Tulsa World Enterprise Editor Ziva Branstetter was one of 12 media witnesses to attend a botched execution Tuesday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
And she wrote the gory details of the execution that went awry..
A few notable points. At 5:40 pm, she reported she heard other inmates banging loudly on their prison cells in a sign of respect for the soon to be state killed.. At 6:28 pm fifty milligrams of midazolam were placed into Lockett’s arms. 6:31 pm: Suffering begins.. 6:36, he mumbles something .. 6:37 is when he begin to buckle and writhe in pain. 6:38, says the word “man” followed by other unintelligible statements. 6:40: Someone notices Lockett is not dying in the fashion he should. 6:50 pm, the execution is ‘stopped.’
Branstetter goes on to write:
Patton leaves for about 10 more minutes and reporters at the end of our row begin interviewing Sanderford and defense attorney David Autry, both clearly upset by the turn of events. “They will save him so they can kill him another day,” Autry says.
We are told to leave the viewing chamber and are escorted back to a waiting white prison van. We have to tear the notes out of the spiral notebook and leave it plus the pen behind. Another van is on the way so I stay behind with reporters from the Associated Press, The Oklahoman, OETA and The Guardian to compare notes. After every execution, it’s important that reporters compare last words and other observations to make sure they have the most accurate version of events possible.
7:06 p.m. Lockett is pronounced dead in the execution chamber from a heart attack. The news of his death is provided to reporters by Patton during a brief statement at the media center on the prison grounds. He explains to reporters that prison officials do not know how much of the second and third drugs entered Lockett’s body.
Finally, the word comes: “His vein exploded.”
There are some that point to the botched execution as a reason we should bring back some more barbaric ways of death, such as the guillotine. But should we? Is it painless as some profess? Quick? A good means to an end? As a reader to Andrew Sullivan wrote in a November 2013 blog post, explaining what a biography of Catherine the Great said,
[W]as death by guillotine so instantaneous as to be truly painless? Some believe not. They argue that because the blade, cutting rapidly through the neck and spinal column, had relatively little impact on the head encasing the brain, there may not have been immediate unconsciousness… Witnesses to guillotining have described blinking eyelids and movements of the eyes, lips, and mouth. As recently as 1956, anatomists experimenting with the severed heads of guillotined prisoners explained this by saying that what appeared to be a head responding to the sound of its name or to the pain of a pin-prick on the cheek might only have been a random muscle twitch or an automatic reflex action.
Eyewitness account: A minute-by-minute look at what happened during Clayton Lockett’s execution
