Oklahoma
prison officials halted an inmate’s execution after a new drug combination left
the man writhing and clenching his teeth on the gurney. He later died of a
heart attack.
Clayton
Lockett, 38, was declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of three drugs
in the state’s new lethal injection combination was administered Tuesday
evening. Three minutes later, he began breathing heavily, writhing, clenching
his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow.
The blinds
were eventually lowered to prevent those in the viewing gallery from watching
what was happening in the death chamber, and the state’s top prison official
eventually called a halt to the proceedings. Lockett died of a heart attack a
short time later, the Department of Corrections said.
“It was a
horrible thing to witness. This was totally botched,” said Lockett’s attorney,
David Autry.
The problems
with the execution are likely to fuel more debate about the ability of states
to administer lethal injections that meet the U.S. Constitution’s requirement
they be neither cruel nor unusual punishment. That question has drawn renewed
attention from defense attorneys and death penalty opponents in recent months, as
several states scrambled to find new sources of execution drugs because
drugmakers that oppose capital punishment — many based in Europe — have stopped
selling to U.S. prisons and corrections departments.
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