"As a very sincere friend, I think this is unworthy of the United States of America," one European lawmaker says.
Oklahoma's botched execution of Clayton Lockett on Tuesday night "showed vividly that the death penalty is a brutal form of punishment which disregards human dignity," the office of European Union High Representative Catherine Ashton told me in a statement on Wednesday. Lockett died after spending 45 minutes
writhing in pain from an ex perimental drug cocktail that had been
secretly obtained by state officials and not evaluated by medical professionals. Charles Warner, a second inmate who was scheduled to die the same night, received a temporary stay of execution from Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin, pending an investigation.
"The European Union is opposed to the use of capital punishment in all cases and under any circumstances," said Ashton, Europe's top diplomat, "based on the conviction that the death penalty is cruel, inhumane and irreversible, and its abolition is essential to protect human dignity." France's Foreign Ministry
also issued a denunciation and urged Oklahoma and other U.S. states to impose a moratorium on executions.
The death penalty's universal abolition is a major EU foreign-policy objective, and EU officials have spoken out strongly against high-profile U.S. executions in the past.
The most successful effort in this arena came in December 2011, when the European Commission
imposed an EU-wide export ban on certain drugs used in lethal injections, including pentobarbital and sodium thiopental, to the United States. U.S. manufacturers had already refused to sell drugs used in standard lethal injections to state prisons, citing ethical obligations. With their last major supply lines severed by Europe, corrections officials in multiple states turned to
back-alley distributors overseas and then to
poorly-regulated compounding pharmacies in the United States. Some states also changed their execution protocols to adjust to the supply shortage, substituting court-sanctioned drug cocktails with experimental ones.
Some suspect that a compounding pharmacy sold the drugs used in Lockett's execution, but Oklahoma Department of Corrections officials
have refused to identify where they obtained them. Oklahoma Supreme Court justices, who had been threatened with impeachment by state lawmakers for delaying the two executions,
lifted their stays of execution last week and denied a motion to force state officials to reveal the drugs' source. Similar legal challenges are still pending in other states that have refused to disclose their drugs' suppliers.
Internationally, the United States belongs to a dwindling club of countries that still perform executions. With the exception of Belarus, all European countries have formally abolished the practice, which is also becoming less common in Africa and Latin America, either in law or in practice. Russia's constitutional court
enacted a moratorium on the death penalty in 1999, three years after the last execution there.
Source: The Atlantic, May 1, 2014
