According to news reports of his murder trial in the Tulsa World, Clayton D. Lockett was a cold-blooded killer who botched his execution-style slaying of an innocent young woman, left her dying in a shallow grave, and then returned to finish the job after he had worked out a kink in his murder weapon, a shotgun. In 2000, an Oklahoma jury found Lockett guilty of this heinous murder and sentenced him to death.
On Tuesday the executioner finally came for Lockett at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, and the executioner – a medical professional contracted by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections – also botched his job. Part of the execution cocktail intended to numb the condemned man failed to work, according to press reports, and Lockett died in the execution chamber of a heart attack after writhing in pain for more than a half-hour. One of Lockett’s attorneys said it looked like “torture.” Considering that a man who had been officially executed managed to rise from the gurney and undergo a heart attack before dying without medical help, it’s difficult to know what else to call it.
In light of Lockett’s own crime, which put an innocent victim through death throes similar to what he would later suffer as punishment, many would say he got what he deserved. Some would go so far as to see the hand of fate or even providence in the agonizing way that Lockett died. A small voice in almost all of us says, at times, that murderers deserve to be murdered and torturers deserve to be tortured. But if we want to take pride in living in (and accept paying taxes to) a civilized state and nation, we must not accept this brutal thinking and allow ourselves to become brutalized in the process of administering punishment. As the philosopher Friedrich W. Nietzsche warned, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”
Like Oklahoma, Missouri is a death penalty state. Like Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections, ours has difficulty securing drugs for executions because many providers, especially those based overseas, do not want to do business with executioners. And as in Oklahoma, our executioners try to hide from the condemned the details of their lethal drug cocktails. As St. Louis Public Radio points out, Oklahoma and Missouri have bought execution drugs from compounding pharmacies, which are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and whose products have a significant failure rate. Oklahoma and Missouri also both shield the identity, and therefore the competence, of their executioners.
What happened to Lockett could happen to any of the condemned prisoners in Missouri whose executions the Missouri Supreme Court continues to schedule and that Gov. Jay Nixon and Attorney General Chris Koster continue to endorse and encourage. Indeed, as St. Louis Public Radio points out, Koster even used the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling on one of Lockett’s appeals to argue that Missouri’s execution drug supplier should remain secret.
“No execution should take place in Oklahoma until there has been a full investigation into Clayton Lockett’s death, including an independent autopsy and full transparency surrounding the drugs and the process of administering them,” said Madeline Cohen, a federal public defender and lawyer for another condemned man who had been scheduled for execution after Lockett. We strongly believe the same should be true in Missouri. We must not tolerate our state government buying and mixing lethal cocktails in our name and executing prisoners in a manner that – after the death of Clayton Lockett – clearly can end in what amounts to torture. When punishing monsters, we must not become monsters.
