[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OKLAHOMA

[Rick Halperin]

May 13



OKLAHOMA:

Cruel and Unusual----The botched execution of Clayton Lockett - and how capital 
punishment became so surreal



On the morning of his execution, Clayton Lockett hid under the covers.

Before a team of correctional officers came to get him at 5:06 a.m., he 
fashioned a noose out of his sheets. He pulled the blade out of a safety razor 
and made half-inch-long cuts on his arms. He swallowed a handful of pills that 
he'd been hoarding. And on April 29, 2014, when the team of officers knocked on 
the door of his cell in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, 
Clayton Lockett - a 38-year-old convicted murderer - pulled a blanket over his 
head and refused to get up.

The officers left and asked for permission to tase him. While they were gone, 
Lockett tried to jam the door. They came back, forced their way in, tased him, 
and dragged him out.

11 hours later, at about 5:20 p.m., after a medical examination, X-rays, 8 
hours in a holding cell, and a shower, Lockett was brought by a 5-member 
strap-down team into the death chamber. It was a small, clinical-looking room 
with white walls and a polished floor that reflected the lights overhead. A 
gurney stood in the center of the room; above it hung a microphone for 
Lockett's final words.

One of the walls in the chamber had a pair of baseball-size holes through which 
IV lines could pass into the chemical room, a small space where 3 executioners 
would administer the drugs that would kill him. The executioners had been 
driven to the prison earlier in the day, and had put on hoods as they 
approached. They would remain out of sight until after Lockett was dead.

There had never been a question of Lockett's guilt. 15 years earlier, on June 
3, 1999, he had stood in a ravine and aimed a 12-gauge shotgun at Stephanie 
Neiman, a 19-year-old who had graduated from high school 2 weeks earlier. 
Lockett and 2 accomplices had beaten one of Neiman's friends and raped another. 
Lockett told Neiman multiple times that he would kill her if she didn't promise 
to keep quiet. He warned her 1 last time, but she insisted she would go to the 
police.

He pulled the trigger. The shot sent her spinning to the ground. The gun 
jammed; he cleared it and fired at her again. Then one of Lockett's accomplices 
buried Neiman alive in a shallow grave, the dirt puffing up as she struggled to 
breathe, and they left her to die.

Lockett was arrested 3 days later, a Sunday. Mark Gibson, the district attorney 
who would prosecute him, went to the jail that night because Lockett wanted to 
give a statement. Lockett smoked a cigarette and showed no remorse as he 
confessed. Gibson thought he saw a twinkle in the young man's eye, as though he 
was relishing the attention, and came away believing that Lockett was pure 
evil.

In the execution chamber, Lockett was belted to the gurney. To his left, beige 
blinds covered the windows to the viewing area. Soon, shadows would be visible 
as the seats on the other side filled up. There was so much media interest in 
his execution that the prison had had to draw names to decide which reporters 
could attend.

A clock on the wall read 5:26. The execution was scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. 
Lockett could expect to be dead within about 45 minutes.

Since the mid-1990s, when lethal injection replaced electrocution as America's 
favored method of execution, states have found drug combinations that they 
trust to quickly and painlessly end a life. They often use 3 drugs. The 1st is 
an anesthetic, to render the prisoner unconscious. The 2nd is a paralytic. The 
3rd, potassium chloride, stops the heart.

What many people don't realize, however, is that choosing the specific drugs 
and doses involves as much guesswork as expertise. In many cases, the person 
responsible for selecting the drugs has no medical training. Sometimes that 
person is a lawyer - a state attorney general or an attorney for the prison. 
These officials base their confidence that a certain drug will work largely on 
the fact that it has seemed to work in the past. So naturally, they prefer not 
to experiment with new drugs. In recent years, however, they have been forced 
to do so.

The problems began at a pharmaceutical plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. 
The Food and Drug Administration discovered that some of the drugs made there 
were contaminated and in April 2010 sent the manufacturer, Hospira, a warning 
letter. Hospira stopped producing, among other drugs, a barbiturate called 
sodium thiopental. No other company was approved by the FDA to make sodium 
thiopental, which was the anesthetic of choice for almost all of the states 
that carried out executions. (The death penalty is legal in 32 states; 17 of 
them have performed an execution in the past 5 years.)

With sodium thiopental suddenly unavailable, states scrambled to find 
alternatives. In June of that year, officials in Georgia discovered a 
work-around: a small-time businessman in London named Mehdi Alavi, who sold 
wholesale drugs through a company called Dream Pharma, would ship sodium 
thiopental to them. Georgia bought some from him, and then Arkansas did too. 
With Hospira offline, Alavi had the U.S. execution market cornered. Arizona 
bought sodium thiopental from him in late September and used it the next month 
to execute a convicted murderer named Jeffrey Landrigan. California placed an 
order as well.

Maya Foa, an anti-death-penalty advocate based in London, saw Dream Pharma 
mentioned in court documents related to Landrigan's execution and decided to 
pay a visit. At the company???s address, she found a small building with 
peeling white paint and a placard that read Elgone Driving Academy. Inside she 
found 2 desks and, in the back of the room, a single cabinet. That was it: 
Dream Pharma. Alavi imported execution drugs from elsewhere in Europe and 
shipped them to the United States, using that cupboard in a driving school as 
his base of operations.

The judges seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett 
and Charles Warner waited to die.

Reprieve, the human-rights organization where Foa worked, wrote to the British 
government, arguing that supplying drugs for executions violated British law, 
since the death penalty is illegal in Europe. The government balked. Stopping 
the shipment of a drug would hamper free trade and could be harmful to 
patients. Foa responded that the "patient" argument was erroneous - there was 
no trade of sodium thiopental between the U.S. and the U.K. for medicinal 
purposes. It was all for executions. This time, the government agreed. England 
announced tighter export restrictions, which effectively banned the sale of the 
drug for executions. Foa then persuaded the European Commission to follow suit 
by amending its torture regulation. U.S. states trying to carry out the death 
penalty were now blocked from buying drugs not just from England, but from all 
of Europe.

