Summary: Today, one of the bloggers that I follow regularly linked to Charles Pierce’s angry opinion piece on the State Of Oklahoma’s execution of Clayton Lockett: Barbarians In Oklahoma. Because I’ve recently been under a general anaesthetic for surgery, I was curious and decided on a whim to look up the drugs used in the “lethal injection cocktail.” Shaken and upset, I hope that my interpretation of the pharmacological effects is wrong. I’m pretty sure I am not.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
— Eighth amendment to the US Constitution
Article deleted at author’s request.
(7) For More Information
(a) About the botched Oklahoma’s execution:
- Charles Pierce’s article: Barbarians In Oklahoma, Esquire, Esquire, 30 April 2014
- “How Oklahoma’s Botched Execution Affects the Death Penalty Debate“, Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic, 30 April 2014 — “State officials used untested drugs from a secret source to end the life of Clayton Lockett, who took more than 45 minutes to die.”
- “Cruel and Unusual“, Avicenna (self-identified as a medical student), FreeThoughtBogs, 3 May 2014
(b) “On Curare“, including a doctor’s experience with the drug
(c) “Rate of false conviction of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death“, Samuel R. Grossa et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in press — Summary:
The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. We use survival analysis to model this effect, and estimate that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.
(d) About Arbitrariness, from the Death Penalty Information Center. See their graphic.
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