Finalist: Tulsa World, by Ziva Branstetter and Cary Aspinwall
For courageous reporting on the execution process in Oklahoma after a botched execution – reporting that began a national discussion.
Nominated Work
June 22, 2014
Clayton Lockett left Stephanie Neiman in a ditch off a dirt road. Fifteen years later, Oklahoma led Lockett to his own death
By Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Branstetter
When her muddy grave was ready, one of the killers held down a barbed-wire fence so Stephanie Neiman could climb over it, down into the shallow hole where she would die.
From his perch on the dirt road’s shoulder above the fenced pasture, Clayton Lockett loaded the sawed-off shotgun and fired. Kickback caused the gun to flip out of his hand and the shot to stray; shell fragments blasted into Stephanie’s shoulder.
Forced to her knees, her mouth still duct-taped, she cried as Lockett dug for the weapon in the waist-high Johnsongrass lining the gravel road. He darted back to the truck to find a tool to unjam the shotgun.
Lockett reloaded, leaned over the fence and fired again.
Stephanie stopped wailing.
Lockett told his two accomplices: “It’s done, I think she dead.”
He racked the shell out of the shotgun and put it back in one of the two pickups used to drive their three young victims to his “old stomping grounds” between the oil refineries and ranches of Kay County.
This is where they planned to kill and dump Stephanie and her friends, Bobby Bornt and Jane Doe.
Somewhere along the 30-minute drive out there, the killers changed their minds about shooting Bobby and Jane. Jane was raped repeatedly by the men, and she and Bobby were badly beaten. But both were parents to babies and had promised not to tell. They would live.
Stephanie would promise no such thing.
Lockett told Shawn Mathis and his cousin, Alfonso Lockett, that since he had to shoot her, he wasn’t going to bury her.
“I ain’t gonna take care of everything,” Lockett said.
Shawn and Alfonso climbed over the fence to drag Stephanie’s body into the hole they had carved out of the ruddy soil.
The two men soon jumped back over: “She’s not dead, she’s not dead!”
Stephanie was still breathing, kicking and moving, they told Clayton Lockett.
“I done shot her twice; I ain’t going to shoot her again,” Lockett said.
Go get the shotgun and finish her, he scolded.
“They was like: ‘Naw, Naw!’ ” Lockett told police.
All right, then, just bury her. She hadn’t gotten up and tried to run, so she must be dying, he told them.
They started dumping dirt on Stephanie, and she began to cough.
“I could see the dirt coming in the air as she was coughing,” Lockett later told investigators.
They heaped soil on top of her, until it muffled the sounds of her coughing and they could no longer hear her choking, still trying to live.
Nearly 15 years after Stephanie’s murder, Lockett lay dying as her family watched along with a gallery of law enforcement officials, prison administrators and journalists through the window of Oklahoma’s execution chamber.
State officials had promised in court records and interviews that Oklahoma’s new execution protocol would dispatch him swiftly and painlessly. They were so confident in this assurance that Gov. Mary Fallin ordered Lockett to be executed April 29, the same night another convicted killer was set to die.
Lockett’s death didn’t go as planned.
The execution began nearly 25 minutes late. After he was declared unconscious from an injection of midazolam overseen by an unnamed physician whose credentials remain secret under state law, he began to writhe, strain and mumble as the final two drugs were pushed into his IV. That night, Oklahoma was using a combination and dosage of midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride that had never been used in a U.S. execution.
His right leg kicked; his head rolled to one side. His body started bucking, as if he were trying to get up from the gurney.
He grimaced, grunted and mumbled something unintelligible.
“Man,” he groaned. Witnesses said he appeared to be in pain.
Prison officials quickly lowered the blinds before ushering the witnesses out of the room.
The witnesses couldn’t see what was happening under the white sheet that covered Lockett: The femoral IV that was supposed to deliver the drugs to kill him was either leaking into his groin tissue or spilling the drugs out of his body.
On a land-line phone yanked into the hallway outside the viewing area, Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton asked the warden and the presiding doctor, both behind the curtain with Lockett: “Have enough drugs been administered to cause death?”
“No,” the doctor answered.
Is another vein available, and if so, are there enough drugs remaining to finish the execution? Patton asked.
“No.”
The doctor reported that Lockett was unconscious with a faint heartbeat. Patton called off the execution.
Ten minutes later, Lockett was dead.
State officials initially claimed he died of a massive heart attack, and that the problems with his execution were due to a “collapsed vein.” They ordered an investigation and an autopsy to be performed out of state, with Gov. Mary Fallin later declaring that Lockett’s 43-minute death simply “took too long.”
An independent autopsy requested by attorneys for other death row inmates revealed what many experts had suspected: There was no collapsed vein. The body revealed numerous failed attempts to start an IV. The IV likely never delivered the drugs properly.
In a 2010 lawsuit over the Oklahoma Department of Corrections’ execution protocol, state officials admitted “that it would be painful to receive a concentrated dose of potassium chloride without first receiving an anesthetic.”
This echoed what the U.S. Supreme Court said in 2008, in a separate challenge to death penalty protocols, saying it was “uncontested” that without a proper dose of anesthetic administered to the inmate “there is a substantial, constitutionally unacceptable risk of suffocation” from the final two drugs in lethal injections.
Lockett and his minions had come to Perry the night of June 3, 1999, to collect $20 and serve up a beating.
Bobby Bornt owed Lockett money for tattooing over the name of an ex-girlfriend on his arm.
Bobby, 23, was asleep on the couch of a garage apartment, just behind his parents’ house. It was shortly before midnight, and his 8-month-old baby was asleep in the next room.
Lockett, Alfonso and Shawn kicked in the door, beat Bobby badly and tore his house apart, intending to steal his appliances and belongings.
“You’re bleeding on my couch,” Lockett snarled.
The men kept demanding to know where the drugs were, but Bobby didn’t have any. There weren’t any drugs, and he wasn’t involved in any drug deals with Lockett, he testified later. Police never found any evidence of drugs or paraphernalia at Bobby’s apartment.
“Out the gate,” it was decided killing the baby wasn’t an option, Lockett later told investigators.
This tiny bit of honor would seem out of place, given what happened next.
In the door walked an unsuspecting Jane Doe, a friend of Bobby’s who had invited him over to her house for a party earlier that evening. He didn’t show, and Jane was stopping by to see why.
Lockett punched Jane in the face and the men beat her. Then they realized something: She had gotten out of the passenger side of the pickup parked in the alley.
Who drove her there?
Her good friend, Stephanie Neiman. She was a principal’s honor roll student, proud alum of the Perry Maroons marching band and even prouder owner of a black Chevy truck, license plate: “Tazzz”
Clayton Lockett hollered out the door for Stephanie to come inside.
“I don’t know you; I’m not coming in,” she responded.
Lockett held a gun to Jane’s head and demanded she lure her friend inside.
“If you run, I’m going to shoot the tires out, and if you get out, I’m going to shoot you in the back,” he warned her.
Jane told her friend to come inside, she wanted to have a drink with Bobby and it wouldn’t take long. Stephanie caved.
The men grabbed her, hit her in the head, taped her up and demanded the keys to her Chevy.
“I ain’t giving you the keys to my damn truck,” she told them.
“Ain’t nobody got to get hurt; just give us what we want so we can go,” Lockett said. He was lying, and perhaps Stephanie sensed that.
They had to hit her in the head with the shotgun to force her to hand over her keys and the alarm code to her truck. Bobby and Stephanie remained bound with duct tape while Alfonso dragged Jane to the other room and raped her. Don’t put your clothes back on, he told her. Then Lockett came into the room and raped her repeatedly.
Raping Jane moved the crime into much more serious territory. Lockett and his buddies knew this. He and Shawn had already served prison time.
The only thing we can do is take them out in the country and kill them, Lockett decided.
From his cell on death row, Clayton Lockett once wrote a letter to Stephanie’s parents, allegedly as an apology for taking the life of their only child:
“The truth of why this happened is not over twenty dollars or because I thought that Stephanie would report my crimes to any law enforcement. The truth is deep down I feared Stephanie, I feared her because she was so strong in the face of death.”
Bobby testified in court that at the scene, Stephanie’s murderers talked about how tough she was, because of the way she took that first botched shotgun blast.
Lockett’s letter to the Neimans continued: “Please realize that before I get to (sic) far into this that I am by no means trying to manipulate my way out of receiving the death penalty, in fact, if it will compensate for the (loss) of your child’s life and ease your pain I will lay my life down a thousand times over.”
When it came time for Lockett to die by lethal injection, he seemed to have changed his mind. He damaged his own veins on the day of his execution to complicate the IV insertion and refused prison guards’ orders so that they used a stun gun to remove him from his cell for medical exams. He demanded a grand last meal of Chateaubriand steak, fried shrimp and pecan pie, and refused a substitute offer of Western Sizzlin. (Oklahoma inmates’ last meals must cost less than $15 and can only come from restaurants within a few miles of the prison.)
Lockett’s offer in his letter to the Neimans seems rather insincere from a man who in a letter to one of his pals coldly described telling the Noble County District Attorney: “I did shoot that bitch.”
The state prison system is called the Department of Corrections under the theory that convicts can be rehabilitated or reformed in some capacity. That never seemed to work on Lockett.
A month after he was arrested for Stephanie’s murder, a sewage backup at the Kay County jail revealed a stash of weapons Lockett had made and hidden in his cell. There was a 27-inch pipe fashioned into a crude sword and a toothbrush carved into a shank.
At Oklahoma State Penitentiary, he threw feces and urine on the officers tasked with bringing his meals. He signed the disciplinary record “Daffy Duck” and told officials: “F—k this kangaroo court, next time it will be a knife.”
Days later, he was caught with a 23-inch handmade club and an 11-inch knife in his cell. He once sharpened an aluminum walking cane into a 3-foot-long shank.
Corrections officials haven’t explained how Lockett was able to cut his arms on the morning of the execution. But his resistance to the execution chamber shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
“Clayton Lockett always thought he was the smartest man in any situation,” prosecutor Mark Gibson recalled.
Lockett wasn’t just brazen, “he lived to put his finger in the eye of authority,” Gibson said.
Gibson never really bought the story that Lockett’s crime was just a robbery gone bad, that he hadn’t intended to kill anyone.