So they looked even farther afield. In late 2010, a company in Mumbai, Kayem 
Pharmaceuticals, received an e-mail from the Nebraska Department of 
Correctional Services. Officials there wanted an anesthetic that Kayem made 
mostly for clients in Angola: sodium thiopental. Kayem sold Nebraska 500 vials, 
enough for more than 80 executions. Soon after, Foa's boss wrote the company to 
explain how Nebraska planned to use its product. When South Dakota officials 
tried to place an order, Kayem jacked up the price 900 percent, to $20 a vial, 
hoping the cost would dissuade them. It didn't. South Dakota bought 500 vials. 
Kayem stopped selling the drug to the U.S. immediately after that.

Nebraska also turned to a middleman named Chris Harris, who contacted another 
company, called Naari, that made sodium thiopental in India. When Nebraska 
prison officials later announced that they'd obtained sodium thiopental from 
Naari, the firm's CEO was livid. He wrote to the chief justice of the Nebraska 
supreme court saying he'd been duped: Naari had supplied Harris with vials of 
the drug only because Harris had offered to get it registered for future sale 
in Zambia, where there is a huge need for cheap surgical drugs. The CEO wrote 
that Harris was "not authorised to sell the product" to Nebraska and that Naari 
was "deeply opposed to the use of the medicines in executions." He demanded 
that the vials be returned. They were not.

In Oklahoma, with sodium thiopental increasingly difficult to get and an 
execution scheduled for December 2010, officials decided they could no longer 
avoid finding a substitute. They settled on another powerful barbiturate that 
was more easily available: a short-term therapy for insomnia called 
pentobarbital, made in the U.S. by a Copenhagen-based company called Lundbeck. 
According to state officials, pentobarbital was ideal "for humane euthanasia in 
animals." Oklahoma used the new drug in the execution of John David Duty. It 
worked.

Oklahoma had found its solution just in time: the federal Drug Enforcement 
Administration was about to start raiding prisons. Since Hospira had been the 
only FDA-approved supplier of sodium thiopental, states that had imported it 
had done so illegally. Prisons had become, in effect, drug smugglers, and while 
the FDA may have been willing to look the other way, the DEA was not. In March 
2011, agents seized Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental. In April, they 
seized Tennessee's, Kentucky's, South Carolina's, and Alabama's.

Meanwhile, as other states followed Oklahoma's lead and shifted to 
pentobarbital, pressure mounted on Lundbeck, the drug's manufacturer, to block 
prisons from buying it. Reprieve issued press releases, the Danish media picked 
up the story, The Lancet published an open letter urging the company to stop 
supplying executions, and shareholders threatened to divest.

Maya Foa knew that pharmaceutical companies like Lundbeck had no interest in 
supplying executions - the fact that their drugs are used to kill people makes 
for terrible publicity. But what could Lundbeck do about it? Foa researched the 
American pharmaceutical industry and learned about controls that a manufacturer 
can put in place to restrict a drug???s distribution if, for example, new side 
effects come to light or the company wants to prevent off-label uses. She met 
with Lundbeck's senior executives to present an idea: Why not put distribution 
controls on pentobarbital, and prevent middlemen from selling it to prisons?

"We can't do that," one of Lundbeck's communications officers told her. But as 
he began to explain his objections, the CEO interrupted.

"Why not?"

The room fell silent.

7 months after pentobarbital was first used in an execution, Lundbeck 
instituted distribution controls. Departments of corrections could no longer 
get their 2nd-choice anesthetic.

At 5:30, half an hour before Lockett's execution was to begin, a young reporter 
named Katie Fretland rode in a prison van with other witnesses. They were taken 
to the death-row law library to wait. Fretland heard a low thrumming fill the 
halls, the sound of inmates banging on their cell doors in tribute to the 
condemned.

Fretland had arrived in McAlester just that day, but Oklahoma was something of 
a 2nd home to her. She'd first come in 2012, a few years out of college, after 
landing a 14-week temp job with the Associated Press. The AP had asked her to 
cover the execution of Timothy Stemple, a Tulsa man convicted of killing his 
wife. Fretland tried to find out where the state would get the execution drugs, 
but she quickly ran into a roadblock: Oklahoma had passed a law less than a 
year earlier that made nearly every aspect of executions a state secret, 
including where officials obtained the drugs.

Fretland decided to follow the money. She had a source who worked at the 
prison, and she asked him how the state's Department of Corrections would pay 
for the drugs. He said it would use petty cash. She couldn't believe it. Could 
the department do that - use an account with no public oversight to buy 
execution drugs? She filed a series of records requests and kept asking 
questions. She found petty-cash purchases of pentobarbital totaling more than 
$50,000.

Pentobarbital was by now no longer available from Lundbeck, but Fretland 
learned that compounding pharmacies were copying execution drugs and selling 
them to prisons. Compounding pharmacies exist to fill niche needs - for 
example, making a version of a drug for a patient who is allergic to an 
additive in the mass-market product. Part drug company, part pharmacy, they 
operate in a gray area with little oversight. (In April 2013, after a deadly 
meningitis outbreak was traced to a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts, FDA 
officials announced that they had inspected about 30 compounding pharmacies and 
found unsanitary conditions in all but one of them.)

Fretland kept filing records requests, and accumulated reams of documents. Her 
AP job ended, but she couldn't leave the story alone. She crashed with friends 
while continuing to interview pharmacists and former wardens, trying to put 
together a picture of Oklahoma's frantic pursuit of execution drugs.

