Oklahoma Bishop: Death Penalty ‘Brutal’

Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City said the botched execution on April 29 of an Oklahoma inmate “highlights the brutality of the death penalty” and should bring the nation to “consider whether we should adopt a moratorium on the death penalty or even abolish it altogether.” The planned execution of Clayton Lockett, a convicted killer, in McAlester, Okla., using a new three-drug lethal injection protocol, failed, leaving Lockett showing signs of pain and causing prison officials to halt the procedure. Lockett later died of a heart attack. The state attorney general’s office agreed to a six-month stay of execution for Charles Warner, an inmate scheduled to be executed two hours after Lockett. Gov. Mary Fallin also ordered the state’s department of corrections to conduct a “full review of Oklahoma’s execution procedures to determine what happened and why” during the execution. Archbishop Coakley, in a statement on April 30, said, “How we treat criminals says a lot about us as a society.” The culture of death, he added, “threatens to completely erode our sense of the innate dignity of the human person.”

This article appears in May 26-June 2 2014.