They left in two pickups, but in the end, took none of Bobby’s possessions.
When she was abducted, Stephanie had a knife in her pocket she couldn’t reach because her hands were bound. She also had a mild learning disability that may have contributed to her stubborn stance during the abduction: In her world, there was right and wrong. To her captors, she seemed resistant, almost defiant.
“I told Shawn, man, ‘Homegirl’s going to tell. We going to have to kill her,’ ” Lockett told investigators.
At the trial, Gibson explained to the jury that Stephanie died because “she had the temerity, because Stephanie had the backbone, because Stephanie had the nerve to say to Clayton Lockett, ‘Yeah, I will tell what you do, what you have done, who you are.’ ”
The first shot, the medical examiner testified, wouldn’t have killed her. It just blasted plastic casing from the shotgun shell into her soft tissue.
The second shot, after Lockett unjammed the gun and reloaded, tore through her body. It was not survivable, and likely killed her quickly.
The killers left her body in the shallow grave and drove her truck back to the edge of Perry, stealing the stereo and slashing the tires to make it look like a carjacking.
Bobby and Jane promised not to tell, to give phony-sounding cover stories for their injuries (“you fell down the stairs!”) because Lockett threatened to kill their babies and families otherwise.
But police were already on the killers’ trail. Shawn’s blue Mercury Cougar with bullet holes had been called in by a sharp-eyed neighbor and towed from Bobby’s neighborhood in the middle of the night.
The killers were sloppy, stopping at the same convenience store on the way out of town to buy gas and cigarettes that they had stopped at to buy duct tape on the way to Bobby’s house. It was all caught on time-stamped surveillance tape.
Jane told; Bobby told; Shawn told; Alfonso told and showed police where Stephanie’s body was buried. When Lockett was picked up by cops a few days later, he also told what happened in great detail.
Steve and Susie Neiman witnessed Lockett’s execution April 29, but have declined interview requests and asked for privacy. At trial, they had a relative read the letter they wrote describing for jurors the pain of losing their only child.
“Losing her pretty much destroyed the world that Steve and I live in. Steve and I died when Stephanie died,” Susie Neiman wrote. “The brutality of murder is not matched by anything else that can be experienced.”
June 23, 2014
By Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Branstetter
In a cramped, dimly lit room next to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s death chamber, three volunteer executioners push syringes full of lethal drugs into the veins of an inmate they cannot see.
Sometimes the executioners use flashlights to illuminate what they are doing in the drug room. While the three can hear what is said in the death chamber, they use a makeshift system to communicate with the warden, doctor or others in the room.
The executioners stick colored pencils through holes in the wall where two IV lines feed into the inmate’s body.
“If you saw red, there might be possible problems,” a deputy warden explained in a deposition.
The 2007 description of the chaotic scene in the state’s death chamber was documented as part of a legal challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection process.
“I use the flashlight to make sure that all the drugs are in the right order,” the deputy warden explained during his deposition.
The state’s failure to require executioners to monitor inmates during the process or require them to receive any training is among serious flaws in Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol, a Tulsa World investigation has found. When compared to policies in other active death penalty states, Oklahoma’s protocol falls short in key areas that could lead to more botched executions.
The World reviewed execution protocols or policies in Oklahoma and 19 other states that have carried out the death penalty since 2008 and compared each state’s requirements based on 10 factors that can affect the outcome of executions. While the death penalty is legal in 32 states and the federal government, 20 states have carried out an execution since 2008, records show.
The state’s vague requirements for training, qualifications of participating medical staff and procedures to check an inmate’s consciousness may have all played a role in the April 29 botched execution of Clayton Lockett. Preliminary results from an autopsy sought by defense attorneys indicate Lockett’s IV was not properly placed and cast doubt on the state’s claims that his vein “collapsed.”
Among the World’s findings:
No regular training is required of Oklahoma’s execution team. In about half of the states that make detailed protocols public, team members must train for the procedure on a regular basis.
No backup drugs are required by Oklahoma in case the initial doses of lethal drugs don’t work. In Lockett’s execution, the Department of Corrections had no backup drugs on hand when things went wrong, leaving him to die on the gurney after the execution had been halted. Nine states surveyed by the World had protocols requiring a second complete set of drugs for use in such cases.
No specific procedures are required in Oklahoma to ensure an inmate is unconscious. A physician in the death chamber pronounced Lockett unconscious three minutes before he began writhing, mumbling and rising from the gurney. In five states, officials had specific directions on how to determine consciousness.
No method exists for DOC’s director to modify the state’s execution protocol. Director Robert Patton complained about his lack of authority over the process in a letter to Gov. Mary Fallin following Lockett’s execution. However, the current policy was approved while Patton was in charge of the agency. No state protocol reviewed by the World left a prison warden exclusively in charge of deciding how an inmate would be put to death.
No preference is expressed for a more reliable one-drug protocol. At least eight of the states surveyed by the World have switched to using only one drug in lethal injections, which many experts agree is less error prone. Last week, both Missouri and Georgia executed inmates without incident using the single-drug method. Oklahoma has a one-drug option among its five drug combinations but chose not to use it.
The Oklahoma Attorney General’s office defended the current protocol during a series of last-minute court challenges by Lockett’s attorneys. The office cited a 2006 Court of Criminal Appeals ruling that stated: “Risk of accident cannot and need not be eliminated from the execution process in order to survive constitutional review.”
The state does make its protocol publicly available, unlike states including Alabama and Virginia. Several states also had protocols with even fewer safeguards than Oklahoma. In Mississippi, an official state executioner serves at the pleasure of the governor and is paid $500 per execution.
Oklahoma wrote its new protocol after telling the state Supreme Court it had run out of drugs, delaying the executions of Lockett and Charles Warner. The protocol gives the Oklahoma State Penitentiary warden “sole discretion as to which lethal agent will be used for the scheduled execution.”
For Lockett’s execution, the state chose a new drug combination using the sedative midazolam. The drug has been used by three states — Ohio, Florida and Oklahoma – in nine executions. Two of those were clearly botched, while a third took longer than expected, according to witness and news accounts.
Because the second drug in three-drug protocols paralyzes inmates, witnesses often would not know whether the first drug worked — possibly leading to other botched executions that went unnoticed. Without a proper dose of anesthetic, the third drug, potassium chloride, would cause extreme pain, something attorneys for the state of Oklahoma acknowledged in a 2010 lawsuit.
“Defendants admit that it would be painful to receive a concentrated dose of potassium chloride without first receiving an anesthetic,” states the filing by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Krise.
Krise is now general counsel at the Department of Public Safety, where Commissioner Michael Thompson is leading the state’s investigation into Lockett’s execution.
Dr. Jay Chapman is a retired forensic pathologist and former chief medical examiner who developed Oklahoma’s original lethal injection protocol. It was later copied by other states and nations seeking a more humane way to execute people.
Chapman, who supports the death penalty, dismissed claims that the three-drug protocol and others like it are “untested.”
“How did they want them tested? Did they want someone to go out and take a bunch of prisoners and see what happens?”
While Oklahoma has consulted an expert in the past — Massachusetts anesthesiologist Mark Dershwitz — the state’s latest protocol involved no expert input. Instead, Pruitt’s office took testimony Dershwitz gave in a Florida court case and used it to justify Oklahoma’s use and amount of midazolam, records show.
However, Florida uses 500 milligrams of the sedative, five times the amount called for in Oklahoma’s protocol. Also, comparing state protocols this way is something Dershwitz is professionally barred from doing.
“I am not allowed to compare one state’s protocol to another. … What I have testified in the past, and this is a matter of public record, is that when I have used midazolam for inducing general anesthesia, my dose is around 40 or 50 milligrams.”
But experts in that case and elsewhere have said midazolam is not typically used by itself to anesthetize people before surgeries.
Frank Romanelli, associate dean and professor at the University of Kentucky’s College of Pharmacy, said the drug is used to produce “conscious sedation” for procedures such as wisdom tooth removal and colonoscopies.
“Sometimes it might be used in anesthesia as sort of an induction ... before you get the full blown anesthesia.”
Dershwitz, who has testified on behalf of states in lethal injection challenges, said botched executions occur due to errors by medical personnel and not the drugs themselves.
“When an execution has gone awry, it has never been due to the drug or the choice of drug, the dose of the drug. It has always been due to the failure to deliver the drug into a vein,” he said.
Placing an IV into a person’s femoral vein requires a level of skill that phlebotomists and similar medical assistants lack, he said.
Surgeons, cardiologists and other specialists would be trained in starting such IVs, but “it would not be the sort of training I would expect a primary care physician to have,” Dershwitz said.
Exactly what type of medical professional placed Lockett’s IV remains unanswered. The agency’s official timeline reported to the governor states a “phlebotomist” assisted in locating veins for the IV. Phlebotomists aren’t licensed to start IVs in Oklahoma.
The state’s protocol requires an EMT-paramedic “or other licensed person” to start IVs.
When the World questioned DOC about the discrepancy, spokesman Jerry Massie said the reported timeline was wrong and that an EMT was actually present.
As far back as 2006, DOC records refer to using phlebotomists to insert IVs, including a federal lawsuit by two inmates.
Records show improperly placed IVs may have played a role in several other botched executions in the state.
In 2001, witnesses said inmate Loyd LaFevers repeatedly convulsed and his chest rose off the gurney during the six minutes it took him to die.
In an autopsy, an investigator with the Oklahoma State Medical Examiner’s Office states that LaFevers’ IV “infiltrated after the first drug was administered.”
“A prison unit manager had sent two letters to the clemency board stating that this inmate needed to die,” the autopsy report states.
“The family of (LaFevers) is accusing prison officials of diluting the execution drugs or gave it (sic) in the wrong order to make this inmate suffer.”
An expert testifying for plaintiffs in a 2006 lawsuit stated LaFevers had a level of anesthetic in his blood that was not sufficient to render him unconscious.
In 1992, it took inmate Robyn Parks 11 minutes to die, during which he remarked “I’m still awake.”
Witnesses said his body began bucking under the straps as he spewed the air out of his lungs. A reporter from the World who witnessed the execution described it as “overwhelming, stunning, disturbing.”
