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Oklahoma Botched an Execution With Untested Lethal Injection Drugs
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "The state of Oklahoma had scheduled two executions for Tuesday, April 29th. This in spite of myriad objections that the drugs being used for both lethal injections had not been tested, and thus could violate the constitutional right to the courts, as well as the 8th Amendment: protection from cruel and unusual punishment. After much legal and political wrangling, the state proceeded with the executions anyway. It soon became clear that the critics' worst case scenarios were coming true — Oklahoma violently botched the first execution. The inmate "blew" a vein and had a heart attack. The state quickly postponed the second one. 'After weeks of Oklahoma refusing to disclose basic information about the drugs for tonight's lethal injection procedures, tonight, Clayton Lockett was tortured to death,' Madeline Cohen, the attorney of Charles Warner, the second man scheduled for execution, said in a statement. Katie Fretland at The Guardian reported from the scene of the botched attempt to execute Lockett using the untested, unvetted, and therefore potentially unconstitutional lethal injection drugs."
sciencehabit also points out a study indicating that around 4% of death row inmates in the U.S. are likely innocent.
> 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heart attack vs. breathing dirt
False dichotomy. Everyone reading this would not be effected by either, as long as he's behind bars.
Cue the madding crowds telling me why I'm wrong to hold my opinion
Why does the US still even have the Death penalty?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Seems they've tested it now.
Not all heart attacks kill. Many induce absolutely tremendous levels of suffering.
Well, that's okay then. As long as you only violate due process when the mob thinks the guy really, really deserves it then there's no problem.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I find it hard to believe that no one has looked into execution using Nitrogen. Something akin to an old style dive helmet with a hose near the top to feed in gas. When the time comes, switch the flow over from air to pure nitrogen. Simple, cheap, painless and there is a limitless supply of Nitrogen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation
Some people think that the justice systems' job is the arbiter of karma, rather than preventing crime. I've not discovered a way to discuss these things with the former group. I'm not sure what you can tell that kind of person.
Generally when we as a society decide that we do not torture criminals to death, it is not because we don't feel the criminals deserve it, but rather that we as a society are better then that.
According to Robert Patton, the director of Oklahoma's department of corrections, when doctors felt that the drugs were not having the required effect on Lockett, they discovered that a vein had ruptured.
This is not a problem related to the drug(s) used but incompetent administration.
This in spite of myriad objections that the drugs being used for both lethal injections had not been tested ...
How does one test lethal injections?
Not that the crime is entirely relevant to whether state executions should be okay or not, but you appear to suffer from reading comprehension issues. The crime you refer to was committed by the inmate who had their execution stayed after the first botched one.
I am actually mostly against the death penalty but I agree on this one. All this concern over suffering of someone you are planning to kill. It really strikes me as silly. If you really have the moral conviction to believe killing him is the right thing to do, then fucking grow some balls and do it. Shooting him in the head is many times more humane than this whole pseudomedical procedure of dressing it up.
If the people can't handle the blood shedding then they should admit they don't have the stomac for it and stop doing it; not try to dress it up and make it appear less barbaric.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It's one thing to claim about the drugs being untested .. and you can still probably claim they're untested, because all of the reports are suggesting that it was a blown out blood vessel, so the whole thing would've been botched no matter what drugs they had actually used.
(and before you say I'm just against executions ... I actually think that prisoners who are sentanced to life without parole should be given the opportunity to be administered euthenasia ... but the costs of capital punishment as they curently exist are so high that it should only be reserved for those really, really horrible crimes (which this one would seem to be).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
It is not justice if somebody is been given the death penalty and then gets 45 minutes of torture on top.
There is a reason torture (or cruel and unusual punishment) is not legal. If we treat criminals not better then they treated their victims we're not better than they are.
As a society we should strife to be better than our criminals and not hide our own cruelty behind words like justice and punishment.
While funny, it distracts from several serious problems in the US.