She turned up e-mails from early 2011 in which state officials discussed how 
they should respond to their peers in Texas, who had asked for help addressing 
the drug shortage. An Oklahoma assistant attorney general wrote to a colleague, 
"I propose we help if TX promises to take a dive in the [University of Oklahoma 
- University of Texas football] game for the next 4 years." His colleague 
suggested that Texas should provide tickets for "Team Pentobarbital (you, me, 
Martha, the Warden, Mike Oakley, plus anyone else we can think of who is 
deserving) to the 2011 OU-Texas game plus an on-field presentation of a 
commemorative plaque at halftime recognizing Oklahoma's on-going contributions 
to propping up the Texas system of capital punishment." He added, "And throw in 
lifetime passes for the North Dallas Tollway, Highway 121 and the Bush 
Turnpike. That would be a good deal."

Fretland also learned that in some executions, the prisoner had died of an 
overdose of the 1st drug, the anesthetic, and that the executioners had then 
disposed of the other 2 drugs by injecting them into the corpse.

Georgia had used pentobarbital from an undisclosed source in a June 2011 
execution, and Fretland found e-mails from the next month proving that Oklahoma 
officials knew that the inmate had remained conscious for longer than he was 
supposed to and may have experienced severe pain. But a month after that e-mail 
exchange, they spent $10,400 of petty cash to buy pentobarbital. They made 
another purchase a year later, this time spending $40,000.

In March 2014, Fretland published her findings in The Colorado Independent. She 
editorialized just once. "Banter about exchanging lethal injection help for 
football tickets and other favors," she wrote, "raises questions about how 
seriously Oklahoma officials take the death penalty."

A month later, Fretland came to McAlester to watch Clayton Lockett's execution. 
A little before 6, she and the other witnesses were taken down a long hallway. 
She turned a corner into the viewing area, where 2 tiered rows of metal folding 
chairs faced the death chamber. Fretland took her seat along with 11 other 
reporters, 2 of Lockett's lawyers, and an assortment of Oklahoma officials. 
Stephanie Neiman's family would sit in a separate room for the victim???s 
relatives. Blinds covered the windows to the death chamber, so Fretland 
couldn't see what was going on inside.

She sat down, and waited.

About 2 months earlier, Mike Oakley, the general counsel for the Oklahoma 
Department of Corrections, had returned from vacation to find the department in 
a near-frenzy. Before he'd left, the department had ordered pentobarbital from 
a compounding pharmacy for the executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles 
Warner, a 46-year-old man convicted in 2003 of raping and killing his 
roommate's 11-month-old baby. But compounding pharmacies had come under 
pressure to stop selling drugs for executions, and Oklahoma's supplier had 
backed out. With the executions scheduled for March 20 and March 27, one of 
Oakley's deputies began driving around the state, walking into pharmacies and 
asking for pentobarbital, without success.

Oakley didn't know why the task of finding drugs for executions fell largely to 
him: he had no medical training. But he wanted to help his colleagues - 
especially the warden, whom he considered conscientious and hardworking - 
because he knew how much strain carrying out a death sentence put on them. He 
had gone into corrections, 25 years earlier, because Oklahoma was doing 
interesting work in mediation between victims and offenders. Now he was about 
to retire, and he found himself, as his swan song, developing a new execution 
cocktail.

Oakley had to report on his progress to Robert Patton, the director of the 
Oklahoma Department of Corrections, first thing in the morning and again before 
he went home each day. The attorney general's office called Oakley multiple 
times a day, and Patton himself was getting pressure from the governor's 
office.

Both the attorney general, Scott Pruitt, and Governor Mary Fallin had elections 
coming up, and there were rumors that a Tea Party candidate might outflank 
Fallin on the right. Oakley believed they were worried about looking soft on 
crime.

In mid-March, Pruitt had to make the embarrassing admission, as part of a brief 
to the state's court of criminal appeals, that Oklahoma didn't have all the 
necessary drugs, and Lockett's and Warner's executions had to be delayed.

Fewer and fewer medical experts were willing to advise Oakley, even 
unofficially. But he had professional contacts he'd met through the National 
Institute of Corrections, and he asked them for advice. He and members of the 
attorney general's staff also looked at expert testimony related to executions 
in Florida.

In October 2013, Florida had used a sedative called midazolam in the execution 
of William Happ. Florida officials had determined that it was "the most humane 
and dignified way to do the procedure." Doctors sometimes administer midazolam 
during anesthesia, but usually just to relax the patient, and in combination 
with a drug that blocks pain. In a high enough dose, it should render the 
patient unconscious - but some experts argue that, unlike sodium thiopental and 
pentobarbital, midazolam cannot produce the deep, coma-like state needed to 
guarantee he feels no pain.

William Happ shook his head, blinked, and opened his mouth during his 
execution. Witnesses had no way of knowing whether he was in pain, but he 
appeared to remain conscious longer than offenders given sodium thiopental or 
pentobarbital. Ohio used midazolam in the execution of Dennis McGuire a few 
months later, and witnesses reported that McGuire snorted, heaved, clenched one 
of his fists, and gasped for air.

Oakley asked his counterpart in Ohio about the state's experience with 
midazolam. The media had exaggerated the problems, he was told. Yes, the new 
drug took a little longer to put a person to sleep, but it wasn't as bad as 
everyone was saying. Midazolam was also relatively easy to obtain: multiple 
U.S. companies made it. Oakley's wife had just had a kidney stone removed, and 
1 of the drugs she'd been given was midazolam. Both Oakley and the attorney 
general's office recommended that the state use it.

On April 23, 2014, 6 days before Lockett's execution, Mike Oakley retired.

April 23 would, by coincidence, prove to be a decisive day for the Oklahoma 
judicial system, for Clayton Lockett, and for his legal team, including Dave 
Autry.