At least five state protocols surveyed by the World contained detailed instructions on how medical professionals should check consciousness of an inmate. Oklahoma’s protocol contains no requirements, leaving it up to the doctor.
Eight minutes after Lockett’s execution began, a physician in the death chamber looked closely at his face and placed a hand on his chest, shaking him gently. Lockett was pronounced unconscious. Three minutes passed with little movement from Lockett until his body began reacting fiercely.
Oklahoma’s protocol states the physician should monitor the offender “through whatever means the physician believes are appropriate to ensure that the condemned is sufficiently unconscious” before the paralyzing drug is given.
During Lockett’s execution, Patton ordered a halt to the process after being told Lockett was still alive but there were no additional drugs on hand.
It’s unclear why the prison did not use the lethal drugs it had available for the execution of Charles Warner, who was set to die two hours after Lockett.
There is no language in Oklahoma’s protocol about what the execution team should do if something goes wrong.
In the event of a stay issued after the execution has begun, the policy is to lower the shades “and medical personnel will take action immediately to render emergency measures.” Officials have refused to say whether they took such measures after Lockett’s execution was halted and his heart was still beating.
Man gets no answers while watching father's killer die
By Ziva Branstetter
As Carl Kelley watched his father’s young killer lying strapped to the execution gurney, he hoped to hear the answers he needed.
Why had Scott Carpenter, then only 19, walked into A.J. Kelley’s bait shop on Lake Eufaula and stabbed him to death? Why had Carpenter refused to meet with Carl Kelley to explain the unprovoked attack on a 56-year-old hard-working man with glaucoma?
Instead, Carpenter took that secret to his grave, offering no last words before the lethal chemicals flowed into his body. Carpenter had waived all his appeals and was just 22 when he was executed May 8, 1997.
Kelley, now 57, said his decision to witness the execution “wasn’t to get revenge or anything.”
“The reason for witnessing the execution was in hopes that he would make some comments or make some explanation. He robbed me of that as well. He was just quiet.”
Kelley knew what it was like to feel powerless, angry and hungry for justice. After working as a Muskogee police officer for nearly a decade, he spent more than eight years working with crime victims at the Eastern District of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“What most people have to endure or experience, they have no clue about the process or what to expect. I had an in-depth knowledge of exactly what to expect in this.”
Part of the punishment for taking another life and being sentenced to death should be the waiting. Kelley said.
“My view of it is a little skewed ... because I know the system. My thought process of it was, that’s the punishment: wondering if that’s going to be the day and getting it reset again.”
Kelley figured like most death penalty defendants, Carpenter would spend many years fighting his case.
“He basically robbed me of that,” he said.
Kelley would have had to witness the execution alone, but a law rushed through the previous day expanded the list of victims’ relatives
allowed to attend. Kelley’s wife and their two adult children witnessed the execution with him.
During the 11 minutes it took Carpenter to die, he convulsed, clenched his jaw, made noises and his legs lifted, witnesses said.
Kelley said he was told the process took longer than usual because the inmate was young and physically fit.
“Who knows whether he felt pain or not, but if he did endure a little pain again, so what? It’s in no way in comparison to what his victim felt.”
Kelley supports the death penalty but abhors how the executions seem to be mostly about the inmate.
“It seems like the individual being executed has more attention focused than the victim of the crime initially and what was their life.”
A.J. Kelley worked nights at a Muskogee manufacturing plant and often worked a second job while his kids were in school.
“He was just a good, blue-collar worker. Went to church every Sunday … raised his family and provided a good home,” Carl Kelley said.
After 30 years, A.J. Kelley was forced into retirement when the Fansteel Metals Inc. plant shut down.
His father bought the bait shop, which he owned for a year or two and sold when his eyesight began to fail. A.J. Kelley planned to spend about 10 more days at the shop when Carpenter walked in, asked for minnows and followed him to the back.
“It really wasn’t a robbery,” Carl Kelley said. “It almost appeared that he had set out that day and was going to kill someone.”
June 24, 2014
By Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Branstetter
The state has conducted autopsies on less than half of the inmates executed in Oklahoma since 1990 and, in many cases, does not perform tests that could show whether inmates were awake and paralyzed as painful drugs flowed into their veins, a Tulsa World investigation has found.
Because state records are inconsistent and blood is sometimes drawn long after inmates die, it is difficult to say how many inmates were conscious when they received potassium chloride, the third drug in Oklahoma’s lethal injection process. Medical experts, judges and attorneys for the state agree that potassium chloride is excruciatingly painful if given to a conscious person.
The botched execution of Clayton Lockett on April 29 has sparked a nationwide discussion about the death penalty and new scrutiny in how Oklahoma and other states put people to death.
The World created a database using 109 medical examiner’s reports from Oklahoma inmates executed since 1990, including the levels of anesthetic in their blood following death where available. Experts in anesthesiology and clinical pharmacology reviewed the data to spot issues and problem cases.
Among the World’s findings:
The Oklahoma State Medical Examiner’s office conducted full autopsies on all executed inmates until 2000, when state lawmakers passed a measure banning such autopsies except in narrow circumstances. Only 10 out of 50 inmates executed since the law was passed received an autopsy.
Weights of executed inmates varied widely, from 145 pounds to 317 pounds, yet all received the same doses of drugs under the state’s execution protocol. Those inmates had widely varying levels of anesthetic in their blood.
Full or nearly full syringes of anesthetics were returned with inmates’ bodies in at least four cases, an apparent violation of Department of Corrections protocol.
Handling of evidence varied randomly from case to case, with some blood samples being held 30 days and others for five years.
More than 30 inmates had levels of anesthetic in their blood below what experts say might be necessary to produce sufficient anesthesia. In many cases, state pathologists drew blood hours or days after inmates’ deaths and tested it despite those samples being possibly useless in accurately reflecting drug levels.
Medical experts consulted by the World say Oklahoma should investigate the inmates’ deaths and revise its lethal injection protocol to ensure inmates do not suffer “cruel and unusual” punishment during executions, violating the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“I don’t have enough data, but there is cause to investigate … because of the potential for underdose,” said Frank Romanelli, professor and associate dean at the University of Kentucky’s College of Pharmacy.
Romanelli has advocated for pharmacy students to learn about lethal injection protocols. He has not testified in legal challenges to the death penalty.
Officials with the Oklahoma DOC and Office of Chief Medical Examiner declined to comment on the autopsy data gathered and analyzed by the World. Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s office did not respond to a request for an interview.
During challenges to Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol over the past decade, attorneys for the state have insisted their method is constitutional.
Key court rulings have found that while inmates cannot expect a pain-free death, the state cannot cause more pain than necessary during executions.
While ruling in favor of states’ rights to execute by lethal injection in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court said it was “uncontested” that without a proper dose of anesthetic administered to the inmate “there is a substantial, constitutionally unacceptable risk of suffocation” from the final two drugs used in most state’s methods, including Oklahoma’s.
In the years since that ruling, at least seven death penalty states have switched to single-drug lethal injection protocols. States also have scrambled to find new drugs as manufacturers have banned the use of their drugs in executions.
Oklahoma’s protocol allows DOC to choose one of five drug combinations, including a single dose of an anesthetic called pentobarbital. The state opted instead to use a new three-drug combination featuring a sedative called midazolam in Lockett’s execution.
Romanelli said if inmates do not receive a sufficient dose of the initial anesthetic, they may be conscious yet paralyzed before the third drug, potassium chloride, is administered, “which is extremely painful.”
In at least 32 cases from 1990 through 2014, Oklahoma medical examiner’s reports show levels of anesthetic in inmates’ blood were below the threshold used by doctors to render patients unconscious. Each of those executions used a barbiturate — either sodium thiopental or pentobarbital — as the anesthetic in the three-drug cocktail.
Romanelli said the time lapse between when drugs are administered and when blood is drawn heavily influences those test results and the ability to interpret them. In some of the 32 cases, pathologists took samples within an hour, while in others they waited more than one day, records show.
Dr. Mark Heath, a board-certified anesthesiologist and a professor of anesthesiology at Columbia University, also reviewed the inmate autopsy data at the World’s request. Heath has provided expert testimony in challenges to lethal injection protocols in Oklahoma and 15 other states.
Heath said the Oklahoma autopsy data shows “that all the prisoners did receive thiopental or pentobarbital. It does not show whether it was properly delivered into their circulation or whether it was the first drug or the second drug.”
Heath said cases where the level of drugs are below the anesthetic threshold should be investigated to determine why.
In those cases, “that low level is inconsistent with being anesthetized,” he said.
Additionally, the full dose of lethal drugs is not always given, records show.
In at least four cases, full syringes of drugs — including the initial anesthetic — were sent with inmates’ bodies to the medical examiner. The practice appears to violate DOC’s protocol, which requires all drugs to be injected.
In one such case, inmate Olan Robison took 15 minutes to die, according to the medical examiner’s report. One of two syringes of sodium thiopental was returned nearly full with Robison’s body on the night he was executed, March 13, 1992.
Robison’s autopsy shows multiple needle punctures on his arms and bleeding below the surface, indicating problems with his IV.
Preliminary results of an autopsy sought by attorneys for death row inmates indicate Lockett’s IV was inserted improperly. Lockett spent three minutes writhing, mumbling and rising from the gurney before prison officials closed a blind and discovered the drugs had leaked out of his IV.
Department of Corrections director Robert Patton ordered Lockett’s execution halted because the prison had no backup drugs on hand and medical personnel said they could not locate another suitable vein. Lockett died on the gurney 10 minutes later.
Gov. Mary Fallin called for an independent autopsy by the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office, which is pending. An investigation headed by Fallin’s public safety commissioner, Michael Thompson, is also pending.
Lockett was sentenced to die in the 1999 killing of Stephanie Neiman, 19, of Perry. Lockett and two accomplices abducted Neiman, two of her friends and a baby.
He shot Neiman twice and ordered her buried in a shallow grave beside a rural road, despite being told she was still alive.
While the state has ordered a full, independent autopsy for Lockett, autopsies are rare following executions in Oklahoma, the World’s investigation shows.
A state law passed in 2000 amended existing law that required the state medical examiner to investigate deaths of all prisoners.
