Death Row Stories (2014–…): Season 2, Episode 6 - Cruel and Unusual - full transcript
On this episode
of Death Row Stories,
executions around the
country go horribly wrong.
It was clear something was not right.
He looked like he was
trying to get up off the gurney.
You could see a spasm go through his body.
But when secrets emerge
about government executions...
You've got people
carrying cash in the night
across state lines.
They want to create the
aura that everything is smooth.
The question is asked,
"Does it matter how
we put people to death?"
These are evildoers.
These are animals.
We want justice.
Who cares if he feels pain?
You are not allowed
to experiment on people
when killing them.
We've demonstrated again
and again and again... we
make these God-like decisions
without God-like skills.
- There's a body - in the water.
- He was butchered
- and murdered.
Many people proclaim their innocence.
In this case, there are
a number of things that stink.
This man is remorseless.
He needs to pay for it with his life.
The electric chair
flashed in front of my eyes.
Get a conviction at all costs.
Let the truth fall where it may.
From the beginning
of recorded history,
civilization has sought justice
through the ultimate punishment... death.
And as societies have evolved,
so, too, have their methods of execution.
In ancient Rome,
prisoners were fed to the lions
in front of large amphitheaters of people.
In Greece, the condemned
were sealed inside a bronze bull
which, when set on fire,
would pour smoke from the nostrils
while the person inside roasted to death.
In England,
prisoners were drawn and quartered
with horses pulling
people apart limb by limb.
France, famously, used the guillotine,
responding to the chant,
"Off with their heads."
For a long time,
the method of choice
in America was hanging.
In the United States,
the first recorded execution
was in 1608 in Jamestown, Virginia.
Over the years hangings
became the great social event,
the great source of entertainment.
People brought picnics.
Teachers would bring the students.
Parents would bring the kids.
There was a choir, a band.
Executions were public because
they were considered a ritual
whose goal was to deter the populous.
But our history
of executions
also included a dark side,
botched executions
that quickly turned
horrifying for the masses.
It turns out it's difficult
to properly hang somebody.
If the drop was too long,
the person's head would fall off.
So somebody invented
a machine where the rope
would go up to a pulley
and a boulder was dropped.
They called it Jerk to
Jesus or Launch to Eternity.
There was a man named Eddie Ives.
Eddie weighed only 80 pounds.
So the weight drops and he goes kazoom,
and twirled around the horizontal beam
and came crashing down to the ground.
They had to hang him twice.
There was a lot of concern
about botched hangings.
That's why the electric
chair was brought in.
By the late 1800s,
electricity was transforming America.
In order to demonstrate
the incredible power
of this new phenomenon,
Thomas Edison filmed the
electrocution of an elephant.
Executioners quickly
seized on this modern method
of putting the condemned to death.
One of our first electric appliances
was the electric chair,
but the electric chair's
got its own problems.
Jesse Tafero was executed
in 1990 in the electric chair
in Florida.
A lot of reasonable people do
believe that he was innocent.
There were 8-inch flames
that erupted from the skull cap
that Tafero had on during the execution,
so he basically burned to death.
In 1997,
a man named Pedro Medina was executed.
Flame erupted all
across the top of his head,
like, from across this way,
from one ear to the other.
The warden of Florida State
Prison was quoted as saying,
"The flames, the smoke, the putrid odor,
and his death by inferno plagues me still."
In 1977,
lethal injection was invented in Oklahoma
as a more humane way to execute prisoners.
Historically,
executions were very ugly.
Hangings. Electrocution.
And so one of the goals of the state now
is that it looks calm and peaceful.
To a great degree,
the lethal injection regime
has much more to do with the witnesses
than it has to do with the condemned.
The witnesses weren't seeing
the condemned writhe or cough
or choke or snort.
The challenge
with lethal injection
was finding executioners
with the medical skills
to do the job.
Today, in the United States,
it violates ethical codes
for physicians to be involved.
So usually the people who
are involved in the executions
are not physicians,
and they are not properly
trained to do an I.V. insertion,
much less an execution.
Over the years,
the issue of medical training
led to numerous mistakes,
but a watershed moment came in 2009
with the case of Romell Broom in Ohio.
Just 17 steps from the room
where he'd be put to death,
Romell Broom,
convicted of raping and murdering
a 14-year-old girl 25 years ago,
was helping his executioners.
He laid on his side, flexed his muscles
to help them find a vein
to inject lethal chemicals.
Broom never made it out
of the preparation chamber.
There were 20 different
needle insertions into Mr. Broom
in all parts of his body...
In the back of his hand,
in his arm, in his ankle.
Mr. Broom was actually
trying to help them find the vein.
After two hours, the Director
of Rehabilitation and Correction
made an unprecedented request.
He asked the Governor to
grant a temporary reprieve.
Romell Broom became
the only man in U.S. history
to walk away from a lethal injection alive.
Romell Broom is still
on death row,
but he does not have an execution date
and his attorneys are arguing
that you can't try and kill someone twice.
But corrections officials
in Ohio were undeterred.
They devised a new way to kill Romell Broom
called Plan B.
Most executions used one
drug to put the inmate to sleep,
a second drug to paralyze the inmate,
and finally a third drug to stop the heart.
Plan B proposed using
a drug called Midazolam
injected into the muscles
to put the prisoner to sleep,
and this invention would open
a proverbial Pandora's
Box of botched executions,
starting with Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire.
Dennis McGuire
was a human guinea pig
for the State of Ohio to experiment on,
and it did, in a horrific way.
After the failed lethal
injection of Romell Broom,
the State of Ohio proposed
a new method of execution
using a drug called Midazolam.
The medical community
had immediate concerns.
Traditionally, the first drug was used
to induce unconsciousness.
Midazolam does not do that.
If the inmate is not unconscious
and the inmate receives
a second drug that paralyzes the muscles,
that is a horrible, horrible situation
where you are awake but you cannot move.
You cannot breathe.
So you have the sensation of suffocating,
essentially,
and you can't communicate to
anybody that this is happening.
Ohio originally
proposed using Midazolam
as a back-up plan,
but the controversial drug would
soon become their only option.
Tonight, U.S. states
are being forced
to find new drugs for lethal injections
since European-based manufacturers
banned the U.S. prisons
from using their drugs
to carry out the death sentence.
The suppliers,
most of them in Europe
where they don't have the death penalty,
said,
"We will not sell you drugs to kill people.
Our drugs are not intended to kill people."
In January, 2014, Ohio announced
they would try their Plan B drug,
Midazolam,
on inmate Dennis McGuire.
McGuire had been convicted
of the rape and murder
of a housewife named Joy Stewart.
He slashed her throat,
severed her jugular.
- She was carrying a baby...
- She was seven months pregnant.
She was seven months pregnant.
The baby suffocated to death as well.
If you're gonna have the death penalty,
this guy's the poster
child for it for what he did.
Tim Young represented McGuire
in his final appeals.
When we went to court with Mr. McGuire,
we argued that Midazolam
was likely to leave him
in severe pain, almost torture,
as if he were drowning
or unable to breathe,
and choking and gasping for air.
But arguing
the dangers of Midazolam
presented an unnerving catch-22.
The burden of proof is so high
to show that it's gonna go bad,
it actually has to go bad.
The judge said that this
was clearly an experiment,
but he likewise said that the inmate
was not entitled to a pain-free execution.
The federal court has ruled
that they believe the
execution will be humane.
If I believed that it would not be,
we would not be proceeding.
Dennis McGuire was led into
the execution chamber
on January 16th, 2014.
Dennis McGuire
had a very brief
but emotional final statement.
He said he was sorry for what he had done,
and he apologized to the family.