Autry is a soft-spoken man of 56 with a ponytail that hangs halfway down his 
back. He seems to subsist on tobacco and caffeine - 24-ounce mini-mart coffee 
cups and jumbo cans of Red Bull clutter his office. Autry had represented 
Lockett for 11 years, since shortly after Lockett exhausted his state appeals. 
He felt just about ready, after nearly 30 years, to leave the high stakes and 
emotional toll of death-row work to younger lawyers. Clayton Lockett would be 
his 2nd-to-last death-row client.

As time winds down, a death-penalty lawyer has one goal: keep the client alive 
as long as possible. In October 2013, Autry's co-counsel, Dean Sanderford, and 
an attorney for Charles Warner had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review 
their cases, a last-chance effort to argue that constitutional errors had been 
made during trial or sentencing. They knew the Court was unlikely to review 
either case. They also knew from experience that as soon as the Supreme Court 
declined to hear the cases, Oklahoma would set execution dates. The lawyers 
needed a plan they could put in motion the instant the Court decided.

The simplest strategy would have been an Eighth Amendment challenge. But they 
couldn't make a convincing case that the drugs Oklahoma officials planned to 
use would lead to cruel and unusual punishment, because the state's secrecy law 
kept them from getting any information about where the drugs were coming from. 
In that lack of information, however, perhaps they could find an opportunity. 
The lawyers could argue that the secrecy law denied their clients "access to 
the courts" and was therefore unconstitutional. As they prepared to make this 
case, Oklahoma executed Michael Lee Wilson, a 38-year-old charged with beating 
a co-worker to death. After the pentobarbital was injected, Wilson said, "I 
feel my whole body burning."

In January 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the cases. Lockett's 
and Warner's lawyers joined forces to challenge Oklahoma's secrecy law, and 
they requested a stay of execution for the prisoners until the challenge was 
decided.

The case began ping-ponging around the Oklahoma justice system. A state judge 
in Oklahoma City, Patricia Parrish, heard the challenge but said she didn't 
have the authority to grant a stay, so the legal team appealed to the Oklahoma 
supreme court. The supreme court transferred the stay request to the state's 
court of criminal appeals; the court of criminal appeals asked for supplemental 
briefs.

By that point Lockett's execution was days away. In their supplemental brief, 
the lawyers for Lockett and Warner argued that any of these courts had the 
authority to grant a stay. The government filed an opposing brief arguing that 
none of the courts did. But it was in this brief, down on page 8, that Attorney 
General Pruitt made the stunning admission that the state did not have all the 
drugs it needed for the executions. 2 days before Lockett was scheduled to die, 
he and Warner got a 1-month reprieve so that the state could find drugs. A 
minor victory. Lockett's execution was rescheduled for April 22, Warner's for 
April 29.

The same day, Katie Fretland published her bombshell article exposing 
disturbing details about how the state handled executions. A week later, on 
March 26, Judge Parrish decided the challenge to the secrecy law in Lockett and 
Warner's favor. The law was indeed unconstitutional. "I do not think this is 
even a close call," she said. She still believed she lacked the authority to 
grant a stay, but her ruling gave Lockett and Warner another chance: their 
lawyers could now ask the state for information about the drugs, and perhaps 
find the basis for a cruel-and-unusual-punishment lawsuit.

Right away, Oklahoma announced that it would appeal. Doing so put an automatic 
hold on Parrish's decision. By the time the appeal was resolved, Lockett and 
Warner would likely be dead. ?The case began ping-ponging again. The inmates' 
legal team went to the court of criminal appeals to ask for a stay, but the 
judges ruled that the case didn't belong in their court. The lawyers then 
turned to the Oklahoma supreme court, which told the court of criminal appeals 
that it did, in fact, have jurisdiction. The court of criminal appeals 
disagreed and again denied the stay. To Autry and the other lawyers, the judges 
seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett and Charles 
Warner waited to die.

Finally, on April 21, 1 day before Lockett's execution, a miracle: the Oklahoma 
supreme court, divided 5-4, granted a stay. The justices made clear that they 
intended to seriously contemplate the issues. The ruling seemed likely to put 
the executions off for a long time and give Lockett and Warner a chance of 
actually winning the case. Since the case challenged state law, Oklahoma 
couldn't take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. No court in the country could 
overturn the ruling.

Autry called Lockett's stepmother and drove out to Del City to give Lockett's 
favorite aunt the news in person. It was an emotional evening, one of the rare 
moments in a death-penalty case this far along when you get to celebrate. At 
the prison the next morning, Lockett was moved out of the isolation unit where 
the condemned spend their final days, and sent back to a regular cell.

That same day, a shocking reversal: Governor Mary Fallin stepped in. She issued 
an executive order saying she did not recognize the Oklahoma supreme court's 
authority to grant the stay. "The execution for Clayton Derrell Lockett," she 
announced, "is therefore scheduled for April 29, 2014" - just 1 week away, and 
the same night as Charles Warner's execution.

Autry had never heard of a governor doing something like that. Was it even 
legal? Could a governor just do away with a ruling by the state supreme court?

The next day things got even worse: a state representative filed articles of 
impeachment against the 5 justices who had voted for the stay. The Oklahoma 
supreme court bowed to the pressure. 2 days after saying that it would need a 
long and proper debate in order to determine the constitutionality of the 
secrecy law, the court issued a decision: the law was fine. The stay was 
lifted.

The national media went into a frenzy. It looked as though the state's judicial 
system had collapsed. "Execution Case Roils Oklahoma Courts," The New York 
Times declared; other publications quoted the attorney general calling the 
events a "constitutional crisis." Reporters descended on McAlester. It seemed 
as though everyone with even a fleeting interest in the Oklahoma justice system 
had come to the penitentiary. Everyone except Governor Fallin. On the night of 
the executions, she was headed to the Chesapeake Energy Arena, to watch Kevin 
Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 5 of the NBA conference 
quarterfinals.