“No autopsy shall be performed on the body of an executed inmate unless requested by the immediate family of the inmate prior to the execution or unless directed by the Department of Corrections or the Chief Medical Examiner,” states the law, sponsored by then-Sen. Glenn Coffee.
The law states the medical examiner “shall not automatically authorize or perform an autopsy” in such cases.
“The Chief Medical Examiner may authorize or perform an autopsy only when the public interest requires it,” the law states.
When Michael Lee Wilson was executed Jan. 9, his last words were “I feel my whole body burning.”
In that case, no autopsy was conducted. A brief medical examiner’s report fails to note how long Wilson took to die or placement of his IVs.
“No acute injuries noted,” it states.
Several death penalty states require coroners to conduct autopsies or investigations following executions, including South Dakota and Georgia.
Romanelli said the state should conduct autopsies and collect better data on levels of drugs in inmates’ blood to ensure the process is constitutional.
“If you have the data you can show one of two things,” he said. “The prison system can show it does what we say it does and the folks were sufficiently anesthetized or we can show it doesn’t do what we say it does.
“Without the data, I don’t understand how anyone could come to the conclusion that it meets the constitutional test.”
Heath said the state’s use of a paralyzing drug is akin to pulling a blind down during an execution, as occurred in Lockett’s case. The drug serves no purpose other than to prevent witnesses from seeing an inmate thrash around, he said.
“In places where prisoners are being paralyzed … that conceals the critical information about whether or not it was done legally and constitutionally and humanely,” Heath said.
Statements and reactions witnessed during the execution of several of Oklahoma’s condemned inmates indicate they could have been conscious while the second or third drugs were administered.
On Jan. 7, 1999, Kay County killer John Castro said, “I can feel it,” after the drugs began flowing into his veins.
Seven months later, after Norman Newsted’s execution began, he remarked: “I can taste it.”
Both had levels of sodium thiopental in their blood below the level needed for sufficient anesthesia, records show.
The autopsy data shows a handful of cases in which medical personnel made multiple failed attempts to place IVs in inmates’ veins.
DOC’s protocol requires an EMT-paramedic “or person with similar qualifications” to place IVs in the inmate’s arms. If the EMT has difficulty starting an IV, the physician takes over the process.
Medical personnel made seven attempts to start an IV on inmate John Bolz in 2006 before placing one in his femoral vein, a procedure also used for Lockett.
Records show the execution crew had to resort to using a single IV line in at least six cases.
Romanelli said starting IVs in such a high-pressure situation makes mistakes more likely.
“You take obese patients and patients with a lot of tattoos, and when you think about the high pressure situation of being in an execution environment. … It requires a higher level of expertise.”
State's execution secrecy law passed quietly
By Ziva Brandstetter and Cary Aspinwall
State reveals little about protocol after judge tosses secrecy law
Governor calls for investigation into botched execution
A law that cloaks executions in secrecy and sparked a constitutional crisis in Oklahoma sailed through the state Legislature with scant debate.
When he introduced House Bill 1991 in 2011, then-Rep. Dan Sullivan described his legislation this way: “It changes the provisions as it relates to carrying out the death penalty. This is a request bill from the Department of Corrections and the Attorney General’s Office.”
“It doesn’t change who can witness the deal, does it?” one lawmaker asked.
Sullivan, R-Tulsa, replied that the bill “doesn’t really change that.”
Without further debate, House lawmakers passed the bill 94-0. In the Senate, where debates are not videotaped, the measure received three no votes.
The bill did change procedures for carrying out the death penalty, deleting specific language about the type of drugs that would be administered in lethal injections. However, the bill would have a far more sweeping impact because it also provided complete anonymity to execution participants and suppliers.
The clause, tucked into HB 1991, prevents the public from knowing whether doctors, pharmacists, EMTs and others taking part in executions are qualified.
Three years later, Gov. Mary Fallin would face off against the state Supreme Court over the law, claiming that the court had overstepped its authority in issuing stays for death-row inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner. The inmates challenged the secrecy law, saying it prevented them from ensuring that the process of executing them would be constitutional.
State officials have cited the law in refusing to discuss the training of medical officials who attempted to execute Lockett on April 29.
When the inmate was still writhing on the gurney 33 minutes after the lethal injection had started, they stopped the procedure. Lockett, however, died about 10 minutes later from what DOC Director Robert Patton said was “a massive heart attack.”
To ensure there is no record of the participants in executions, the Department of Corrections uses petty cash accounts to pay pharmacists, doctors and others.
State Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s office has said the secrecy is necessary due to threats by death-penalty opponents against pharmacies. When asked for details of such threats, Pruitt’s office declined, saying they are under investigation.
Critics say such laws, which are being adopted rapidly by other states, merely serve to protect doctors and pharmacists from criticism.
A federal judge ordered Missouri to overhaul the way it executed inmates after learning that a doctor with dyslexia had been mixing drugs for executions. That state has a secrecy law similar to Oklahoma’s.
An expert hired to review Oklahoma’s lethal-injection process by plaintiffs in a 2005 federal lawsuit concluded that the state’s protocol failed to meet the “minimum standard of safe care for any person.”
The expert, Dr. Richard Cook, is an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Chicago. Cook wrote in a 2007 report that inmates in some executions showed signs that they were not properly anesthetized before painful drugs were administered.
As examples of such cases, Cook cited the Oklahoma executions of inmates including Scott Carpenter in 1997 and Loyd LaFevers in 2001.
Records and news accounts show that the physician supervising both executions was Dr. Robert Wiebe, an osteopathic physician who works in the emergency room at McAlester Regional Medical Center. Wiebe did not return multiple calls seeking comment.
Wiebe is in good standing with the board that oversees osteopathic doctors in Oklahoma and has been licensed since 1978. He is not board certified in emergency medicine, according to the American Board of Medical Specialties.
Wiebe cut short his Colorado vacation in 1995 to oversee the execution of inmate Robert Brecheen, news accounts state. Before his execution, Brecheen swallowed a large dose of pills in an attempt to kill himself.
The inmate was taken to McAlester Regional Medical Center, where Wiebe oversaw his treatment. Noting that “the law’s the law,” Wiebe said he administered drugs to reverse the overdose and returned with him to the prison for the execution, which records show began at 1:49 p.m.
“He was a little thick tongued, but he was well aware,” Wiebe told a reporter for The Oklahoman at the time.
A microphone malfunctioned, and witnesses could not hear Brecheen’s last words.
Two years later, Wiebe attended Carpenter’s execution and pronounced the inmate dead, according to news accounts. Witnesses said Carpenter’s body convulsed 18 times before he died.
Anthony Thornton, then a reporter for The Oklahoman, said Carpenter’s execution disturbed him.
“I actually told my editors if they could find somebody else, I didn’t want to witness any more. That was my last one,” Thornton said.
In LaFevers’ 2001 execution, witnesses said he repeatedly convulsed and his chest rose off the gurney during the six minutes it took him to die.
In an autopsy, an investigator with the Oklahoma State Medical Examiner’s Office states that LaFevers’ IV “infiltrated after the first drug was administered.” If an IV is not properly inserted during an execution, the inmate may not be anesthetized during the process.
David Keith, CEO of McAlester Regional Medical Center, said the hospital has no contract to provide doctors to the Department of Corrections for executions. Individual doctors in the McAlester area have been overseeing executions “for several decades,” he said.
“I know there are doctors in this community that do this on their own. What doctors do on their own time is left to them,” Keith said.
Nearly all medical associations, including the American Medical Association and the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians, ban the participation of their members in executions.
In addition to granting anonymity to doctors taking part in executions, Oklahoma also keeps the names of three volunteer executioners secret. Most other states with the death penalty do the same.
State lawmakers quietly approved a law in 2011 banning release of information about participants in executions. Now that law prevents the public from knowing whether doctors and others who oversee them are qualified.
Here's what the law says:
"The identity of all persons who participate in or administer the execution process and persons who supply the drugs, medical supplies or medical equipment for the execution shall be confidential and shall not be subject to discovery in any civil or criminal
proceedings.
The purchase of drugs, medical supplies or medical equipment necessary to carry out the execution shall not be subject to the provisions of the Oklahoma Central Purchasing Act."
May 1, 2014
Gov. Mary Fallin orders a review of the botched lethal injection of Clayton Lockett
By Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Branstetter
Oklahoma's botched execution Tuesday became the subject of intense international scrutiny as questions emerged on whether the use of an unproven drug protocol led to an inhumane death for inmate Clayton Lockett.
President Barack Obama weighed in on the controversy, saying through a spokesman that the execution fell short of humane standards.
Lockett writhed, strained and mumbled on the gurney inside Oklahoma's execution chamber Tuesday night, appearing to remain conscious and lift his head long after a primary dose of the sedative midazolam was administered to knock him out. Officials closed the blinds to media witnesses 16 minutes after the injection began, and Lockett reportedly died of a massive heart attack less than 20 minutes later.
David Autry, one of two defense attorneys for Lockett who witnessed the execution, said it was apparent that his client was not fully sedated.
"He was experiencing a great deal of pain," Autry said. "For them to claim that he was sedated appropriately and adequately is ridiculous."
It was the first time this combination and dosage of midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride had been used in a U.S. execution. It was one of five different combinations the Oklahoma Department of Corrections has approved as policy to use in its executions.
Gov. Mary Fallin announced that there would be an "independent review" of what happened during what was supposed to be the first double execution in Oklahoma since 1937. Inmate Charles Warner, who was supposed to be executed two hours after Lockett, received a stay until May 13 for the state to review its execution procedures.
"I believe the legal process worked. I believe the death penalty is the appropriate response and punishment for those who commit heinous crimes against their fellow men and women," Fallin said. "However, I also believe the state needs to be certain of its protocols and its procedures for executions and that they work. For that reason, I asked last night for a review of the Department of Corrections execution protocols."
She appointed Public Safety Commissioner Michael Thompson to conduct the review.
Late Wednesday, the Oklahoma Medical Examiner's Office issued a statement that "pursuant to the governor's order," Lockett's body had been taken to the Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office "for a complete post mortem examination."
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the execution fell short of the humane standards required when the death penalty is carried out. He said President Obama believes that evidence shows the death penalty doesn't effectively deter crime but that some crimes are so heinous that the death penalty is merited.