He mentioned his son and daughter,
who were there, and how he loved them.
And then the drugs began flowing.
It typically would have been five or six,
maybe ten minutes,
and it would have been all over.
But after a few minutes,
Dennis McGuire began gasping,
kind of wheezing and coughing,
sucking in breath.
For 13 minutes,
his body was struggling not to die.
It was obvious that he was
trying to get air into his lungs
and the drugs were preventing it.
And 13 minutes doesn't
sound like very long,
but if you're watching somebody
do that with his family there,
it's an eternity.
It just went on and on and on.
And I'll be candid, as a human being,
I was at this point going,
"Please, just let him die.
Let it stop."
Finally, at 10:53 p.m.,
Dennis McGuire was declared dead.
Yesterday,
I watched the State of Ohio kill my dad.
I witnessed his execution
along with my wife and my sister.
After watching my dad's execution...
I know what cruel and
unusual punishment is.
Anger bubbled up quickly.
This was so foreseeable and so obvious.
The agony and terror of watching my dad
suffocate to death lasted
more than 19 minutes.
I saw him just gasping for his air.
His head kept coming up,
and he just... his mouth was wide open
and he was making all
kinds of horrible noises.
We just don't need to do this.
There's nothing in the name of the people
that justifies this horrible,
painful process before dying.
Europe's drug ban
soon left other states
facing their own drug shortages,
and despite Dennis
McGuire's botched execution,
lessons from Midazolam
had yet to be learned.
After the McGuire execution,
I thought there would be no state
that would consider using Midazolam,
that they would be moving on.
And I have since been
disabused of that notion.
McGuire was predictable.
It was foreseeable.
How do you ever go
forward after that moment?
That's just beyond horrifying to me.
After the botched
execution of Dennis McGuire,
many thought that the
controversial drug Midazolam
would no longer be used in executions.
But less than six months later,
Arizona announced they would use
Midazolam on inmate Joseph Wood.
Wood was found guilty of
murdering his ex-girlfriend
and her father in 1989.
We were very aware
about what happened
with the execution of Dennis McGuire,
so we asked the Department of Correction
for information about
the source of the drugs
and the qualifications of the executioners,
and wardens and the State of Arizona
told us to go pound sand.
It would not disclose
the source of the drugs
and it said, "Trust us.
The people that are going
to be doing this are qualified."
Why all the secrecy?
Because I think the
Departments of Corrections
would like to take care
of this ugly little business
in as efficient a way as possible.
They have a job to do.
They have executions to carry out.
If people start raising questions
about where the drugs come from,
who the doctor is,
then it slows down the process.
Joseph Wood was taken
to the execution chamber
at the State Penitentiary in
Florence on July 23rd, 2014.
At 1:52 p.m.,
the State of Arizona injected Wood
with 50 milligrams of Midazolam,
five times the amount used in Ohio.
Mr. Wood opened his mouth wide
and took a very deep breath.
Suddenly his mouth
popped open... like that,
and, um...
everybody sort of jumped a little bit,
you know.
Hadn't seen that before.
You could see a spasm go through his body.
You could see it went all
the way down to his stomach.
Gasping like a fish. It
was extraordinarily loud.
I started doing, you know,
hash marks in my notebook
each time that he would
make that sucking sound.
He was gulping. He was gasping.
He was struggling to breathe.
I eventually counted 240 hash marks.
It went on and on, and I wondered,
"Is someone going to stop this execution?"
There were two lawyers,
in addition to Dale Baich,
sitting next to me,
and I saw them get up and go out.
One full hour
into the execution,
Joseph Wood was still alive.
Baich called for the
execution to be halted.
We immediately filed a motion
with the Federal District Court
asking the federal judge
to stop the execution.
They got an Assistant
Attorney General on the phone
and he said, "He's unconscious.
He's not feeling any pain.
"The judge said," Well,
do you have an E.E.G. set up to him?"
"Well, no we don't." "Well,
so then you don't know."
On the call,
the Assistant Attorney General
admitted that a second dose of Midazolam
had now been given to Wood.
What was not reported was that
14 additional doses of
the drug were administered
while all this was going on.
Nearly all drugs have
what we call a ceiling effect.
Even though Joseph Wood
received a total of 750
milligrams of Midazolam,
he was breathing and his heart was working
for nearly two hours.
Eventually,
Joseph Wood's gasping slowed,
and it slowed,
and eventually it petered out,
and it was done.
And then finally it was over.
After an hour
and 57 minutes,
Joseph Wood was finally declared dead,
becoming one of the longest
executions in US history.
To many, this was a clear case
of cruel and unusual punishment.
Joe Wood is dead,
but it took him two hours to die.
I can't imagine this is what
the criminal justice system
had hoped for when they came
up with this new drug protocol.
There was someone from
the Attorney General's office
that said, "Oh, it was very peaceful.
He was just sleeping and snoring."
It's like, "No,
this is not what it looks like."
The victim's family
had little sympathy for Joseph Wood.
Everybody here, from what I've heard,
said it was excruciating. You don't know
what excruciating is.
What's excruciating
is seeing your dad lying
there in a pool of blood.
Seeing your sister lying
there in a pool of blood.
That's excruciating. This man deserved it.
This man conducted
a horrifying murder,
and you guys are going, "Oh,
let's worry about the drug
and how he... affect."
Well, why didn't we give him a bullet?
Why didn't we give him some Drano?
All you people that
think these drugs are bad,
well, the hell with you guys."
One of the family members said,
what does it matter if
it's done with Drano?
Well, the answer is is we don't do that.
This is the United States.
We have a Constitutional Amendment
that forbids cruel and unusual punishment.
We're supposed to be above that.
With botched
executions now spreading,
questions mounted about
the fate of the 3,000 people
remaining on Death Row.
And with the moral implications
falling on those normally
hidden behind the curtain,
the executioners themselves
began to speak out.
I just felt like the people
had the right to know something
that's been cloaked in secrecy
for years and years and years.
I just wanted the people to understand.
It's not that I couldn't handle it,
it's that I couldn't handle
what it turned me into.
When lethal injection
became the standard method
of capital punishment,
the executioners themselves,
some with little or no medical training,
suffered unintended consequences.
Reverend Carroll Pickett
witnessed 95 executions
at the Death House in Huntsville, Texas.
We've had guards
who were strapping people down
and faint in the death house.
We've had guards come
back in to undo the straps,
and they freeze because
they can't touch death.
They come and go quite rapidly.
Every couple weeks another would change,
and they just couldn't do it.
The life of an executioner
is very much a hidden world,
literally shrouded in secrecy.
Filmmaker Patty Dillon
directed a documentary
about executioners titled...
The executioners that
I've spent the most time with
joined the Department of Corrections
and worked their way up
from a correctional officer
all the way up to a Major
which is when they became executioners.
It was the highest promotion.
It just happened to include execution.
Among the executioners
Patty found
were Craig Baxley and Terry Bracey
who carried out executions
at the Broad River
Prison in South Carolina.
The inmate is less then
just a few feet away.
The duty that I had was to
take the syringe, screw it in,
and then do the plunging.
If the inmate does not die
within a certain few minutes,
then you have to actually do another set.
It's not the fact that I
couldn't do it... I did it.
It's the fact that it changes
you psychologically.
It changes you into a different person.
You know, I was not trained to do it,
and it messed me up.
Taking that plunger
and pushing it in
sort of set me on a particular course
that I wasn't really prepared for.
I expected to be trained.
I expected to be counseled.
None of that took place.
There's still those
fundamental Christian rules
of "Thou Shalt Not Kill,"
and they're just trapped
in their own head with
this deep dark secret
of,
"I'm not supposed to be killing people."
