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What it was like watching the botched Oklahoma execution

A dozen people filed into a small room on Tuesday evening to watch Clayton Lockett die. They were media witnesses selected from a lottery, a dozen people chosen to observe the moment because there were only a dozen spots available and more than 12 reporters wanted to see this execution.

They arrived at a media center on the grounds of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and climbed into the white prison vans that carried them into the prison itself. They were intensely searched before being handed spiral stenographer’s notebooks and small, white Bic pens with blue caps. “You can’t bring anything with you, not even a watch,” Ziva Branstetter, one of the witnesses, said in an interview the following day. Afterward, when the execution was over and Lockett was dead, the witnesses would be told to tear out their notes and return the notebooks and the small, white pens with the blue caps.

At the beginning, the only thing that was different was that the execution was late. At 6:23 p.m., 23 minutes after the execution had been scheduled to begin, the beige blinds lifted up and the witnesses in the next two rooms could see Lockett on the gurney. They didn’t know — because they couldn’t know — that the execution was delayed because a technician couldn’t find a place to insert the IV, according to Robert Patton, director of the Department of Corrections. That technician looked at Lockett’s arms, legs, feet and neck before ultimately placing the IV in Lockett’s groin area five minutes before the blinds were lifted, Patton wrote in a timeline sent to the governor. The area with the IV was covered by a sheet so that witnesses couldn’t see his groin, blocking their view of the vein where the needle was inserted.

After Lockett said he had no last words, the execution began. They administered the drug midazolam, which is meant to induce unconsciousness. Ten minutes later, they announced that he was unconscious. “This is the first execution I’ve covered that they’ve made a point of pronouncing someone unconscious before they pronounce him dead,” Branstetter said. Three minutes later, “the violent reaction” began, she said. First, she saw his foot kick. Then his body bucked, he clenched his jaw and he began rolling his head from side to side, trying to lift his head up, grimacing and clenching his teeth.


Source: The Washington Post, Mark Berman and The Washington Post National Staff, May 2, 2014
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