First, why does the US still allow a death penalty? Surely there are some people with mental disorders that can not maintain a life with the rest of society, but this is what Prisons and mental health institutes are supposed to be for. We tend to argue how much a prisoner costs society, but rarely discuss the morality of executing people.
Next, and relates to the first is that the Prison systems in the US have become a for profit business. The privatization of prisons has caused countless issues. Such as contracts requiring a specific capacity at all times in prisons and the exploitation of prisoners. Laws have been passed to help keep prisons at capacity and nearly everyone in the US can commit several felonies every day without their knowledge. This means that we have people in prison that should probably not be there, and we lack the capacity to keep the really socially defunct people in jail.
We could discuss other issues, such as how rehabilitation in the US really does not exist and society lacks opportunity for people motivating people to illegal activities but can save that for later. We should address why the US has the highest percentage of people in prison in the world, and why we still have executions first.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Or even something simpler, like some kind of coup de grace, maybe a 12 gauge slug to the back of the head? Maybe by making executions much more visceral we'll be less inclined to make them clean and clinical and stop thinking about them as clean and clinical.
As bloody as such an execution would be, perhaps it should be so and the judge, prosecuting attorney and lead low enforcement investigators could be mandated to be in attendance and watching. It's one thing to plant evidence, withhold exculpatory information from the defense, commit gross prosecutorial misconduct and run quadrennial judicial elections on your persona as a "hangin' judge" when the convicted is executed somewhere else in a manner more consistent with outpatient surgery than an actual execution.
But when you know ahead of time that if the death penalty goes through you're going to see a human being have a good chunk of the head taken off in front of you, maybe you might not sleep so well knowing it happened because you broke the rules.
So, the standard philosophical counterargument is "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" but I suspect that despite the fact that the edgucated world as a whole had already resolved that capital punishment is immoral over a thousand years ago, you'll continue to lack empathy for those you feel "don't deserve it" so I'll argue from your point of view.
Lets make several points so you can disagree with them directly if you feel you need to:
1. Capital punishment costs orders of magnitude more money than Life in prison. The trials have to be rigorous, and therough, we have to be absolutely sure of the defendants guilt before we execute them. They get guarenteed retrials and the evidence has to be air tight. As a result, capital punishement trials costs states many millions of dollars each.
2. Murder trials are very difficult on the victims family. In order to get a conviction the prosecution needs to present very gory details, interview the family on the stand in depth, etc...
3. Prison is worse than death.
So, if you want to save money, save the family grief, and punish the prisoner in pretty much the worst method available legally, let him rot in prison for the rest of his life. You don't even need to be an ethical person to know that it's the right thing to do from every perspective. When even the catholic church things what you're doing is too barbaric, you know you're doing something wrong.
In that case, amend your constitution to say that it's fine to torture criminals once they've been convicted. If you're going to pretend to have the rule of law, then at least make a token effort to follow your own rules.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
From my understanding, a week with Slashdot Beta should about do it.
We have to pay for this monster to live for the rest of his life. We *all* pay taxes for that. It's expensive.
And carrying out a death penalty also has it's costs. Take a read of costs death penalty. (I may be cherry picking a bit here but) From that article it was estimated that California could save $170 million a year by commuting al death sentences to life in prison.
So do you want to pay more or less taxes?
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Yea because otherwise everyone will be evil. I mean its lucky the US has the death penalty because it has deterred so many of the evil fucking people. Oh wait, the US has one of the worse rates of violent crime. States with the death penalty don't have less of this crime. It is not a preventive nor a deterrent.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The 'problem' is that in these United States, we want to maintain the fiction that we're civilized beings, and that translates into 'sanitizing' the process of ending the life of a violent criminal by injecting them with 'humane' substances that are lethal yet (allegedly) painless. While I'm not an advocate of bringing back hangings, or Texas' long-standing tradition of Old Sparky (electric chair, if someone actually doesn't know), an expertly-aimed round from a large-caliber rifle right between the eyes will end someone's life quickly and relatively painlessly, especially relatively-speaking in comparison to the pain and suffering some of these 'people' inflicted on their victims. Of course as previously stated that's way too much horror-show stuff for the general public to stomach, which is why we don't do it anymore. The general public just wants violent, death-row inmates to fade away, no screaming, no blood, no horror or discomfort of any kind.. really, execution by lethal injection is designed to be humane for everyone else, with it being humane to the criminal being executed just as a side benefit; it allows everyone left behind afterwards to feel like they're not as bad as the person who was just killed.