I do believe if you've taken some lives,
you are a serial killer.
I do believe that.
But I also look at a
serial killer every day
when I look in the mirror.
I see a serial killer,
and there are times when
it becomes unbearable.
I haven't met anybody on an execution team
that was not experiencing some sort of
post traumatic damage.
Some of them survive, and many didn't.
Many committed suicide.
The only thing that has
kept me from turning into
one of these people
that you see on the news
is I got good professional
help and medication,
and my wife and my children.
These men that we've appointed
to keep us safe say, you know,
"I'm the garbage man
taking out your trash,
"or what you're considering to be trash,
and it's ruining my life."
- The executioners
- who were in charge
Of the botched executions
in Ohio and Arizona
had largely avoided public scrutiny.
But in Oklahoma, that would change
with the case of Clayton Lockett.
- Clayton Lockett was convicted
- of the murder
Of 18-year-old Stephanie Neiman.
Mr. Lockett shot her with a shotgun,
dug a grave,
and buried her alive.
I could see her coughing.
I could see the dirt coming in the
air as she was coughing. Mr. Lockett
confessed to the police.
He was convicted on 19 counts.
He received about 2,500
years plus the death penalty.
Facing their own shortage
from the European drug ban,
Oklahoma announced they
would use Midazolam on Lockett,
and in a rare double header,
inmate Charles Warner to
be executed the same night.
Both of these crimes,
Charles Warner's
as well as Clayton Lockett's,
were pretty horrific.
Charles Warner raped and murdered a baby,
so there wasn't a lot of
sympathy for either person.
The question is whether
the process was handled
constitutionally and properly.
Susanna Gattoni
represented Lockett and Warner.
A law had been passed in Oklahoma in 2011
which made the source
of drugs completely secret.
But if my clients are not
being rendered unconscious,
that's cruel and unusual punishment.
So I tried to show that this statute
is unconstitutional because
it prohibits Mr. Lockett,
Mr. Warner, anyone,
from finding out where
those drugs came from.
In fact, Gattoni discovered
Oklahoma had planned to
execute Lockett and Warner
with drugs purchased in a
potentially illegal manner.
Some correspondents from
the Attorney General's office
admitted that the drugs
were coming from a compounding pharmacy
which is not regulated by the F.D.A.
Compounding pharmacies
are neighborhood pharmacies, in some cases,
that typically don't do
this kind of thing at all.
They do small drugs, lotions and creams,
and other sort of simple things.
Compounding pharmacies
don't traditionally make
intravenous compounds.
That's not what they're for.
Nobody really oversees
what is in the compound.
Nobody oversees if, in fact,
the drug will do what it's supposed to do.
If the State of Oklahoma
is buying drugs from a compounding pharmacy
without a doctor/patient relationship,
then that would mean that
they're violating federal law.
Criminal law.
In December of 2013,
a court in Missouri
ordered the release of
records detailing transactions
with a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma.
- Officials
- from the State of Missouri
Department of Corrections
went to Oklahoma to obtain drugs
from a compounding pharmacy,
apparently taking $11,000 in cash
and buying it from a company in Oklahoma
that wasn't licensed to
do business in Missouri.
It's like a shady drug deal.
Suddenly you've got people
carrying cash in the night
across state lines so that
the public doesn't know
how or where $11,000 in
taxpayer money was spent?
Abide by the Constitution
in the full light of day,
in front of everybody,
like our justice system's supposed to.
Missouri officials
were accused of buying drugs
from a compounding pharmacy
named The Apothecary Shoppe
in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Email chains also
revealed secret agreements
between The Apothecary
Shoppe and prison officials
in Louisiana and Georgia
where the pharmacy was
also unlicensed to do business.
It's almost a cloak and dagger way
of trying to get drugs
to use for executions.
I think the real reason for all the secrecy
that's happening now is states
are at the end of their rope,
so to speak.
They've tried everything.
This is like their last ditch effort
to proceed with executions.
With less than 24
hours to go,
the Oklahoma Supreme Court
agreed to hear Susanna Gattoni's argument
and granted Clayton
Lockett and Charles Warner
a rare stay of execution.
That decision would set off
one of the biggest political
firestorms in state history.
These are evildoers. These are animals.
You can call them demons, if you may.
We want justice.
Oklahoma Supreme Court
had granted Clayton Lockett
and Charles Warner a rare stay of execution
in order to hear Susanna Gattoni's argument
against secrecy laws that allowed the state
to mask their source of execution drugs.
Political reaction was swift and forceful.
I believe the death penalty
is an appropriate response
and punishment to those
who commit heinous crimes
against their fellow men and women.
The very next day,
Governor Fallin issued an executive order
which essentially said
she didn't believe that the
Oklahoma Supreme Court
had jurisdiction to do what they did.
She was trying to override,
usurp, what the court had done.
The governor said
that the Supreme Court
had exceeded its authority.
I don't know if that's ever
happened in Oklahoma,
and no one really questioned
whether she had the authority
to do that or not.
All the Supreme Court was
really asking for was more time
for the attorneys in the
case to brief these issues.
Reaction also came
from State Representative
and former police officer Mike Christian
who immediately introduced legislation
to impeach the judges
who'd voted in favor of Lockett and Warner.
The way I see it, these are evildoers.
These are animals.
You can call them demons, if you may.
And the people across this country,
in particular Oklahoma,
we want justice.
People in Oklahoma strongly
support the death penalty.
They feel we don't spend enough time
talking about the victims of these crimes.
An 18-year-old girl ends up
being savagely duct taped, shot,
and buried alive,
and we're talking about
Mr. Lockett and his rights.
Mike Christian is a very
pro-death penalty lawmaker,
as many are in Oklahoma.
Christian and several others
proposed Articles of Impeachment.
At that point we had a major
controversy on our hands
between our branches of government.
Faced with impeachment
and a battle against the governor,
the Oklahoma Supreme
Court now had second thoughts.
The very next day,
the Oklahoma Supreme
Court dissolved their stay,
said that the secrecy
statute was constitutional,
and called our claim frivolous.
In their ruling dissolving their own stay
they seemed kind of peeved
that this process was rushed,
but people were calling
for their impeachment.
I felt very disappointed in myself.
I was reminded of something my stepfather,
who is a lawyer,
told me once when I was in law school
stressing.
He said to me, "Susanna, just remember,
no matter what you do, no one will die."
And in this instance...
that... that wasn't true.
- At the Oklahoma
- State Penitentiary
On April 29th, 2014,
Clayton Lockett was led
to the execution chamber
while Charles Warner waited in the wings.
Ziva Branstetter witnessed
Lockett's execution.
The Clayton Lockett execution
was my fourth execution to witness.
It was scheduled for 6:00 p.m.
Eventually,
they roll up the shades at 6:20.
Lockett was asked if
he had a last statement,
and he just said, "No."
At 6:23 p.m.,
Lockett was injected
with Midazolam to render him unconscious.
At 6:31, the doctor checked consciousness,
and the warden announced
that the inmate was still conscious.
A few minutes later,
the doctor checked consciousness again
and said the inmate is unconscious.
A second drug
was injected,
intended to paralyze Lockett.
At 6:33,
I noticed a reaction.
There was a kicking of his leg.
Clayton Lockett began to
strain against the restraints.
His body began to kind of buck.
He was struggling and writhing.
He looked like he was trying
to get up off the gurney, to me.
It was really very shocking.
It was clear to me that Clayton
Lockett was still conscious.
It was clear to me that he was in pain.
I heard him say, "Man!" you know, like...
he was shocked at whatever
it was that he was feeling,
and he was lifting his
head up and shoulders
clear off the gurney mumbling,
"Something is wrong."
