A drug is headed to the Supreme Court: midazolam, which makes up a third of the lethal cocktail used in Oklahoma’s botched execution last year.
During his April 2014 execution, death row inmate Clayton Lockett woke up groaning in agony after his first injection with the cocktail. He finally passed away thirty minutes later from a heart attack, still in pain. A prison warden would later recall the execution as “a bloody mess.”
The court will determine whether or not midazolam meets their standards for humane executions. The decision to hear this case came just one week after the court declined to delay Oklahoma’s first execution since Lockett. The since-deceased inmate, Charles Warner, had appealed based on the uncertainty surrounding the state’s injections, which still contain midazolam. An AP reporter present at his death recalled him saying, “It feels like acid” and “My body is on fire.”
Lethal injections are currently the primary means of execution in every state.
The court ruled in 2008 that injections were allowed under the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, and stipulated the type of ingredients necessary for a humane death, including the anesthetic sodium thiopental.
But boycotts by manufacturers have made sodium thiopental impossible to obtain, so midazolam began replacing it. Since it came into practice, multiple states have botched executions involving the drug: an Ohio prisoner told the room he could “feel his whole body burning” during his execution.
Despite these controversial executions, support for the death penalty in America has remained fairly strong, although it has declined in some groups, particularly among young people.
The court is expected to hear oral arguments in the Spring.
