In this undated Gwinnett County Police Department photo, Sgt. Michael Bongiovanni poses for an official portrait. Gwinnett County police said in an emailed statement Thursday, April 13, 2017, that Bongiovanni... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this undated Gwinnett County Police Department photo, Sgt. Michael Bongiovanni poses for an official portrait. Gwinnett County police said in an emailed statement Thursday, April 13, 2017, that Bongiovanni was fired after a new video surfaced showing him hitting a man in the face. Earlier in the... (Associated Press) 
 
 ATLANTA (AP) — Two Georgia police officers were fired Thursday, a day after authorities say one punched a man who had his hands up and the other kicked the man in the head once he was handcuffed on the ground. 
 
 The Gwinnett County Police Department said Thursday afternoon that Master Police Officer Robert McDonald violated department policy and the law. Video showed McDonald assaulting the handcuffed man, identified as Demetrius Bryan Hollins, while assisting a supervisor who had called for backup during a traffic stop about 4 p.m. Wednesday, police said. 
 
 Several hours later, police said that supervisor, Sgt. Michael Bongiovanni, had also been fired after a second video surfaced of him punching Hollins in the face as Hollins put his hands in the air. 
 
 "We acknowledge that the actions of these two officers have implications that will be felt for some time," a police department statement says. "However, we also believe that our decisive action in terminating both officers speaks volumes about what is expected of each officer that wears a Gwinnett County Police badge." 
 
 The department also has opened criminal investigations into the behavior of the two officers. The results will be turned over to the county district attorney, who will decide whether to prosecute the two officers. 
 
 McDonald was hired by the department in August 2013 and graduated from the police academy in March 2014, while Bongiovanni was hired in September 1998 and graduated from the academy in February 1999. 
 
 No working number could be found for McDonald, and the voicemail at a number listed for Bongiovanni was full. It wasn't immediately clear whether either man had an attorney who could comment. 
 
 Bongiovanni pulled Hollins over in Lawrenceville, just outside Atlanta, police said. 
 
 Video filmed by a witness shows Bongiovanni punching Hollins as Hollins stands with his hands up after getting out of the car, police said. 
 
 The other video shows Bongiovanni appearing to yell at a handcuffed man who then lies face-down in a left-turn lane of the busy intersection. McDonald runs up and immediately appears to stomp on the man's head before both officers eventually pull him to his feet. 
 
 Hollins, 21, appears to have blood on his nose and lip in his booking photo. 
 
 The shift commander initiated an "immediate investigation" and placed McDonald on administrative leave after Hollins' arrest. 
 
 Hollins was driving a red Acura Integra with no license plate and a brake light that didn't work, and switched lanes three times without signaling, according to an incident report filed by Bongiovanni. 
 
 Hollins yelled and began to "act strange," and based on that and the officer's recollection of Hollins' behavior during a previous arrest in August, Bongiovanni called for backup, the report says. 
 
 Hollins yelled and refused to obey orders when Bongiovanni ordered him out of the car and resisted when Bongiovanni tried to arrest him, the report says. There is no mention of Bongiovanni hitting Hollins. 
 
 The report mentions McDonald arriving after Bongiovanni had used his stun gun on Hollins and gotten him handcuffed on the ground. It doesn't mention any contact between McDonald and Hollins. 
 
 The two officers are white and Hollins appears to be black, police Cpl. Michele Pihera said in an email. 
 
 Jail records show Hollins faces charges of driving with a suspended or revoked license, operating a vehicle with a suspended or revoked registration, failure to signal, having a brake light that's not in good repair, obstructing a law enforcement officer and having less than an ounce of marijuana. He was released on bond Thursday afternoon. 
 
 Police released McDonald's personnel file Thursday and said Bongiovanni's would be released Thursday. 
 
 McDonald was "an excellent example of a team player with a strong work ethic" who completed his work on time, was always willing to help others and was courteous and professional with the public, Bongiovanni wrote in annual evaluation last June. He gave McDonald a rating of "often exceeds expectations" in many categories and no rating lower than "generally meets expectations." 
 
 McDonald received a few commendations and recognitions, including sharing the officer of the month honor in November 2015. 
 
 He had filed three use-of-force reports explaining why he used his stun gun or physical force in the course of his duties. 
 
 He faced a disciplinary loss of his good driving record after he rear-ended another car in his patrol car in June 2015. But the officer who responded to the accident said in a letter to the department's safety review committee that it would have been very difficult for McDonald to avoid the wreck. ||||| Two police officers have been fired after video surfaced showing them punching and stomping a man during an arrest in Georgia. (Reuters) 
 
 Two Georgia police officers have been fired after videos surfaced on social media showing them punching and then kicking a man in the head, authorities said. 
 
 Gwinnett County police said late Thursday that Sgt. Michael Bongiovanni was fired after authorities discovered a video showing Bongiovanni punching the man in the face as the man stepped from a vehicle with his hands up. Earlier, authorities had fired Officer Robert McDonald, who was captured in a different video kicking the man in the head as he lay handcuffed on the ground. 
 
 “The revelations uncovered in this entire investigation are shocking,” police said in a statement after Bongiovanni’s termination. “ … We acknowledge that the actions of these two officers have implications that will be felt for some time. However, we also believe that our decisive action in terminating both officers speaks volumes about what is expected of each officer that wears a Gwinnett County Police badge.” 
 
 [Police shootings so far in 2017] 
 
 
 
 Former Gwinnett County police sergeant Michael Bongiovanni, left, and former police officer Robert McDonald. (Courtesy of Gwinnett County Police Department) 
 
 The incident, which quickly went viral on social media, occurred about 4 p.m. Wednesday. One video, which was shot from across the street, shows a man getting out of a vehicle with his hands raised before the arresting officer punches him in the face. 
 
 The other video, shot from a different angle, begins as that officer is struggling with the man as he gets out of the vehicle and raises his hands. Shortly after the man is subdued by the officer and handcuffed, a second officer arrives on the scene and kicks the man in the head. 
 
 A struggle ensues before the officers search the man’s pockets. Both officers are white; the man, who is black, was identified as 21-year-old Demetrius Bryan Hollins of Lawrenceville, Ga., according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 
 
 The nonprofit community group Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta condemned the officers Thursday evening in a Facebook post. 
 
 Gwinnett Police Kicks Handcuffed Black Man In The Face MAKE THIS VIRAL: We are DEMANDING that Gwinnett County Police Department immediately terminate this officer who viciously kicked a HANDCUFFED BLACK MAN lying on the ground in the middle of the street (off Sugarloaf Parkway) without cause and without merit. After brutally kicking him in the face, blood splattered everywhere. Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta is now hereby seeking to have criminal charges brought against this officer expeditiously. This is why we take to the streets and scream #BlackLivesMatter, it's because American police officers have ZERO regards for black lives, they beat us, shoot and kill us without a blink of an eye and the biggest problem is, it all goes UNCHALLENGED. We can almost betcha the Chief of Police will say, "I'm sorry but we can't speak on personnel matters or we are conducting a full investigation" and after the investigation they will say… "We have determined to INVESTIGATE OURSELVES and found no wrong doings"Posted By Sir Maejor, President of BLMGA #BlackLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatterATl #BlackLivesMatterGA #BlackLivesMatterAtlanta Posted by Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta on Wednesday, April 12, 2017 
 
 Hollins told NBC News that he was trying to get to the camera app on his own cellphone Wednesday to record the encounter. He said one officer started “shoving me in my car and telling me that I was never going to have a video, that I was never going to make the phone call to my mom. When I had my hands up, that’s when he punched me in the face.” 
 
 Hollins told the news station that when he was handcuffed and lying on the ground, “another cop came out of nowhere and stomped me in the face.” 
 
 He was charged with multiple traffic citations, obstruction of a police officer and possession of less than an ounce of marijuana. 
 
 Demetrius Hollins. (Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office) 
 
 Hollins’s attorney, Justin Miller, told NBC News that had the moment not been captured on video, it may have been overlooked. 
 
 “The fact that these guys felt so brazen as to … assault him in public in broad daylight in front of hundreds of onlookers and hundreds of cars is indicative of what they think is okay,” Miller told the news station. Without the videos, he added, “they would have painted him as the bad guy, arrested him, brushed it under the rug and probably did it to them again the next time they saw him.” 
 
 Gwinnett County Police Chief Butch Ayers said at a news conference Thursday that McDonald, a three-year veteran on the force, was responding to assist Bongiovanni during a traffic stop when he “got tunnel vision.” 
 
 Police said Hollins was pulled over for having a broken taillight and then resisted Bongiovanni. But by the time McDonald arrived, Hollis was on the ground and no longer resisting, Ayers said, noting that no use of force was necessary. 
 
 “This incident — this type of force and this action — was uncalled for,” the police chief said Thursday. “It shouldn’t have happened. There is no excuse for it. We have taken appropriate and swift action to deal with this. This officer and his actions do not represent the men and women of this police department who put their lives on the line every single day to protect this county.” 
 
 The chief said that the officer apologized for his actions but that the footage still made him angry. “I was upset and it felt like I had been gut-punched,” Ayers said. 
 
 During an internal investigation, authorities discovered a second video Thursday, filmed by a witness and posted online, that was “contrary to what was reported by Michael Bongiovanni,” police said in the statement. That video showed Bongiovanni strike the man in the face before the other officer had arrived, police said. 
 
 Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta also referred to the second video on its Facebook page. 
 
 Gwinnett County Police Officer Punches Demetrius Hollins In Th… NEWLY RELEASED VIDEO: Here is a second released video of the arresting officer brutally punching Demetrius Hollins in the face. After reviewing the police report in it's entire we have reasons to believe the arresting officer lied throughout his entire police report.We are now hereby demanding that Gwinnett County Police Department terminate the arresting officer and will also seek criminal charges against both officer involved. Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta will follow this case throughout its duration for up to the minuet information please LIKE us on twitter @SirMaejor and @OfficialBLMATL #GwinnettPolice #GwinnettCounty #GwinnettPD #GwinnettCountyPolice #SirMaejor #BlackLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatterATL #BlackLivesMatterAtlanta #BlackLivesMatterGA Posted by Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta on Thursday, April 13, 2017 
 
 Bongiovanni was hired in 1998 and graduated from the police academy in 1999, according to the police department. 
 
 The police chief said during the news conference that a plan is in place to outfit uniformed officers with body cameras by the end of the year. 
 
 Asked what message the incident sends, Ayers told reporters: “We have standards, we have policies, and we’re going to hold ourselves to those standards and to those policies. And if you violate those, there will be a swift investigation. And if those complaints are found to be sustained, action will be taken.” 
 
 This story has been updated. 
 
 MORE READING: 
 
 Video shows an officer slamming, then pummeling a black man accused of jaywalking 
 
 In a shift, the U.S. was not among the world’s leaders in executions last year 
 
 Jailed while pregnant: A woman claims guards ignored her pleas and killed her unborn baby ||||| On the morning of his execution, Clayton Lockett hid under the covers. Before a team of correctional officers came to get him at 5:06 a.m., he fashioned a noose out of his sheets. He pulled the blade out of a safety razor and made half-inch-long cuts on his arms. He swallowed a handful of pills that he’d been hoarding. And on April 29, 2014, when the team of officers knocked on the door of his cell in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, Clayton Lockett—a 38-year-old convicted murderer—pulled a blanket over his head and refused to get up. The officers left and asked for permission to tase him. While they were gone, Lockett tried to jam the door. They came back, forced their way in, tased him, and dragged him out. Eleven hours later, at about 5:20 p.m., after a medical examination, X‑rays, eight hours in a holding cell, and a shower, Lockett was brought by a five-member strap-down team into the death chamber. It was a small, clinical-looking room with white walls and a polished floor that reflected the lights overhead. A gurney stood in the center of the room; above it hung a microphone for Lockett’s final words. 
 