And then the warden said,
"Ladies and gentlemen,
we need to temporarily close the blinds."
And they closed the
blinds and shut off the mike.
I sat next to the victim's
family at the execution.
No one knew if he had died or if he lived
or what was happening.
They were concerned about that.
The attorneys who were witnessing this
on behalf of Clayton Lockett said,
"They're gonna revive him so
they can kill him another day."
The blinds would not reopen,
and at 6:56 p.m.,
Clayton Lockett's execution
was officially halted.
We were taken back
to the Media Witness Center,
but there was no clear discussion
of what was going on with Clayton Lockett.
Is Lockett dead, or... - We don't know.
- We don't know his status right now.
We don't know the status.
Breaking news from the
State Prison at McAlester.
The first of two scheduled
executions at the prison
did not go as planned.
Clayton Lockett was supposed
to receive the death penalty
for killing a woman 15 years ago,
but tonight,
his punishment is being referred to
as a botched execution.
Things obviously went horribly wrong
with Mr. Lockett's execution.
My assistant reached me and told me
that I needed to turn on a T.V.
to see what was happening.
The reports were that he was still alive.
At 7:23 p.m.,
the man in charge of Lockett's execution,
Department of Corrections
Director Robert Patton,
addressed the media.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I'm gonna make a short statement.
I will not be taking any questions,
so please don't scream and holler at me.
As those that were inside witnessed,
the drugs were not having the effect,
so the doctor observed the line
and determined that the line had blown.
It was my decision at that
time to stop the execution.
At approximately 7:06 hours,
the inmate suffered what appears to be
a massive heart attack and passed away.
Why did you decide
to lower the curtain?
So the physician could check the vein.
What's "line's blown"
mean?
The vein blew.
- The vein.
- Yes. - So it blew.
It means the vein exploded.
- Yes.
He said his vein exploded,
which I thought was a
really strange explanation
because veins don't generally explode.
The truth would only
be revealed
after months of investigation,
but in the meantime,
just down the hall from the death chamber,
Charles Warner had eaten his last meal.
Warner's family and lawyers
were now told that his
execution would proceed.
After the botched execution
of Clayton Lockett,
Charles Warner,
scheduled to die immediately after Lockett,
was left in the dark.
His family waited to attend his execution.
The family was very,
very deep in devout prayer.
The mother, of course,
was sobbing through her prayers.
It was very sad.
We waited for a long time.
It became time for Charles' execution,
and we were still sitting in that room,
and nobody was telling us anything.
Then another attorney
came rushing into our room
and said there is not gonna be an execution
for Charles Warner that night.
The family was crying with joy.
Mrs. Warner said, "You know,
those prayers were
heard by a higher being."
We were so relieved.
But the mood soon
turned sour as prison officials
seemed confused about
what exactly was going on.
We were gonna go home.
We were led out to the parking lot,
and we started to get in the car.
Well, out of the building
ran the warden yelling at us,
"Get back into this building.
You're breaking protocol.
You have to get back into the building."
Prison officials now told
Warner's family
the execution would proceed.
I was horrified.
We went back into the building,
and then we sat there for a while
not knowing if Charles
Warner would be executed.
I was angry and perplexed.
It was too late to go
file anything in the court.
We had no phone.
Finally, at some point,
we were told that Charles
Warner would not be executed,
and we were told to go home.
It was an incredible
roller coaster of emotions.
Investigations
into the botched execution
of Clayton Lockett
eventually revealed what
happened behind the blinds.
We later learned that the doctor
who was supposed to perform the execution
had backed out two days before
Clayton Lockett's execution,
and this other doctor,
who had only performed
one other execution in the state,
stepped in.
The doctor made 12
attempts to start an I.V.,
and it was not properly inserted.
The drugs were not delivered into his vein,
they went into the tissue.
There were no back-up drugs that night.
There was no emergency
plan if something went wrong.
Regarding the use
of Midazolam,
Mike Oakley from the Corrections Department
said, "I looked online, you know.
"Went past the key Wiki leaks,
Wiki leaks or whatever it is,
"and I did find out Midazolam
"would render a person unconscious,
so we thought it was okay."
Obviously, they need someone
who is better equipped
at knowing if someone
is rendered unconscious.
After hitting an artery,
causing Lockett's blood to spray,
the doctor who executed
Lockett said he hoped to,
quote, "Get enough money out of this
to go buy a new jacket."
What happened in
Oklahoma is deeply troubling.
Clayton Lockett's case
would bring world-wide attention
to America's botched executions
and questions about the
future of lethal injection.
- There's human rights outrage...
- After botching the delivery
of a new, untested combination of drugs.
Clayton Lockett was still said to be
shaking uncontrollably
20 minutes after the first
drug was administered.
- You've got amateur hour
- going on here.
You're having someone poorly
trained brew up something
in the back, so to speak,
in the kitchen saying,
"I've never tried this before.
Let's see how it goes."
And voices on both sides
of the issue
responded forcefully. The fact
that there may be some pain
during the process does not offend me.
I don't think it offends most
of the people in Oklahoma.
Why are we designing the
most pleasant death possible
for people who have imposed
the most unpleasant death possible?
I want them to sit back and think,
if that was your child,
would you have sympathy?
It took two hours for this man to die.
This guy snored on his way to hell.
It wasn't an execution.
This man was killed by
malpractice of a doctor.
He was killed by negligence of the states.
The Death Penalty is a government program
and the government, it takes them a week
to deliver a piece of mail.
What gives us the idea
that the government can
make life and death decisions
with life and death accuracy?
Lockett should be given the same mercy
that he gave his victim Stephanie,
and that would be none.
Our constitutional rights
are with us until we die.
We shouldn't dismiss them
because we think the person
who's being executed isn't deserving.
We are saying to the world,
this is done as a considered,
thoughtful moment of punishment,
not as some rageful, heinous act.
If that's the punishment we're imposing,
then we're him.
We're the heinous murderer.
Time is running out for
convicted killer Charles Warner
set to die at 6:00 p.m. in
the state's first execution
since last April.
Nine months after
Clayton Lockett's execution,
Oklahoma completed construction
on a brand new death chamber
which they were now ready
to use on Charles Warner.
A microphone will come on,
and the staff member
will read the Warrant of
Execution to the offender.
The offender will be allowed
to make a last statement.
The first drug in a three drug protocol,
Midazolam, will be administered.
But Warner's defense team
had filed one last plea
for a Stay of Execution
with the U.S. Supreme Court
claiming the use of Midazolam
was a violation of the 8th Amendment's ban
on cruel and unusual punishment.
Meanwhile, the mother of Warner's victim,
an 11-month-old baby,
made her feelings clear.
If they truly want to honor me,
then they will give him life in prison
without the possibility of parole.
I don't see any justice in just
sentencing someone to die.
To me, the justice is in someone
living with what they have done to you,
to your family,
and having to live with
that for the rest of their life
knowing they'll never walk out those bars.
When he dies,
I want it to be because it's his time,
not because he's been executed
due to what happened to me and my child,
and I don't want that on my hands.
It makes me feel like
I'm no different than him,
and I don't want to feel that way.
- The time
- for Warner's execution
Came and went as Oklahoma waited for word
from the U.S. Supreme Court
about whether they could
use Midazolam on Warner.
At 6:20 p.m., the decision came down.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote,
"The Food and Drug Administration
"has not approved Midazolam
for use as an anesthetic.
"The 8th Amendment
guarantees that no one should be
"subjected to an execution
that causes searing,
unnecessary pain before death."
But Justice Sotomayor's
opinion was in the minority.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the U.S. Supreme Court has
denied the Stay of Execution,
and the process will begin shortly.