All that being said, and if they're so fucking concerned about 'being humane', then I don't know why the hell they don't just give criminals being executed a lethal dose of morphine and be done with it. Will kill them in short order, and they won't feel a damned thing on the way out.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Unless they happened to fall into that 4%. Then that murderer/rapist walks free while an innocent man is tortured to death for no reason.
We have to pay for this monster to live for the rest of his life. We *all* pay taxes for that. It's expensive. Tell me how that doesn't affect us. A death-row inmate costs, what, $50-75-100K/yr to house and feed? We get no value from this. This is akin to toxic waste disposal. How many doctors, teachers, scientists can we hire for the amount of money we pay to house these people? How much further would we be as a society if we spent the money on getting ahead, not waste disposal
There are approximately 3,000 people on death row. I would imagine a liberal estimate, if we never killed any, would put mayby 10,000 people that might otherwise, eventually, be executed in prison for life.
As of 2011, there were 2,300,000 people in pirson.
So to answer your question as a percentage: We could save less than 00.5% of our prison budget... assuming executations themselves add $0 cost to the process, and assuming that those executions were carried out before even the trial happened. If you have trials, and waits, and there's a cost to the execution: we save less still.
And remember: these are based on grossly liberal estimates. If I just use current numbers, the savings is closer to 00.1% before lowerign it further with execution costs.
How about you drop the pretense that the issue is cost?
Because, murderer or no, they are human beings? Nothing is actually gained through their suffering, besides pleasing the bloodthirsty.
There are a lot of bloodthirsty people here on Slashdot.
I think it's a good thing to try to move away from the, "He made others suffer so he should suffer," mentality. Punishment, capital or otherwise, should be about rendering the criminal incapable of commiting futher crimes to protect the populace. It's self defense, nothing more. Making sure that criminals suffer is barbaric. It turns my stomach a bit, and I liked that cinnamon roll.
That cost, even if it is correct, it is negligible in the face of: (a) the risk of murdering innocents, when other methods of containment exist; (b) the shame of being one of only developed countries in the world that still implement archaic methods of containment; and (c) the fact that this sort of person and his mental condition is ultimately a result of his own unfavorable context imposed by society.
Learn the difference between justice and vengeance.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Because the morally superior group that retains the right to judge this guy just loves suffering so much?
You know what I get out of a murderer suffering in agony? You know what amazing benefit society at large gains?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
I'm not sure why your personal lack of concern is even relevant.
We've got a debate here that has two sides.
1. "We think there's a higher principal to uphold as a society"
2. *Comes in shouting about how little they care about the issue*
It is easy to be cavalier until you consider yourself, or someone you care about, being innocent.
There are many known painless and very effective ways of killing a human being. For example, suffocation with Nitrogen gas. It will cause a state of euphoria, then unconsciousness, then death. No pain, dead simple (pun not intended), and 100% success rate. It's a no-brainer. Or a simple, massive overdose of pretty much any anesthetic will do. It does not take complicated mixtures. But it would mean, your convict would die "happy". And that thought would be too much to bear for the victims. The death penalty is not about justice. It is about revenge. It is designed to be gruesome, the suffering is intentional. The deliquent is no longer considered a human being, and the pig deserves to suffer. It seems to be consensus even here on slashdot.
It's more complex than that.
You face many concerns considering legal punishment: deterrent effect, risk of harm to innocents, and direct impact of punishment, to name three. These depend largely on the crime, the punishment, and the surrounding culture.
