Corinna Barrett Lain, the author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, recently spoke at OKC’s Full Circle Bookstore. Lain shared the findings from her seven years of research, as well as powerful stories she learned from inmates, attorneys, wardens, and prison guards — and Oklahoma, the birthplace of lethal injections in America, played a huge role in her narratives.
Secrets of the Killing State asks why lethal injections, which were once sold as the most humane execution method, have been carried out in such brutal and incompetent ways. In her book, Lain explains that “botched executions are not random glitches, but rather the spillover effects of a system that is deeply broken.”
Oklahoma ranks second only to Texas in terms of lethal injections, and it has carried out 125 executions since 1976. So, Lain asks, why has even Oklahoma struggled to get its execution protocols straight?
She explained to National Public Radio that the protocol by which many states perform lethal injections was first devised in 1977 by Oklahoma’s chief medical examiner, Jay Chapman.
“He had no basis whatsoever. And he later told an interviewer, ‘[I just knew from having been placed under anesthesia myself, what we needed],’” Lain told KOSU’s Sierra Pfeifer. “And he later had this famous line, or at least famous within the circle of those who study this, where he said, ‘I am an expert in dead bodies, but not in how to get them that way.’”
‘I don’t know anything about the drugs’
While Oklahoma was the first state to approve lethal injections, it became infamous for botched executions a decade ago. As noted by the Oklahoma Policy Institute, Gov. Mary Fallin “laid the groundwork” in 2011 for the 2014 botched execution of Clayton Lockett by signing legislation “that enabled Oklahoma to experiment with the drugs used in lethal injections and to keep the details secret.” Because drug manufacturer Hospira objected to the use of Pentothal for executions, the company ceased producing it. States turned to other anesthetics, like midazolam, which was used in Lockett’s execution that saw him regain consciousness and writhe in pain.
Reporting from the New York Times explains how then-Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt “led the state’s effort to conceal the contents of the drug cocktail given to Mr. Lockett, because he was worried that the producer of the drugs would be intimidated by ‘anti-death-penalty groups’ and defense lawyers.”
Prior to Lockett’s execution, the Christian Science Monitor reported Oklahoma had “declared it had pursued ‘every feasible option to obtain the necessary execution drugs’ for Lockett but its ‘Herculean’ efforts so far had been unsuccessful.”
According to Lain’s book, the drug selection process was conducted by the Department of Corrections’ lawyer — not a medical professional — who searched online and selected midazolam. The attorney could have just read the FDA warning label, or a basic pharmacy textbook, or asked experts at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center in order to see the problems with midazolam. But apparently he did not, nor did he ask Florida’s executioners if it was OK to use only one-fifth of the dose they used when they successfully executed a man with the same three-drug cocktail Oklahoma used on Lockett.
The Lockett execution prompted so many headlines across the nation that Fallin ordered an investigation into what went wrong. The late Ryan Kiesel, then executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma, dismissed the state’s investigation as “a self-serving, internal review by government insiders that raises more questions than it answers.”
Lain agrees. She explained to the Full Circle audience that the investigation produced 3,000 pages of documents. During her research, she found that the political nature of the state’s investigation into what went wrong made participants more open to speaking about it. For example, Lain’s book says the DOC lawyer admitted he was under political pressure to move fast.
Similarly, the Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s warden, Anita Trammell, was supposed to make the decision on what drugs would be used. As part of that process, she had to sign an affidavit saying they were obtained by a licensed pharmacist. Lain recounts how Trammell signed the affidavit without knowing if that were actually true.
“I don’t know anything about the drugs,” Trammell admitted. “In hindsight, I wouldn’t have signed it.”
One day before Lockett was executed in April 2014, the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a temporary stay against it. But with the Court of Criminal Appeals taking a different position, Fallin chose to defy a district court and the Supreme Court, and she scheduled the execution anyway, and Lockett died in infamy.
‘In theory lethal injection could work’
In her book, Lain provides a detailed narrative of how and why the procedure spun out of control, leading to 43 minutes of horrible pain.
On execution day, when the paramedic started to prepare for the first injection, Trammell worried that the process was being conducted in “the aura of rush, rush, rush.” Moreover, “the setup was all wrong. The syringes, the saline, the tubing — none of that was right.”
Lockett ultimately died of a heart attack after the cocktail likely absorbed into his muscle instead of entering his bloodstream.
The secrecy and the false claims about Oklahoma’s execution process continued with the 2015 execution of Charles Warner, whose last words were, “My body is on fire.” That marked Oklahoma’s last execution for six years until Gov. Kevin Stitt resumed lethal injections in 2021. Underscoring the lingering uncertainty of whether the process is safe and humane, John Grant went into convulsions and vomited during his execution.
According to NPR, as the planned execution of Richard Glossip approached in 2015, The Oklahoman revealed how Warner had received an incorrect drug during his execution. The paper subsequently reported how “Glossip was in his boxer shorts and within minutes of going to the nearby death chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on Sept. 30 when Gov. Mary Fallin granted him a stay of execution.”
“She did so because one of the three drugs prepared for him was potassium acetate, when the proper drug in the state protocol is potassium chloride,” the story revealed.
At her Full Circle event, Lain cited an NPR study that examined 200 autopsies of executed persons. The investigation concluded that 84 percent “showed eviÂdence of pulÂmonary edeÂma, a conÂdiÂtion in which a person’s lungs fill with fluÂid that creÂates the feelÂing of sufÂfoÂcaÂtion or drownÂing that experts have likened to waterboarding.”
That condition is generally not perceived by witnesses, something Lain discusses in her book.
When one execution participant learned about the hidden pain, he responded, “So, we’re basically waterboarding people to death.”
However, a prison guard said his first execution was upsetting, but after a while, it “ain’t no different from getting a beer out of the fridge.”
The difference between those two mindsets led Lain to explain how 60 percent of death penalties come from 2 percent of the nation’s counties.
Moral issues aside, the execution process takes an average of 22 years and costs millions of taxpayer dollars. Lain said Florida, for instance, would save $51 million a year if it just sentenced convicted killers to life in prison.
And that brings us back full circle to the interview Lain had with KOSU.
“In theory, lethal injection could work. I mean, we put down pets every day, we know how physician’s-assisted suicide works,” she said. “But I think you can’t read my book and get to the end and say, ‘Oh, yeah this is workable, we can just fix it.’”
