move that fits seamlessly into the GOP’s War on the War on Poverty, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin (R) has signed a bill into law that prohibits cities in the state from establishing mandatory minimum wages or vacation and sick-day requirements. The new law’s proponents claim that such a ban is necessary for economic homogeneity across the state, as allowing different municipalities to have different minimum wages could draw work disproportionately away from or towards certain cities. In essence, it seems that the logic goes something like this — if we all lose together, we practically win together.

According to Rep. Randy Grau (R-Edmond), the bill’s main supporter in the House, the ban provides “safeguards that protect small businesses and consumers,” while raising the minimum wage “could derail local economies in a matter of months.” According to Grau, without a “level playing field” across the state, it seems that economic prosperity would all but perish. Currently, Oklahoma’s minimum wage stands at $7.25, equal to the federal level.

The bill was officially passed by Oklahoma’s House of Representatives on Tuesday.

Oklahoma’s new law comes only two months after Governor Fallin, the chair of the National Governors Association, led a national conference of governors that clashed over President Obama’s proposal to increase the national minimum wage to $10.10. In February, Obama signed an executive order that required federal contractors to pay their employees $10.10 an hour. But Gov. Fallin, along with many of her Republican colleagues, found the minimum-wage hike to be poor planning.

Claiming that the market would “take care of itself,” Governor Fallin insisted that a higher minimum wage was not only unnecessary, but actively harmful to the American economy.

“I’m not for increasing the minimum wage because I’m concerned it would destroy jobs, especially for small-business owners,” she said at the time. Her concerns were quickly echoed by GOP leaders, who latched onto a Congressional Budget Office report that said raising the minimum wage by nearly $3 could reduce jobs in 2016 by about 500,000. Of course, the CBO also found that approximately 45 million Americans would fall below the poverty line in 2016 if the minimum wage were to remain at its current level. That finding was handily ignored.

Many critics say that Fallin’s new measure unfairly targets Oklahoma City, where proponents of Obama’s $10.10 wage are collecting signatures to support the increase. The author of the initiative petition, lawyer David Slain, told the Associated Press that he was disappointed that state lawmakers “would vote in such a way to take the right of the people to decide minimum wage.”

In a press release on Monday, Governor Fallin insisted that increasing the minimum wage is not the path out of poverty that Democrats suggest it is, stating:

“Most minimum-wage workers are young, single people working part-time or entry-level jobs. Many are high school or college students living with their parents in middle-class families. Mandating an increase in the minimum wage would require businesses to fire many of those part-time workers. It would create a hardship for small business owners, stifle job creation and increase costs for consumers, and it would do all of these things without even addressing the goal of reducing poverty.”

Governor Fallin, once again, seemed to ignore the CBO’s report that such an increase could boost collective earnings by $31 billion for 33 million low-wage workers and bring an estimated 900,000 people out of poverty. But who’s counting?

 Photo: pbarcas via Flickr