But Carney said the U.S. has a fundamental standard that the death penalty must be carried out humanely. He said everyone would recognize that this case fell short.
University of Tulsa law professor Lyn Entzeroth, a national expert in death-penalty issues, said there are legal actions Lockett's attorneys could take as a result of what happened to their client Tuesday, but she said "complicated questions" remain about how they would go about it.
They may attempt to prove that their client suffered "cruel and unusual" punishment in violation of his Eighth Amendment rights. While executions are legal in Oklahoma and other states, the Constitution "does require that those executions be carried out in a way that does not involve gratuitous pain and suffering and does not involve torture," Entzeroth said.
"What we saw (Tuesday) night raises some very serious questions about the protocol used by the state of Oklahoma," she said.
Although both Lockett and Warner were convicted of heinous crimes, she said, they have constitutional rights that no state may violate. The Eighth Amendment says that "excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
"The Eighth Amendment was ratified by our founding fathers," she said. "Execution is an incredible use of power by the states. ... The state cannot kill someone in a manner that would be cruel and unusual even if it's someone who is a bad guy because we are a government, and we have to comply with the Constitution and with the rule of law."
The inmates' executions had been postponed by a series of court challenges to an Oklahoma law that allows certain details of the execution procedure to be concealed from the public.
After Fallin intervened, the Supreme Court dissolved its own stay, with one justice declaring that the inmates had no more right to know the details they sought than they would the type of rope with which an inmate would be hanged.
State Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who for months fought hard against any further delays to Lockett's or Warner's executions, issued a statement Wednesday saying it was important "to ascertain what transpired and to ensure the death penalty is administered correctly."
Pruitt advocated for transparency in the fact-finding surrounding Lockett's execution.
"It's equally important that any such review be conducted with a commitment to objectivity," he said.
Pruitt said he was designating a special adviser to assess the results of the independent review of Lockett's execution, as well as DOC's procedures.
Neither Fallin nor Pruitt attended Tuesday's execution at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton and Thompson witnessed it, along with Noble County Sheriff Charlie Hanger, former Noble County Sheriff Jerry Cook, District Attorney Brian Hermanson and members of the media.
Lockett was convicted in the 1999 shooting death of Stephanie Neiman, 19, of Perry.
Neiman's parents, Steve and Susie Neiman, and her aunt and uncle also witnessed the execution.
At a Capitol press conference Wednesday, Sen. Constance Johnson, D-Forest Park, and Rep. Seneca Scott, D-Tulsa, said they will introduce a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions until an independent, thorough investigation can be conducted.
Johnson conceded that the proposal was unlikely to be considered during the current legislative session but said it is time for the state to have a conversation about the issue.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the state ranked first nationally in per capita executions between 1976 and 2011.
Dean Sanderford, an attorney who witnessed Lockett's execution, said: "We need to stop killing people until we know whether we can do it in a manner consistent with the Constitution."
Sanderford, an assistant federal public defender who also represented Lockett, was in tears as he watched Tuesday's botched procedure. He said he has no confidence in Fallin's decision to appoint a Cabinet-level member of her administration instead of a neutral party to examine what happened.
"In order to understand exactly what went wrong in last night's horrific execution, and restore any confidence in the execution process, the death of Clayton Lockett must be investigated by a truly independent organization, not a state employee or agency," he said.
Officials quiet on full protocol of exectution
By Ziva Brandsetter
State officials refused to say Wednesday whether attempts were made to revive an inmate following a botched execution.
Inmate Clayton Lockett spent three minutes writhing in pain at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary before prison officials said they had halted his execution. Shades were drawn in the execution chamber 16 minutes after the execution began, preventing media witnesses from seeing what happened to Lockett, 38.
Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton later said Lockett had been pronounced dead of a heart attack at 7:06 p.m., a total of 43 minutes after the execution began.
Lockett was injected with midazolam, a sedative, and then was supposed to be injected with vecuronium bromide, a paralytic drug intended to stop the breathing; and potassium chloride, a drug intended to stop the heart.
It is unclear how much of the drugs were administered, DOC officials said.
Alex Weintz, a spokesman for Gov. Mary Fallin, referred questions to DOC about what happened to Lockett before his death.
A spokesman said the agency would not comment on the execution or make a statement Wednesday.
Officials said previously that Lockett died on the gurney and was not removed from the execution chamber before his death.
Records show DOC's new execution protocol, approved April 14, lists no policies for such situations. It allows the prison to choose from five drug combinations, including the untested combination used Tuesday.
A physician in the execution chamber declared Lockett unconscious. DOC officials cited the state's execution secrecy law in refusing to identify the doctor.
David Autry, one of two defense attorneys for Lockett who witnessed the execution, told the World: "This was obviously a botched execution. ... For them to claim that he was sedated appropriately and adequately is ridiculous."
Autry said he is unaware of what happened to Lockett after the blinds were drawn.
"All I know is Director (Robert) Patton came in and said he was halting the execution," he said. "I assumed that they were going to try to revive him. What efforts if any they made to revive him or try to counteract the drugs, I don't know."
Autry questioned DOC's statement that Lockett's vein had collapsed, preventing full administration of the drugs.
"I'm not a medical professional, but Mr. Lockett was not someone who had compromised veins," Autry said. "He was in very good shape. He had large arms and very prominent veins."
Autry said the state's pledge to investigate the botched execution before Warner's death "is not going to cut it."
"They are going down the same path they've gone down before trying to get this done at all costs regardless," he said. "... That's going to be a whitewash. They are going to paper over this."
A medical expert who has testified in death penalty cases said, based on witness accounts, Lockett was conscious and experienced a painful execution.
Dr. David Waisel, associate professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, said midazolam is typically given in small doses to patients before surgery. Waisel, who has testified or consulted in about eight death penalty cases, said he is not aware of another execution using the same three-drug combination used by Oklahoma on Tuesday.
After conferring with the physician, OSP Warden Anita Trammell declared Lockett was unconscious at 6:33 p.m., 10 minutes after the procedure began. Less than five minutes later, a World reporter and other witnesses to the execution saw Lockett convulsing and writhing, apparently in pain. He tried to speak, although what he said was not clear.
Waisel said people who are unconscious are not capable of speaking and bodily movements. Waisel said given the timeline and drugs used, "it is possible that he received enough midazolam to make him sleepy, but not the full intended dose."
He said if the second and third drugs were administered directly to Lockett's blood stream through a vein "he would have died right away."
"What I suspect happened was that the two drugs were not injected into the vein, but were injected in the soft tissue around the vein," he said. "That can be very painful, and would be consistent with the reaction being reported."
Waisel said because so many minutes had elapsed between administering of the midazolam and Lockett's violent reaction, "clearly this sounds like a new injection of something that was very painful."
Attorney General Scott Pruitt's office said in a statement Tuesday that an expert witness had testified in court cases to the safety of midazolam used in Florida executions.
Pruitt's statement cited court testimony by Dr. Mark Dershwitz, professor of anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts, that "a 50 mg dose prevented his patients from perceiving the noxious stimuli associated with neurosurgery."
"The state is using twice as much midazolam (100 mg) in the executions of Lockett and Warner," Pruitt's statement says. However, Florida uses 500 milligrams of midazolam in its executions, records show.
Three-drug protocol
Oklahoma's execution protocol allows officials to choose from five drug combinations. The state chose the fifth option for the scheduled executions of two inmates Tuesday night. Here are the three drugs chosen by the state.
1. Midazolam: A sedative, 50 milligrams in each arm.
2. Vecuronium bromide: Paralytic drug intended to stop breathing, 20 milligrams in each arm. The drug "will not be administered until at least 5 minutes after the beginning of the administration of the midazolam."
3. Potassium chloride: A drug intended to stop the heart, 50 cc in each arm.
May 1, 2014
Failed IV line was started by a medical professional whose credentials are a secret under state law.
By Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Brandstetter
Clayton Lockett's death took nearly four times as long as most Oklahoma executions because a failed IV line started by a medical professional whose credentials remain secret under state law slowly leaked a drug combination that experts had warned could potentially be inhumane, a Tulsa World investigation has found.
When state officials realized what was happening, they technically halted Lockett's execution, but they had no backup drugs to restart the process. Unlike protocols in other death-penalty states, Oklahoma's policy contains few — if any — fail-safes or backup plans in case something goes wrong during an execution.
Gov. Mary Fallin's office knew an hour before Lockett's execution began about complications finding a suitable vein for the injection but left the decision of whether to continue up to prison officials, a spokesman said.
And state officials have not said whose decision it was to use the three-drug combination in Lockett's execution, which began with an injection of midazalom — a sedative that many medical experts say doesn't qualify as a true anesthetic and could be replaced with more humane options. According to the Department of Corrections policy, the prison's warden "shall have the sole discretion as to which lethal agent will be used for the scheduled execution."
Lockett, 38, reportedly died of a heart attack 43 minutes after his April 29 execution at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary began. Several minutes after a doctor declared him unconscious and executioners had injected two other lethal drugs, Lockett writhed, strained and appeared to be in pain on the gurney, lifting his head and mumbling. Officials closed the curtains to media witnesses, cut off the microphone to the execution chamber and shuttled the witnesses out of the building before declaring Lockett dead.
The state of Oklahoma is now investigating his death and reviewing its execution protocol.
While lethal injection is legal in Oklahoma and 31 other states, the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution bans "cruel and unusual" punishment.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has issued a six-month stay for Charles Warner, a convicted murderer and rapist who was supposed to be executed immediately after Lockett.
Lockett was sentenced to death for the 1999 killing of Stephanie Neiman, 19, of Perry. Neiman was shot twice, and Lockett ordered an accomplice to bury her in a shallow grave while she was still alive.
The official timeline of Lockett's execution reported to the governor's office by Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton states a "phlebotomist" searched for arm, leg and foot veins to place the IVs and couldn't find "a viable point" to insert one.
The timeline states the doctor then "went to the groin area," but doesn't say who inserted the IV.
If the state allowed a phlebotomist to either insert or help insert an IV into Clayton Lockett's body to deliver the lethal drugs, it violated its own protocol.
The protocol, updated April 14, states the warden of OSP will recruit a "licensed/certified health care specialist in IV insertion" before the execution. The protocol states the specialist must be an EMT-paramedic "or person with similar qualifications and experience in IV insertion."