At 5:27 p.m., a paramedic approached the gurney. Like the three executioners, 
she would remain anonymous. Before the blinds opened, she would retreat into 
the chemical room while a doctor and the prison???s warden stayed with Lockett 
in the death chamber. But first she had a job to do: prepare the drugs and 
medical equipment, and get an IV into Lockett. (Those who participated in the 
execution either did not respond to requests for interviews or could not be 
reached. Court records provide a detailed account of what happened.)

The paramedic later told investigators that she'd felt incredible pressure 
since she'd walked into the room an hour earlier. She'd never participated in 
an execution that used midazolam. She'd never participated in 2 executions in 1 
night - not many people in the world had. And she knew the media were watching.

To make matters worse, the equipment was all wrong: the saline was packed in 
bags instead of syringes, the drugs were in syringes that looked smaller than 
she was used to, and the tubing for the IV was the wrong kind. But she tried to 
focus on doing her job and getting everything set up on time. She would be paid 
$600 for the 2 executions.

The paramedic stuck a needle into a vein in Lockett???s left arm. A few drops 
of blood moved up the catheter - "flashback." A good sign. It meant the needle 
was in the vein. But she'd forgotten tape to hold the IV in place. She asked 
someone to bring it to her, but the IV slipped out before she could secure it. 
Lockett's arm started to bleed, so she put pressure on it and tried again. This 
time, she didn't get flashback. Then she tried a brachial vein, near Lockett's 
biceps. No luck there.

By now, she'd tried to place an IV 3 times. She???d been taught that if you 
can't find a vein after the 3rd attempt, you ask someone else to step in. So 
she asked the doctor to help.

The doctor, Johnny Zellmer, was a last-minute substitute. (Zellmer, whose name 
was revealed in a lawsuit following the execution and in multiple press 
reports, has not denied his involvement. He did not respond to requests for 
comment.) He was a local family-medicine and emergency-room physician who'd 
participated in just 1 previous execution. Zellmer had arguably violated his 
profession's oath to "never do harm" the moment he stepped into the death 
chamber. Indeed, the American Medical Association's code of ethics states that 
physicians should not participate in executions, even in a supervisory 
capacity. But Zellmer thought his job would be limited to checking the offender 
for consciousness and pronouncing the time of death. He wasn't expecting to 
actually do anything to Lockett.

The paramedic's request for help put him in the position of no longer just 
observing the execution but actively facilitating it. She was clearly 
struggling, though. He scanned Lockett's body and didn't see any good veins. 
Then Lockett turned his head, and the paramedic saw a vein in his neck pop up. 
She pointed it out to Zellmer. "Get me a needle for the jugular," he said.

This was an odd choice. IVs in the neck are painful, and also hard to place. On 
the arms and legs, you can use a tourniquet to bring the veins up. You cannot 
do that on the neck, because a tourniquet on the neck is effectively a noose, 
and while this was an execution, it was not a hanging.

As Zellmer tried to get the needle into the jugular, the paramedic stuck 
Lockett 3 more times on his right arm, failing each time.

Zellmer got the needle into Lockett's neck and saw flashback, but then saw 
blood spread under the skin - he thought the needle might have gone all the way 
through the vein. Zellmer decided to try a subclavian line, in a vein running 
beneath Lockett's collarbone. The paramedic brought him a central-venous 
catheterization kit, and Zellmer numbed Lockett's chest with lidocaine. The 
paramedic tried 2 different veins on Lockett's right foot; both attempts 
failed.

Zellmer kept trying to get the needle into Lockett's subclavian vein. He 
finally saw a little flashback, then lost the vein and couldn't get the needle 
back in. After repeatedly sticking Lockett's chest, he decided to try the 
femoral vein, in Lockett's groin. The paramedic went to get a longer needle.

As the warden, Anita Trammell, watched the doctor and the paramedic work on 
Lockett, she felt a sliver of pride for the inmate. He'd now been stuck with 
needles more than a dozen times. She knew he was in pain, but she thought he 
was taking it like a man. Trammell tried to make conversation to help calm him. 
She knew he had been a drug user. "What was your drug of choice?" she asked 
him.

"Ice."

"I thought that was a white man's drug," she said, and he laughed.

The paramedic came back and said she had no needles longer than an inch and a 
quarter. That presented a problem. The femoral vein lies deeper in the body 
than other veins, so they would ideally use a needle at least twice that 
length. There were longer needles inside a 2nd central-venous catheterization 
kit, like the one they'd just used on Lockett's chest, but neither Zellmer nor 
the paramedic thought of it. Zellmer asked for an IO-infusion needle. IO stands 
for "intraosseous" - into the bone. It is, in effect, a power drill, used to 
bore a hole through bone and into the marrow, and therefore doesn't require 
finding a vein.

The prison had no IO needle. Zellmer had only the absurdly short 1 1/4-inch 
needle. "Well," he told the paramedic, "we'll just have to make it work."

Lockett's prison scrubs and underwear were cut away. Zellmer stuck the needle 
into Lockett's femoral vein and saw flashback on the first try. Finally, after 
almost an hour, they had an IV.

Right away, the paramedic noticed a potential warning sign. Saline should have 
been flowing easily through the IV, but it flowed only when she propped up the 
line. Instead of starting over, though, she taped the IV in place. 2 IVs are 
typically used to administer the drugs, but with the execution running way 
behind schedule, the doctor and the paramedic decided they would proceed with 
just one.

Warden Trammell asked Lockett whether he needed anything. "I was gonna see if I 
could get my mouth wiped off," he said. She got a Kleenex and wiped it for him.

Finally, a sheet was draped over Lockett, covering him up to his chest. The 
execution could begin.

Lockett???s closest family members were about two hours away. His stepmother, 
LaDonna Hollins, had made the drive to the prison countless times. During her 
final visit, she and Lockett had sat looking at each other and crying. "I do 
not want you to be at the execution," she later recalled him saying, "because I 
do not know the outcome. I do not think it's gonna be very good. Because the 
drugs that they use have not been tested."