I need the witnesses to
prepare themselves for transport.
of Death Row Stories,
executions around the
country go horribly wrong.
It was clear something was not right.
He looked like he was
trying to get up off the gurney.
You could see a spasm go through his body.
But when secrets emerge
about government executions...
You've got people
carrying cash in the night
across state lines.
They want to create the
aura that everything is smooth.
The question is asked,
"Does it matter how
we put people to death?"
These are evildoers.
These are animals.
We want justice.
Who cares if he feels pain?
You are not allowed
to experiment on people
when killing them.
We've demonstrated again
and again and again... we
make these God-like decisions
without God-like skills.
- There's a body - in the water.
- He was butchered
- and murdered.
Many people proclaim their innocence.
In this case, there are
a number of things that stink.
This man is remorseless.
He needs to pay for it with his life.
The electric chair
flashed in front of my eyes.
Get a conviction at all costs.
Let the truth fall where it may.
From the beginning
of recorded history,
civilization has sought justice
through the ultimate punishment... death.
And as societies have evolved,
so, too, have their methods of execution.
In ancient Rome,
prisoners were fed to the lions
in front of large amphitheaters of people.
In Greece, the condemned
were sealed inside a bronze bull
which, when set on fire,
would pour smoke from the nostrils
while the person inside roasted to death.
In England,
prisoners were drawn and quartered
with horses pulling
people apart limb by limb.
France, famously, used the guillotine,
responding to the chant,
"Off with their heads."
For a long time,
the method of choice
in America was hanging.
In the United States,
the first recorded execution
was in 1608 in Jamestown, Virginia.
Over the years hangings
became the great social event,
the great source of entertainment.
People brought picnics.
Teachers would bring the students.
Parents would bring the kids.
There was a choir, a band.
Executions were public because
they were considered a ritual
whose goal was to deter the populous.
But our history
of executions
also included a dark side,
botched executions
that quickly turned
horrifying for the masses.
It turns out it's difficult
to properly hang somebody.
If the drop was too long,
the person's head would fall off.
So somebody invented
a machine where the rope
would go up to a pulley
and a boulder was dropped.
They called it Jerk to
Jesus or Launch to Eternity.
There was a man named Eddie Ives.
Eddie weighed only 80 pounds.
So the weight drops and he goes kazoom,
and twirled around the horizontal beam
and came crashing down to the ground.
They had to hang him twice.
There was a lot of concern
about botched hangings.
That's why the electric
chair was brought in.
By the late 1800s,
electricity was transforming America.
In order to demonstrate
the incredible power
of this new phenomenon,
Thomas Edison filmed the
electrocution of an elephant.
Executioners quickly
seized on this modern method
of putting the condemned to death.
One of our first electric appliances
was the electric chair,
but the electric chair's
got its own problems.
Jesse Tafero was executed
in 1990 in the electric chair
in Florida.
A lot of reasonable people do
believe that he was innocent.
There were 8-inch flames
that erupted from the skull cap
that Tafero had on during the execution,
so he basically burned to death.
In 1997,
a man named Pedro Medina was executed.
Flame erupted all
across the top of his head,
like, from across this way,
from one ear to the other.
The warden of Florida State
Prison was quoted as saying,
"The flames, the smoke, the putrid odor,
and his death by inferno plagues me still."
In 1977,
lethal injection was invented in Oklahoma
as a more humane way to execute prisoners.
Historically,
executions were very ugly.
Hangings. Electrocution.
And so one of the goals of the state now
is that it looks calm and peaceful.
To a great degree,
the lethal injection regime
has much more to do with the witnesses
than it has to do with the condemned.
The witnesses weren't seeing
the condemned writhe or cough
or choke or snort.
The challenge
with lethal injection
was finding executioners
with the medical skills
to do the job.
Today, in the United States,
it violates ethical codes
for physicians to be involved.
So usually the people who
are involved in the executions
are not physicians,
and they are not properly
trained to do an I.V. insertion,
much less an execution.
Over the years,
the issue of medical training
led to numerous mistakes,
but a watershed moment came in 2009
with the case of Romell Broom in Ohio.
Just 17 steps from the room
where he'd be put to death,
Romell Broom,
convicted of raping and murdering
a 14-year-old girl 25 years ago,
was helping his executioners.
He laid on his side, flexed his muscles
to help them find a vein
to inject lethal chemicals.
Broom never made it out
of the preparation chamber.
There were 20 different
needle insertions into Mr. Broom
in all parts of his body...
In the back of his hand,
in his arm, in his ankle.
Mr. Broom was actually
trying to help them find the vein.
After two hours, the Director
of Rehabilitation and Correction
made an unprecedented request.
He asked the Governor to
grant a temporary reprieve.
Romell Broom became
the only man in U.S. history
to walk away from a lethal injection alive.
Romell Broom is still
on death row,
but he does not have an execution date
and his attorneys are arguing
that you can't try and kill someone twice.
But corrections officials
in Ohio were undeterred.
They devised a new way to kill Romell Broom
called Plan B.
Most executions used one
drug to put the inmate to sleep,
a second drug to paralyze the inmate,
and finally a third drug to stop the heart.
Plan B proposed using
a drug called Midazolam
injected into the muscles
to put the prisoner to sleep,
and this invention would open
a proverbial Pandora's
Box of botched executions,
starting with Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire.
Dennis McGuire
was a human guinea pig
for the State of Ohio to experiment on,
and it did, in a horrific way.
After the failed lethal
injection of Romell Broom,
the State of Ohio proposed
a new method of execution
using a drug called Midazolam.
The medical community
had immediate concerns.
Traditionally, the first drug was used
to induce unconsciousness.
Midazolam does not do that.
If the inmate is not unconscious
and the inmate receives
a second drug that paralyzes the muscles,
that is a horrible, horrible situation
where you are awake but you cannot move.
You cannot breathe.
So you have the sensation of suffocating,
essentially,
and you can't communicate to
anybody that this is happening.
Ohio originally
proposed using Midazolam
as a back-up plan,
but the controversial drug would
soon become their only option.
Tonight, U.S. states
are being forced
to find new drugs for lethal injections
since European-based manufacturers
banned the U.S. prisons
from using their drugs
to carry out the death sentence.
The suppliers,
most of them in Europe
where they don't have the death penalty,
said,
"We will not sell you drugs to kill people.
Our drugs are not intended to kill people."
In January, 2014, Ohio announced
they would try their Plan B drug,
Midazolam,
on inmate Dennis McGuire.
McGuire had been convicted
of the rape and murder
of a housewife named Joy Stewart.
He slashed her throat,
severed her jugular.
- She was carrying a baby...
- She was seven months pregnant.
She was seven months pregnant.
The baby suffocated to death as well.
If you're gonna have the death penalty,
this guy's the poster
child for it for what he did.
Tim Young represented McGuire
in his final appeals.
When we went to court with Mr. McGuire,
we argued that Midazolam
was likely to leave him
in severe pain, almost torture,
as if he were drowning
or unable to breathe,
and choking and gasping for air.
But arguing
the dangers of Midazolam
presented an unnerving catch-22.
The burden of proof is so high
to show that it's gonna go bad,
it actually has to go bad.
The judge said that this
was clearly an experiment,
but he likewise said that the inmate
was not entitled to a pain-free execution.
The federal court has ruled
that they believe the
execution will be humane.
If I believed that it would not be,
we would not be proceeding.
Dennis McGuire was led into
the execution chamber
on January 16th, 2014.
Dennis McGuire
had a very brief
but emotional final statement.
He said he was sorry for what he had done,
and he apologized to the family.
He mentioned his son and daughter,
who were there, and how he loved them.