In Oklahoma, phlebotomists are unlicensed, unregulated and not trained to insert IVs, according to Karen Holmes, the director of Tulsa Community College's medical lab technology and phlebotomy program.
Alex Weintz, a spokesman for Gov. Mary Fallin, said: "We were told it was a phlebotomist administering the IV."
When the Tulsa World asked DOC officials to verify whether a phlebotomist was present at the execution as Patton's report states, spokesman Jerry Massie said the person was actually an EMT, as required by the protocol.
An Oklahoma law passed in 2011 designed to conceal key facts of its execution procedures prevents anyone from finding out who the medical participants were and what qualifications they may or may not have.
Oklahoma's law states: "The identity of all persons who participate in or administer the execution process and persons who supply the drugs, medical supplies or medical equipment for the execution shall be confidential and shall not be subject to discovery in any civil or criminal proceedings."
It's also unclear when DOC officials became aware that Lockett's execution could be complicated by trouble finding a vein. DOC's protocol requires the prison's medical unit to examine a condemned inmate within 30 days before the execution "for ease of intravenous accessibility for identification purpose that may interfere with or affect the execution process."
It took the prison's medical team nearly an hour to insert the IV, records show.
Weintz said the governor's legal staff "is more or less on speaker phone in the run up to the execution ... so the governor's office was aware that there were issues finding a vein."
"We were also aware of course that he had tried to cut himself earlier in the day. As you would expect, we defer to the medical and corrections professionals," he said.
State officials chose to proceed with Lockett's execution and insert the IV into a femoral vein in the groin area instead, a procedure more complicated than traditional IVs.
The April 29 botched execution is not the first time Patton has been questioned about such problems.
As part of a lawsuit brought by death-row inmates in Arizona's prison system, where Patton worked before he came to Oklahoma, Patton acknowledged that a member of the prison's execution team lacked qualifications related to IV placement. He said in a 2011 deposition that he never checked to determine whether any execution team members had experience placing femoral IVs, a requirement of the Arizona prison system's protocol.
Patton was division director of operations at the time and responsible for planning and directing all execution-related activities.
An expert who reviewed medical records of five executed inmates testified that four of the IVs were improperly placed in the femoral vein.
The Arizona prison's medical team leader explained in his deposition that "with each execution we were learning probably a little bit more about the natural course of performing the execution."
Dr. Jay Chapman, a former Oklahoma state medical examiner who developed the state's first execution protocol, said he doubted DOC's initial explanation that Lockett's vein "exploded."
"From reading the media and of course having no first-hand knowledge, it appears that the line was not well placed. It was not an intravenous ... The drugs that were injected infiltrated into the tissues around the vein and of course this would cause pain."
While acknowledging the need for an investigation, Fallin has pushed back at criticism of the state following the botched execution.
"The people of Oklahoma do not have blood on their hands," she wrote in a monthly column distributed by her office. "They saw Clayton Lockett for what he was: evil. His execution means he will never again harm or terrorize another person."
Oklahoma used three drugs in Lockett's execution: midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride.
State officials consulted no experts in developing the recipe for this new lethal drug cocktail, relying mainly on legal research to come up with a method experts in the field have predicted would fail.
Used as the first drug in place of barbiturates the state had relied on for decades, the sedative midazolam would likely not render inmates unconscious, especially when executioners delivered the second and third drugs, experts testified in a recent Florida case.
It would be akin to injecting "liquid fire" into the inmate, said one expert who testified in the Florida case.
The Florida suit was brought by an inmate challenging use of midazolam in that state's executions.
Testimony from the case has been cited by Oklahoma's Attorney General in defending the new protocol. Florida, the only other state using midazolam as the first drug in its executions, uses five times more of the drug than Oklahoma does.
Experts in the case also warned that the drug poses a troubling side effect called a "paradoxical reaction" demonstrated in numerous studies in people with a history of aggressiveness and impulse control problems. Instead of sedating such patients, midazolam made them react violently.
In addition to Lockett's execution, there have been reports in other states of problems during executions with midazolam.
In 2013, witnesses reported Florida inmate William Happ did not close his eyes for 10 minutes after the drug was administered and then began moving his head.
In January, Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire's death took more than 25 minutes. Witnesses said McGuire was gasping and snorting during the process.
The same Massachusetts expert touted in Oklahoma by Attorney General Scott Pruitt Dr. Mark Dershwitz had testified in Ohio that McGuire wouldn't feel pain and possibly would feel "euphoria."
A 2008 case known as Baze v. Rees prompted the U.S. Supreme Court's most significant ruling regarding lethal injection protocol in recent years. The justices ruled that Kentucky could legally execute the inmate in that case but stated plainly: If the first of three drugs failed to render an inmate unconscious, it was "uncontested" there was a "substantial, constitutionally unacceptable risk" of suffocation and pain from the two drugs that followed.
Due to what state officials deemed a "collapsed vein" or failed IV insertion, no one knows yet how much midazolam Lockett received.
At least 10 minutes after the drug had supposedly rendered him unconscious, Lockett was able to speak, lift his head and shoulders off the gurney and he writhed for three minutes, according to witnesses.
The vecuronium bromide, in theory, should have acted as a paralytic and slowed his breathing, experts said. But it had already been administered when he was seen straining and was heard saying "man" in the execution chamber.
The potassium chloride which interferes with the electrical signals of the body to stop the heart and is severely painful without an anesthetic apparently worked as it was supposed to.
Craig Stevens, a professor of pharmacology at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, questions why the state chose midazolam as the initial drug and didn't consult any experts in pharmacology or anesthesiology in developing its plan.
"Midazolam has no analgesic properties. It's a whole different drug class than sodium thiopental or barbiturates," Stevens said.
Barbiturates can technically be called anesthetics; midazolam cannot, he said. It's a benzodiazepine with amnesic effects, so it can sedate someone and erase their memory of the event, but wouldn't necessarily block pain, Stevens said.
And because the condemned inmate is then given a muscle paralyzer, it would also mask signs the sedative may not be working as it should, he said.
If an inmate was given doses of vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride without a proper dose of an anesthetic drug, it would be a "horrific" way to die, Stevens said.
OSP Warden Anita Trammell, in an affidavit signed the day of Lockett's execution, called midazolam an "anesthetic" and stated: "Both I and the physician in attendance will monitor the inmates to be satisfied the inmates are sufficiently unconscious before the final two drugs are administered."
Lockett wasn't supposed to be the only man Oklahoma executed on April 29.
Warner, sentenced to die for the 1997 rape and murder of an 11-month-old Oklahoma City girl, had been prepped for the execution chamber and fed his requested last meal. After Lockett's execution went so wrong, Patton requested a stay of Warner's execution for 14 days.
Last week, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals moved his execution date to Nov. 13, to give the state time to review Lockett's death and review its execution protocols.
Attorneys for Lockett and Warner repeatedly raised the issue of the execution drug dosages in various court filings before April 29. At one point, DOC officials even revised the protocol "to correct the dosages to ensure that Plaintiffs receive the appropriate amount of drugs," court records show.
The Attorney General's Office insisted in court filings it had "fully and adequately produced relevant information concerning the drugs used for Plaintiff's executions."
Officials at DOC and the Attorney General's Office have repeatedly declined to explain why they chose a dose of midazolam that is five times less than what Florida uses in executions.
Diane Clay, a spokeswoman for Pruitt, said the office defends legal challenges to the state's execution protocol and "it's up to DOC to write the protocol."
DOC referred questions about the execution to the Department of Public Safety, which is conducting the investigation. A DPS spokesman did not provide answers to the World's questions.
Here are selected events from DOC records and witness reports during the April 29 execution of Clayton Lockett:
5:22 p.m.: Lockett placed and restrained on the execution table
5:27 p.m. to 6:18 p.m.: A phlebotomist repeatedly tries to find a suitable vein for IVs and the doctor settles on a femoral vein. DOC's timeline doesn't say who placed the IV.
6:23 p.m.: Shades are raised in the death chamber and Warden Anita Trammell orders the execution to begin.
6:33 p.m.: The physician pronounces Lockett unconscious. Vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride are administered.
6:36 p.m. to 6:39 p.m.: Witnesses see Lockett clench his jaw, strain, mumble and raise his head and shoulders from the gurney.
6:42 p.m.: Shades lowered in the execution chamber.
6:44 p.m. to 6:56 p.m.: Warden tells director about IV problem and says there are not enough drugs remaining nor an available vein to restart the process. Execution halted while Lockett has a "faint heartbeat."
7:06 p.m.: Lockett dies on the gurney.
December 14, 2014
The document was filed by attorneys representing 21 death-row inmates.
By Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Brandstetter
When Oklahoma investigators issued a report on what went wrong with the April execution of Clayton Lockett, they downplayed and omitted disturbing details from witnesses and officials, records filed in federal court show.
During interviews with state investigators, the warden at Oklahoma State Penitentiary recalled the scene inside the execution chamber on April 29 as “a bloody mess,” according to a motion filed Friday by attorneys for death-row inmates.
Another witness said the scene “was like a horror movie” as Lockett was bucking and attempting to raise himself off the gurney when he was supposed to be unconscious and dying.
The paramedic who struggled to start numerous IVs that night told state investigators that “the process that day as a whole” was “a cluster.”
The document was filed by attorneys representing 21 death-row inmates suing the state as a result of Lockett’s execution, alleging Oklahoma’s execution procedures amount to cruel and unusual punishment and violate their constitutional rights.
Lockett began to writhe and mumble several minutes after he was declared unconscious by the doctor. His death took 43 minutes and involved numerous failed IV attempts.
A state investigation released in September pointed to the failed IV as the largest problem in Lockett’s execution, noting the prison lacked key medical equipment and a contingency plan despite having two inmates scheduled to die that night. The investigation, led by Public Safety Commissioner Michael Thompson, did not hold any state official or execution team member responsible for failures during the execution.
The document filed Friday reveals many details the state has not publicly disclosed and has fought in court to conceal since Lockett’s death. The plaintiffs’ proposed findings of fact is based on DPS documents, including interview transcripts that remain sealed.