Lockett knew that Michael Lee Wilson had said "I feel my whole body burning" 
when the state executed him earlier that year. Lockett was scared. "Do me one 
favor," Hollins told him, according to an article in the German magazine Der 
Spiegel. "As long as you can talk on that gurney: Talk. Let the world know how 
they are executing people here in Oklahoma."

After that visit, she heard that the prison had refused Lockett's request for a 
last meal - chateaubriand, fried shrimp, baked potato, garlic toast, and a 
whole Kentucky bourbon pie - because it exceeded the $15 limit. Hollins called 
the prison and said she'd pay for it, or even drive the meal down herself, but 
she wasn't allowed to. She didn't think Lockett could be spared after what he'd 
done, but she didn't think he should suffer anymore, either. So she did what 
she'd always done: try, however she could, to offer him some small comfort.

Lockett had first shown up on her doorstep in Southern California at the age of 
3, crying and soaked in urine. His mother had put him on a bus all the way from 
Oklahoma to live with his father. There'd been no notice.

Hollins testified in court that when Lockett was a young child, she saw his 
half brother, who was about 5 years older, lying on top of him, the 2 boys 
looking strange together. Then a call from the school. Lockett was in the 
infirmary. He'd come in crying and complaining of pain around his anus.

Another memory: Lockett following his father, John, from room to room as he got 
ready for work, and then following him out of the house, into the street. 
Lockett in tears, certain that his father would never return.

Once, as a birthday present for his brother John Jr., the boys' mother agreed 
to talk with them on the phone. Lockett waited for his turn with anticipation - 
he was now 4, and hadn't heard his mother's voice since she had put him on the 
bus. But she took offense when John Jr. referred to Hollins as "Mama LaDonna," 
and hung up before Lockett got to talk with her.

John Sr. disciplined Lockett and his other children with everything from belts 
to 2-by-4s. Hollins tried to protect the boy, but she wasn't exempt from John 
Sr.'s violent temper either; he broke her arm twice.

John Sr. taught his children to steal - groceries sometimes, televisions other 
times - and punished them only for getting caught. Hollins remembers John Sr. 
blowing marijuana smoke up Lockett's nose and sitting him down to watch porn 
when Lockett was a child. "Boy," he said, "you need to tear that pussy up." 
That's what he told Lockett he was going to do to Hollins.

By the time Lockett was in middle school, his father and Hollins had brought 
him back to Oklahoma. To his 8th-grade teacher - a woman whose son, Mark 
Gibson, would later prosecute him - he stood out as smart and likable. Lockett 
brightened around small children. He babysat younger family members, liked to 
cook for them, and carried them around on his back. He had a girlfriend whose 
baby had Down syndrome, and he was the only person who could always make the 
little girl smile.

But he also spent a lot of time trying to act tough, and racked up charges 
including burglary and intimidating a witness. At 16, he was sentenced as an 
adult and sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. With no one to protect him, 
he was raped almost immediately by 3 other inmates.

When Lockett got out, at age 20, he wanted to be feared. He wanted everyone to 
know that if they crossed him, they'd pay. So, a few years later, when a guy 
named Bobby Bornt seemed to be holding out on a $40 debt for marijuana and a 
tattoo, Lockett got his cousin and a friend and a shotgun and went to see him.

That same night, by terrible coincidence, Stephanie Neiman and a friend drove 
to Bornt's house in Neiman's new Chevy pickup truck, which had a Tasmanian 
Devil sticker and vanity plates that read Tazzz. Neiman was an only child whose 
parents had instilled in her a strong sense of right and wrong. She was admired 
by her classmates and by school administrators for her kindness and loyalty, 
and because of what she had overcome - she was considered "intellectually 
challenged" but had played saxophone in the school band and earned her diploma. 
Those who worked with her at the school believe she wasn't able to understand 
how serious the situation was that night, or what the consequences might be.

Neiman and Bornt had known each other since they were young children; they'd 
been in the same YMCA day care. When the girls arrived at Bornt's house, 
Lockett and the others were already there, attacking Bornt. Neiman reacted in a 
way that unsettled Lockett: she seemed unafraid. He told her to hand over the 
keys to her truck. She said no - the truck belonged to her. Lockett and his 
accomplices beat up Bornt, raped Neiman's friend, and bound all 3 victims. Then 
Lockett led the group into Bornt's and Neiman's trucks and out of town, north 
into Kay County, up on the border with Kansas. The men threatened to kill the 3 
victims if they reported the night's crimes to the police. Bornt and Neiman's 
friend swore they wouldn't, and Lockett later let them go. But Neiman refused. 
Her parents had taught her to tell the truth. So when Lockett asked whether she 
would go to the police, she said yes.

Lockett asked her a final time. Then he raised the gun and fired.

23 minutes behind schedule, the blinds to the death chamber opened. Warden 
Trammell stood facing the witnesses. She asked Lockett whether he had any last 
words.

"No." "Let the execution begin."

Just behind Lockett's head, in the chemical room, 1 of the 3 executioners 
pushed the plunger on a syringe full of midazolam. The sedative went into the 
tubing, traveling 132 inches through the hole in the wall, into the death 
chamber, under the sheet, and into Clayton Lockett's groin.

But not all of it went straight into his bloodstream. Somehow, the IV 
dislodged, and midazolam was pumped into Lockett's tissue instead of his vein. 
Some of the drug would make its way into his bloodstream, but the smaller dose 
would be less effective.

Minutes passed. Lockett remained alert. He pursed his lips and blinked. He 
licked his lips.

To Katie Fretland, he looked confused. Several more minutes passed. Lockett 
turned his head and looked toward the witnesses. He looked back up. Finally, he 
closed his eyes.

In the chemical room, the executioners counted time on a stopwatch. Five 
minutes after they pushed the midazolam into the line, they flipped a switch 
and a light bulb went on in the death chamber, signaling that it was time to 
check whether Lockett was unconscious. Zellmer got up and checked Lockett. He 
was still conscious. The light went off.

