Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Botched Oklahoma execution comes as alternatives emerge from shadows

Death row inmate Clayton Lockett in a picture from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections By Jon Herskovitz AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Firing squads, electric chairs and other methods of execution seen as cruel or antiquated could be getting a fresh look after Oklahoma botched a lethal injection, leaving the condemned inmate withering in apparent pain on its death chamber gurney. Lawmakers in several states this year have put forward legislation to revise alternative methods of capital punishment in the face of a shortage of drugs once used for executions as well as legal challenges to new lethal "cocktails." Oklahoma was among those states, and it had faced lawsuits to stop the execution of convicted rapist and murderer Clayton Lockett, who died on Tuesday night of an apparent heart attack minutes after a medical official on the scene called a halt to the botched process, saying something had gone wrong with the lethal injection. "As long as there are problems with lethal injection, and there have been and there will be, there will always be legislators determined to kill people with some other method," said Rick Halperin, director of the Embrey Human Rights Program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.








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