The deterrent effect, for example, has two major factors: perceived severity of the punishment and perceived threat of punishment. A weak punishment, colloquially a "slap on the wrist", carries little deterrent effect; a strong punishment carries high deterrent effect. A punishment lacks threat if it is unlikely to actually occur.
The strength of punishment comes from perception: jail time, pain, execution, fines, and how much the individual fear these personally. Some individuals do not fear prison; others fear it a lot. The poor fear fines more than the rich. Death almost universally incites terror. Pain is unpleasant, but imprisonment may destabilize personal security and provide greater fear.
Punishment carries threat when it is likely. The death penalty is a great example: in drug-riddled ghettos where criminal activity meets its abrupt end 99% by death and 1% by state execution, state execution carries no threat. In peaceful but armed suburbs, attacking someone may get you shot. Either way, someone will probably shoot you in the face before the state gets to you; if the police do catch you, they may simply provide a noose to save you from a bullet. In peaceful suburbs with low justifiable homicide rates, state action is the dominating outcome to murder; execution becomes a looming, subconscious threat.
Putting these together: the death penalty is a deterrent only where death is feared and state execution is a likely consequence of capital crime. In places where the criminal base is used to and does not fear death at a distance, state execution is a laughable thing; the first thing to consider is how to not get killed committing your crimes.
Once it's determined the deterrent effect, you have to consider other consequences. Fines and jail time can destroy lives. Executions kill people. If 4% of the executed are innocent, but executions provide such a deterrent effect as to stave off a hundred murders for each innocent executed, then that is unfortunate. If 4% of the executed are innocent, and executions provide no deterrent, then that is unacceptable.
And of course there are other considerations. I mentioned direct impact of punishment. You will want a punishment which rehabilitates criminals if repeat offense represents a larger proportion of the crime than the additional general deterrent from the next best method. Putting together further conditions, you can increase the severity of punishment as the risk of punishing innocents decreases (it's null if the punishments to innocents is dismissed on appeal 100% of the time before the time is served--increase punishment as much as you like). It gets extremely complex.
Justice is like sex: it feels good, but that doesn't make it wrong. Executing a man who stalks, rapes, and murders a woman feels immensely liberating to some; it is anxiolytic to a society who can distance themselves from the act of killing yet feel that they have participated in punishment. At the same time, such a man has earned his punishment. We may look down on people for enjoying vengeance, but we should not thus assume punishment is wrong.
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Death row, appeals, and execution, are far more expensive for the taxpayer than lifetime imprisonment.
At this point, the real question is: Why anyway?
And no, I definitely refuse any notion that at some point a conviction is final. It is always preliminary, as it is always possible that new evidence pops up.
I was recently assigned to a jury panel in a murder case. The state I live in has capital punishment.
I went into the courtroom with a fairly solid conviction against the death penalty (excluding military cases, i.e. fratricide, where soldiers should be held to a higher standard and capital punishment could be considered a necessary component of discipline).
As the evidence was presented, I started to question my beliefs. The defendant was accused of murdering and raping a 12 year old boy, and was a twice-convicted sex offender (why he wasn't already in prison is an entirely different question). This person showed no remorse for the crime, and if given life imprisonment, would still be able to see his friends and family....something his victim could no longer do. It really made me question my thoughts on capital punishment.
In the end I wasn't chosen for the jury, and the guy was found guilty. I still believe that capital punishment is wrong and doesn't solve anything, but life imprisonment, although no cake walk, doesn't necessarily equate to justice or punishment...because let's face it, this criminal won't be rehabilitated and shouldn't be given the chance.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Because you are better then that? Don't stoop to their level. Do your dirty work and move on. Getting enjoyment out of it is macab, and disturbing.
Your Constitutional Rights have freed you from morality.
Oklahoma didn't realize anything wouldn't pass muster. They were shocked and horrified by a gruesome sight. They are afraid to face the reality of what they do; lethal injection is a long, slow, terrifying process which appears peaceful to the observer so that he may absolve himself of the commission of murder.
