US
president orders investigation into problems with death penalty after Oklahoma
inmate's untested lethal injection
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| Barack Obama says the death penalty is warranted in some cases but he says it is problematic, with evidence of racial bias. Photograph: UPI/Landov/Barcroft Media |
The US president, Barack Obama, has said the botched execution of an Oklahoma inmate was “deeply troubling” and announced that he will ask the attorney general, Eric Holder, to analyse problems with the implementation of the death penalty.
In his
first comments on the case of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett, the president
expressed conflicting feelings about the death penalty. He said Americans
needed to “ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions around these
issues”.
Obama said
the death penalty was warranted in some cases, specifically mentioning mass
murder and child murder, and said Lockett's crimes were “heinous”.
However, he
said the death penalty's application in the US was problematic, with evidence
of racial bias and the eventual exoneration of some death-row inmates.
“All these,
I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being
applied,” said Obama, who was asked about the case at a news conference at the
House House with the visiting German chancellor, Angela Merkel, “and this
situation in Oklahoma I think just highlights some of the significant problems
there.”
Last
Tuesday, the state of Oklahoma attempted to carry out Lockett's death sentence
by lethal injection, using a drug combination that had not been previously used
in the state.
Lockett
convulsed violently during the execution and tried to lift his head after a
doctor declared him unconscious. He died of an apparent heart attack, 43
minutes after the execution had begun.
“What
happened in Oklahoma is deeply troubling,” Obama said when asked about
international condemnation of US application of the death penalty following
Lockett’s case. He said he would be asking Holder and others “to get me an
analysis of what steps have been taken, not just in this particular instance,
but more broadly in this area”.
The White
House declined to comment further on what the analysis might cover. The Justice
Department indicated that its review would focus more on how executions are
carried out, rather than the issues of race and wrongful convictions that Obama
said also should be discussed.
“The
department is currently conducting a review of the federal protocol used by the
Bureau of Prisons, and has a moratorium in place on federal executions in the
meantime. At the president's direction, the department will expand this review
to include a survey of state-level protocols and related policy issues,” the
department said in a statement on Friday.
Lockett had
already been convicted of four crimes when he was found guilty, by a jury in
2000, of murder, rape, kidnapping, burglary and other charges and given the
death sentence. The murder victim was 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman, who came
across Lockett and two accomplices as they were beating a man in front of his
nine-month-old son during a robbery.
Neiman and
a friend came to the house while the robbery was in progress. The intruders
bound the two women with duct tape and raped Neiman's friend. The three men
then drove all four victims, including the baby, to a remote area, where
Lockett shot Neiman with a sawn-off shotgun after she refused to say she would
not report them to police. Lockett then watched as his two accomplices buried
her alive.
A spokesman
for the United Nations’ human rights office in Geneva said Lockett's prolonged
execution could amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under
international human rights law. Rupert Colville said Lockett’s was the second
problematic execution in the US this year after Dennis McGuire's death in Ohio
on 16 January from an allegedly untested combination of drugs.
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