 One of the walls in the chamber had a pair of baseball-size holes through which IV lines could pass into the chemical room, a small space where three executioners would administer the drugs that would kill him. The executioners had been driven to the prison earlier in the day, and had put on hoods as they approached. They would remain out of sight until after Lockett was dead. There had never been a question of Lockett’s guilt. Fifteen years earlier, on June 3, 1999, he had stood in a ravine and aimed a 12-gauge shotgun at Stephanie Neiman, a 19-year-old who had graduated from high school two weeks earlier. Lockett and two accomplices had beaten one of Neiman’s friends and raped another. Lockett told Neiman multiple times that he would kill her if she didn’t promise to keep quiet. He warned her one last time, but she insisted she would go to the police. He pulled the trigger. The shot sent her spinning to the ground. The gun jammed; he cleared it and fired at her again. Then one of Lockett’s accomplices buried Neiman alive in a shallow grave, the dirt puffing up as she struggled to breathe, and they left her to die. Lockett was arrested three days later, a Sunday. Mark Gibson, the district attorney who would prosecute him, went to the jail that night because Lockett wanted to give a statement. Lockett smoked a cigarette and showed no remorse as he confessed. Gibson thought he saw a twinkle in the young man’s eye, as though he was relishing the attention, and came away believing that Lockett was pure evil. 
 
 In the execution chamber, Lockett was belted to the gurney. To his left, beige blinds covered the windows to the viewing area. Soon, shadows would be visible as the seats on the other side filled up. There was so much media interest in his execution that the prison had had to draw names to decide which reporters could attend. A clock on the wall read 5:26. The execution was scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Lockett could expect to be dead within about 45 minutes. Since the mid-1990s, when lethal injection replaced electrocution as America’s favored method of execution, states have found drug combinations that they trust to quickly and painlessly end a life. They often use three drugs. The first is an anesthetic, to render the prisoner unconscious. The second is a paralytic. The third, potassium chloride, stops the heart. What many people don’t realize, however, is that choosing the specific drugs and doses involves as much guesswork as expertise. In many cases, the person responsible for selecting the drugs has no medical training. Sometimes that person is a lawyer—a state attorney general or an attorney for the prison. These officials base their confidence that a certain drug will work largely on the fact that it has seemed to work in the past. So naturally, they prefer not to experiment with new drugs. In recent years, however, they have been forced to do so. 
 
 The problems began at a pharmaceutical plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The Food and Drug Administration discovered that some of the drugs made there were contaminated and in April 2010 sent the manufacturer, Hospira, a warning letter. Hospira stopped producing, among other drugs, a barbiturate called sodium thiopental. No other company was approved by the FDA to make sodium thiopental, which was the anesthetic of choice for almost all of the states that carried out executions. (The death penalty is legal in 32 states; 17 of them have performed an execution in the past five years.) With sodium thiopental suddenly unavailable, states scrambled to find alternatives. In June of that year, officials in Georgia discovered a work-around: a small-time businessman in London named Mehdi Alavi, who sold wholesale drugs through a company called Dream Pharma, would ship sodium thiopental to them. Georgia bought some from him, and then Arkansas did too. With Hospira offline, Alavi had the U.S. execution market cornered. Arizona bought sodium thiopental from him in late September and used it the next month to execute a convicted murderer named Jeffrey Landrigan. California placed an order as well. Maya Foa, an anti-death-penalty advocate based in London, saw Dream Pharma mentioned in court documents related to Landrigan’s execution and decided to pay a visit. At the company’s address, she found a small building with peeling white paint and a placard that read Elgone Driving Academy. Inside she found two desks and, in the back of the room, a single cabinet. That was it: Dream Pharma. Alavi imported execution drugs from elsewhere in Europe and shipped them to the United States, using that cupboard in a driving school as his base of operations. The judges seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner waited to die. Reprieve, the human-rights organization where Foa worked, wrote to the British government, arguing that supplying drugs for executions violated British law, since the death penalty is illegal in Europe. The government balked. Stopping the shipment of a drug would hamper free trade and could be harmful to patients. Foa responded that the “patient” argument was erroneous—there was no trade of sodium thiopental between the U.S. and the U.K. for medicinal purposes. It was all for executions. This time, the government agreed. England announced tighter export restrictions, which effectively banned the sale of the drug for executions. Foa then persuaded the European Commission to follow suit by amending its torture regulation. U.S. states trying to carry out the death penalty were now blocked from buying drugs not just from England, but from all of Europe. 
 
 So they looked even farther afield. In late 2010, a company in Mumbai, Kayem Pharmaceuticals, received an e-mail from the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services. Officials there wanted an anesthetic that Kayem made mostly for clients in Angola: sodium thiopental. Kayem sold Nebraska 500 vials, enough for more than 80 executions. Soon after, Foa’s boss wrote the company to explain how Nebraska planned to use its product. When South Dakota officials tried to place an order, Kayem jacked up the price 900 percent, to $20 a vial, hoping the cost would dissuade them. It didn’t. South Dakota bought 500 vials. Kayem stopped selling the drug to the U.S. immediately after that. Nebraska also turned to a middleman named Chris Harris, who contacted another company, called Naari, that made sodium thiopental in India. When Nebraska prison officials later announced that they’d obtained sodium thiopental from Naari, the firm’s CEO was livid. He wrote to the chief justice of the Nebraska supreme court saying he’d been duped: Naari had supplied Harris with vials of the drug only because Harris had offered to get it registered for future sale in Zambia, where there is a huge need for cheap surgical drugs. The CEO wrote that Harris was “not authorised to sell the product” to Nebraska and that Naari was “deeply opposed to the use of the medicines in executions.” He demanded that the vials be returned. They were not. 
 
 In Oklahoma, with sodium thiopental increasingly difficult to get and an execution scheduled for December 2010, officials decided they could no longer avoid finding a substitute. They settled on another powerful barbiturate that was more easily available: a short-term therapy for insomnia called pentobarbital, made in the U.S. by a Copenhagen-based company called Lundbeck. According to state officials, pentobarbital was ideal “for humane euthanasia in animals.” Oklahoma used the new drug in the execution of John David Duty. It worked. 
 
 Oklahoma had found its solution just in time: the federal Drug Enforcement Administration was about to start raiding prisons. Since Hospira had been the only FDA-approved supplier of sodium thiopental, states that had imported it had done so illegally. Prisons had become, in effect, drug smugglers, and while the FDA may have been willing to look the other way, the DEA was not. In March 2011, agents seized Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental. In April, they seized Tennessee’s, Kentucky’s, South Carolina’s, and Alabama’s. 
 
 Meanwhile, as other states followed Oklahoma’s lead and shifted to pentobarbital, pressure mounted on Lundbeck, the drug’s manufacturer, to block prisons from buying it. Reprieve issued press releases, the Danish media picked up the story, The Lancet published an open letter urging the company to stop supplying executions, and shareholders threatened to divest. Maya Foa knew that pharmaceutical companies like Lundbeck had no interest in supplying executions—the fact that their drugs are used to kill people makes for terrible publicity. But what could Lundbeck do about it? Foa researched the American pharmaceutical industry and learned about controls that a manufacturer can put in place to restrict a drug’s distribution if, for example, new side effects come to light or the company wants to prevent off-label uses. She met with Lundbeck’s senior executives to present an idea: Why not put distribution controls on pentobarbital, and prevent middlemen from selling it to prisons? “We can’t do that,” one of Lundbeck’s communications officers told her. But as he began to explain his objections, the CEO interrupted. “Why not?” The room fell silent. Seven months after pentobarbital was first used in an execution, Lundbeck instituted distribution controls. Departments of corrections could no longer get their second-choice anesthetic. 
 
 At 5:30, half an hour before Lockett’s execution was to begin, a young reporter named Katie Fretland rode in a prison van with other witnesses. They were taken to the death-row law library to wait. Fretland heard a low thrumming fill the halls, the sound of inmates banging on their cell doors in tribute to the condemned. Fretland had arrived in McAlester just that day, but Oklahoma was something of a second home to her. She’d first come in 2012, a few years out of college, after landing a 14‑week temp job with the Associated Press. The AP had asked her to cover the execution of Timothy Stemple, a Tulsa man convicted of killing his wife. Fretland tried to find out where the state would get the execution drugs, but she quickly ran into a roadblock: Oklahoma had passed a law less than a year earlier that made nearly every aspect of executions a state secret, including where officials obtained the drugs. Fretland decided to follow the money. She had a source who worked at the prison, and she asked him how the state’s Department of Corrections would pay for the drugs. He said it would use petty cash. She couldn’t believe it. Could the department do that—use an account with no public oversight to buy execution drugs? She filed a series of records requests and kept asking questions. She found petty-cash purchases of pentobarbital totaling more than $50,000. Pentobarbital was by now no longer available from Lundbeck, but Fretland learned that compounding pharmacies were copying execution drugs and selling them to prisons. Compounding pharmacies exist to fill niche needs—for example, making a version of a drug for a patient who is allergic to an additive in the mass-market product. Part drug company, part pharmacy, they operate in a gray area with little oversight. (In April 2013, after a deadly meningitis outbreak was traced to a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts, FDA officials announced that they had inspected about 30 compounding pharmacies and found unsanitary conditions in all but one of them.) 
 
 Fretland kept filing records requests, and accumulated reams of documents. Her AP job ended, but she couldn’t leave the story alone. She crashed with friends while continuing to interview pharmacists and former wardens, trying to put together a picture of Oklahoma’s frantic pursuit of execution drugs. She turned up e-mails from early 2011 in which state officials discussed how they should respond to their peers in Texas, who had asked for help addressing the drug shortage. An Oklahoma assistant attorney general wrote to a colleague, “I propose we help if TX promises to take a dive in the [University of Oklahoma–University of Texas football] game for the next 4 years.” His colleague suggested that Texas should provide tickets for “Team Pentobarbital (you, me, Martha, the Warden, Mike Oakley, plus anyone else we can think of who is deserving) to the 2011 OU‑Texas game plus an on-field presentation of a commemorative plaque at halftime recognizing Oklahoma’s on-going contributions to propping up the Texas system of capital punishment.” He added, “And throw in lifetime passes for the North Dallas Tollway, Highway 121 and the Bush Turnpike. That would be a good deal.” Fretland also learned that in some executions, the prisoner had died of an overdose of the first drug, the anesthetic, and that the executioners had then disposed of the other two drugs by injecting them into the corpse. Georgia had used pentobarbital from an undisclosed source in a June 2011 execution, and Fretland found e-mails from the next month proving that Oklahoma officials knew that the inmate had remained conscious for longer than he was supposed to and may have experienced severe pain. But a month after that e-mail exchange, they spent $10,400 of petty cash to buy pentobarbital. They made another purchase a year later, this time spending $40,000. Also see: A Brief History of Executions 
 
 by Matt Ford In March 2014, Fretland published her findings in The Colorado Independent. She editorialized just once. “Banter about exchanging lethal injection help for football tickets and other favors,” she wrote, “raises questions about how seriously Oklahoma officials take the death penalty.” 
 