An execution should be quick and gruesome. It should be visible death, not peaceful rest. A hanging, a beheading, shooting, a beating to death. A thing that shows us what we do so that we may face it and understand it is terrible but it is just. The more zeal a people have for a punishment, the more visible and terrible it should be so that the people are shocked and sickened back into the understanding of what it is they do.
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I've read that in Switzerland their suicide kit comprises a helium bottle and a plastic bag.
Also when I give 0,5 litre of my blood, I know that I may faint if I don't drink enough and then stand up suddenly.
I guess making someone give all of it would be fatal with no pain.
(again I want to state that I'm against death penalty, I don't suggest anything to carry on those punishments, just wondering why they still use drugs)
Of course, the defining characteristic of his depravity was his lack of empathy for others, his willingness to see them die horribly. It's what made him less than acceptable as a human. Go feel self-righteous all you want, history's got a long, long track record on people and cultures who punish brutally. Vengeance or justice, the motive doesn't lessen the act's effect. Doing things like that turns people into beasts. Your rage should worry you.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
China, Malaysia, vietnam, Uganda, Indonesia, Gambia, Thailand, India, pakistan, Bahrain, Botswana, Equitorial guinea, Bangla desh, UAE, North Korea, Kuwait, afghanistan, Taiwan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Sudan North and South, Ethiopia, Somalia.
Nice crowd.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Yeah, yeah. Pretending I'm endorsing the murder of one person because I don't support the torture of another.
Great. That's extraordinarily dishonest and you should feel bad.
The problem is that a lot of us don't think our justice system should be a purely retributive system seeking vengeance upon those we consider "wastes of oxygen." (And no, the death penalty is not a deterrent.) Maybe this guy did deserve to die. But if so, then what about the next guy who not-quite-fatally shoots the girlfriend only once? Or the one who doesn't bury her alive, but just leaves her for dead? Or the one who just rapes her, and leaves her for dead, but didn't actually shoot her? Or the one who just rapes her?
Where do you draw the line between "he deserves to die" and "he's scum, but we'll just give him life in prison"? There's a demonstrable racial bias in which "wastes of oxygen" get put to death and which have better lawyers that can get them life in prison, or eventually paroled. Given that there will likely always be such biases and imbalances in our justice system, don't you think it's a bit on the callous side to sanction the ultimate punishment on an inequitable basis like this?
Complicating matters is the fact that sometimes the justice system just plain gets things wrong. Eyewitnesses are never 100% dependable. Confessions can and have been coerced. "Wastes of oxygen" that we were absolutely certain at the time "did it" turned out to be exonerated by later evidence. As the submitter referred to in his or her summary, we know that this is costing innocent people's lives.
Personally, I would rather have the guy locked safely away where he cannot harm anyone else, but still around in case we find later that there were mitigating circumstances or the jury just plain blew a verdict. Plus, although YOU consider him a "waste of oxygen," people like me consider the fact that even locked away, he can still contribute to society in discouraging others from following his path or, if nothing else, in helping researchers study the criminal mind. There's absolutely no harm in sentencing people to life in prison instead of death, other than the mob's blood lust for revenge doesn't get satisfied. Sorry, but that's just not compelling enough to me to kill someone who poses no threat.
And food for thought, once we give the state the right to determine who it is okay to kill who poses no threat, what's to stop the state from abusing that power? Do you honestly think that the government and the media have never colluded to present a narrative to The People to justify (and get away with) truly horrible things? What if it were YOU being railroaded through the system, with only one side (hint: not your side) of the story being presented for public consumption, and sentenced to death for something that you either did not do or that you did, but with extenuating circumstances that should be a mitigating factor in your trial, but that was suppressed for political expedience so that important people can be seen as "tough on crime"? How is it that you, who I am guessing were not on the jury or legal teams, or who otherwise has no first-hand knowledge of this case, are able to determine with 100% certainty that these guys are the "wastes of oxygen" that you believe them to be?
