Photos from a Botched Lethal Injection

Angel Diaz on Dec. 12, 2006,
the day before his execution.

On December 13, 2006, the state of Florida botched the lethal injection of Angel Diaz. The execution team pushed IV catheters straight through the veins in both his arms and into the underlying tissue. As a result, Diaz, who was convicted of murder in 1986, required two full doses of the lethal drugs, and an execution scheduled to take only ten to 15 minutes lasted 34. It was one of the worst botches since states began using lethal injection in the 1980s, and Jeb Bush, then the governor of Florida, responded with a moratorium on executions.

Other states hardly heeded Diaz’s death at all. Since he died, states have continued to botch lethal injections: A recent study by Austin Sarat at Amherst College estimated that at least 7 percent of all lethal injections have been visibly botched. The most controversial was in Oklahoma this past April, when the state executed a convicted murderer and rapist named Clayton Lockett using a three-drug protocol, like most other death-penalty states. The execution team struggled for 51 minutes to find a vein for IV access, eventually aiming for the femoral vein deep in Lockett’s groin. Something went wrong: Oklahoma first said the vein had “blown,” then “exploded,” and eventually just “collapsed,” all of which would be unusual for the thick femoral vein if an IV had been inserted correctly. Whatever it was, the drugs saturated the surrounding tissue rather than flowing into his bloodstream. The director of corrections called off the execution, at which point the lethal injection became a life-saving operation. But it was too late for Lockett. Ten minutes later, and a full hour-and-forty-seven minutes after Lockett entered the death chamber, a doctor pronounced him dead.

Witnesses to the execution say Lockett writhed, clenched his teeth, and mumbled throughout the procedure. We won’t better understand what happened until Oklahoma releases an autopsy report some time this summer. But we do know what happened to Angel Diaz, who died under similar conditions. While the details of his execution have been known since 2006, The New Republic is publishing for the first time photographs of the injuries Diaz sustained from the lethal injection. I discovered the photographs in the case file of Ian Lightbourne, a Florida death-row inmate whose lawyers submitted them as evidence that lethal injection poses an unconstitutional risk of cruel and unusual punishment.

States adopted lethal injection in order to make the death penalty seem more peaceful, like an ordinary medical procedure. “No pain, no spasms, no smells or sounds—just sleep then death,” said Bill Wiseman, the Oklahoma state representative who led the first push for lethal injection in 1977. But even back then, Jay Chapman, the Oklahoma chief medical examiner who wrote the protocol, warned, in the words of The Daily Oklahoman, that “the major hazard of using lethal drugs in the execution of criminals is missing the vein in establishing an intravenous ‘pathway’ for the drugs.” That is what happened to Diaz and appears to be what happened to Lockett.

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Source: New Republic, Ben Crair, May 29, 2014

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