Richard Glossip
Richard Glossip had already eaten his last meal and was minutes away from execution when Oklahoma’s governor called it off last week, saying there were “last minute questions” about the execution protocol and the drugs.
It later emerged that the Department of Corrections had the wrong drugs on hand. Officials in Oklahoma have not explained how this error went unnoticed until minutes before an execution.
It is becoming more and more obvious that states are simply not capable of carrying out executions. Oklahoma is the state that made national news in 2014, when Clayton Lockett writhed and moaned for 43 minutes before dying from his lethal injection. The same state that supposedly conducted a thorough review and rewrote its execution protocols in the wake of that disaster.
The process of trying to kill people has become absurd. Lockett has now eaten three last meals while state officials try to figure out how to execute him. Meanwhile, his strongly supported claims of innocence have been ignored. (Glossip was convicted almost entirely on the testimony of an unreliable co-defendant.)
In North Carolina, the response to multiple botched executions across the country (not to mention the exoneration of N.C.’s longest serving death row inmate) has been to remove transparency and accountability from the state’s execution protocol.
Thanks to a bill passed this session, the suppliers of execution drugs are now a state secret in North Carolina. Doctors are no longer required to be present at executions. And the execution protocol is exempt from a public rule-making process that could help ensure we don’t have last-minute disasters like the one in Oklahoma.
If executions were to resume in North Carolina, our state would likely be making the same embarrassing headlines that Oklahoma is right now — stories of torturous executions, last-minute foul ups, and possibly innocent inmates eating their last meals again and again as the state fumbles with its machinery of death.
This is theater of the absurd, and North Carolina need not play a part.
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