10 Years after Clayton Lockett's Execution: What's Changed, What Hasn't
On April 29th, 2014, Lockett's execution revealed the true nature of lethal injection. Dishearteningly little changed in the decade that followed.
10 years ago today, lethal injection showed the world what it truly was.
Prior to Clayton Lockett’s execution for the rape and murder of Stephanie Nieman, lethal injection was able to maintain the “humane“ medicalized image it had presented since its development in the late 1970s. While the method had always held the potential for torture, the controversies surrounding lethal injection largely surrounded its connection to legitimate medicine. When anesthesiologists, the medical specialty most experienced in the drugs involved in lethal injection, backed out of the procedure, no mention was made of its potential for inhumanity. Similarly, when the sole American supplier of sodium thiopental, the sedative in the original lethal injection cocktail, made the drug unavailable in the US, contemporary news accounts made no mention of botched executions. Hollywood’s version of a botched lethal injection, in 2009’s Law Abiding Citizen, occurs only because the antagonist replaced the typical cocktail with “something a little more…deliberate.“ Even as former Oklahoma lawmaker Bill Wiseman came to regret his invention of the method, he maintained belief that “this technique is far preferable to any alternative.”
Lockett’s execution laid bare the reality. Physician Johnny Zellmer and a paramedic who has remained anonymous struggled for more than 45 minutes to find a suitable vein, poking him with needles at multiple sites and calling for adjunct equipment you’d expect in a medical setting before finally settling for an attempt at his femoral vein, located near the groin, and okaying the administration of midazolam (already an inferior sedative chosen for its easy availability rather than any scientific rationale and used the first time that day). Moments later, Zellmer declared Lockett unconscious, and the infusion of the fatal drugs began.
Larger central veins, however, require different equipment from the peripheral veins they were prepared for, and by the time drugs started flowing, the line had already failed; a sheet pulled over the site to preserve his “dignity” hid this reality from execution staff. Consequently, the supposedly sedating midazolam pooled around the injection site rather than entering his bloodstream in sufficient quantities, as vecuronium bromide (a paralytic, which offers no sedation or pain relief but causes the subject to lose the ability to move or even breathe) and potassium chloride (which stops the heart but feels like being burned alive even at much lower quantities) continued to flow.
The results are disputed by witnesses, but even the least gruesome account is horrifying. The supposedly paralyzed Lockett began lifting his extremities off the gurney, groaning, and even speaking. By the time the medical staff stepped back in—a full ten minutes into the administration of the paralytic and potassium—Oklahoma had used too much of their supply of drugs to save his life, without enough remaining to effect his death. Zellmer, a family physician and last-minute substitute with little experience in the specialties whose procedures he attempted, first tried to salvage the execution—attempting to cannulate femoral vein on the opposite side only to find the artery, resulting in blood spurting onto his shirt—before turning Lockett over to a medical team in an attempt to save his life. Hyperkalemia (literally excess potassium in the bloodstream) was preventing Lockett’s heart cells from making the sodium-potassium exchange necessary to continue beating, however, and Zellmer recorded a pulse as low as six times per minute before Lockett finally expired.
A Problem They Couldn’t Ignore
While the grisly details of Lockett’s execution stand out, the idea of a botched execution via lethal injection wasn’t new to observers. Botched executions had been a hallmark of the method going back to the very first attempt; through 2010, a comparative study of botched executions had put the failure rate for lethal injection at the highest of American execution methods.1 Nor was Oklahoma proceeding without warning on its new cocktail; an Oklahoma State pharmacology professor described the potential as “horrific,” and the non-partisan, death-penalty-agnostic Constitution Project wrote a report noting the cocktail’s risks were too high even for use on animals.
Those grisly details, however, broke out into the wider public. The Atlantic would offer a gruesome play-by-play both of the execution and of the shady means by which Oklahoma selected and procured its drugs. The White House described it as “[falling] short of human standards,“ with the United Nations adding that it was “cruel, unusual and degrading.” The pressure was such that even Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin, who had risked a constitutional crisis to make sure her Department of Corrections had carried out the execution, had seen enough, calling for a review of Oklahoma’s execution protocol and delaying the execution of Charles Frederick Warner, scheduled for later that night.
Oklahoma Still Uses—And Still Botches—That Same Protocol
That investigation resulted in a 32-page report containing four pages of recommendations; none question the drugs used. As far as the failed IV goes: the report recommends only one specific change to the equipment used (adding ultrasound for venous detection, with no additional training requirements for a team that may never have used one) and spills more ink describing how to manage witnesses than what equipment may be necessary.
The failure to recommend new drugs may have been a legal necessity: Oklahoma would soon be defending its protocol from challenges by inmates who didn’t want to be tortured to death. At oral argument before the Supreme Court, the old myth of “humane“ lethal injections struck again, with Justices Alito and Scalia blaming the “guerilla war on the death penalty“ for the failure to secure “100-percent sure drugs“ rather than the state for its own choices.
Attorneys for Richard Glossip found a murderer’s row of 14 medical and pharmacology professors to submit a brief arguing that midazolam couldn’t be certain to produce a constitutional level of sedation even if administration worked as intended; Oklahoma responded with a single pharmacist who had never prescribed midazolam and half of whose brief was lifted from consumer-facing drug websites. (Naturally, the state won 5–4.)
If You Can’t Kill Better, Lie Harder
Warner’s execution was carried out the next year using the same protocol, with the pharmacologically insignificant substitution of potassium acetate for potassium chloride after Oklahoma ordered the wrong drug; his final words were “my body is on fire.“ The moratorium that followed lasted six years, following which the state executed John Grant. What happened next depends on who you believe.
Media and Grant’s witnesses described Grant as having “full-body convulsions,“ “drowning in his own vomit,” and gasping for air a full five minutes after Oklahoma told the Supreme Court their protocol would have him peacefully put under. The state’s response was essentially to call them liars. (Naturally, the latter never commented on an autopsy that backed up witness accounts.)
A Slow, Groggy Awakening
Despite the truth slowly leaking out, lethal injection still enjoys an undeservedly sterling reputation. In a 2023 poll, the method enjoyed 68% approval from the public, higher than any other method surveyed. (The new method of nitrogen gas hypoxia was not polled, but coverage has been near-universally negative.) However, faith in the death penalty overall has fallen significantly since Lockett’s execution, holding steady hold in the 60–65% range for the 11 years before but dropping all the way to 53% last year. The effect has been even greater in the halls of power, with four states outright abolishing the penalty (admittedly a dead letter in some of them) and another five ending them at least temporarily via executive action.
For Wiseman, who died in 2007 after leaving politics for the priesthood, the mistaken belief that he’d made the death penalty “gentler“ couldn’t overcome the guilt that he’d made it easier to levy. Wherever he is, perhaps it’s some comfort—however cold—that he’d done the opposite of both.
As Sarat notes, the use of a paralytic would inherently hide at least some of the suffering the subject experiences, meaning that his comparatively high rate of observed failure may still be exponentially lower than reality.