And then the drugs began flowing.
It typically would have been five or six,
maybe ten minutes,
and it would have been all over.
But after a few minutes,
Dennis McGuire began gasping,
kind of wheezing and coughing,
sucking in breath.
For 13 minutes,
his body was struggling not to die.
It was obvious that he was
trying to get air into his lungs
and the drugs were preventing it.
And 13 minutes doesn't
sound like very long,
but if you're watching somebody
do that with his family there,
it's an eternity.
It just went on and on and on.
And I'll be candid, as a human being,
I was at this point going,
"Please, just let him die.
Let it stop."
Finally, at 10:53 p.m.,
Dennis McGuire was declared dead.
Yesterday,
I watched the State of Ohio kill my dad.
I witnessed his execution
along with my wife and my sister.
After watching my dad's execution...
I know what cruel and
unusual punishment is.
Anger bubbled up quickly.
This was so foreseeable and so obvious.
The agony and terror of watching my dad
suffocate to death lasted
more than 19 minutes.
I saw him just gasping for his air.
His head kept coming up,
and he just... his mouth was wide open
and he was making all
kinds of horrible noises.
We just don't need to do this.
There's nothing in the name of the people
that justifies this horrible,
painful process before dying.
Europe's drug ban
soon left other states
facing their own drug shortages,
and despite Dennis
McGuire's botched execution,
lessons from Midazolam
had yet to be learned.
After the McGuire execution,
I thought there would be no state
that would consider using Midazolam,
that they would be moving on.
And I have since been
disabused of that notion.
McGuire was predictable.
It was foreseeable.
How do you ever go
forward after that moment?
That's just beyond horrifying to me.
After the botched
execution of Dennis McGuire,
many thought that the
controversial drug Midazolam
would no longer be used in executions.
But less than six months later,
Arizona announced they would use
Midazolam on inmate Joseph Wood.
Wood was found guilty of
murdering his ex-girlfriend
and her father in 1989.
We were very aware
about what happened
with the execution of Dennis McGuire,
so we asked the Department of Correction
for information about
the source of the drugs
and the qualifications of the executioners,
and wardens and the State of Arizona
told us to go pound sand.
It would not disclose
the source of the drugs
and it said, "Trust us.
The people that are going
to be doing this are qualified."
Why all the secrecy?
Because I think the
Departments of Corrections
would like to take care
of this ugly little business
in as efficient a way as possible.
They have a job to do.
They have executions to carry out.
If people start raising questions
about where the drugs come from,
who the doctor is,
then it slows down the process.
Joseph Wood was taken
to the execution chamber
at the State Penitentiary in
Florence on July 23rd, 2014.
At 1:52 p.m.,
the State of Arizona injected Wood
with 50 milligrams of Midazolam,
five times the amount used in Ohio.
Mr. Wood opened his mouth wide
and took a very deep breath.
Suddenly his mouth
popped open... like that,
and, um...
everybody sort of jumped a little bit,
you know.
Hadn't seen that before.
You could see a spasm go through his body.
You could see it went all
the way down to his stomach.
Gasping like a fish. It
was extraordinarily loud.
I started doing, you know,
hash marks in my notebook
each time that he would
make that sucking sound.
He was gulping. He was gasping.
He was struggling to breathe.
I eventually counted 240 hash marks.
It went on and on, and I wondered,
"Is someone going to stop this execution?"
There were two lawyers,
in addition to Dale Baich,
sitting next to me,
and I saw them get up and go out.
One full hour
into the execution,
Joseph Wood was still alive.
Baich called for the
execution to be halted.
We immediately filed a motion
with the Federal District Court
asking the federal judge
to stop the execution.
They got an Assistant
Attorney General on the phone
and he said, "He's unconscious.
He's not feeling any pain.
"The judge said," Well,
do you have an E.E.G. set up to him?"
"Well, no we don't." "Well,
so then you don't know."
On the call,
the Assistant Attorney General
admitted that a second dose of Midazolam
had now been given to Wood.
What was not reported was that
14 additional doses of
the drug were administered
while all this was going on.
Nearly all drugs have
what we call a ceiling effect.
Even though Joseph Wood
received a total of 750
milligrams of Midazolam,
he was breathing and his heart was working
for nearly two hours.
Eventually,
Joseph Wood's gasping slowed,
and it slowed,
and eventually it petered out,
and it was done.
And then finally it was over.
After an hour
and 57 minutes,
Joseph Wood was finally declared dead,
becoming one of the longest
executions in US history.
To many, this was a clear case
of cruel and unusual punishment.
Joe Wood is dead,
but it took him two hours to die.
I can't imagine this is what
the criminal justice system
had hoped for when they came
up with this new drug protocol.
There was someone from
the Attorney General's office
that said, "Oh, it was very peaceful.
He was just sleeping and snoring."
It's like, "No,
this is not what it looks like."
The victim's family
had little sympathy for Joseph Wood.
Everybody here, from what I've heard,
said it was excruciating. You don't know
what excruciating is.
What's excruciating
is seeing your dad lying
there in a pool of blood.
Seeing your sister lying
there in a pool of blood.
That's excruciating. This man deserved it.
This man conducted
a horrifying murder,
and you guys are going, "Oh,
let's worry about the drug
and how he... affect."
Well, why didn't we give him a bullet?
Why didn't we give him some Drano?
All you people that
think these drugs are bad,
well, the hell with you guys."
One of the family members said,
what does it matter if
it's done with Drano?
Well, the answer is is we don't do that.
This is the United States.
We have a Constitutional Amendment
that forbids cruel and unusual punishment.
We're supposed to be above that.
With botched
executions now spreading,
questions mounted about
the fate of the 3,000 people
remaining on Death Row.
And with the moral implications
falling on those normally
hidden behind the curtain,
the executioners themselves
began to speak out.
I just felt like the people
had the right to know something
that's been cloaked in secrecy
for years and years and years.
I just wanted the people to understand.
It's not that I couldn't handle it,
it's that I couldn't handle
what it turned me into.
When lethal injection
became the standard method
of capital punishment,
the executioners themselves,
some with little or no medical training,
suffered unintended consequences.
Reverend Carroll Pickett
witnessed 95 executions
at the Death House in Huntsville, Texas.
We've had guards
who were strapping people down
and faint in the death house.
We've had guards come
back in to undo the straps,
and they freeze because
they can't touch death.
They come and go quite rapidly.
Every couple weeks another would change,
and they just couldn't do it.
The life of an executioner
is very much a hidden world,
literally shrouded in secrecy.
Filmmaker Patty Dillon
directed a documentary
about executioners titled...
The executioners that
I've spent the most time with
joined the Department of Corrections
and worked their way up
from a correctional officer
all the way up to a Major
which is when they became executioners.
It was the highest promotion.
It just happened to include execution.
Among the executioners
Patty found
were Craig Baxley and Terry Bracey
who carried out executions
at the Broad River
Prison in South Carolina.
The inmate is less then
just a few feet away.
The duty that I had was to
take the syringe, screw it in,
and then do the plunging.
If the inmate does not die
within a certain few minutes,
then you have to actually do another set.
It's not the fact that I
couldn't do it... I did it.
It's the fact that it changes
you psychologically.
It changes you into a different person.
You know, I was not trained to do it,
and it messed me up.
Taking that plunger
and pushing it in
sort of set me on a particular course
that I wasn't really prepared for.
I expected to be trained.
I expected to be counseled.
None of that took place.
There's still those
fundamental Christian rules
of "Thou Shalt Not Kill,"
and they're just trapped
in their own head with
this deep dark secret
of,
"I'm not supposed to be killing people."
I do believe if you've taken some lives,
you are a serial killer.
