I wish I could say Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin will lose sleep over this, but somehow I doubt it:
Clayton Lockett, 38, was declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of three drugs in the state’s new lethal injection combination was administered. Three minutes later, though, he began breathing heavily, writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow.
The blinds were eventually lowered to prevent those in the viewing gallery from watching what was happening in the death chamber, and the state’s top prison official eventually called a halt to the proceedings. Lockett died of a heart attack a short time later, the Department of Corrections said.
‘‘It was a horrible thing to witness. This was totally botched,’’ said Lockett’s attorney, David Autry.
“Botched” is legalese for “full metal fuck up.”
You may recall a story from a few years back where certain drug manufacturers refused to sell combinations of medications to states that maintained the death penalty. Corporate conscience. Whoda thunk?
And whoda thunk corporations would have more soul than many governors in the South? They scurried to find new ways of killing inmates, and hit upon this combination.
Which has now failed at least twice this year alone.
We’ve turned our prisons into an industry: private corporations make profits off human beings when they are incarcerated, they make profits when inmates get sick, and they make profits when they are killed.
This is immoral. End of discussion.
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