Continuing OK LI coverage: National Public Radio, Associated Press, and more
Stefanie Faucher
National Public Radio - Attorneys For Oklahoma Death Row Inmates Seek To Halt Executions
Associated Press - Clayton Lockett's Botched Execution Was A Rushed, 'Bloody Mess,' New Documents Reveal
Tulsa World - Public Safety Commissioner Michael Thompson subpoenaed in legal challenge filed by 21 death row inmatesBrennan Center - The Dying Light
Brennan Center - The Dying Light
News 9 OK - 9 Investigates: Plaintiffs File Lawsuit Following Lockett Execution
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/17/clayton-lockett-new-documents_n_6339672.html
Clayton Lockett's Botched Execution Was A Rushed, 'Bloody Mess,' New Documents Reveal
By SEAN MURPHY, December 17, 2014
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A federal hearing begins Wednesday over Oklahoma's attempts to resume executions nine months after a bungled lethal injection in which a death row inmate writhed on the gurney, mumbled and lifted his head after receiving a new drug combination.
Attorneys for 21 Oklahoma death row inmates argue the state's new lethal injection drug combinations and doses amount to human experiments that violate their constitutional protection from cruel and unusual punishment. Attorneys for the state maintain the April 29 execution of Clayton Lockett was an anomaly and that new protocols and training will prevent problems as they move forward with plans for a January execution.
An 80-page court filing in the case included never-before-released witness accounts from a Department of Public Safety investigation into Lockett's execution. Prison officials lowered the blinds after a doctor noticed problems with Lockett's IV, preventing some witnesses from seeing what happened. Lockett died 43 minutes after the procedure began.
Some highlights from the witness accounts:
SELECTING THE DRUGS
The top lawyer for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, Michael Oakley, told state investigators the sedative midazolam was selected as the first of three drugs for Lockett's execution after he talked with officials from other states and conducted his own online research on "Wiki leaks or whatever it is," according to a transcript of the interview. Oakley said state officials were scrambling to find alternative drugs after those commonly used became scarce, and he acknowledged there was political pressure on the elected attorney general's office to "get it done, hurry up about it." Oakley retired days before Lockett's execution.
LACK OF TRAINING
Prison officials and members of the execution team told investigators they weren't properly trained and knew little about the effects of midazolam. A doctor and paramedic involved in the execution said they had never attended any training. The doctor, who placed an intravenous line in Lockett that became dislodged, also said the prison didn't have needles of the correct length. The names of the members of the execution team were not included in the documents.
Several witnesses said Lockett tried to talk after the midazolam was administered, and one witness became so upset she ran out of a viewing room.
BEHIND THE BLINDS
Oklahoma State Penitentiary Warden Anita Trammell told investigators that after the blinds were lowered, the doctor tried to set a second IV line in Lockett's groin, and that "blood squirted up and got all over his jacket." Trammell described that scene as a "bloody mess." One member of the execution team said Lockett continued trying to rise up from the gurney after the blinds were lowered and became "a little bit more aggressive." The paramedic described Lockett's execution from start to finish as "such a cluster."
EXECUTION HALTED
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin's general counsel, Steve Mullins, told investigators he was notified of a problem and began working on an executive order to halt the execution. He said he also talked to the director of the state's prison system, Robert Patton, and both agreed the execution should be halted.
However, all of the drugs had already been administered, and Lockett died as the members of the execution team debated what measures to take to save him
The doctor said the warden asked him if Lockett could be resuscitated, and he responded that he would have to take him to the local emergency room. A paramedic said no lifesaving measures were given "because the purpose of being there was to provide an execution ... and we were told not to reverse it."
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Public Safety Commissioner Michael Thompson subpoenaed in legal challenge filed by 21 death row inmates
By Ziva Branstetter, December 17, 2014
Public Safety Commissioner Michael Thompson has been subpoenaed to testify in federal court after attorneys apparently failed to resolve a dispute involving records of an investigation he led.
Thompson is opposing the subpoena, saying he was not listed as a witness in the case -- a legal challenge filed by 21 death row inmates -- and was not given proper notice, court records show. Department of Public Safety General Counsel Steve Krise is also opposing a subpoena to testify in the case, records show.
In a court filing Tuesday, the plaintiffs’ attorneys say they subpoenaed Thompson and Krise to testify after the state opposed public release of witness statements related to a botched execution. Gov. Mary Fallin appointed Thompson to lead a state investigation into the 43-minute execution of Clayton Lockett.
Testimony is scheduled to begin Wednesday in what is expected to be a three-day hearing in Oklahoma’s Western District of federal court. The inmates claim the state’s execution process is unconstitutional and are asking U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot to issue a preliminary injunction halting upcoming executions.
The state maintains its process is constitutional and that the Department of Corrections has made changes recommended by the investigation.
