By Jeremy Kohler
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — In the wake of a botched execution in Oklahoma, attorneys for condemned Missouri prisoner Russell Bucklew asked Gov. Jay Nixon on Wednesday to suspend Missouri’s death penalty.
But a spokesman for Nixon said he continued to support his state’s execution protocol, which has been upheld by courts.
Bucklew, 45, is scheduled to die by injection May 21. He was convicted of fatally shooting Michael Sanders on March 21, 1996, in Cape Girardeau. Bucklew would be the seventh Missouri inmate to be executed in seven months.
In Oklahoma, Gov. Mary Fallin is calling for an independent review of the state’s execution protocols after an inmate appeared to struggle in pain before the execution was called off. The inmate then died, apparently from a heart attack, Tuesday night 43 minutes after his execution began. The White House said Wednesday that the state’s process fell short of the nation’s standards for humane executions.
Until a review shows what caused Oklahoma killer Clayton Lockett to suffer, it was not clear Wednesday if lawyers could point to the botched execution to challenge the constitutionality of lethal injection in other states, including Missouri.
Lockett, 38, had been declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of three drugs in the state’s new lethal injection combination was administered Tuesday evening. Three minutes later, he began breathing heavily, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head. Officials later blamed a ruptured vein for the problems with the execution.
The blinds eventually were lowered to prevent those in the viewing gallery from watching what was happening in the death chamber, and the state’s top prison official later called a halt to the proceedings.
Fallin stayed the execution of Charles Warner, which was scheduled to begin two hours after Lockett’s.
Previously, most executions in Oklahoma, which used different fast-acting barbiturates, were completed and the inmate declared dead within about 10 minutes of the start of the procedure.
That has been the experience for the past six months in Missouri, where executioners administer a fatal dose of a single drug, pentobarbital.
But in Missouri, lawyers have seized on the one commonality in the state’s execution protocols: secrecy.
Like Oklahoma, Missouri has fought hard to keep confidential the identities of its execution team and lethal drug suppliers.
In 2006, a Post-Dispatch investigation revealed the identity of Missouri’s lead executioner, exposing a history including public discipline from the state medical board and false statements in court. After the story, then-Department of Corrections director Larry Crawford testified that he had lost confidence in the doctor. It took the state several weeks to find a board-certified anesthesiologist willing to participate in executions.
At the urging of the Department of Corrections, legislators revised state statutes to ban any person from “knowingly disclosing the identity of a current or former member of an execution team.”
In a news release Wednesday, Bucklew’s attorneys, Cheryl Pilate and Lindsay Runnels, said Lockett’s execution was botched “by the extreme secrecy surrounding lethal injection that Oklahoma fought hard in the courts to protect.”
“Last night’s botched execution in Oklahoma holds important lessons for Missouri and should lead to an immediate suspension of all executions in Missouri pending full disclosure by the State of its protocols and its drug,” the statement said. “Like Oklahoma, Missouri relies on unknown drugs and untested protocols, hiding everything behind a wall of secrecy. Under these circumstances, a botched execution is inevitable.”
The attorneys for Bucklew said independent medical specialists had reviewed Bucklew’s records and found that he had malformed blood vessels, adding to the risk that he would suffer an excruciating execution.
In an emailed statement, a spokesman for Nixon noted that “the State of Missouri has its own execution protocol.”
“This protocol has been upheld by the courts and used by the Department of Corrections to fulfill its obligation under the law and carry out these sentences for the most heinous of crimes in an efficient, effective and humane manner. The Governor continues to support the ultimate punishment imposed by juries and courts for the most merciless and violent crimes.”