Oklahoma Execution drugs leaked from IV

Some of the Execution drugs used in a botched execution in Oklahoma did not enter the inmate’s system because the vein they were injected into collapsed, and the failure was not noticed for 21 minutes, the state’s prison chief said. Robert Patton urged changes to the state’s execution procedure after the death of Clayton Lockett.

Photo: American Press

The execution has drawn intense scrutiny to the US death penalty system from around the world. On Tuesday the United Nations human rights office in Geneva said Lockett’s execution could amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international human rights law. A letter by written by Mr Patton to the state’s governor detailing Lockett’s last day described how medical officials tried for nearly an hour to find a vein in Lockett’s arms, legs and neck before finally inserting an IV line into his groin. By the time a doctor lifted a sheet covering the inmate and noticed the line had become dislodged from the vein, all of the execution drugs had been administered and there was not another suitable vein, the report said.

“The drugs had either absorbed into tissue, leaked out or both,” Mr Patton wrote. “The director asked the following question: ‘Have enough drugs been administered to cause death?’. The doctor responded, ‘No’.”

At that time, Mr Patton halted the Tuesday night execution, but Lockett was pronounced dead of a heart attack 10 minutes later. Oklahoma’s execution rules call for medical personnel to immediately give emergency aid if a stay is granted while the lethal drugs are being administered, but it is not clear if that happened. The report does not say what occurred from when Mr Patton called off the execution at 6.56pm to Lockett being pronounced dead at 7.06pm.

A United Nations human rights office spokesman, Rupert Colville, said it was “the second case of apparent extreme suffering caused by malfunctioning lethal injections” reported in the United States this year, after Dennis McGuire’s execution in Ohio on January 16 with an allegedly untested combination of drugs.

States have been scrambling to find new sources of drugs as several pharmaceutical companies, many based in Europe, have stopped selling to US prisons and corrections departments that conduct executions. Mr Colville told reporters that “the apparent cruelty involved in these recent executions simply reinforces the argument that authorities across the United States should impose an immediate moratorium on the use of the death penalty and work for abolition of this cruel and inhuman practice”.