April 29, 2014, 5:58 p.m.
Clayton Lockett was slated to be the first to die after a legal battle over Oklahoma's lethal-injection methods, which have come under fire from death penalty opponents for the secrecy surrounding the process.
But his vein apparently burst while officials were trying to administer the drugs beginning at 6:23 p.m. He began to convulse and officials tried to resuscitate him, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.
According to the AP, Lockett had received a new lethal-injection formula that included the sedative midazolam as the first in a three-drug combination. He died of a heart attack at 7:06 p.m. The second execution was called off....
These deaths are in violation of USA law and are torture of an American citizen.
...I've seen people die many times before: (click here) in nursing homes, families I've known, my own mother. In most settings I've found death to be a very peaceful experience. But this was something else. By my count it took 26 minutes for McGuire to be pronounced dead.
We sat down in the death house – McGuire's children and daughter-in-law in the front row and me in the row behind them. At about 10.15am he was brought in and strapped to the gurney. With his arms spread and, not to put too fine a point on it, I whispered to his daughter that he looked as though he were on the cross....
...They began to put lines into him. That was unsettling, as from what I could observe they seemed to find it hard to get insert the IV and there seemed to be blood coming from his right arm.
At 10.27am, the syringe containing the untested concoction of midazolam and hydromorphone was injected into him. At 10.30am, three minutes into the execution, he lifted his head off the gurney, and said to the family who he could see through the window: "I love you, I love you." Then he lay back down.
At about 10.31am, his stomach swelled up in an unusual way, as though he had a hernia or something like that. Between 10.33am and 10.44am – I could see a clock on the wall of the death house – he struggled and gasped audibly for air.
I was aghast. Over those 11 minutes or more he was fighting for breath, and I could see both of his fists were clenched the entire time. His gasps could be heard through the glass wall that separated us. Towards the end, the gasping faded into small puffs of his mouth. It was much like a fish lying along the shore puffing for that one gasp of air that would allow it to breathe. Time dragged on and I was helpless to do anything, sitting helplessly by as he struggled for breath. I desperately wanted out of that room.
For the next four minutes or so a medical tech listened for a heart beat on both sides of his chest. That seemed to drag on too, like some final cruel ritual, preventing us from leaving. Then, at 10.53am, the warden called the time of death, they closed the curtains, and that was it.
I came out of that room feeling that I had witnessed something ghastly. I was relieved to be out in the fresh air. There is no question in my mind that Dennis McGuire suffered greatly over many minutes. I'd been told that a "normal" execution lasted five minutes – this experimental two-drug concoction had taken 26 minutes. I consider that inhumane....
This is really straight forward. These Governors are directly responsible for violating the Eight Amendment of the USA Constitution.
The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:
