Witnesses to a Botched Execution

On Tuesday night, just after 8 P.M., a series of chilling tweets from an Associated Press reporter in Oklahoma City, Bailey Elise McBride, began to circulate widely. Before joining the AP, McBride was a high-school teacher. She writes a blog called PBR & Pearls, on which she logs inspirations and interests; most recently, a “mild obsession” with the band Tiny Ruins. At work, her subject matter tends to be darker. In addition to covering a mysterious case of dead birds dropping from the sky and the financial complications prompted by a bridge closure, McBride was one of the reporters following Oklahoma’s plans to execute two death-row inmates, on the same night, by lethal injection.
Both executions, of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, were to be carried out by midnight, and, as the Fordham law professor and death-penalty expert Deborah Denno told the Los Angeles Times, “The world was watching.”
Oklahoma had run out of lethal-injection drugs for the same reason that other death-penalty states have also run out of them. As Jeffrey Toobin described in a Comment, the sole American manufacturer of sodium thiopental, a key ingredient in lethal injections, stopped making the drug in 2011. Death-penalty states turned to European manufacturers, but it became impossible to import the drugs to the United States, owing to the European Union’s commitment to wipe out capital punishment worldwide. Left with dwindling supplies, states shifted their execution protocols toward the improvisational, recombining drugs and seeking the services of compounding pharmacies, which are loosely regulated by the federal government.
Where are states getting these chemicals? And how are they tinkering with them? These are excellent questions, but new secrecy laws allow certain states, Oklahoma among them, to remain completely silent on the matter. Constitutional challenges based on Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment have failed. Lethal injection—supposedly ethically superior to hanging, gas, electrocution, and firing squad—has been employed with untested and controversial drug combinations that are bought, with legally protected secrecy, from companies that want anonymity. Texas is refusing to reveal the source of its newest compounded drugs; Georgia considers the names of its suppliers a “state secret.” Secrecy laws involving lethal injection have been attacked, unsuccessfully, in Missouri and Louisiana.
Executions, meanwhile, have continued, some of them with horrific results. In January, the Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson said, during his execution, “I feel my whole body burning.” An inmate in Ohio spent ten minutes “struggling and gasping loudly for air,” NPR reported, and made “snorting and choking sounds.” It took nearly thirty minutes for him to die.
For the execution of Clayton Lockett, Oklahoma used, for the first time, the midazolam (a sedative) in combination with vecuronium bromide (which paralyzes the respiratory system) and potassium chloride (which stops the heart). The drugs are delivered intravenously, in that order. The suffocating pain caused by the second and third drugs would be agonizing without the sedative effects of the first.
Oklahoma’s secrecy laws make it impossible to know anything beyond the names of the ingredients injected into the condemned prisoner. The state has declined to provide the public with reasons for selecting a particular drug cocktail, or with any details about the drugs themselves, or about the supplier. The state reportedly buys the drugs with petty cash, to make the purchases more difficult to track and, therefore, harder to legally challenge.
What is known, though, is that, ten minutes into Lockett’s execution, a prison official told a doctor, “Go ahead and check to see if he’s unconscious.