2 minutes later, the light came on again - a signal to check Lockett a second 
time. The doctor blew in Lockett's eyes, rubbed his sternum, and pinched him. 
This time, he determined that Lockett was unconscious.

The executioners injected a syringe full of vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, 
into the line. When properly administered, vecuronium bromide blocks the 
signals that the nervous system sends to the muscles, turning the body into a 
vehicle the brain no longer controls. It's as if the wire that connects them 
has been severed and signals can no longer pass - including the signal that 
says breathe.

An incompletely sedated person under a paralytic might look serene, because his 
face muscles are paralyzed. But he's suffocating: when he tries to expand his 
chest and draw breath, nothing happens. The Animal Welfare Act has banned the 
use of paralytics without anesthesia in the euthanasia of animals.

To anti-death-penalty advocates, the fact that these drugs are used in 
executions is revealing. If the sedative worked, why would you need to paralyze 
someone? They argue that the paralytic prevents us from seeing the offender's 
distress, so that the procedure appears clinical and painless - even if it's 
not.

One of Lockett's executioners would later recall noticing something strange: 
the plunger was hard to push. He had no way of knowing that he might be 
injecting fluid into tissue, though, so he simply pushed harder. He heard what 
sounded like a moan come from the chamber.

Zellmer watched Lockett, oblivious to the fact that, under the sheet, the IV 
was not in place. In the chemical room, the executioners administered the 3rd 
drug, potassium chloride.

At 6:36, Katie Fretland saw Lockett move.

During Lockett's trial and his early years on death row, he showed no remorse. 
In his letters, he posed as a member of a far-reaching criminal network. "Im an 
assassin - point blank!" he wrote to one friend. "You honestly think that my 
boys is gone let a nigga as valuable me go to the penn forever? Fucc No!"

He was a terror, hiding homemade weapons in his cell and once throwing urine 
and excrement at a guard - anything he could do to show his disdain for 
authority. But in letters to his father, now also in prison, Lockett still 
yearned for a bond. He told his father about a girlfriend on the outside.

Dad I can send her to visit you, keep me informed on how you're doing ... Dad 
it's a few people on my team that will be sending me money. I'm not going to be 
needing all that, I just really want a tube and some canteen and Im cool. Dad, 
I know you aint got too many people in your corner so I know you'll need some 
money. Give me a few months to get my stable in order and I can start sending 
you some ends through my girl.

Gradually, the weight of his crime began to overwhelm him. He talked often with 
Autry, his lawyer, about what he'd done to Neiman's parents, taking away their 
only child. A couple of years in, he tried to kill himself. After that, he took 
to all the prison self-improvement pastimes: reading, painting, philosophy. 
Autry lent him books, and Lockett became the most well-read client the attorney 
had ever had. Still, there was a hollowness to Lockett's new persona, as though 
he had gone from posing as a gangbanger to posing as a self-educated prison 
sophisticate.

When the time came for a clemency hearing before the pardon-and-parole board - 
one of his last chances for survival - Lockett declined to show up. Instead, he 
gave Autry a letter to read to Neiman's family. "It would be disingenuous of me 
to tell you that I woke up one day and suddenly felt remorse," he wrote. "Or 
that I found some arcane bible verse that miraculously inspired me to change. 
The truth is not so simple as that." He told them that for him, remorse had 
been slow, but debilitating. "I want you to know that if by me relinquishing my 
life you find solace in my death & can one day find the strength to forgive me 
then I am okay with this."

Right up to the very end, Lockett pretended he actually had some control.

To Warden Trammell, it looked as though Lockett was trying to communicate 
something. He kicked his right leg. He began to breathe heavily. He clenched 
his teeth. He rolled his head. Then he tried to speak.

My God, Trammell thought. He's coming out of this.

Lockett lurched up against the restraints. While the witnesses looked on, he 
started writhing as if trying to free himself, to get up off the gurney. He 
struggled violently, twisting his whole body.

Autry, sitting in the viewing area, couldn't believe it; next to him, Dean 
Sanderford, Lockett's other lawyer, began to cry. Lockett got his whole head up 
off the gurney, as far as the restraints would let him go. He kept trying to 
speak but couldn't form the words, and he rolled his head back and forth.

Zellmer watched the monitor. The potassium chloride was supposed to stop 
Lockett's heart immediately, by disrupting the electrical charge that causes 
the heart muscles to contract. But although Lockett's heart was slowing, it 
kept beating.

The normal resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 and 100 beats per 
minute. Lockett's dropped into the 20s. From the waves on the screen, it looked 
like his heart muscles were starting to fire erratically. The doctor thought 
Lockett might be starting to seize. But he still felt uncertain of his role, 
and hesitated to intervene.

>From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, "He's trying to get 
off the table!"

Finally Lockett managed to speak: "Man."

Zellmer had seen enough. He came to the gurney and lifted the sheet. 
Underneath, he saw a protrusion almost the size of a tennis ball on Lockett???s 
groin.

>From the viewing area, Katie Fretland could see the doctor's face for the 1st 
time, and his expression was clear: Oh, fuck. Another witness saw Lockett open 
his eyes and look right at the doctor, like something out of a horror movie.

The warden glanced under the sheet and noticed what looked like blood and clear 
liquid pooled around Lockett's groin. She looked up and addressed the 
witnesses: "We're going to lower the blinds, temporarily."

>From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, "He's trying to get 
off the table!" She came into the death chamber as the doctor was trying to 
figure out how to finish the execution.

"I need to get another IV in the left femoral," Zellmer told her. She swabbed 
Lockett's groin with a sterile pad.

"Take deep breaths," the paramedic told Lockett, in case he could hear her, 
while Zellmer pushed the short needle back into Lockett's groin. Blood squirted 
all over Zellmer, so much of it that it soaked his jacket.