The Tulsa World requested the transcripts, emails and other documents related to the execution months ago from DPS and Gov. Mary Fallin’s office, but they have not been released. DPS has not cited a law allowing it to withhold the transcripts and after the World’s request, DPS attorneys asked a judge to seal them.
According to the filing Friday, key prison officials and the doctor who carried the execution say they had little knowledge of the drugs being administered, and the Attorney General’s Office helped select the drug combination used. The botched execution was the state’s first use of midazolam, a sedative involved in problematic executions in Ohio and Arizona.
In emails and prior statements to the World, Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s office repeatedly insisted DOC was solely responsible for the protocol. The state’s protocol states that the OSP warden “will have sole discretion as to which lethal agent will be used for the scheduled execution.”
A former Department of Corrections general counsel told investigators the state was under “a lot of pressure” to carry out the executions of Lockett and another inmate, Charles Warner, on the same night.
“The Attorney General’s Office, being an elective office, was under a lot of pressure,” said Michael Oakley, former general counsel for the Department of Corrections, according to the motion. Oakley has since retired from DOC.
“The staff over there was under a lot of pressure to, to say, ‘Get it done,’ you know, and so, yeah, I, I think it was a joint decision but there was, I got to say there was a definite push to make the decision, get it done, hurry up about it.”
A week before Lockett and a second inmate were set to be executed, Fallin intervened in an ongoing legal challenge before the Supreme Court. Fallin stated that the court exceeded its authority when it had issued a stay in the case and set her own stay for seven days later.
According to the court filing, OSP Warden Anita Trammell said it was Pruitt’s office and Oakley who came up with the revamped execution protocol used on April 29. An affidavit that Trammell signed on the day of the execution said she would ensure DOC execution policies were followed.
“I signed the damn thing,” Trammell said during her interview with DPS. “I did not write that policy. I did not choose those drugs.”
Director Robert Patton confirmed in interviews with DPS that the lethal drugs were not chosen by Trammell: “The previous general counsel (Oakley) and the Attorney General’s Office” chose the drugs, he told investigators.
When supplies of Oklahoma’s usual execution drug ran short, the AG’s office and DOC’s general counsel cobbled together a new drug protocol, the filing shows. They used online research such as “Wiki leaks or whatever it is” and testimony from an expert who testified in Florida whom they did not meet with, Oakley told investigators.
Trammell said she was told the drug could take a few minutes longer to sedate the condemned men than previous drugs. When she talked to the execution team about “this drug, Midazolam, and the effects, the slower effects ... the executioners didn’t know anything about it. No one did.”
Jennifer Chance, deputy general counsel to Fallin, also told DPS investigators: “I knew that these drugs were expected to take longer than the old drugs. ... I had an understanding that it would take 10 to 15 minutes instead of the six to eight minutes.”
She said she learned that information from Patton, who was hired about three months before the execution after many years in Arizona. But the drug had not yet been used in an Arizona execution by the time Patton began working as DOC director.
In July, Arizona executed inmate Joseph Wood using midazolam, a process that took nearly two hours. Five days later, the warden who oversaw that execution, Lance Hetmer, began a newly created job as a special assistant to Patton.
The state’s official investigation reported Lockett received enough of the lethal drugs to die but did not verify that he had received enough midazolam to be rendered fully unconscious before the final two drugs were administered.
The death-row inmates who filed the suit seek an injunction halting future Oklahoma executions, alleging the state’s process is unconstitutional. Attorneys for the state say DOC should be allowed to continue with executions because a new protocol requires additional training and safeguards to ensure executions will be constitutional.
A hearing over the injunction request begins Wednesday in Oklahoma City’s federal court.
DPS Director Thompson said after the investigation that he didn’t consider the execution botched because “Lockett died.” But statements from witnesses and executioners paint a picture of a disturbingly bloody and hectic scene inside the prison.
One member of the execution team who was interviewed told investigators: “The warden, you know, said it was very bad. You know.
“And said we’d all be — said we’d all be going to federal court.”
The paramedic who described the scene as “a cluster” and others told investigators they felt stressed by the pressure of two executions in one night. Lockett and Warner were set to be executed two hours apart.
“There was an air of urgency there. The quick, quick. Got to get it done. Got to get it done,” he told investigators.
The paramedic initially “got the vein the first stick” when attempting to set the IV line but did not have tape to secure the line.
The doctor overseeing the execution filled in at the last minute after the prison’s usual execution doctor had a schedule conflict. The doctor, who had overseen one previous execution, said he was never told he would have to start an IV.
Neither the doctor nor paramedic who presided over Lockett’s execution are identified in the court filings due to a state law that bans state release of such information. The doctor has been identified in a civil suit by Lockett’s family as McAlester emergency room doctor Johnny Zellmer.
Zellmer has not returned calls seeking comment.
“I was hesitant to do anything,” the unnamed doctor told state investigators. “I said, I don’t know, you know, what my status is inside here. I’m not supposed to be doing anything except, you know, deciding whether he was unconscious and then declaring him deceased.”
He said he was told he may only have to insert an IV “in an emergent situation.”
Executioners who pushed the drugs were driven to the prison in hoods and paid $600 each because two executions were scheduled that night. They’re typically paid $300.
While a person’s hand is one of the easiest places to start an IV, the offender’s hands are tied down in a manner that makes it difficult, the paramedic told investigators.
When the doctor and paramedic began to attempt more difficult IV access in Lockett’s neck and groin areas, they didn’t have an ultrasound machine to guide the procedure or needles that were long enough.
The doctor said he attempted the femoral IV in Lockett’s groin as a last resort.
“Someone asked me about putting another line in, and I said I wouldn’t attempt it, I couldn’t, that I didn’t think I could get another line in and I wasn’t going to attempt” to.
“We had stuck this individual so many times, I didn’t want to try and do another line,” the doctor told investigators. “I wasn’t wanting to do the IV access in the first place. … I didn’t want to do any more, plain and simple.”
They covered the IV in Lockett’s groin area with a sheet so he wasn’t exposed to witnesses, the paramedic said. The sheet made it difficult to tell that the IV had infiltrated and the lethal injection drugs were leaking, according to the state’s investigation.
Trammell told investigators she should have realized the agency’s policy “does not tell us what to do when something goes south.”
One executioner said he heard a moan as the second syringe of drugs was pushed, but he wasn’t sure if it came from Lockett. The execution team pushing the drugs operate in a closet-sized room with a limited view of the chamber.
As they pushed the third and final drug, another executioner noticed Lockett’s violent reaction.
“He tried to get up. In my opinion, he tried to get up, because it floored me,” the executioner told investigators.
Several said he grimaced and appeared to be in pain, and may have uttered “man” or expletives.
Patton gave his own description of Lockett’s reaction to investigators: “I heard him say the word ‘man’, he did strain, he did – I guess a good word is to kinda (bare) his teeth a little bit.
“He had appeared, and by no means am I a medical professional, but it did appear that he was at least tremors. I’m not sure it was convulsions, but there were – he was having tremors in his legs, mainly. You know, the reaction from the witnesses was pretty intense.”
One witness said the execution “was like a horror movie,” recalling that Lockett kept bucking and trying to get off the gurney.
The paramedic, who had stepped out of the chamber by this point, heard someone say the blinds were being lowered and he needed to return to the room.
“They’re putting the blinds down and he’s trying to get off the table. I thought, wow. Okay. What’s going on,” he told investigators.
Although the prison lacked the right needles and had no backup drugs, the doctor attempted another femoral IV. No one was sure why.
Blood backed up into the IV line, and the paramedic told the doctor he’d hit the artery, noting the doctor seemed anxious.
“We’ve got blood everywhere,” the paramedic recalled to investigators.
The warden described the scene inside the chamber as “a bloody mess.” The paramedic didn’t know whether a stay had been issued at this point.
Trammell got the director on the phone outside the chamber and told him what was happening.
Thompson was reportedly the first person who “recommended that we terminate the execution,” officials reported.
Patton consulted with the governor’s general counsel, Steve Mullins, and they decided to stop the execution.
Fallin was attending a Thunder basketball game in Oklahoma City at the time. She has said that members of her staff were in constant communication with DOC throughout the evening.
“Prior to the last witness leaving, the Warden called me back on the phone and said the offender had expired – had died. And I said,
‘Wow. Was it the chemicals or what?’ ” Patton recalled to investigators.
December 23, 2014
Oklahoma inmates’ contention of cruel and unusual punishment is rejected by the court.
By Cary Aspinwall and Ziva Brandstetter
OKLAHOMA CITY — A federal judge has rejected a request by Oklahoma death-row inmates to halt executions in the state, finding that the state’s protocol does not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot clears the way for four upcoming executions, though the plaintiffs are expected to take their case to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In making his ruling, Friot found that the plaintiffs, 21 death-row inmates, failed to prove that the state’s use of a new lethal drug, midazolam, presents a constitutionally unacceptable risk of pain and suffering during executions. That is the standard set up by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2008 ruling upholding lethal injection.
Friot said the inmates failed to establish that the state’s revised protocol presents a risk that is “sure or very likely to cause illness or suffering.”
DOC Director Robert Patton said the state “will now proceed with the guidelines set forth in the policy and protocol in preparation for the upcoming executions.” Patton declined to answer questions after the ruling, citing ongoing litigation.
The inmates’ lawsuit asked Friot to rule that the April 29 execution of inmate Clayton Lockett was unconstitutional. Lockett began speaking and trying to rise up from the gurney after a doctor declared him unconscious. Witnesses watched him writhe and mumble for three minutes before blinds in the execution chamber were closed.
Patton ordered the execution halted, and Lockett died on the gurney 43 minutes after the process began while Gov. Mary Fallin was attempting to grant a stay, testimony indicated. Despite a policy calling for emergency measures in such situations, prison officials and the doctor took none.
Friot said he sensed that “the experience of the Lockett execution was, in some ways, repugnant to Warden (Anita) Trammell and she does not want a mishap like this to occur again.”
Friot’s ruling came after a three-day hearing last week in Oklahoma’s Western District of federal court.
Attorneys for the state maintained that midazolam has been found constitutional in Florida, where it has been used in 11 executions as the initial substance in a three-drug cocktail.