I do believe that.
But I also look at a
serial killer every day
when I look in the mirror.
I see a serial killer,
and there are times when
it becomes unbearable.
I haven't met anybody on an execution team
that was not experiencing some sort of
post traumatic damage.
Some of them survive, and many didn't.
Many committed suicide.
The only thing that has
kept me from turning into
one of these people
that you see on the news
is I got good professional
help and medication,
and my wife and my children.
These men that we've appointed
to keep us safe say, you know,
"I'm the garbage man
taking out your trash,
"or what you're considering to be trash,
and it's ruining my life."
- The executioners
- who were in charge
Of the botched executions
in Ohio and Arizona
had largely avoided public scrutiny.
But in Oklahoma, that would change
with the case of Clayton Lockett.
- Clayton Lockett was convicted
- of the murder
Of 18-year-old Stephanie Neiman.
Mr. Lockett shot her with a shotgun,
dug a grave,
and buried her alive.
I could see her coughing.
I could see the dirt coming in the
air as she was coughing. Mr. Lockett
confessed to the police.
He was convicted on 19 counts.
He received about 2,500
years plus the death penalty.
Facing their own shortage
from the European drug ban,
Oklahoma announced they
would use Midazolam on Lockett,
and in a rare double header,
inmate Charles Warner to
be executed the same night.
Both of these crimes,
Charles Warner's
as well as Clayton Lockett's,
were pretty horrific.
Charles Warner raped and murdered a baby,
so there wasn't a lot of
sympathy for either person.
The question is whether
the process was handled
constitutionally and properly.
Susanna Gattoni
represented Lockett and Warner.
A law had been passed in Oklahoma in 2011
which made the source
of drugs completely secret.
But if my clients are not
being rendered unconscious,
that's cruel and unusual punishment.
So I tried to show that this statute
is unconstitutional because
it prohibits Mr. Lockett,
Mr. Warner, anyone,
from finding out where
those drugs came from.
In fact, Gattoni discovered
Oklahoma had planned to
execute Lockett and Warner
with drugs purchased in a
potentially illegal manner.
Some correspondents from
the Attorney General's office
admitted that the drugs
were coming from a compounding pharmacy
which is not regulated by the F.D.A.
Compounding pharmacies
are neighborhood pharmacies, in some cases,
that typically don't do
this kind of thing at all.
They do small drugs, lotions and creams,
and other sort of simple things.
Compounding pharmacies
don't traditionally make
intravenous compounds.
That's not what they're for.
Nobody really oversees
what is in the compound.
Nobody oversees if, in fact,
the drug will do what it's supposed to do.
If the State of Oklahoma
is buying drugs from a compounding pharmacy
without a doctor/patient relationship,
then that would mean that
they're violating federal law.
Criminal law.
In December of 2013,
a court in Missouri
ordered the release of
records detailing transactions
with a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma.
- Officials
- from the State of Missouri
Department of Corrections
went to Oklahoma to obtain drugs
from a compounding pharmacy,
apparently taking $11,000 in cash
and buying it from a company in Oklahoma
that wasn't licensed to
do business in Missouri.
It's like a shady drug deal.
Suddenly you've got people
carrying cash in the night
across state lines so that
the public doesn't know
how or where $11,000 in
taxpayer money was spent?
Abide by the Constitution
in the full light of day,
in front of everybody,
like our justice system's supposed to.
Missouri officials
were accused of buying drugs
from a compounding pharmacy
named The Apothecary Shoppe
in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Email chains also
revealed secret agreements
between The Apothecary
Shoppe and prison officials
in Louisiana and Georgia
where the pharmacy was
also unlicensed to do business.
It's almost a cloak and dagger way
of trying to get drugs
to use for executions.
I think the real reason for all the secrecy
that's happening now is states
are at the end of their rope,
so to speak.
They've tried everything.
This is like their last ditch effort
to proceed with executions.
With less than 24
hours to go,
the Oklahoma Supreme Court
agreed to hear Susanna Gattoni's argument
and granted Clayton
Lockett and Charles Warner
a rare stay of execution.
That decision would set off
one of the biggest political
firestorms in state history.
These are evildoers. These are animals.
You can call them demons, if you may.
We want justice.
Oklahoma Supreme Court
had granted Clayton Lockett
and Charles Warner a rare stay of execution
in order to hear Susanna Gattoni's argument
against secrecy laws that allowed the state
to mask their source of execution drugs.
Political reaction was swift and forceful.
I believe the death penalty
is an appropriate response
and punishment to those
who commit heinous crimes
against their fellow men and women.
The very next day,
Governor Fallin issued an executive order
which essentially said
she didn't believe that the
Oklahoma Supreme Court
had jurisdiction to do what they did.
She was trying to override,
usurp, what the court had done.
The governor said
that the Supreme Court
had exceeded its authority.
I don't know if that's ever
happened in Oklahoma,
and no one really questioned
whether she had the authority
to do that or not.
All the Supreme Court was
really asking for was more time
for the attorneys in the
case to brief these issues.
Reaction also came
from State Representative
and former police officer Mike Christian
who immediately introduced legislation
to impeach the judges
who'd voted in favor of Lockett and Warner.
The way I see it, these are evildoers.
These are animals.
You can call them demons, if you may.
And the people across this country,
in particular Oklahoma,
we want justice.
People in Oklahoma strongly
support the death penalty.
They feel we don't spend enough time
talking about the victims of these crimes.
An 18-year-old girl ends up
being savagely duct taped, shot,
and buried alive,
and we're talking about
Mr. Lockett and his rights.
Mike Christian is a very
pro-death penalty lawmaker,
as many are in Oklahoma.
Christian and several others
proposed Articles of Impeachment.
At that point we had a major
controversy on our hands
between our branches of government.
Faced with impeachment
and a battle against the governor,
the Oklahoma Supreme
Court now had second thoughts.
The very next day,
the Oklahoma Supreme
Court dissolved their stay,
said that the secrecy
statute was constitutional,
and called our claim frivolous.
In their ruling dissolving their own stay
they seemed kind of peeved
that this process was rushed,
but people were calling
for their impeachment.
I felt very disappointed in myself.
I was reminded of something my stepfather,
who is a lawyer,
told me once when I was in law school
stressing.
He said to me, "Susanna, just remember,
no matter what you do, no one will die."
And in this instance...
that... that wasn't true.
- At the Oklahoma
- State Penitentiary
On April 29th, 2014,
Clayton Lockett was led
to the execution chamber
while Charles Warner waited in the wings.
Ziva Branstetter witnessed
Lockett's execution.
The Clayton Lockett execution
was my fourth execution to witness.
It was scheduled for 6:00 p.m.
Eventually,
they roll up the shades at 6:20.
Lockett was asked if
he had a last statement,
and he just said, "No."
At 6:23 p.m.,
Lockett was injected
with Midazolam to render him unconscious.
At 6:31, the doctor checked consciousness,
and the warden announced
that the inmate was still conscious.
A few minutes later,
the doctor checked consciousness again
and said the inmate is unconscious.
A second drug
was injected,
intended to paralyze Lockett.
At 6:33,
I noticed a reaction.
There was a kicking of his leg.
Clayton Lockett began to
strain against the restraints.
His body began to kind of buck.
He was struggling and writhing.
He looked like he was trying
to get up off the gurney, to me.
It was really very shocking.
It was clear to me that Clayton
Lockett was still conscious.
It was clear to me that he was in pain.
I heard him say, "Man!" you know, like...
he was shocked at whatever
it was that he was feeling,
and he was lifting his
head up and shoulders
clear off the gurney mumbling,
"Something is wrong."
And then the warden said,
"Ladies and gentlemen,
we need to temporarily close the blinds."