 A month later, Fretland came to McAlester to watch Clayton Lockett’s execution. A little before 6, she and the other witnesses were taken down a long hallway. She turned a corner into the viewing area, where two tiered rows of metal folding chairs faced the death chamber. Fretland took her seat along with 11 other reporters, two of Lockett’s lawyers, and an assortment of Oklahoma officials. Stephanie Neiman’s family would sit in a separate room for the victim’s relatives. Blinds covered the windows to the death chamber, so Fretland couldn’t see what was going on inside. She sat down, and waited. 
 
 About two months earlier, Mike Oakley, the general counsel for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, had returned from vacation to find the department in a near-frenzy. Before he’d left, the department had ordered pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy for the executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, a 46-year-old man convicted in 2003 of raping and killing his roommate’s 11-month-old baby. But compounding pharmacies had come under pressure to stop selling drugs for executions, and Oklahoma’s supplier had backed out. With the executions scheduled for March 20 and March 27, one of Oakley’s deputies began driving around the state, walking into pharmacies and asking for pentobarbital, without success. 
 
 Oakley didn’t know why the task of finding drugs for executions fell largely to him: he had no medical training. But he wanted to help his colleagues—especially the warden, whom he considered conscientious and hardworking—because he knew how much strain carrying out a death sentence put on them. He had gone into corrections, 25 years earlier, because Oklahoma was doing interesting work in mediation between victims and offenders. Now he was about to retire, and he found himself, as his swan song, developing a new execution cocktail. Oakley had to report on his progress to Robert Patton, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, first thing in the morning and again before he went home each day. The attorney general’s office called Oakley multiple times a day, and Patton himself was getting pressure from the governor’s office. Both the attorney general, Scott Pruitt, and Governor Mary Fallin had elections coming up, and there were rumors that a Tea Party candidate might outflank Fallin on the right. Oakley believed they were worried about looking soft on crime. In mid-March, Pruitt had to make the embarrassing admission, as part of a brief to the state’s court of criminal appeals, that Oklahoma didn’t have all the necessary drugs, and Lockett’s and Warner’s executions had to be delayed. Fewer and fewer medical experts were willing to advise Oakley, even unofficially. But he had professional contacts he’d met through the National Institute of Corrections, and he asked them for advice. He and members of the attorney general’s staff also looked at expert testimony related to executions in Florida. 
 
 In October 2013, Florida had used a sedative called midazolam in the execution of William Happ. Florida officials had determined that it was “the most humane and dignified way to do the procedure.” Doctors sometimes administer midazolam during anesthesia, but usually just to relax the patient, and in combination with a drug that blocks pain. In a high enough dose, it should render the patient unconscious—but some experts argue that, unlike sodium thiopental and pentobarbital, midazolam cannot produce the deep, coma-like state needed to guarantee he feels no pain. William Happ shook his head, blinked, and opened his mouth during his execution. Witnesses had no way of knowing whether he was in pain, but he appeared to remain conscious longer than offenders given sodium thiopental or pentobarbital. Ohio used midazolam in the execution of Dennis McGuire a few months later, and witnesses reported that McGuire snorted, heaved, clenched one of his fists, and gasped for air. Oakley asked his counterpart in Ohio about the state’s experience with midazolam. The media had exaggerated the problems, he was told. Yes, the new drug took a little longer to put a person to sleep, but it wasn’t as bad as everyone was saying. Midazolam was also relatively easy to obtain: multiple U.S. companies made it. Oakley’s wife had just had a kidney stone removed, and one of the drugs she’d been given was midazolam. Both Oakley and the attorney general’s office recommended that the state use it. 
 
 
 
 On April 23, 2014, six days before Lockett’s execution, Mike Oakley retired. 
 
 April 23 would, by coincidence, prove to be a decisive day for the Oklahoma judicial system, for Clayton Lockett, and for his legal team, including Dave Autry. Autry is a soft-spoken man of 56 with a ponytail that hangs halfway down his back. He seems to subsist on tobacco and caffeine—24-ounce mini-mart coffee cups and jumbo cans of Red Bull clutter his office. Autry had represented Lockett for 11 years, since shortly after Lockett exhausted his state appeals. He felt just about ready, after nearly 30 years, to leave the high stakes and emotional toll of death-row work to younger lawyers. Clayton Lockett would be his second-to-last death-row client. As time winds down, a death-penalty lawyer has one goal: keep the client alive as long as possible. In October 2013, Autry’s co-counsel, Dean Sanderford, and an attorney for Charles Warner had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review their cases, a last-chance effort to argue that constitutional errors had been made during trial or sentencing. They knew the Court was unlikely to review either case. They also knew from experience that as soon as the Supreme Court declined to hear the cases, Oklahoma would set execution dates. The lawyers needed a plan they could put in motion the instant the Court decided. The simplest strategy would have been an Eighth Amendment challenge. But they couldn’t make a convincing case that the drugs Oklahoma officials planned to use would lead to cruel and unusual punishment, because the state’s secrecy law kept them from getting any information about where the drugs were coming from. In that lack of information, however, perhaps they could find an opportunity. The lawyers could argue that the secrecy law denied their clients “access to the courts” and was therefore unconstitutional. As they prepared to make this case, Oklahoma executed Michael Lee Wilson, a 38-year-old charged with beating a co-worker to death. After the pentobarbital was injected, Wilson said, “I feel my whole body burning.” 
 
 In January 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the cases. Lockett’s and Warner’s lawyers joined forces to challenge Oklahoma’s secrecy law, and they requested a stay of execution for the prisoners until the challenge was decided. The case began ping-ponging around the Oklahoma justice system. A state judge in Oklahoma City, Patricia Parrish, heard the challenge but said she didn’t have the authority to grant a stay, so the legal team appealed to the Oklahoma supreme court. The supreme court transferred the stay request to the state’s court of criminal appeals; the court of criminal appeals asked for supplemental briefs. By that point Lockett’s execution was days away. In their supplemental brief, the lawyers for Lockett and Warner argued that any of these courts had the authority to grant a stay. The government filed an opposing brief arguing that none of the courts did. But it was in this brief, down on page eight, that Attorney General Pruitt made the stunning admission that the state did not have all the drugs it needed for the executions. Two days before Lockett was scheduled to die, he and Warner got a one-month reprieve so that the state could find drugs. A minor victory. Lockett’s execution was rescheduled for April 22, Warner’s for April 29. The same day, Katie Fretland published her bombshell article exposing disturbing details about how the state handled executions. A week later, on March 26, Judge Parrish decided the challenge to the secrecy law in Lockett and Warner’s favor. The law was indeed unconstitutional. “I do not think this is even a close call,” she said. She still believed she lacked the authority to grant a stay, but her ruling gave Lockett and Warner another chance: their lawyers could now ask the state for information about the drugs, and perhaps find the basis for a cruel-and-unusual-punishment lawsuit. 
 
 Right away, Oklahoma announced that it would appeal. Doing so put an automatic hold on Parrish’s decision. By the time the appeal was resolved, Lockett and Warner would likely be dead. The case began ping-ponging again. The inmates’ legal team went to the court of criminal appeals to ask for a stay, but the judges ruled that the case didn’t belong in their court. The lawyers then turned to the Oklahoma supreme court, which told the court of criminal appeals that it did, in fact, have jurisdiction. The court of criminal appeals disagreed and again denied the stay. To Autry and the other lawyers, the judges seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner waited to die. Finally, on April 21, one day before Lockett’s execution, a miracle: the Oklahoma supreme court, divided 5–4, granted a stay. The justices made clear that they intended to seriously contemplate the issues. The ruling seemed likely to put the executions off for a long time and give Lockett and Warner a chance of actually winning the case. Since the case challenged state law, Oklahoma couldn’t take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. No court in the country could overturn the ruling. Autry called Lockett’s stepmother and drove out to Del City to give Lockett’s favorite aunt the news in person. It was an emotional evening, one of the rare moments in a death-penalty case this far along when you get to celebrate. At the prison the next morning, Lockett was moved out of the isolation unit where the condemned spend their final days, and sent back to a regular cell. 
 
 That same day, a shocking reversal: Governor Mary Fallin stepped in. She issued an executive order saying she did not recognize the Oklahoma supreme court’s authority to grant the stay. “The execution for Clayton Derrell Lockett,” she announced, “is therefore scheduled for April 29, 2014”—just one week away, and the same night as Charles Warner’s execution. Autry had never heard of a governor doing something like that. Was it even legal? Could a governor just do away with a ruling by the state supreme court? The next day things got even worse: a state representative filed articles of impeachment against the five justices who had voted for the stay. The Oklahoma supreme court bowed to the pressure. Two days after saying that it would need a long and proper debate in order to determine the constitutionality of the secrecy law, the court issued a decision: the law was fine. The stay was lifted. 
 
 
 
 The national media went into a frenzy. It looked as though the state’s judicial system had collapsed. “Execution Case Roils Oklahoma Courts,” The New York Times declared; other publications quoted the attorney general calling the events a “constitutional crisis.” Reporters descended on McAlester. It seemed as though everyone with even a fleeting interest in the Oklahoma justice system had come to the penitentiary. Everyone except Governor Fallin. On the night of the executions, she was headed to the Chesapeake Energy Arena, to watch Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game Five of the NBA conference quarterfinals. 
 
 At 5:27 p.m., a paramedic approached the gurney. Like the three executioners, she would remain anonymous. Before the blinds opened, she would retreat into the chemical room while a doctor and the prison’s warden stayed with Lockett in the death chamber. But first she had a job to do: prepare the drugs and medical equipment, and get an IV into Lockett. (Those who participated in the execution either did not respond to requests for interviews or could not be reached. Court records provide a detailed account of what happened.) The paramedic later told investigators that she’d felt incredible pressure since she’d walked into the room an hour earlier. She’d never participated in an execution that used midazolam. She’d never participated in two executions in one night—not many people in the world had. And she knew the media were watching. To make matters worse, the equipment was all wrong: the saline was packed in bags instead of syringes, the drugs were in syringes that looked smaller than she was used to, and the tubing for the IV was the wrong kind. But she tried to focus on doing her job and getting everything set up on time. She would be paid $600 for the two executions. The paramedic stuck a needle into a vein in Lockett’s left arm. A few drops of blood moved up the catheter—“flashback.” A good sign. It meant the needle was in the vein. But she’d forgotten tape to hold the IV in place. She asked someone to bring it to her, but the IV slipped out before she could secure it. Lockett’s arm started to bleed, so she put pressure on it and tried again. This time, she didn’t get flashback. Then she tried a brachial vein, near Lockett’s biceps. No luck there. 
 
