McALESTER, Okla. - The White House weighed in Wednesday on the debate over the botched execution in Oklahoma as state officials scrambled to untangle what went wrong.
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said at a news conference that she had asked for an independent review of the failed execution of Clayton D. Lockett by the state’s Department of Public Safety. Fallin said that she had asked for a full assessment of Lockett’s cause of death, a review of whether officials had followed execution protocols and whether those protocols needed to be improved.
The problems with the botched execution by lethal injection, in which Lockett kicked, gasped and appeared to try to sit up after he was declared sedated, are expected to fuel the debate about the ability of states to administer lethal injections that meet the Constitution’s requirement that they be neither cruel nor unusual punishment.
That question has drawn renewed attention from defense lawyers and death penalty opponents in recent months, as several states scrambled to find new sources of drugs used in executions because drugmakers that oppose capital punishment - many based in Europe - have stopped selling to prisons and corrections departments.
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said Wednesday that he had not talked to President Barack Obama about the incident, but that the White House viewed the episode as having fallen short of being humane.
“We have a fundamental standard in this country that even when the death penalty is justified, it must be carried out humanely,” Carney said. “And I think everyone would recognize that this case fell short of that standard.”
Robert Patton, Oklahoma’s director of corrections, has already requested – and received – a 14-day stay of execution for Charles F. Warner, who was scheduled to be executed two hours after Lockett. Warner was convicted of raping and murdering an 11-month-old girl in 1997.
Anti-death penalty groups called for an immediate moratorium on all executions in Oklahoma. “In Oklahoma’s haste to conduct a science experiment on two men behind a veil of secrecy, our state has disgraced itself before the nation and world,” Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the Oklahoma branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Fallin said she had not given Michael C. Thompson, commissioner of Oklahoma’s Department of Public Safety, a deadline for completing his review. She said that if the review was not completed by May 13, she would grant Warner an additional stay of execution.
