This week Oklahoma resumed executions by lethal injection following a national outcry over the botched killing of inmate Clayton Lockett last April, yet it came in for harsh criticism once again after the inmate being executed exclaimed from the death chamber: “My body is on fire.
On Thursday Charles Warner (47) became the first inmate to be put to death in the state since April 29, the day on which Lockett, strapped down in a gurney, “began writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head after he was injected with lethal drugs.”
Warner was convicted in the 1997 rape and beating death of an 11-month-old girl.
The procedure for Lockett was botched so badly that he died of a heart attack 43 minutes into the procedure.
On the heels of widespread condemnation of the procedure even U.S. President Barack Obama stepped into the controversy describing the treatment of Lockett as “inhumane,”
And Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin subsequently agreed to a six-month stay of execution for another inmate while the state conducted an investigation of the death of Lockett.
However Oklahoma decided to proceed with a variation of the same drug formula used on Lockett, and some death penalty lawyers say the state “still risks violating the Constitution by inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on inmates.”
Madeline Cohen, Warner's attorney was quoted saying, “Because Oklahoma injected Mr. Warner with a paralytic tonight, acting as a chemical veil, we will never know whether he experienced the intense pain of suffocation and burning that would result from injecting a conscious person with rocuronium bromide and potassium chloride.”
On the controversy surrounding the type of lethal drugs used, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissenting opinion against deniying an appeal by Warner’s attorney’s, that she was “deeply troubled” by the continued use of sedative midazolam.
In recent times Oklahoma has joined other states such as Missouri in using “compounded execution drugs purchased from unnamed pharmacies,” after the main sedative used traditionally, sodium thiopental, became unavailable due to its sole manufacturer, a company called Hospira, halting production in 2010.
Following campaigns by anti-death-penalty groups such as the United Kingdom’s Reprieve, pharmaceutical companies agreed to restrict U.S. prisons’ access to their therapeutic drugs for execution purposes.
Shortly thereafter some U.S. prisons, including Nebraska, turned to other nations to import the drug, including from India, and despite import approvals not being authorised by the U.S. regulator, the Food and Drug Administration.
However media reports, including in The Hindu, highlighted the role of the Indian firm involved, Kayem Pharma, and that company subsequently pulled out of the deal with the U.S. prison.