Honestly, I think that is only the tip of the iceburg. The whole idea of punishing criminals seems pointless to me. How about rehabilitating them? If somebody is innocent, then we rehabilitate them and in theory that should go pretty quickly since they weren't particularly prone to committing crimes in the first place. If somebody is a likely criminal, then rehabilitation should involve whatever it takes to make them no longer a likely criminal. That doesn't necessarily mean locking them up at all, unless they're so prone to criminal behavior that having them out on the streets is a danger to society.
Getting rid of the death penalty is like arguing that it is better for an innocent person to be raped in prison for the rest of their life instead of being executed. It kind of misses the point, and I don't think the way we run prisons in the US is appropriate for even the guilty, let alone the innocent.
I would prefer the guilty walk free over the innocent being condemned.
You can't "undo" an execution or imprisonment. The guilty still have a chance at getting theirs.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
That's exactly the same standard we're supposed to be using in non-capital cases too!
It is not valid for death sentences to cost more than life sentences. The real problem is that people aren't getting competent and thorough defenses in the initial trial. I would argue it's even more of an injustice for those receiving life sentences because, without the permanence of execution, the public sees it as less of a problem worth fixing.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Okay, took some digging on the proceedings of the national academy of sciences.
Essentially they applied comparative statistical methods on exoneration rates of those on death row(but not yet executed), those not on death row, and found that while the latter mapped to a Poisson distribution for exoneration occurrences, the former fell off sharply at the time of execution(but until then fitting the same model).
They then extrapolated that curve forward past the point of execution, concluding that if they had been continuing to fight for exoneration 4.1% would have gotten it. This includes the very small dataset of those who actually were exonerated after death. They call those conclusion a conservative estimate because it's entirely possible that exoneration rates don't actually cover the full set of unjustly punished.
On what data are you basing your statement? I thought it was interesting, but wanted to verify. Google search: "statistics death row executions race"
First result:
Race of death row inmates executed since 1976 (US).
Comparing the percentage of executions by race to the population data shown lower on the page, I don't think your statement is correct. More whites are executed, but more blacks have pending executions.
sig: sauer
How about rehabilitating them?
Well, I am all in favor of that, but how do you actually DO that? What if they don't want to be rehabilitated? What if they like raping and killing babies (that is what one of these guys did)? What if they pretend they were rehabilitated so that you would let them re-enter society and then they did it again? The crime that eventually got these guys on death row was only the last on their rap sheet. Some people are deemed fit to re-enter society and then go back to the prison several times over.
I'm sure everybody would be happy to rehab instead of incarcerate if only somebody could come up with a rehab plan that actually worked.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Read that page again. The strongest documented discrimination is over the race of the victim:
White Defendant / Black Victim (20)
Black Defendant / White Victim (270)
A black person who kills a white person is far more likely to be prosecuted and sentenced to death than vice versa.
Baldus and Woodworth answered a lot of your questions. Case-controlled studies are never perfect, but they're the best evidence we have.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.or...
Two of the country's foremost researchers on race and capital punishment, law professor David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth, along with colleagues in Philadelphia, have conducted a careful analysis of race and the death penalty in Philadelphia which reveals that the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black. These results were obtained after analyzing and controlling for case differences such as the severity of the crime and the background of the defendant. The data were subjected to various forms of analysis, but the conclusion was clear: blacks were being sentenced to death far in excess of other defendants for similar crimes....
Another measure of race's impact on the death penalty is the combined effect of the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. In the Philadelphia study, the racial combination which was most likely to result in a death sentence was a black defendant with a nonblack victim, regardless of how severe the murder committed. Black-on-black crimes were less likely to receive a death sentence, followed by crimes by other defendants, regardless of the race of their victims.
There is a big difference between life imprisonment and execution that you are missing.
With life imprisonment, it is at least possible for the system to realize a mistake has been made and partially rectify it. It actually happens shockingly often.
Once an execution has been carried out, however, we can no longer even partially rectify the error.
Absolutely we should support fixing the system more generally. But that should not stop us from also declaring a moratorium on capital punishment until that goal is accomplished.
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