LONDON — Europeans largely consider the death penalty a particularly brutal American anachronism, but the prolonged death of Clayton D. Lockett in Oklahoma, after a botched execution by lethal injection, produced more than the usual horror on Wednesday.
The death penalty is banned in the European Union, which has also moved to ban the export of sedatives like sodium thiopental for use in lethal injections. The drug’s producer has stopped making it, and other European companies have sought to prevent their drugs from being used for executions, fearing European Union sanctions. As a result, the authorities in Oklahoma, and officials in other states, have been improvising new mixtures of drugs.
According to the International Commission Against the Death Penalty, based in Switzerland, Belarus is the only European country that still carries out legal executions, usually by a gunshot to the head. But for some Europeans on Wednesday, even that method of killing seemed humane compared with what Mr. Lockett suffered until
his heart stopped, about 43 minutes after the process began. Many here agreed with Madeline Cohen, a lawyer who witnessed the execution, who said that Mr. Lockett had been “tortured to death.”
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Robert Badinter, a former minister of justice who was instrumental in banning the death penalty in France in 1981, denounced “methods that are even more barbaric than ordinary barbarism.”
Both Britain and France issued official statements condemning the execution in Oklahoma and urging the abolition of the death penalty. The British Foreign Office said it opposed the death penalty “in all circumstances as a matter of principle,” asserting that “its use undermines human dignity” and that “there is no conclusive evidence of its deterrent value.” France urged Oklahoma “to establish a moratorium with a view to abolishing this punishment, as many other states in the United States have done,” said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Vincent Floréani.
The criticism spanned Europe’s ideological divide, outraging conservatives and liberals. Alice Arnold, a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, a right-leaning newspaper in Britain, wrote that “America is missing the point,” which is about “the very concept of killing in cold blood” and not about the method.
“I am proud to be British today, proud that I live in a country where this barbarism does not exist, but we must remember this atrocity occurred not in some far-off, third-world dictatorship,” Ms. Arnold wrote. “It happened in America, land of the free.”
Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, a member of Spain’s Parliament from the governing, conservative Popular Party, said that “botched or not, unnecessarily gruesome or technically flawless, executions are unacceptable.”
Mario Marazziti, who coordinates a global campaign for a moratorium on the death penalty for the Sant’Egidio Community of lay Roman Catholics, called lethal injection “unusually cruel and inhuman.” Despite the claims, he said, “it is never a ‘clean’ procedure,” but it represents what he termed “the moral and scientific bankruptcy of ‘clean’ capital punishment.”
Source: The New York Times, STEVEN ERLANGER, April 30, 2014