And they closed the
blinds and shut off the mike.
I sat next to the victim's
family at the execution.
No one knew if he had died or if he lived
or what was happening.
They were concerned about that.
The attorneys who were witnessing this
on behalf of Clayton Lockett said,
"They're gonna revive him so
they can kill him another day."
The blinds would not reopen,
and at 6:56 p.m.,
Clayton Lockett's execution
was officially halted.
We were taken back
to the Media Witness Center,
but there was no clear discussion
of what was going on with Clayton Lockett.
Is Lockett dead, or... - We don't know.
- We don't know his status right now.
We don't know the status.
Breaking news from the
State Prison at McAlester.
The first of two scheduled
executions at the prison
did not go as planned.
Clayton Lockett was supposed
to receive the death penalty
for killing a woman 15 years ago,
but tonight,
his punishment is being referred to
as a botched execution.
Things obviously went horribly wrong
with Mr. Lockett's execution.
My assistant reached me and told me
that I needed to turn on a T.V.
to see what was happening.
The reports were that he was still alive.
At 7:23 p.m.,
the man in charge of Lockett's execution,
Department of Corrections
Director Robert Patton,
addressed the media.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I'm gonna make a short statement.
I will not be taking any questions,
so please don't scream and holler at me.
As those that were inside witnessed,
the drugs were not having the effect,
so the doctor observed the line
and determined that the line had blown.
It was my decision at that
time to stop the execution.
At approximately 7:06 hours,
the inmate suffered what appears to be
a massive heart attack and passed away.
Why did you decide
to lower the curtain?
So the physician could check the vein.
What's "line's blown"
mean?
The vein blew.
- The vein.
- Yes. - So it blew.
It means the vein exploded.
- Yes.
He said his vein exploded,
which I thought was a
really strange explanation
because veins don't generally explode.
The truth would only
be revealed
after months of investigation,
but in the meantime,
just down the hall from the death chamber,
Charles Warner had eaten his last meal.
Warner's family and lawyers
were now told that his
execution would proceed.
After the botched execution
of Clayton Lockett,
Charles Warner,
scheduled to die immediately after Lockett,
was left in the dark.
His family waited to attend his execution.
The family was very,
very deep in devout prayer.
The mother, of course,
was sobbing through her prayers.
It was very sad.
We waited for a long time.
It became time for Charles' execution,
and we were still sitting in that room,
and nobody was telling us anything.
Then another attorney
came rushing into our room
and said there is not gonna be an execution
for Charles Warner that night.
The family was crying with joy.
Mrs. Warner said, "You know,
those prayers were
heard by a higher being."
We were so relieved.
But the mood soon
turned sour as prison officials
seemed confused about
what exactly was going on.
We were gonna go home.
We were led out to the parking lot,
and we started to get in the car.
Well, out of the building
ran the warden yelling at us,
"Get back into this building.
You're breaking protocol.
You have to get back into the building."
Prison officials now told
Warner's family
the execution would proceed.
I was horrified.
We went back into the building,
and then we sat there for a while
not knowing if Charles
Warner would be executed.
I was angry and perplexed.
It was too late to go
file anything in the court.
We had no phone.
Finally, at some point,
we were told that Charles
Warner would not be executed,
and we were told to go home.
It was an incredible
roller coaster of emotions.
Investigations
into the botched execution
of Clayton Lockett
eventually revealed what
happened behind the blinds.
We later learned that the doctor
who was supposed to perform the execution
had backed out two days before
Clayton Lockett's execution,
and this other doctor,
who had only performed
one other execution in the state,
stepped in.
The doctor made 12
attempts to start an I.V.,
and it was not properly inserted.
The drugs were not delivered into his vein,
they went into the tissue.
There were no back-up drugs that night.
There was no emergency
plan if something went wrong.
Regarding the use
of Midazolam,
Mike Oakley from the Corrections Department
said, "I looked online, you know.
"Went past the key Wiki leaks,
Wiki leaks or whatever it is,
"and I did find out Midazolam
"would render a person unconscious,
so we thought it was okay."
Obviously, they need someone
who is better equipped
at knowing if someone
is rendered unconscious.
After hitting an artery,
causing Lockett's blood to spray,
the doctor who executed
Lockett said he hoped to,
quote, "Get enough money out of this
to go buy a new jacket."
What happened in
Oklahoma is deeply troubling.
Clayton Lockett's case
would bring world-wide attention
to America's botched executions
and questions about the
future of lethal injection.
- There's human rights outrage...
- After botching the delivery
of a new, untested combination of drugs.
Clayton Lockett was still said to be
shaking uncontrollably
20 minutes after the first
drug was administered.
- You've got amateur hour
- going on here.
You're having someone poorly
trained brew up something
in the back, so to speak,
in the kitchen saying,
"I've never tried this before.
Let's see how it goes."
And voices on both sides
of the issue
responded forcefully. The fact
that there may be some pain
during the process does not offend me.
I don't think it offends most
of the people in Oklahoma.
Why are we designing the
most pleasant death possible
for people who have imposed
the most unpleasant death possible?
I want them to sit back and think,
if that was your child,
would you have sympathy?
It took two hours for this man to die.
This guy snored on his way to hell.
It wasn't an execution.
This man was killed by
malpractice of a doctor.
He was killed by negligence of the states.
The Death Penalty is a government program
and the government, it takes them a week
to deliver a piece of mail.
What gives us the idea
that the government can
make life and death decisions
with life and death accuracy?
Lockett should be given the same mercy
that he gave his victim Stephanie,
and that would be none.
Our constitutional rights
are with us until we die.
We shouldn't dismiss them
because we think the person
who's being executed isn't deserving.
We are saying to the world,
this is done as a considered,
thoughtful moment of punishment,
not as some rageful, heinous act.
If that's the punishment we're imposing,
then we're him.
We're the heinous murderer.
Time is running out for
convicted killer Charles Warner
set to die at 6:00 p.m. in
the state's first execution
since last April.
Nine months after
Clayton Lockett's execution,
Oklahoma completed construction
on a brand new death chamber
which they were now ready
to use on Charles Warner.
A microphone will come on,
and the staff member
will read the Warrant of
Execution to the offender.
The offender will be allowed
to make a last statement.
The first drug in a three drug protocol,
Midazolam, will be administered.
But Warner's defense team
had filed one last plea
for a Stay of Execution
with the U.S. Supreme Court
claiming the use of Midazolam
was a violation of the 8th Amendment's ban
on cruel and unusual punishment.
Meanwhile, the mother of Warner's victim,
an 11-month-old baby,
made her feelings clear.
If they truly want to honor me,
then they will give him life in prison
without the possibility of parole.
I don't see any justice in just
sentencing someone to die.
To me, the justice is in someone
living with what they have done to you,
to your family,
and having to live with
that for the rest of their life
knowing they'll never walk out those bars.
When he dies,
I want it to be because it's his time,
not because he's been executed
due to what happened to me and my child,
and I don't want that on my hands.
It makes me feel like
I'm no different than him,
and I don't want to feel that way.
- The time
- for Warner's execution
Came and went as Oklahoma waited for word
from the U.S. Supreme Court
about whether they could
use Midazolam on Warner.
At 6:20 p.m., the decision came down.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote,
"The Food and Drug Administration
"has not approved Midazolam
for use as an anesthetic.
"The 8th Amendment
guarantees that no one should be
"subjected to an execution
that causes searing,
unnecessary pain before death."
But Justice Sotomayor's
opinion was in the minority.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the U.S. Supreme Court has
denied the Stay of Execution,
and the process will begin shortly.
I need the witnesses to
prepare themselves for transport.