The state’s attorneys say those executions were without incident. However, plaintiffs’ attorneys noted that the second drug is a paralytic, which would prevent inmates from indicating they are in pain.
Midazolam was used in an Ohio execution that took 53 minutes and an Arizona execution that lasted nearly two hours.
Lockett was sentenced to death for the murder of 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman of Perry, who was shot and left for dead in a ditch by Lockett and two accomplices in 1999.
A second inmate who was scheduled to be executed on April 29, Charles Warner, is now set to die Jan. 15. Executions are also set for Richard Glossip on Jan. 29; John Marion Grant on Feb. 19; and Benjamin Cole on March 5.
Dale Baich, one of several attorneys who represented the plaintiffs, said in an email that the plaintiffs planned to appeal Friot’s ruling to the 10th Circuit.
“There are several reasons for serious concerns about Oklahoma’s ability to carry out executions that comply with the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment,” Baich said.
“Our primary concern is the use of midazolam, a drug that is inappropriate for use in executions because it does not relieve pain and does not maintain prisoners at an adequate level of anesthesia.”
In making his findings of fact, Friot found credible the statements of witnesses who heard Lockett saying “something’s wrong” and “this sh— is f—ing with my mind.” The judge criticized the execution team’s failure to notice a large bulge near Lockett’s femoral IV, indicating the drugs were not going into his bloodstream.
An autopsy found that Lockett had levels of all three lethal drugs in his system, including potassium chloride. The Supreme Court has said it is “uncontested” that inmates would feel pain if they received the second and third drugs without being anesthetized by the initial drug.
“By all accounts potassium chloride will cause an individual extreme pain. … What is not clear by the evidence is the extent to which that occurred,” Friot said.
In making his ruling, Friot found the state’s new execution protocol, approved Sept. 30, to be “facially constitutional” when measured by the Supreme Court’s standard. He said the protocol requires two IV sites, confirmation of a viable IV site and monitoring of the offender throughout the process.
He noted that opposition to the death penalty had resulted in more reliable drugs, pentobarbital and sodium thiopental, being unavailable to Oklahoma and other states.
Friot also noted that the state has “a significant interest in meting out a sentence of death” on behalf of the victims.
“An injunction would not be in the public interest. … Only with real finality can the victims of crime move forward knowing that a sentence will be carried out,” Friot said.
Testimony during the three-day hearing pulled back the curtain on legal maneuvering and political pressure leading up to the April 29 execution.
A former DOC general counsel testified that political pressure played a key role in the rush to find a new execution drug.
“There were calls from the Governor’s Office,” said Michael Oakley, former general counsel for the DOC. “We would get word from the Attorney General’s Office that we better hurry up and do something.”
Midazolam was chosen in the five days after the state reported to the Court of Criminal Appeals on March 17 that it couldn’t obtain either of the drugs used previously to render inmates unconscious — pentobarbital and sodium thiopental. A revised execution policy allowing the use of midazolam was in place by March 21, Oakley confirmed in court.
Much of the testimony centered on documents and interviews that were part of the state’s official investigation into Lockett’s death, most of which have not been released to the public. Attorneys for the state have designated them confidential and have not complied with a request by the Tulsa World in September for copies under the Open Records Act. Large portions of some transcripts shown in court have been redacted.
The World and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sued Fallin and DPS on Monday, alleging the state has not complied with the Open Records Act in continuing to withhold the transcripts as well as emails related to the execution.
Dear Pulitzer jurors:
The government of the state of Oklahoma holds the tremendous power to execute inmates convicted of crimes considered “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.”
The Tulsa World has always aggressively reported on this extraordinary government power for two reasons: to shine a light on the execution process; and to ensure that stories of victims of violent crime don’t get lost in the debate.
The work done by World Enterprise Editor Ziva Branstetter and reporter Cary Aspinwall demonstrates this commitment. And, while the reporting was not always popular with readers, these journalists have provided work that exemplifies the importance of covering Oklahoma’s “botched execution” of Clayton Lockett.
Lockett’s execution was scheduled to take place April 29, 2014, as the state’s first double execution since 1937. Branstetter and Aspinwall were there to tell the story in brutal detail, with Branstetter set to witness Lockett’s death and Aspinwall planning to witness the death of convicted killer and rapist Charles Warner.
Both writers had researched the cases extensively and written in-depth advance stories outlining the details of the inmates’ respective crimes to ensure the victims’ stories didn’t get lost in the surrounding legal challenges. They also knew and had reported on the risks of the drug combination Oklahoma planned to use.
Quickly, witnesses realized something had gone horribly wrong. Branstetter watched as Lockett struggled and attempted to rise up from the gurney, speaking and moving long after a doctor declared him unconscious.
Prison officials shut the blinds in the death chamber, preventing Branstetter and other witnesses from seeing what happened next. They said they halted Lockett’s execution, but performed no lifesaving measures.
He died on the gurney 43 minutes after his execution started, something state officials didn’t tell witnesses until they had been ushered out of the viewing room and returned to the media center. Warner was given a last-minute stay by the governor.
Lockett’s execution made international headlines, with President Obama calling on the Justice Department to conduct a nationwide review. The United Nations Human Rights Commissioner condemned the execution, saying it may have violated international law.
Though state officials have vehemently tried to fight the labeling of Lockett’s execution as “botched,” the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals later labeled it a “procedural disaster” and a federal judge reviewing the case said it was abundantly clear Lockett was conscious long after he was not supposed to be. And nearly one year later, the U.S. Supreme Court now plans to review the drug protocol Oklahoma used on Lockett.
In Oklahoma, the death penalty enjoys wide public support and Tulsa World readers largely had little sympathy for either Lockett or Warner (who was recently executed by the state on Jan. 15).
Both men, after all, had committed brutal acts of violence. Lockett was convicted of shooting 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman and ordering an accomplice to bury her, while she was still breathing. Warner was convicted of raping and murdering 11-month-old Adrianna Waller, his roommate’s daughter.
Yet public pushback and popular opinion in the reddest of red states never dissuaded Branstetter and Aspinwall from pursuing the truth of what happened in Lockett’s death. They immediately began pressing state officials for answers, combing through documents and every detail of the process to uncover what happened.
Less than two weeks after Lockett’s death, Aspinwall and Branstetter reported what it would take other news outlets months to publish: Lockett’s death took nearly four times as long as most Oklahoma executions because of a failed IV line started by a medical professional whose credentials remain secret under state law.
Their gutsy reporting caught the eye of the national media and raised the ire of state officials who were busy trying to conceal facts and records related to Lockett’s death.
Aspinwall and Branstetter didn’t stop there. In June, they published a three-part series that examined in gripping detail both the deaths of Stephanie Neiman and Clayton Lockett, as well as flaws in Oklahoma’s lethal injection process.
The series, Fatal Flaws, exposed the fact that executioners were pushing lethal drugs from a cramped, dimly lit closet while using flashlights to see and colored pencils to communicate. The reporters reviewed autopsies from 100 executions to show this wasn’t the first problematic execution in Oklahoma. The series revealed that in recent years, the state had also quietly passed a measure banning autopsies on death row inmates except in rare cases, exams that could have yielded useful information on the effectiveness of execution drugs the state was using.
Months later, the state published findings of its own investigation into Lockett’s death, placing most of the blame on the failed IV and declining to hold any officials accountable. But many of the flaws exposed by the World’s reporting were swiftly addressed: Officials remodeled the execution chamber, ditched the colored pencil system, added medical equipment and required more training at the prison.
In a move clearly designed to strike back at media scrutiny of their actions, one of the “revisions” Oklahoma made to its execution protocol was to cut the number of media witnesses in half.
A legal challenge by several Oklahoma death row inmates resulted in other details of Lockett’s execution being revealed in federal court documents, despite state officials’ rapid attempts to conceal them. The World hustled to grab court documents before the state’s lawyers could get them sealed and reported the gruesome details – the bloody mess inside the execution chamber, the rush job to get new drugs approved – that seemed to be missing from the state’s own investigation.
Branstetter and Aspinwall’s relentless efforts to publish the truth continue to receive intense pushback from state officials who would like the issue to go away. That pushback has included phone calls and visits from public officials and voiced concern from local Chamber of Commerce officials that Oklahoma was getting a bad name with continued coverage of a “botched execution.”
Our reporters have not backed down.
Less than a week later, with the help of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the World sued the Governor and public safety officials for their continuing refusal to release documents related to Lockett’s execution. The lawsuit is currently pending in Oklahoma County court.
For their diligent commitment to shining a light on problems with Oklahoma’s execution process in spite of intense public and political pushback, these journalists are worthy of the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.
Thank you for your consideration,
Susan Ellerbach
Executive Editor, Tulsa World
Biography
Ziva Branstetter is the enterprise editor at the Tulsa World, where she has worked since 1994.
Cary Aspinwall is an enterprise writer for the Tulsa World.
Winners
Prize Winner in Local Reporting in 2015:
Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch and Frank Suraci
For their inquiry into widespread corruption in a small, cash-strapped school district, including impressive use of the paper's website.
Local Reporting
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Local Reporting in 2015:
Joe Mahr, Joseph Ryan and Matthew Walberg
For their probe into government corruption in a Chicago suburb, using public records, human stories and shoe-leather reporting to lay out the consequences.
The Jury
The Jury
Angie Muhs(Chair )
executive editor and vice president of audience development
Buffy Andrews
assistant managing editor/social media and engagement
Bill Church
executive editor
Meg Heckman
lecturer of journalism
Jacinthia Jones
metro editor
Carlos Sanchez
executive editor
Ned Seaton
publisher and editor-in-chief
Winners in Local Reporting
Will Hobson and Michael LaForgia
For their relentless investigation into the squalid conditions that marked housing for the city's substantial homeless population, leading to swift reforms.
Brad Schrade, Jeremy Olson and Glenn Howatt
For their powerful reports on the spike in infant deaths at poorly regulated day-care homes, resulting in legislative action to strengthen rules.
Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff
For courageously revealing and adeptly covering the explosive Penn State sex scandal involving former football coach Jerry Sandusky.
Frank Main, Mark Konkol and John J. Kim
For their immersive documentation of violence in Chicago neighborhoods, probing the lives of victims, criminals and detectives as a widespread code of silence impedes solutions.
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.