 By now, she’d tried to place an IV three times. She’d been taught that if you can’t find a vein after the third attempt, you ask someone else to step in. So she asked the doctor to help. The doctor, Johnny Zellmer, was a last-minute substitute. (Zellmer, whose name was revealed in a lawsuit following the execution and in multiple press reports, has not denied his involvement. He did not respond to requests for comment.) He was a local family-medicine and emergency-room physician who’d participated in just one previous execution. Zellmer had arguably violated his profession’s oath to “never do harm” the moment he stepped into the death chamber. Indeed, the American Medical Association’s code of ethics states that physicians should not participate in executions, even in a supervisory capacity. But Zellmer thought his job would be limited to checking the offender for consciousness and pronouncing the time of death. He wasn’t expecting to actually do anything to Lockett. The paramedic’s request for help put him in the position of no longer just observing the execution but actively facilitating it. She was clearly struggling, though. He scanned Lockett’s body and didn’t see any good veins. Then Lockett turned his head, and the paramedic saw a vein in his neck pop up. She pointed it out to Zellmer. “Get me a needle for the jugular,” he said. This was an odd choice. IVs in the neck are painful, and also hard to place. On the arms and legs, you can use a tourniquet to bring the veins up. You cannot do that on the neck, because a tourniquet on the neck is effectively a noose, and while this was an execution, it was not a hanging. 
 
 As Zellmer tried to get the needle into the jugular, the paramedic stuck Lockett three more times on his right arm, failing each time. Zellmer got the needle into Lockett’s neck and saw flashback, but then saw blood spread under the skin—he thought the needle might have gone all the way through the vein. Zellmer decided to try a subclavian line, in a vein running beneath Lockett’s collarbone. The paramedic brought him a central-venous catheterization kit, and Zellmer numbed Lockett’s chest with lidocaine. The paramedic tried two different veins on Lockett’s right foot; both attempts failed. Zellmer kept trying to get the needle into Lockett’s subclavian vein. He finally saw a little flashback, then lost the vein and couldn’t get the needle back in. After repeatedly sticking Lockett’s chest, he decided to try the femoral vein, in Lockett’s groin. The paramedic went to get a longer needle. As the warden, Anita Trammell, watched the doctor and the paramedic work on Lockett, she felt a sliver of pride for the inmate. He’d now been stuck with needles more than a dozen times. She knew he was in pain, but she thought he was taking it like a man. Trammell tried to make conversation to help calm him. She knew he had been a drug user. “What was your drug of choice?” she asked him. “Ice.” “I thought that was a white man’s drug,” she said, and he laughed. The paramedic came back and said she had no needles longer than an inch and a quarter. That presented a problem. The femoral vein lies deeper in the body than other veins, so they would ideally use a needle at least twice that length. There were longer needles inside a second central-venous catheterization kit, like the one they’d just used on Lockett’s chest, but neither Zellmer nor the paramedic thought of it. Zellmer asked for an IO-infusion needle. IO stands for “intraosseous”—into the bone. It is, in effect, a power drill, used to bore a hole through bone and into the marrow, and therefore doesn’t require finding a vein. 
 
 The prison had no IO needle. Zellmer had only the absurdly short one-and-a-quarter-inch needle. “Well,” he told the paramedic, “we’ll just have to make it work.” Lockett’s prison scrubs and underwear were cut away. Zellmer stuck the needle into Lockett’s femoral vein and saw flashback on the first try. Finally, after almost an hour, they had an IV. Right away, the paramedic noticed a potential warning sign. Saline should have been flowing easily through the IV, but it flowed only when she propped up the line. Instead of starting over, though, she taped the IV in place. Two IVs are typically used to administer the drugs, but with the execution running way behind schedule, the doctor and the paramedic decided they would proceed with just one. Warden Trammell asked Lockett whether he needed anything. “I was gonna see if I could get my mouth wiped off,” he said. She got a Kleenex and wiped it for him. 
 
 
 
 Finally, a sheet was draped over Lockett, covering him up to his chest. The execution could begin. 
 
 Lockett’s closest family members were about two hours away. His stepmother, LaDonna Hollins, had made the drive to the prison countless times. During her final visit, she and Lockett had sat looking at each other and crying. “I do not want you to be at the execution,” she later recalled him saying, “because I do not know the outcome. I do not think it’s gonna be very good. Because the drugs that they use have not been tested.” 
 
 Lockett knew that Michael Lee Wilson had said “I feel my whole body burning” when the state executed him earlier that year. Lockett was scared. “Do me one favor,” Hollins told him, according to an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel. “As long as you can talk on that gurney: Talk. Let the world know how they are executing people here in Oklahoma.” Lockett knew that another inmate had said “I feel my whole body burning” during his execution. He was scared. After that visit, she heard that the prison had refused Lockett’s request for a last meal—chateaubriand, fried shrimp, baked potato, garlic toast, and a whole Kentucky bourbon pie—because it exceeded the $15 limit. Hollins called the prison and said she’d pay for it, or even drive the meal down herself, but she wasn’t allowed to. She didn’t think Lockett could be spared after what he’d done, but she didn’t think he should suffer anymore, either. So she did what she’d always done: try, however she could, to offer him some small comfort. Lockett had first shown up on her doorstep in Southern California at the age of 3, crying and soaked in urine. His mother had put him on a bus all the way from Oklahoma to live with his father. There’d been no notice. Hollins testified in court that when Lockett was a young child, she saw his half brother, who was about five years older, lying on top of him, the two boys looking strange together. Then a call from the school. Lockett was in the infirmary. He’d come in crying and complaining of pain around his anus. Another memory: Lockett following his father, John, from room to room as he got ready for work, and then following him out of the house, into the street. Lockett in tears, certain that his father would never return. Once, as a birthday present for his brother John Jr., the boys’ mother agreed to talk with them on the phone. Lockett waited for his turn with anticipation—he was now 4, and hadn’t heard his mother’s voice since she had put him on the bus. But she took offense when John Jr. referred to Hollins as “Mama LaDonna,” and hung up before Lockett got to talk with her. John Sr. disciplined Lockett and his other children with everything from belts to two-by-fours. Hollins tried to protect the boy, but she wasn’t exempt from John Sr.’s violent temper either; he broke her arm twice. John Sr. taught his children to steal—groceries sometimes, televisions other times—and punished them only for getting caught. Hollins remembers John Sr. blowing marijuana smoke up Lockett’s nose and sitting him down to watch porn when Lockett was a child. “Boy,” he said, “you need to tear that pussy up.” That’s what he told Lockett he was going to do to Hollins. By the time Lockett was in middle school, his father and Hollins had brought him back to Oklahoma. To his eighth-grade teacher—a woman whose son, Mark Gibson, would later prosecute him—he stood out as smart and likable. Lockett brightened around small children. He babysat younger family members, liked to cook for them, and carried them around on his back. He had a girlfriend whose baby had Down syndrome, and he was the only person who could always make the little girl smile. But he also spent a lot of time trying to act tough, and racked up charges including burglary and intimidating a witness. At 16, he was sentenced as an adult and sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. With no one to protect him, he was raped almost immediately by three other inmates. When Lockett got out, at age 20, he wanted to be feared. He wanted everyone to know that if they crossed him, they’d pay. So, a few years later, when a guy named Bobby Bornt seemed to be holding out on a $40 debt for marijuana and a tattoo, Lockett got his cousin and a friend and a shotgun and went to see him. That same night, by terrible coincidence, Stephanie Neiman and a friend drove to Bornt’s house in Neiman’s new Chevy pickup truck, which had a Tasmanian Devil sticker and vanity plates that read Tazzz. Neiman was an only child whose parents had instilled in her a strong sense of right and wrong. She was admired by her classmates and by school administrators for her kindness and loyalty, and because of what she had overcome—she was considered “intellectually challenged” but had played saxophone in the school band and earned her diploma. Those who worked with her at the school believe she wasn’t able to understand how serious the situation was that night, or what the consequences might be. Neiman and Bornt had known each other since they were young children; they’d been in the same YMCA day care. When the girls arrived at Bornt’s house, Lockett and the others were already there, attacking Bornt. Neiman reacted in a way that unsettled Lockett: she seemed unafraid. He told her to hand over the keys to her truck. She said no—the truck belonged to her. Lockett and his accomplices beat up Bornt, raped Neiman’s friend, and bound all three victims. Then Lockett led the group into Bornt’s and Neiman’s trucks and out of town, north into Kay County, up on the border with Kansas. The men threatened to kill the three victims if they reported the night’s crimes to the police. Bornt and Neiman’s friend swore they wouldn’t, and Lockett later let them go. But Neiman refused. Her parents had taught her to tell the truth. So when Lockett asked whether she would go to the police, she said yes. 
 
 
 
 Lockett asked her a final time. Then he raised the gun and fired. Twenty-three minutes behind schedule, the blinds to the death chamber opened. Warden Trammell stood facing the witnesses. She asked Lockett whether he had any last words. “No.” “Let the execution begin.” Just behind Lockett’s head, in the chemical room, one of the three executioners pushed the plunger on a syringe full of midazolam. The sedative went into the tubing, traveling 132 inches through the hole in the wall, into the death chamber, under the sheet, and into Clayton Lockett’s groin. But not all of it went straight into his bloodstream. Somehow, the IV dislodged, and midazolam was pumped into Lockett’s tissue instead of his vein. Some of the drug would make its way into his bloodstream, but the smaller dose would be less effective. Minutes passed. Lockett remained alert. He pursed his lips and blinked. He licked his lips. To Katie Fretland, he looked confused. Several more minutes passed. Lockett turned his head and looked toward the witnesses. He looked back up. Finally, he closed his eyes. In the chemical room, the executioners counted time on a stopwatch. Five minutes after they pushed the midazolam into the line, they flipped a switch and a light bulb went on in the death chamber, signaling that it was time to check whether Lockett was unconscious. Zellmer got up and checked Lockett. He was still conscious. The light went off. Two minutes later, the light came on again—a signal to check Lockett a second time. The doctor blew in Lockett’s eyes, rubbed his sternum, and pinched him. This time, he determined that Lockett was unconscious. The executioners injected a syringe full of vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, into the line. When properly administered, vecuronium bromide blocks the signals that the nervous system sends to the muscles, turning the body into a vehicle the brain no longer controls. It’s as if the wire that connects them has been severed and signals can no longer pass—including the signal that says breathe. An incompletely sedated person under a paralytic might look serene, because his face muscles are paralyzed. But he’s suffocating: when he tries to expand his chest and draw breath, nothing happens. The Animal Welfare Act has banned the use of paralytics without anesthesia in the euthanasia of animals. To anti-death-penalty advocates, the fact that these drugs are used in executions is revealing. If the sedative worked, why would you need to paralyze someone? They argue that the paralytic prevents us from seeing the offender’s distress, so that the procedure appears clinical and painless—even if it’s not. One of Lockett’s executioners would later recall noticing something strange: the plunger was hard to push. He had no way of knowing that he might be injecting fluid into tissue, though, so he simply pushed harder. He heard what sounded like a moan come from the chamber. Zellmer watched Lockett, oblivious to the fact that, under the sheet, the IV was not in place. In the chemical room, the executioners administered the third drug, potassium chloride. At 6:36, Katie Fretland saw Lockett move. During Lockett’s trial and his early years on death row, he showed no remorse. In his letters, he posed as a member of a far-reaching criminal network. “Im an assassin—point blank!” he wrote to one friend. “You honestly think that my boys is gone let a nigga as valuable me go to the penn forever? Fucc No!” He was a terror, hiding homemade weapons in his cell and once throwing urine and excrement at a guard—anything he could do to show his disdain for authority. But in letters to his father, now also in prison, Lockett still yearned for a bond. He told his father about a girlfriend on the outside. Dad I can send her to visit you, keep me informed on how you’re doing … Dad it’s a few people on my team that will be sending me money. I’m not going to be needing all that, I just really want a tube and some canteen and Im cool. Dad, I know you aint got too many people in your corner so I know you’ll need some money. Give me a few months to get my stable in order and I can start sending you some ends through my girl. Gradually, the weight of his crime began to overwhelm him. He talked often with Autry, his lawyer, about what he’d done to Neiman’s parents, taking away their only child. A couple of years in, he tried to kill himself. After that, he took to all the prison self-improvement pastimes: reading, painting, philosophy. Autry lent him books, and Lockett became the most well-read client the attorney had ever had. Still, there was a hollowness to Lockett’s new persona, as though he had gone from posing as a gangbanger to posing as a self-educated prison sophisticate. When the time came for a clemency hearing before the pardon-and-parole board—one of his last chances for survival—Lockett declined to show up. Instead, he gave Autry a letter to read to Neiman’s family. “It would be disingenuous of me to tell you that I woke up one day and suddenly felt remorse,” he wrote. “Or that I found some arcane bible verse that miraculously inspired me to change. The truth is not so simple as that.” He told them that for him, remorse had been slow, but debilitating. “I want you to know that if by me relinquishing my life you find solace in my death & can one day find the strength to forgive me then I am okay with this.” Right up to the very end, Lockett pretended he actually had some control. To Warden Trammell, it looked as though Lockett was trying to communicate something. He kicked his right leg. He began to breathe heavily. He clenched his teeth. He rolled his head. Then he tried to speak. My God, Trammell thought. He’s coming out of this. Lockett lurched up against the restraints. While the witnesses looked on, he started writhing as if trying to free himself, to get up off the gurney. He struggled violently, twisting his whole body. Autry, sitting in the viewing area, couldn’t believe it; next to him, Dean Sanderford, Lockett’s other lawyer, began to cry. Lockett got his whole head up off the gurney, as far as the restraints would let him go. He kept trying to speak but couldn’t form the words, and he rolled his head back and forth. Zellmer watched the monitor. The potassium chloride was supposed to stop Lockett’s heart immediately, by disrupting the electrical charge that causes the heart muscles to contract. But although Lockett’s heart was slowing, it kept beating. The normal resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Lockett’s dropped into the 20s. From the waves on the screen, it looked like his heart muscles were starting to fire erratically. The doctor thought Lockett might be starting to seize. But he still felt uncertain of his role, and hesitated to intervene. From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, “He’s trying to get off the table!” Finally Lockett managed to speak: “Man.” Zellmer had seen enough. He came to the gurney and lifted the sheet. Underneath, he saw a protrusion almost the size of a tennis ball on Lockett’s groin. From the viewing area, Katie Fretland could see the doctor’s face for the first time, and his expression was clear: Oh, fuck. Another witness saw Lockett open his eyes and look right at the doctor, like something out of a horror movie. The warden glanced under the sheet and noticed what looked like blood and clear liquid pooled around Lockett’s groin. She looked up and addressed the witnesses: “We’re going to lower the blinds, temporarily.” From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, “He’s trying to get off the table!” She came into the death chamber as the doctor was trying to figure out how to finish the execution. “I need to get another IV in the left femoral,” Zellmer told her. She swabbed Lockett’s groin with a sterile pad. “Take deep breaths,” the paramedic told Lockett, in case he could hear her, while Zellmer pushed the short needle back into Lockett’s groin. Blood squirted all over Zellmer, so much of it that it soaked his jacket. “You’ve hit the artery,” the paramedic said. “It’ll be all right,” Zellmer told her. “We’ll go ahead and get the drugs.” Did he intend to put drugs in an artery? The paramedic didn’t want to countermand the doctor’s authority, but that made no sense. “We’ve got to get the vein,” she said. The doctor pulled out the needle. Lockett mumbled incoherently. His heart rate dropped into the teens as more of the potassium chloride that had been pumped into his groin seeped into his bloodstream. Eventually, the doctor and the paramedic stopped what they were doing. The warden asked whether it would be possible to resuscitate Lockett. Zellmer said he could start CPR, but that in order to save him, they’d have to take him to an emergency room. This further confused the paramedic. He’s dying, she thought. Isn’t that why we’re here? Stephanie Neiman’s family was in shock. After the blinds came down, prison staff took them to a rec room and tried to console them. While Neiman’s mother, Susie, wept, someone from the state attorney general’s office tried to explain what had happened, something about Lockett’s heart and a vein exploding. Susie said she wanted to go into the chamber and touch Lockett; otherwise she couldn’t know for sure that her daughter’s killer was dead. Fretland and the other reporters felt almost as stunned. In the viewing area, a black telephone she hadn’t noticed before started ringing. Robert Patton, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections director, picked it up and left the room, pulling the phone cord out into the hall and closing the door behind him. Warden Trammell was calling from the death chamber. Patton asked her, “Has enough drugs been administered to cause death?” He heard Trammell repeat the question. He heard the doctor say no. “Is there another vein available, and if so do you have another set of chemicals back there?” Again, Trammell repeated the question; again the doctor said no. “I wanna be real clear with this, Warden, and I want you to ask the doctor specifically. Has enough drugs entered the inmate’s system to cause death?” A third time, he heard Trammell repeat the question. A third time, the answer was no. Patton hung up the phone and huddled in the hallway with the state secretary of safety and security and two members of the attorney general’s office. Someone briefly floated the idea of using the drugs reserved for Charles Warner’s execution. Patton spoke on the phone with the governor’s general counsel, Steve Mullins, in Oklahoma City. Mullins asked Patton, “Do you want to stop the execution?” “Yes.” “You have the authority to stop the execution,” he told Patton. When they hung up, Mullins called the governor—the basketball game was now an hour from tip-off—to brief her. At 6:56, a call came in to the death chamber. Patton had instructions for the warden. He said something like “stand down,” which Trammell didn’t quite understand. “Do you mean to stop?” Yes, he said, stop the execution. ||||| Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways 
 
 On the morning of his execution, Clayton Lockett hid under the covers. Before a team of correctional officers came to get him at 5:06 a.m., he fashioned a noose out of his sheets. He pulled the blade out of a safety razor and made half-inch-long cuts on his arms. He swallowed a handful of pills that he’d been hoarding. And on April 29, 2014, when the team of officers knocked on the door of his cell in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, Clayton Lockett—a 38-year-old convicted murderer—pulled a blanket over his head and refused to get up. The officers left and asked for permission to tase him. While they were gone, Lockett tried to jam the door. They came back, forced their way in, tased him, and dragged him out. Eleven hours later, at about 5:20 p.m., after a medical examination, X‑rays, eight hours in a holding cell, and a shower, Lockett was brought by a five-member strap-down team into the death chamber. It was a small, clinical-looking room with white walls and a polished floor that reflected the lights overhead. A gurney stood in the center of the room; above it hung a microphone for Lockett’s final words. 
 
 One of the walls in the chamber had a pair of baseball-size holes through which IV lines could pass into the chemical room, a small space where three executioners would administer the drugs that would kill him. The executioners had been driven to the prison earlier in the day, and had put on hoods as they approached. They would remain out of sight until after Lockett was dead. There had never been a question of Lockett’s guilt. Fifteen years earlier, on June 3, 1999, he had stood in a ravine and aimed a 12-gauge shotgun at Stephanie Neiman, a 19-year-old who had graduated from high school two weeks earlier. Lockett and two accomplices had beaten one of Neiman’s friends and raped another. Lockett told Neiman multiple times that he would kill her if she didn’t promise to keep quiet. He warned her one last time, but she insisted she would go to the police. He pulled the trigger. The shot sent her spinning to the ground. The gun jammed; he cleared it and fired at her again. Then one of Lockett’s accomplices buried Neiman alive in a shallow grave, the dirt puffing up as she struggled to breathe, and they left her to die. Lockett was arrested three days later, a Sunday. Mark Gibson, the district attorney who would prosecute him, went to the jail that night because Lockett wanted to give a statement. Lockett smoked a cigarette and showed no remorse as he confessed. Gibson thought he saw a twinkle in the young man’s eye, as though he was relishing the attention, and came away believing that Lockett was pure evil. 
 
 In the execution chamber, Lockett was belted to the gurney. To his left, beige blinds covered the windows to the viewing area. Soon, shadows would be visible as the seats on the other side filled up. There was so much media interest in his execution that the prison had had to draw names to decide which reporters could attend. A clock on the wall read 5:26. The execution was scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Lockett could expect to be dead within about 45 minutes. Since the mid-1990s, when lethal injection replaced electrocution as America’s favored method of execution, states have found drug combinations that they trust to quickly and painlessly end a life. They often use three drugs. The first is an anesthetic, to render the prisoner unconscious. The second is a paralytic. The third, potassium chloride, stops the heart. What many people don’t realize, however, is that choosing the specific drugs and doses involves as much guesswork as expertise. In many cases, the person responsible for selecting the drugs has no medical training. Sometimes that person is a lawyer—a state attorney general or an attorney for the prison. These officials base their confidence that a certain drug will work largely on the fact that it has seemed to work in the past. So naturally, they prefer not to experiment with new drugs. In recent years, however, they have been forced to do so. 
 
 The problems began at a pharmaceutical plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The Food and Drug Administration discovered that some of the drugs made there were contaminated and in April 2010 sent the manufacturer, Hospira, a warning letter. Hospira stopped producing, among other drugs, a barbiturate called sodium thiopental. No other company was approved by the FDA to make sodium thiopental, which was the anesthetic of choice for almost all of the states that carried out executions. (The death penalty is legal in 32 states; 17 of them have performed an execution in the past five years.) With sodium thiopental suddenly unavailable, states scrambled to find alternatives. In June of that year, officials in Georgia discovered a work-around: a small-time businessman in London named Mehdi Alavi, who sold wholesale drugs through a company called Dream Pharma, would ship sodium thiopental to them. Georgia bought some from him, and then Arkansas did too. With Hospira offline, Alavi had the U.S. execution market cornered. Arizona bought sodium thiopental from him in late September and used it the next month to execute a convicted murderer named Jeffrey Landrigan. California placed an order as well. Maya Foa, an anti-death-penalty advocate based in London, saw Dream Pharma mentioned in court documents related to Landrigan’s execution and decided to pay a visit. At the company’s address, she found a small building with peeling white paint and a placard that read Elgone Driving Academy. Inside she found two desks and, in the back of the room, a single cabinet. That was it: Dream Pharma. Alavi imported execution drugs from elsewhere in Europe and shipped them to the United States, using that cupboard in a driving school as his base of operations. The judges seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner waited to die. Reprieve, the human-rights organization where Foa worked, wrote to the British government, arguing that supplying drugs for executions violated British law, since the death penalty is illegal in Europe. The government balked. Stopping the shipment of a drug would hamper free trade and could be harmful to patients. Foa responded that the “patient” argument was erroneous—there was no trade of sodium thiopental between the U.S. and the U.K. for medicinal purposes. It was all for executions. This time, the government agreed. England announced tighter export restrictions, which effectively banned the sale of the drug for executions. Foa then persuaded the European Commission to follow suit by amending its torture regulation. U.S. states trying to carry out the death penalty were now blocked from buying drugs not just from England, but from all of Europe. 
 
 So they looked even farther afield. In late 2010, a company in Mumbai, Kayem Pharmaceuticals, received an e-mail from the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services. Officials there wanted an anesthetic that Kayem made mostly for clients in Angola: sodium thiopental. Kayem sold Nebraska 500 vials, enough for more than 80 executions. Soon after, Foa’s boss wrote the company to explain how Nebraska planned to use its product. When South Dakota officials tried to place an order, Kayem jacked up the price 900 percent, to $20 a vial, hoping the cost would dissuade them. It didn’t. South Dakota bought 500 vials. Kayem stopped selling the drug to the U.S. immediately after that. Nebraska also turned to a middleman named Chris Harris, who contacted another company, called Naari, that made sodium thiopental in India. When Nebraska prison officials later announced that they’d obtained sodium thiopental from Naari, the firm’s CEO was livid. He wrote to the chief justice of the Nebraska supreme court saying he’d been duped: Naari had supplied Harris with vials of the drug only because Harris had offered to get it registered for future sale in Zambia, where there is a huge need for cheap surgical drugs. The CEO wrote that Harris was “not authorised to sell the product” to Nebraska and that Naari was “deeply opposed to the use of the medicines in executions.” He demanded that the vials be returned. They were not. 
 
 In Oklahoma, with sodium thiopental increasingly difficult to get and an execution scheduled for December 2010, officials decided they could no longer avoid finding a substitute. They settled on another powerful barbiturate that was more easily available: a short-term therapy for insomnia called pentobarbital, made in the U.S. by a Copenhagen-based company called Lundbeck. According to state officials, pentobarbital was ideal “for humane euthanasia in animals.” Oklahoma used the new drug in the execution of John David Duty. It worked. 
 
 Oklahoma had found its solution just in time: the federal Drug Enforcement Administration was about to start raiding prisons. Since Hospira had been the only FDA-approved supplier of sodium thiopental, states that had imported it had done so illegally. Prisons had become, in effect, drug smugglers, and while the FDA may have been willing to look the other way, the DEA was not. In March 2011, agents seized Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental. In April, they seized Tennessee’s, Kentucky’s, South Carolina’s, and Alabama’s. Meanwhile, as other states followed Oklahoma’s lead and shifted to pentobarbital, pressure mounted on Lundbeck, the drug’s manufacturer, to block prisons from buying it. Reprieve issued press releases, the Danish media picked up the story, The Lancet published an open letter urging the company to stop supplying executions, and shareholders threatened to divest. 
 
 Maya Foa knew that pharmaceutical companies like Lundbeck had no interest in supplying executions—the fact that their drugs are used to kill people makes for terrible publicity. But what could Lundbeck do about it? Foa researched the American pharmaceutical industry and learned about controls that a manufacturer can put in place to restrict a drug’s distribution if, for example, new side effects come to light or the company wants to prevent off-label uses. She met with Lundbeck’s senior executives to present an idea: Why not put distribution controls on pentobarbital, and prevent middlemen from selling it to prisons? “We can’t do that,” one of Lundbeck’s communications officers told her. But as he began to explain his objections, the CEO interrupted. “Why not?” The room fell silent. Seven months after pentobarbital was first used in an execution, Lundbeck instituted distribution controls. Departments of corrections could no longer get their second-choice anesthetic. 
 
 At 5:30, half an hour before Lockett’s execution was to begin, a young reporter named Katie Fretland rode in a prison van with other witnesses. They were taken to the death-row law library to wait. Fretland heard a low thrumming fill the halls, the sound of inmates banging on their cell doors in tribute to the condemned. Fretland had arrived in McAlester just that day, but Oklahoma was something of a second home to her. She’d first come in 2012, a few years out of college, after landing a 14‑week temp job with the Associated Press. The AP had asked her to cover the execution of Timothy Stemple, a Tulsa man convicted of killing his wife. Fretland tried to find out where the state would get the execution drugs, but she quickly ran into a roadblock: Oklahoma had passed a law less than a year earlier that made nearly every aspect of executions a state secret, including where officials obtained the drugs. 
 
 Fretland decided to follow the money. She had a source who worked at the prison, and she asked him how the state’s Department of Corrections would pay for the drugs. He said it would use petty cash. She couldn’t believe it. Could the department do that—use an account with no public oversight to buy execution drugs? She filed a series of records requests and kept asking questions. She found petty-cash purchases of pentobarbital totaling more than $50,000. Pentobarbital was by now no longer available from Lundbeck, but Fretland learned that compounding pharmacies were copying execution drugs and selling them to prisons. Compounding pharmacies exist to fill niche needs—for example, making a version of a drug for a patient who is allergic to an additive in the mass-market product. Part drug company, part pharmacy, they operate in a gray area with little oversight. (In April 2013, after a deadly meningitis outbreak was traced to a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts, FDA officials announced that they had inspected about 30 compounding pharmacies and found unsanitary conditions in all but one of them.) Fretland kept filing records requests, and accumulated reams of documents. Her AP job ended, but she couldn’t leave the story alone. She crashed with friends while continuing to interview pharmacists and former wardens, trying to put together a picture of Oklahoma’s frantic pursuit of execution drugs. 
 
 She turned up e-mails from early 2011 in which state officials discussed how they should respond to their peers in Texas, who had asked for help addressing the drug shortage. An Oklahoma assistant attorney general wrote to a colleague, “I propose we help if TX promises to take a dive in the [University of Oklahoma–University of Texas football] game for the next 4 years.” His colleague suggested that Texas should provide tickets for “Team Pentobarbital (you, me, Martha, the Warden, Mike Oakley, plus anyone else we can think of who is deserving) to the 2011 OU‑Texas game plus an on-field presentation of a commemorative plaque at halftime recognizing Oklahoma’s on-going contributions to propping up the Texas system of capital punishment.” He added, “And throw in lifetime passes for the North Dallas Tollway, Highway 121 and the Bush Turnpike. That would be a good deal.” Fretland also learned that in some executions, the prisoner had died of an overdose of the first drug, the anesthetic, and that the executioners had then disposed of the other two drugs by injecting them into the corpse. Georgia had used pentobarbital from an undisclosed source in a June 2011 execution, and Fretland found e-mails from the next month proving that Oklahoma officials knew that the inmate had remained conscious for longer than he was supposed to and may have experienced severe pain. But a month after that e-mail exchange, they spent $10,400 of petty cash to buy pentobarbital. They made another purchase a year later, this time spending $40,000. Also see: A Brief History of Executions 
 
 by Matt Ford In March 2014, Fretland published her findings in The Colorado Independent. She editorialized just once. “Banter about exchanging lethal injection help for football tickets and other favors,” she wrote, “raises questions about how seriously Oklahoma officials take the death penalty.” 
 
 A month later, Fretland came to McAlester to watch Clayton Lockett’s execution. A little before 6, she and the other witnesses were taken down a long hallway. She turned a corner into the viewing area, where two tiered rows of metal folding chairs faced the death chamber. Fretland took her seat along with 11 other reporters, two of Lockett’s lawyers, and an assortment of Oklahoma officials. Stephanie Neiman’s family would sit in a separate room for the victim’s relatives. Blinds covered the windows to the death chamber, so Fretland couldn’t see what was going on inside. She sat down, and waited. 
 
 About two months earlier, Mike Oakley, the general counsel for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, had returned from vacation to find the department in a near-frenzy. Before he’d left, the department had ordered pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy for the executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, a 46-year-old man convicted in 2003 of raping and killing his roommate’s 11-month-old baby. But compounding pharmacies had come under pressure to stop selling drugs for executions, and Oklahoma’s supplier had backed out. With the executions scheduled for March 20 and March 27, one of Oakley’s deputies began driving around the state, walking into pharmacies and asking for pentobarbital, without success. Oakley didn’t know why the task of finding drugs for executions fell largely to him: he had no medical training. But he wanted to help his colleagues—especially the warden, whom he considered conscientious and hardworking—because he knew how much strain carrying out a death sentence put on them. He had gone into corrections, 25 years earlier, because Oklahoma was doing interesting work in mediation between victims and offenders. Now he was about to retire, and he found himself, as his swan song, developing a new execution cocktail. 
 
 Oakley had to report on his progress to Robert Patton, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, first thing in the morning and again before he went home each day. The attorney general’s office called Oakley multiple times a day, and Patton himself was getting pressure from the governor’s office. Both the attorney general, Scott Pruitt, and Governor Mary Fallin had elections coming up, and there were rumors that a Tea Party candidate might outflank Fallin on the right. Oakley believed they were worried about looking soft on crime. In mid-March, Pruitt had to make the embarrassing admission, as part of a brief to the state’s court of criminal appeals, that Oklahoma didn’t have all the necessary drugs, and Lockett’s and Warner’s executions had to be delayed. Fewer and fewer medical experts were willing to advise Oakley, even unofficially. But he had professional contacts he’d met through the National Institute of Corrections, and he asked them for advice. He and members of the attorney general’s staff also looked at expert testimony related to executions in Florida. In October 2013, Florida had used a sedative called midazolam in the execution of William Happ. Florida officials had determined that it was “the most humane and dignified way to do the procedure.” Doctors sometimes administer midazolam during anesthesia, but usually just to relax the patient, and in combination with a drug that blocks pain. In a high enough dose, it should render the patient unconscious—but some experts argue that, unlike sodium thiopental and pentobarbital, midazolam cannot produce the deep, coma-like state needed to guarantee he feels no pain. 
 
 William Happ shook his head, blinked, and opened his mouth during his execution. Witnesses had no way of knowing whether he was in pain, but he appeared to remain conscious longer than offenders given sodium thiopental or pentobarbital. Ohio used midazolam in the execution of Dennis McGuire a few months later, and witnesses reported that McGuire snorted, heaved, clenched one of his fists, and gasped for air. Oakley asked his counterpart in Ohio about the state’s experience with midazolam. The media had exaggerated the problems, he was told. Yes, the new drug took a little longer to put a person to sleep, but it wasn’t as bad as everyone was saying. Midazolam was also relatively easy to obtain: multiple U.S. companies made it. Oakley’s wife had just had a kidney stone removed, and one of the drugs she’d been given was midazolam. Both Oakley and the attorney general’s office recommended that the state use it. 
 
 
 
 On April 23, 2014, six days before Lockett’s execution, Mike Oakley retired. 
 
 April 23 would, by coincidence, prove to be a decisive day for the Oklahoma judicial system, for Clayton Lockett, and for his legal team, including Dave Autry. Autry is a soft-spoken man of 56 with a ponytail that hangs halfway down his back. He seems to subsist on tobacco and caffeine—24-ounce mini-mart coffee cups and jumbo cans of Red Bull clutter his office. Autry had represented Lockett for 11 years, since shortly after Lockett exhausted his state appeals. He felt just about ready, after nearly 30 years, to leave the high stakes and emotional toll of death-row work to younger lawyers. Clayton Lockett would be his second-to-last death-row client. 
 