Four executions are currently scheduled: Charles Warner, Jan. 15; Richard Glossip, Jan. 29; John Marion Grant, Feb. 19; and Benjamin Cole, March 5.
If Friot grants a preliminary injunction following the hearing, a full trial would be scheduled to determine whether the state’s death penalty process is constitutional.
Records show attorneys for the inmates and the state were trying to strike an agreement limiting the number of witnesses needed for the hearing. Instead of calling some witnesses, attorneys would have agreed that documents produced by DPS, including transcripts of witness statements, were authentic.
“Late Monday, Defendants notified Plaintiffs that, at that time, they would only agree to two narrow stipulations concerning the substitution of DPS transcripts for the testimony of Assistant Attorneys General John Hadden and Tom Bates,” the plaintiffs’ motion filed Tuesday states.
“The parties had been working to stipulate to transcripts not only of Mr. Hadden and Mr. Bates but many other state witnesses that would reduce the plaintiffs’ witness list very substantially.”
However the inmates’ attorneys asked that the state file any such transcripts publicly rather than under seal, their motion states.
“The only apparent sticking point between the parties ... is Plaintiffs’ request that the DPS transcripts offered in lieu of listed witnesses not be submitted under seal, simulating their testimony at the hearing,” states the motion filed by plaintiffs’ attorneys.
The Tulsa World requested copies of the transcripts in September under the Open Records Act, after release of the state investigation that references them. DPS turned over about 3,000 pages of transcribed witness statements to the plaintiffs’ attorneys during discovery.
Attorneys for the state have since designated the witness statements as confidential in the federal case. Though names of execution team members have been redacted from the statements, DPS has not cited a law allowing the agency to continue withholding them from the public.
Fallin and DPS have also not provided emails requested by the World in early May.
In a motion filed Tuesday, Thompson and Krise state they should not be forced to testify in the federal case because they are “non parties,” were not listed as witnesses and were not given proper notice. The motion states Thompson and Krise both have schedule conflicts and being called to testify on short notice is an “undue burden.”
The plaintiffs’ attorneys state in their filing that they will ask Friot to clarify the issue and Thompson and Krise do not need to appear in court for the time being.
“Hopefully, Plaintiffs can simply release the witnesses from these subpoenas as they would prefer to do, circumstances permitting,” the motion states.
In addition to leading the state’s investigation, Thompson witnessed the execution and recommended to Fallin’s general counsel that it be halted, according to a court filing by plaintiffs last week.
That filing quoted the prison’s warden saying the execution was a “bloody mess” and a paramedic who described the day as “a cluster.”
During the hearing this week, the plaintiffs and defendants will present expert testimony on the effectiveness of a new drug used in Lockett’s execution. Besides Lockett’s 43-minute execution, the sedative has been linked to prolonged executions in Arizona and Ohio.
Attorneys for the state say midazolam has been used “without serious incident” in several Florida executions.
According to court filings, the state has obtained enough midazolam to carry out the executions.
In a letter Nov. 26, Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s office informed the inmates’ attorneys that DOC has “sufficient drugs to carry out the executions of the four inmates currently scheduled have been obtained. The drugs are midazolam, rocuronium bromide and potassium chloride.”
In a filing last week, the state asked Friot to rule that “it is not feasible for ODOC to obtain sodium thiopental or pentobarbital for use in executions so that is not a reasonable alternative.”
The state used sodium thiopental and later pentobarbital in previous executions but supplies dried up as pharmaceutical companies banned their use in executions.
The state also asked Friot to rule that midazolam “does not present a risk of serious harm.” That is part of the standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2008 ruling upholding lethal injection.
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http://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/dying-light
The Dying Light
By Andrew Cohen, December 16, 2014
We started this year with the execution of Dennis McGuire in Ohio, a procedure that went so horribly wrong it left normally stoic eyewitnesses grasping to understand what they had just seen. State officials were trying out a new lethal injection drug cocktail on him, one never before used to kill a human being in this country. But instead of exposing their controversial plan to outside scrutiny, instead of saying to the world “we want to try this new procedure, does anyone have any valid concerns about the drugs or their maker we ought to resolve before we proceed?” they cloaked the work in secrecy.
What happened? It took McGuire 26 minutes to die, far longer than it was supposed to, during which time he was gasping and choking and clenching his fists. How did state officials react? The warden said McGuire’s death “went very well.” Ohio conducted an internal investigation, quickly concluded that McGuire did not suffer any pain, but pledged anyway just in case to increase the dosage of the two drugs for the next execution. It took a concerned federal trial judge in the state to impose a moratorium on executions there, one that still is in place.
How do we end the year in the Buckeye State? With Ohio lawmakers moving to ensure that executions in their state will be even more secret, and thus even more prone to being cruel and unusual, than they were when hapless bureaucrats killed McGuire. Lawmakers in Columbus, at the behest of corrections officials and pharmaceutical companies, just passed the nation’s most stringent lethal injection secrecy measure, one that would guarantee that advocates, journalists, judges, and others will be precluded from obtaining still more basic information about how the state will execute its death row inmates in 2015.