"You've hit the artery," the paramedic said.

"It'll be all right," Zellmer told her. "We'll go ahead and get the drugs."

Did he intend to put drugs in an artery? The paramedic didn't want to 
countermand the doctor's authority, but that made no sense. "We've got to get 
the vein," she said. The doctor pulled out the needle.

Lockett mumbled incoherently. His heart rate dropped into the teens as more of 
the potassium chloride that had been pumped into his groin seeped into his 
bloodstream. Eventually, the doctor and the paramedic stopped what they were 
doing.

The warden asked whether it would be possible to resuscitate Lockett. Zellmer 
said he could start CPR, but that in order to save him, they'd have to take him 
to an emergency room. This further confused the paramedic. He's dying, she 
thought. Isn't that why we're here?

Stephanie Neiman's family was in shock. After the blinds came down, prison 
staff took them to a rec room and tried to console them. While Neiman's mother, 
Susie, wept, someone from the state attorney general's office tried to explain 
what had happened, something about Lockett's heart and a vein exploding. Susie 
said she wanted to go into the chamber and touch Lockett; otherwise she 
couldn't know for sure that her daughter's killer was dead.

Fretland and the other reporters felt almost as stunned. In the viewing area, a 
black telephone she hadn't noticed before started ringing. Robert Patton, the 
Oklahoma Department of Corrections director, picked it up and left the room, 
pulling the phone cord out into the hall and closing the door behind him.

Warden Trammell was calling from the death chamber. Patton asked her, "Has 
enough drugs been administered to cause death?" He heard Trammell repeat the 
question. He heard the doctor say no.

"Is there another vein available, and if so do you have another set of 
chemicals back there?" Again, Trammell repeated the question; again the doctor 
said no.

"I wanna be real clear with this, Warden, and I want you to ask the doctor 
specifically. Has enough drugs entered the inmate's system to cause death?" A 
3rd time, he heard Trammell repeat the question. A 3rd time, the answer was no.

Patton hung up the phone and huddled in the hallway with the state secretary of 
safety and security and 2 members of the attorney general's office. Someone 
briefly floated the idea of using the drugs reserved for Charles Warner's 
execution. Patton spoke on the phone with the governor's general counsel, Steve 
Mullins, in Oklahoma City.

Mullins asked Patton, "Do you want to stop the execution?"

"Yes." "You have the authority to stop the execution," he told Patton.

When they hung up, Mullins called the governor - the basketball game was now an 
hour from tip-off - to brief her.

At 6:56, a call came in to the death chamber. Patton had instructions for the 
warden. He said something like "stand down," which Trammell didn't quite 
understand.

"Do you mean to stop?"

Yes, he said, stop the execution.

"I believe the death penalty is an appropriate response and punishment to those 
who commit heinous crimes," Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin said at a press 
conference the day after Lockett's execution.

10 minutes later, at 7:06 p.m., Clayton Lockett was declared dead. He had been 
dying amidst all the chaos, just very slowly and in apparent agony.

The next day, Governor Fallin gave a press conference to remind everyone about 
Lockett's crimes, voice her support for the death penalty, and announce an 
investigation into what had gone wrong. Later in the week, a reporter asked 
President Obama about Lockett's execution. Obama called the events "deeply 
troubling." He maintained his support for the death penalty but added, "We do 
have to, as a society, ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions" 
about how it is applied.

Mark Gibson, the prosecutor, doesn't consider what happened to Lockett a 
tragedy. "If there is ever somebody who deserved it, it was him," he says.

2 separate autopsies were conducted. The results of one suggested that 
Lockett's struggles against the restraints had been so violent that they'd 
caused blunt-impact injuries. Neither autopsy explained why it had taken the 
doctor and the paramedic so many tries to place an IV; there was nothing wrong 
with Lockett's veins. The pathologists also found that the amount of midazolam 
that had made it into his bloodstream should have been enough to render him 
fully unconscious.

An attorney for Lockett's family, David Lane, filed a lawsuit in federal court 
against Governor Fallin, prison officials, and Zellmer, as well as the 
unidentified paramedic and executioners, 2 drug manufacturers, and 2 
compounding pharmacies for violating the Eighth Amendment and standards of 
international law. Lane characterizes what happened to Lockett as "human 
experimentation." The named defendants have filed motions to dismiss, which, as 
of this writing, are still before the court. (The Oklahoma Department of 
Corrections declined to grant interviews for this article, citing the pending 
litigation.) Charles Warner's execution had been delayed that night, and it was 
delayed 2 more times while the state finished investigating Lockett's 
execution, and while officials tried to find more drugs. In July, Arizona used 
midazolam in the execution of Joseph Wood. He took nearly 2 hours to die, and 
witnesses reported that he gasped throughout.

Lawyers for Warner and 3 other men on death row asked the U.S. Supreme Court to 
review Oklahoma's lethal-injection method. They also asked for a stay while the 
Court decided whether to take the case.

On the night of Warner's execution, January 15, 2015, the Court still had not 
ruled on the stay request. The execution was delayed by an hour as the justices 
made their decision. They were 1 vote short of the 5 needed to grant a stay.

Witnesses said Warner didn't appear to be in any pain, but after the midazolam 
was administered, he said, "My body is on fire." He died in 18 minutes.

The next week, even though Warner, the lead petitioner, was now dead, the 
Supreme Court decided to consider the challenge to Oklahoma's lethal-injection 
method. Oral arguments were scheduled for April 29, the 1-year anniversary of 
Lockett's death. Warner's co-complainants have been granted stays until the 
Court decides the case or Oklahoma changes its execution method. Then - U.S. 
Attorney General Eric Holder recommended that all states stop executions, at 
least until the Court issues its ruling.

That decision is expected in June.

(source: Jeffrey Stern, The Atlantic)