 As time winds down, a death-penalty lawyer has one goal: keep the client alive as long as possible. In October 2013, Autry’s co-counsel, Dean Sanderford, and an attorney for Charles Warner had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review their cases, a last-chance effort to argue that constitutional errors had been made during trial or sentencing. They knew the Court was unlikely to review either case. They also knew from experience that as soon as the Supreme Court declined to hear the cases, Oklahoma would set execution dates. The lawyers needed a plan they could put in motion the instant the Court decided. The simplest strategy would have been an Eighth Amendment challenge. But they couldn’t make a convincing case that the drugs Oklahoma officials planned to use would lead to cruel and unusual punishment, because the state’s secrecy law kept them from getting any information about where the drugs were coming from. In that lack of information, however, perhaps they could find an opportunity. The lawyers could argue that the secrecy law denied their clients “access to the courts” and was therefore unconstitutional. As they prepared to make this case, Oklahoma executed Michael Lee Wilson, a 38-year-old charged with beating a co-worker to death. After the pentobarbital was injected, Wilson said, “I feel my whole body burning.” In January 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the cases. Lockett’s and Warner’s lawyers joined forces to challenge Oklahoma’s secrecy law, and they requested a stay of execution for the prisoners until the challenge was decided. 
 
 The case began ping-ponging around the Oklahoma justice system. A state judge in Oklahoma City, Patricia Parrish, heard the challenge but said she didn’t have the authority to grant a stay, so the legal team appealed to the Oklahoma supreme court. The supreme court transferred the stay request to the state’s court of criminal appeals; the court of criminal appeals asked for supplemental briefs. By that point Lockett’s execution was days away. In their supplemental brief, the lawyers for Lockett and Warner argued that any of these courts had the authority to grant a stay. The government filed an opposing brief arguing that none of the courts did. But it was in this brief, down on page eight, that Attorney General Pruitt made the stunning admission that the state did not have all the drugs it needed for the executions. Two days before Lockett was scheduled to die, he and Warner got a one-month reprieve so that the state could find drugs. A minor victory. Lockett’s execution was rescheduled for April 22, Warner’s for April 29. The same day, Katie Fretland published her bombshell article exposing disturbing details about how the state handled executions. A week later, on March 26, Judge Parrish decided the challenge to the secrecy law in Lockett and Warner’s favor. The law was indeed unconstitutional. “I do not think this is even a close call,” she said. She still believed she lacked the authority to grant a stay, but her ruling gave Lockett and Warner another chance: their lawyers could now ask the state for information about the drugs, and perhaps find the basis for a cruel-and-unusual-punishment lawsuit. 
 
 Right away, Oklahoma announced that it would appeal. Doing so put an automatic hold on Parrish’s decision. By the time the appeal was resolved, Lockett and Warner would likely be dead. The case began ping-ponging again. The inmates’ legal team went to the court of criminal appeals to ask for a stay, but the judges ruled that the case didn’t belong in their court. The lawyers then turned to the Oklahoma supreme court, which told the court of criminal appeals that it did, in fact, have jurisdiction. The court of criminal appeals disagreed and again denied the stay. To Autry and the other lawyers, the judges seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner waited to die. Finally, on April 21, one day before Lockett’s execution, a miracle: the Oklahoma supreme court, divided 5–4, granted a stay. The justices made clear that they intended to seriously contemplate the issues. The ruling seemed likely to put the executions off for a long time and give Lockett and Warner a chance of actually winning the case. Since the case challenged state law, Oklahoma couldn’t take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. No court in the country could overturn the ruling. Autry called Lockett’s stepmother and drove out to Del City to give Lockett’s favorite aunt the news in person. It was an emotional evening, one of the rare moments in a death-penalty case this far along when you get to celebrate. At the prison the next morning, Lockett was moved out of the isolation unit where the condemned spend their final days, and sent back to a regular cell. 
 
 That same day, a shocking reversal: Governor Mary Fallin stepped in. She issued an executive order saying she did not recognize the Oklahoma supreme court’s authority to grant the stay. “The execution for Clayton Derrell Lockett,” she announced, “is therefore scheduled for April 29, 2014”—just one week away, and the same night as Charles Warner’s execution. Autry had never heard of a governor doing something like that. Was it even legal? Could a governor just do away with a ruling by the state supreme court? The next day things got even worse: a state representative filed articles of impeachment against the five justices who had voted for the stay. The Oklahoma supreme court bowed to the pressure. Two days after saying that it would need a long and proper debate in order to determine the constitutionality of the secrecy law, the court issued a decision: the law was fine. The stay was lifted. 
 
 
 
 The national media went into a frenzy. It looked as though the state’s judicial system had collapsed. “Execution Case Roils Oklahoma Courts,” The New York Times declared; other publications quoted the attorney general calling the events a “constitutional crisis.” Reporters descended on McAlester. It seemed as though everyone with even a fleeting interest in the Oklahoma justice system had come to the penitentiary. Everyone except Governor Fallin. On the night of the executions, she was headed to the Chesapeake Energy Arena, to watch Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game Five of the NBA conference quarterfinals. 
 
 At 5:27 p.m., a paramedic approached the gurney. Like the three executioners, she would remain anonymous. Before the blinds opened, she would retreat into the chemical room while a doctor and the prison’s warden stayed with Lockett in the death chamber. But first she had a job to do: prepare the drugs and medical equipment, and get an IV into Lockett. (Those who participated in the execution either did not respond to requests for interviews or could not be reached. Court records provide a detailed account of what happened.) The paramedic later told investigators that she’d felt incredible pressure since she’d walked into the room an hour earlier. She’d never participated in an execution that used midazolam. She’d never participated in two executions in one night—not many people in the world had. And she knew the media were watching. To make matters worse, the equipment was all wrong: the saline was packed in bags instead of syringes, the drugs were in syringes that looked smaller than she was used to, and the tubing for the IV was the wrong kind. But she tried to focus on doing her job and getting everything set up on time. She would be paid $600 for the two executions. The paramedic stuck a needle into a vein in Lockett’s left arm. A few drops of blood moved up the catheter—“flashback.” A good sign. It meant the needle was in the vein. But she’d forgotten tape to hold the IV in place. She asked someone to bring it to her, but the IV slipped out before she could secure it. Lockett’s arm started to bleed, so she put pressure on it and tried again. This time, she didn’t get flashback. Then she tried a brachial vein, near Lockett’s biceps. No luck there. 
 
 By now, she’d tried to place an IV three times. She’d been taught that if you can’t find a vein after the third attempt, you ask someone else to step in. So she asked the doctor to help. The doctor, Johnny Zellmer, was a last-minute substitute. (Zellmer, whose name was revealed in a lawsuit following the execution and in multiple press reports, has not denied his involvement. He did not respond to requests for comment.) He was a local family-medicine and emergency-room physician who’d participated in just one previous execution. Zellmer had arguably violated his profession’s oath to “never do harm” the moment he stepped into the death chamber. Indeed, the American Medical Association’s code of ethics states that physicians should not participate in executions, even in a supervisory capacity. But Zellmer thought his job would be limited to checking the offender for consciousness and pronouncing the time of death. He wasn’t expecting to actually do anything to Lockett. The paramedic’s request for help put him in the position of no longer just observing the execution but actively facilitating it. She was clearly struggling, though. He scanned Lockett’s body and didn’t see any good veins. Then Lockett turned his head, and the paramedic saw a vein in his neck pop up. She pointed it out to Zellmer. “Get me a needle for the jugular,” he said. This was an odd choice. IVs in the neck are painful, and also hard to place. On the arms and legs, you can use a tourniquet to bring the veins up. You cannot do that on the neck, because a tourniquet on the neck is effectively a noose, and while this was an execution, it was not a hanging. 
 
 As Zellmer tried to get the needle into the jugular, the paramedic stuck Lockett three more times on his right arm, failing each time. Zellmer got the needle into Lockett’s neck and saw flashback, but then saw blood spread under the skin—he thought the needle might have gone all the way through the vein. Zellmer decided to try a subclavian line, in a vein running beneath Lockett’s collarbone. The paramedic brought him a central-venous catheterization kit, and Zellmer numbed Lockett’s chest with lidocaine. The paramedic tried two different veins on Lockett’s right foot; both attempts failed. Zellmer kept trying to get the needle into Lockett’s subclavian vein. He finally saw a little flashback, then lost the vein and couldn’t get the needle back in. After repeatedly sticking Lockett’s chest, he decided to try the femoral vein, in Lockett’s groin. The paramedic went to get a longer needle. As the warden, Anita Trammell, watched the doctor and the paramedic work on Lockett, she felt a sliver of pride for the inmate. He’d now been stuck with needles more than a dozen times. She knew he was in pain, but she thought he was taking it like a man. Trammell tried to make conversation to help calm him. She knew he had been a drug user. “What was your drug of choice?” she asked him. “Ice.” “I thought that was a white man’s drug,” she said, and he laughed. The paramedic came back and said she had no needles longer than an inch and a quarter. That presented a problem. The femoral vein lies deeper in the body than other veins, so they would ideally use a needle at least twice that length. There were longer needles inside a second central-venous catheterization kit, like the one they’d just used on Lockett’s chest, but neither Zellmer nor the paramedic thought of it. Zellmer asked for an IO-infusion needle. IO stands for “intraosseous”—into the bone. It is, in effect, a power drill, used to bore a hole through bone and into the marrow, and therefore doesn’t require finding a vein. 
 
 The prison had no IO needle. Zellmer had only the absurdly short one-and-a-quarter-inch needle. “Well,” he told the paramedic, “we’ll just have to make it work.” Lockett’s prison scrubs and underwear were cut away. Zellmer stuck the needle into Lockett’s femoral vein and saw flashback on the first try. Finally, after almost an hour, they had an IV. Right away, the paramedic noticed a potential warning sign. Saline should have been flowing easily through the IV, but it flowed only when she propped up the line. Instead of starting over, though, she taped the IV in place. Two IVs are typically used to administer the drugs, but with the execution running way behind schedule, the doctor and the paramedic decided they would proceed with just one. Warden Trammell asked Lockett whether he needed anything. “I was gonna see if I could get my mouth wiped off,” he said. She got a Kleenex and wiped it for him. 
 
 
 
 Finally, a sheet was draped over Lockett, covering him up to his chest. The execution could begin. 
 
 Lockett’s closest family members were about two hours away. His stepmother, LaDonna Hollins, had made the drive to the prison countless times. During her final visit, she and Lockett had sat looking at each other and crying. “I do not want you to be at the execution,” she later recalled him saying, “because I do not know the outcome. I do not think it’s gonna be very good. Because the drugs that they use have not been tested.” 
 