We end the year, too, learning just how badly officials in Oklahoma botched the execution of Clayton Lockett, whose April death was marked by an extraordinary level of violence. We now know, thanks to discovery in a federal lawsuit and no thanks to state officials, that Lockett’s executioners were clueless. They used the wrong needles. They couldn’t properly administer an IV. Blood was everywhere. They didn’t render Lockett fully unconscious before they administered the lethal drugs to kill him. It was a “cluster,” one official was quoted as saying but you know that’s not exactly what he said.
How does this come to pass in a nation that has the Eighth Amendment, the text of which unambiguously precludes ‘cruel and unusual” punishment? Well, for one thing, Oklahoma officials moved before Lockett’s execution to implement new secrecy measures that precluded his lawyers, and state judges, from fully evaluating whether the injection procedures to be used against Lockett comported with constitutional norms. Why did this happen? And why was the Lockett execution a massacre? Here’s one reason. From the testimony of a former corrections official (and omitted from a state report issued earlier this year):
[T]he attorney general’s office, being an elective office, was under a lot of pressure… The, 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.
Before the Lockett execution, two of the three branches of government were in open warfare over injection rules. And as he was dying, bucking and groaning on the gurney with blood spurting out of him, state officials literally drew back a curtain during the Lockett execution so that the witnesses to his killing would not be able to see how gruesome and chaotic the spectacle was as it unfolded in front of them. Indeed, if there were a single moment this year that defines the demise of transparency over capital punishment it was this— government bureaucrats literally hiding their most solemn act from public view. This same dynamic occurred, with or without an actual curtain, all year long in other outlier states.
And all year long the federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, countenanced this push toward secrecy over death penalty procedures. Only once did five justices in Washington join together to halt an execution that state officials planned to carry out under new secrecy rules. Russell Bucklew’s demise was halted, at least for now, not because of injection secrecy rules but because he has a rare medical condition that would have made the Lockett execution look like a tea party had Missouri proceeded to try to kill him. Missouri, a state so eager to kill in 2014 it did so at least once before the Supreme Court had finished reviewing an appeal.
What we saw in 2014 is the acceleration of a trend in capital punishment and a more fully developed gulf between states that still have the death penalty but rarely use it and those states that have it and feel some great compulsion to speed up the pace of its use. It’s a trend exacerbated by the fact that state officials no longer have supplies of the relatively “safe” drug sodium thiopental to use to execute condemned prisoners. And it’s a gulf caused by the extraordinary (and extraordinarily unconstitutional) measures some states have chosen to hide the alternative methods they have chosen to kill death row inmates.
The irony, of course, is that the more frantic these state officials become to kill capital murderers the less defensible their capital regimes become in the eyes of the law. The more secret they make their executions the more legal and political pressure there is to peek behind the curtain. There is no moral reason in law or fact for Oklahoma or Ohio to still be in the business of capital punishment after what officials there did to Lockett and McGuire. And sooner or later this Supreme Court, yes even this Supreme Court, is going to say so.
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9 Investigates: Plaintiffs File Lawsuit Following Lockett Execution
BY ALEX CAMERON, December 16, 2014
OKLAHOMA CITY - More unsettling details emerged in the state's flawed execution of Clayton Lockett. Graphic descriptions and frank assessments of what went on could be found in court documents filed by attorneys trying to force the state to change its protocol. Those filings did not paint a pretty picture.
The attorneys represent 21 Oklahoma death row inmates. Their lawsuit highlights, not just the procedural missteps of April 29, but some shocking admissions made afterward, things not included in the state's official report.
The documents detailed how the decision was made, just a month before the execution, to use Midazolam, the drug that was supposed to render Lockett unconscious, but had never been used in Oklahoma before and only on a limited basis in other states.
Michael Oakley, counsel for corrections at the time, told investigators there was political pressure from the state Attorney General's office to "get it done, hurry up about it."
And according to the filing, Warden Anita Trammel, who was supposed to decide which drugs to use, said she simply signed off on what Oakley and the AG decided. "I signed the damn thing. I did not write that policy," she said.
And as for the fact the Midazolam works differently than drugs Department of Corrections had used before, Trammel said, "The executioners didn't know anything about it. No one did."
The documents described the multiple attempts to put an IV into Lockett, including a final, hurried attempt when it seemed clear Lockett was not unconscious, Trammel described the scene as "a bloody mess."
The paramedic who participated in the execution described the entire process this way: "[I]t was such a cluster."
The plaintiffs requested that all executions be put on hold until the state comes up with a different protocol, one with a track record of success that isn't likely to violate the 8th Amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
A three-day hearing on this begins Wednesday in US District Court.
The next execution is currently scheduled for Jan. 15.
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