Who is coaching the Oklahoma death row inmates?
Via News OK
Prison officers shocked an uncooperative Clayton Lockett with a Taser and found a self-inflicted cut on his arm in the hours before he was brought to the execution chamber, where medical staff had trouble finding a viable place to start an intravenous line to deliver deadly drugs, according to a timeline of the botched lethal injection.
After 51 minutes of trying to find a spot to insert the line in his arms, legs and feet, it was finally placed in his groin, and he was covered by a sheet “to prevent witness viewing of the groin area,” the timeline said.
“Obviously, they didn’t want to show that,” Gov. Mary Fallin said in a brief news conference Thursday to discuss the timeline sent to her by Corrections Department Director Robert Patton.
She said it was too early to draw conclusions about Tuesday night’s events.
“That is why I asked for a review,” Fallin said. “We don’t know all the answers.”
The problems starting the line and its location hidden under a sheet may prove important in an investigation into why the execution went bad. A physician present at all executions usually is able to easily look at the intravenous lines flowing into exposed arms of the person receiving a lethal injection.
Lockett writhed, grimaced and strained to move his head after the drugs were administered — and at a time when he was supposed to already be unconscious. The execution was called off, but he ended up dying, apparently of a heart attack, 43 minutes after the lethal injection began.
The timeline indicates that the first drug in a three-drug combination was administered at 6:23 p.m. At 6:42 p.m. the shades were lowered in the execution chamber, and two minutes later a doctor looked under the sheet and found the vein taking the deadly drugs had collapsed and “the drugs had either absorbed into tissue, leaked out or both,” the timeline said.