A bungled Oklahoma execution continues to attract worldwide attention, and here at home, questions and lawsuits about Florida’s death penalty.Last Tuesday, a condemned prisoner in Oklahoma writhed and moaned after he was supposed to have been unconscious during a lethal injection execution.
Oklahoma prison officials say the execution of Clayton Lockett went awry when an intravenous line of deadly drugs became dislodged. He later died from an apparent heart attack.
Lockett had been sentenced to death for shooting a 19-year-old girl with a sawed-off shotgun and watching as two accomplices buried her alive.
Attorneys for death row inmates hope the spectacle provides new evidence to argue that lethal injections are inhumane and illegal. However, support for capital punishment remains strong in the states that perform the greatest number of executions — Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia and Ohio.
Like Oklahoma, Florida is among several states that have scrambled the past year or so to introduce a new drug into the three-drug lethal dose combination used in executions.
Pharmaceutical companies have stopped selling one of the drugs, pentobarbital sodium, to state prisons, so Florida, Oklahoma and others now substitute Midazolam.
Florida's use of Midazolam in an experimental drug combination has been challenged by the last several inmates executed in recent months on the grounds the new drug mixture may deliver a cruel and unusual death
Dr. Deborah Denno is a national expert on the death penalty with Fordham University School of Law. She joined Melissa Ross to discuss how the execution of Clayton Lockett could affect the future of the death penalty in Florida.
You can follow Melissa Ross on Twiter @MelissainJax.