 Lockett knew that Michael Lee Wilson had said “I feel my whole body burning” when the state executed him earlier that year. Lockett was scared. “Do me one favor,” Hollins told him, according to an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel. “As long as you can talk on that gurney: Talk. Let the world know how they are executing people here in Oklahoma.” Lockett knew that another inmate had said “I feel my whole body burning” during his execution. He was scared. After that visit, she heard that the prison had refused Lockett’s request for a last meal—chateaubriand, fried shrimp, baked potato, garlic toast, and a whole Kentucky bourbon pie—because it exceeded the $15 limit. Hollins called the prison and said she’d pay for it, or even drive the meal down herself, but she wasn’t allowed to. She didn’t think Lockett could be spared after what he’d done, but she didn’t think he should suffer anymore, either. So she did what she’d always done: try, however she could, to offer him some small comfort. Lockett had first shown up on her doorstep in Southern California at the age of 3, crying and soaked in urine. His mother had put him on a bus all the way from Oklahoma to live with his father. There’d been no notice. Hollins testified in court that when Lockett was a young child, she saw his half brother, who was about five years older, lying on top of him, the two boys looking strange together. Then a call from the school. Lockett was in the infirmary. He’d come in crying and complaining of pain around his anus. Another memory: Lockett following his father, John, from room to room as he got ready for work, and then following him out of the house, into the street. Lockett in tears, certain that his father would never return. Once, as a birthday present for his brother John Jr., the boys’ mother agreed to talk with them on the phone. Lockett waited for his turn with anticipation—he was now 4, and hadn’t heard his mother’s voice since she had put him on the bus. But she took offense when John Jr. referred to Hollins as “Mama LaDonna,” and hung up before Lockett got to talk with her. John Sr. disciplined Lockett and his other children with everything from belts to two-by-fours. Hollins tried to protect the boy, but she wasn’t exempt from John Sr.’s violent temper either; he broke her arm twice. John Sr. taught his children to steal—groceries sometimes, televisions other times—and punished them only for getting caught. Hollins remembers John Sr. blowing marijuana smoke up Lockett’s nose and sitting him down to watch porn when Lockett was a child. “Boy,” he said, “you need to tear that pussy up.” That’s what he told Lockett he was going to do to Hollins. By the time Lockett was in middle school, his father and Hollins had brought him back to Oklahoma. To his eighth-grade teacher—a woman whose son, Mark Gibson, would later prosecute him—he stood out as smart and likable. Lockett brightened around small children. He babysat younger family members, liked to cook for them, and carried them around on his back. He had a girlfriend whose baby had Down syndrome, and he was the only person who could always make the little girl smile. But he also spent a lot of time trying to act tough, and racked up charges including burglary and intimidating a witness. At 16, he was sentenced as an adult and sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. With no one to protect him, he was raped almost immediately by three other inmates. When Lockett got out, at age 20, he wanted to be feared. He wanted everyone to know that if they crossed him, they’d pay. So, a few years later, when a guy named Bobby Bornt seemed to be holding out on a $40 debt for marijuana and a tattoo, Lockett got his cousin and a friend and a shotgun and went to see him. That same night, by terrible coincidence, Stephanie Neiman and a friend drove to Bornt’s house in Neiman’s new Chevy pickup truck, which had a Tasmanian Devil sticker and vanity plates that read Tazzz. Neiman was an only child whose parents had instilled in her a strong sense of right and wrong. She was admired by her classmates and by school administrators for her kindness and loyalty, and because of what she had overcome—she was considered “intellectually challenged” but had played saxophone in the school band and earned her diploma. Those who worked with her at the school believe she wasn’t able to understand how serious the situation was that night, or what the consequences might be. Neiman and Bornt had known each other since they were young children; they’d been in the same YMCA day care. When the girls arrived at Bornt’s house, Lockett and the others were already there, attacking Bornt. Neiman reacted in a way that unsettled Lockett: she seemed unafraid. He told her to hand over the keys to her truck. She said no—the truck belonged to her. Lockett and his accomplices beat up Bornt, raped Neiman’s friend, and bound all three victims. Then Lockett led the group into Bornt’s and Neiman’s trucks and out of town, north into Kay County, up on the border with Kansas. The men threatened to kill the three victims if they reported the night’s crimes to the police. Bornt and Neiman’s friend swore they wouldn’t, and Lockett later let them go. But Neiman refused. Her parents had taught her to tell the truth. So when Lockett asked whether she would go to the police, she said yes. 
 
 
 
 Lockett asked her a final time. Then he raised the gun and fired. Twenty-three minutes behind schedule, the blinds to the death chamber opened. Warden Trammell stood facing the witnesses. She asked Lockett whether he had any last words. “No.” “Let the execution begin.” Just behind Lockett’s head, in the chemical room, one of the three executioners pushed the plunger on a syringe full of midazolam. The sedative went into the tubing, traveling 132 inches through the hole in the wall, into the death chamber, under the sheet, and into Clayton Lockett’s groin. But not all of it went straight into his bloodstream. Somehow, the IV dislodged, and midazolam was pumped into Lockett’s tissue instead of his vein. Some of the drug would make its way into his bloodstream, but the smaller dose would be less effective. Minutes passed. Lockett remained alert. He pursed his lips and blinked. He licked his lips. To Katie Fretland, he looked confused. Several more minutes passed. Lockett turned his head and looked toward the witnesses. He looked back up. Finally, he closed his eyes. In the chemical room, the executioners counted time on a stopwatch. Five minutes after they pushed the midazolam into the line, they flipped a switch and a light bulb went on in the death chamber, signaling that it was time to check whether Lockett was unconscious. Zellmer got up and checked Lockett. He was still conscious. The light went off. Two minutes later, the light came on again—a signal to check Lockett a second time. The doctor blew in Lockett’s eyes, rubbed his sternum, and pinched him. This time, he determined that Lockett was unconscious. The executioners injected a syringe full of vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, into the line. When properly administered, vecuronium bromide blocks the signals that the nervous system sends to the muscles, turning the body into a vehicle the brain no longer controls. It’s as if the wire that connects them has been severed and signals can no longer pass—including the signal that says breathe. An incompletely sedated person under a paralytic might look serene, because his face muscles are paralyzed. But he’s suffocating: when he tries to expand his chest and draw breath, nothing happens. The Animal Welfare Act has banned the use of paralytics without anesthesia in the euthanasia of animals. To anti-death-penalty advocates, the fact that these drugs are used in executions is revealing. If the sedative worked, why would you need to paralyze someone? They argue that the paralytic prevents us from seeing the offender’s distress, so that the procedure appears clinical and painless—even if it’s not. One of Lockett’s executioners would later recall noticing something strange: the plunger was hard to push. He had no way of knowing that he might be injecting fluid into tissue, though, so he simply pushed harder. He heard what sounded like a moan come from the chamber. Zellmer watched Lockett, oblivious to the fact that, under the sheet, the IV was not in place. In the chemical room, the executioners administered the third drug, potassium chloride. At 6:36, Katie Fretland saw Lockett move. During Lockett’s trial and his early years on death row, he showed no remorse. In his letters, he posed as a member of a far-reaching criminal network. “Im an assassin—point blank!” he wrote to one friend. “You honestly think that my boys is gone let a nigga as valuable me go to the penn forever? Fucc No!” He was a terror, hiding homemade weapons in his cell and once throwing urine and excrement at a guard—anything he could do to show his disdain for authority. But in letters to his father, now also in prison, Lockett still yearned for a bond. He told his father about a girlfriend on the outside. Dad I can send her to visit you, keep me informed on how you’re doing … Dad it’s a few people on my team that will be sending me money. I’m not going to be needing all that, I just really want a tube and some canteen and Im cool. Dad, I know you aint got too many people in your corner so I know you’ll need some money. Give me a few months to get my stable in order and I can start sending you some ends through my girl. Gradually, the weight of his crime began to overwhelm him. He talked often with Autry, his lawyer, about what he’d done to Neiman’s parents, taking away their only child. A couple of years in, he tried to kill himself. After that, he took to all the prison self-improvement pastimes: reading, painting, philosophy. Autry lent him books, and Lockett became the most well-read client the attorney had ever had. Still, there was a hollowness to Lockett’s new persona, as though he had gone from posing as a gangbanger to posing as a self-educated prison sophisticate. When the time came for a clemency hearing before the pardon-and-parole board—one of his last chances for survival—Lockett declined to show up. Instead, he gave Autry a letter to read to Neiman’s family. “It would be disingenuous of me to tell you that I woke up one day and suddenly felt remorse,” he wrote. “Or that I found some arcane bible verse that miraculously inspired me to change. The truth is not so simple as that.” He told them that for him, remorse had been slow, but debilitating. “I want you to know that if by me relinquishing my life you find solace in my death & can one day find the strength to forgive me then I am okay with this.” Right up to the very end, Lockett pretended he actually had some control. To Warden Trammell, it looked as though Lockett was trying to communicate something. He kicked his right leg. He began to breathe heavily. He clenched his teeth. He rolled his head. Then he tried to speak. My God, Trammell thought. He’s coming out of this. Lockett lurched up against the restraints. While the witnesses looked on, he started writhing as if trying to free himself, to get up off the gurney. He struggled violently, twisting his whole body. Autry, sitting in the viewing area, couldn’t believe it; next to him, Dean Sanderford, Lockett’s other lawyer, began to cry. Lockett got his whole head up off the gurney, as far as the restraints would let him go. He kept trying to speak but couldn’t form the words, and he rolled his head back and forth. Zellmer watched the monitor. The potassium chloride was supposed to stop Lockett’s heart immediately, by disrupting the electrical charge that causes the heart muscles to contract. But although Lockett’s heart was slowing, it kept beating. The normal resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Lockett’s dropped into the 20s. From the waves on the screen, it looked like his heart muscles were starting to fire erratically. The doctor thought Lockett might be starting to seize. But he still felt uncertain of his role, and hesitated to intervene. From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, “He’s trying to get off the table!” Finally Lockett managed to speak: “Man.” Zellmer had seen enough. He came to the gurney and lifted the sheet. Underneath, he saw a protrusion almost the size of a tennis ball on Lockett’s groin. From the viewing area, Katie Fretland could see the doctor’s face for the first time, and his expression was clear: Oh, fuck. Another witness saw Lockett open his eyes and look right at the doctor, like something out of a horror movie. The warden glanced under the sheet and noticed what looked like blood and clear liquid pooled around Lockett’s groin. She looked up and addressed the witnesses: “We’re going to lower the blinds, temporarily.” From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, “He’s trying to get off the table!” She came into the death chamber as the doctor was trying to figure out how to finish the execution. “I need to get another IV in the left femoral,” Zellmer told her. She swabbed Lockett’s groin with a sterile pad. “Take deep breaths,” the paramedic told Lockett, in case he could hear her, while Zellmer pushed the short needle back into Lockett’s groin. Blood squirted all over Zellmer, so much of it that it soaked his jacket. “You’ve hit the artery,” the paramedic said. “It’ll be all right,” Zellmer told her. “We’ll go ahead and get the drugs.” Did he intend to put drugs in an artery? The paramedic didn’t want to countermand the doctor’s authority, but that made no sense. “We’ve got to get the vein,” she said. The doctor pulled out the needle. Lockett mumbled incoherently. His heart rate dropped into the teens as more of the potassium chloride that had been pumped into his groin seeped into his bloodstream. Eventually, the doctor and the paramedic stopped what they were doing. The warden asked whether it would be possible to resuscitate Lockett. Zellmer said he could start CPR, but that in order to save him, they’d have to take him to an emergency room. This further confused the paramedic. He’s dying, she thought. Isn’t that why we’re here? Stephanie Neiman’s family was in shock. After the blinds came down, prison staff took them to a rec room and tried to console them. While Neiman’s mother, Susie, wept, someone from the state attorney general’s office tried to explain what had happened, something about Lockett’s heart and a vein exploding. Susie said she wanted to go into the chamber and touch Lockett; otherwise she couldn’t know for sure that her daughter’s killer was dead. Fretland and the other reporters felt almost as stunned. In the viewing area, a black telephone she hadn’t noticed before started ringing. Robert Patton, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections director, picked it up and left the room, pulling the phone cord out into the hall and closing the door behind him. Warden Trammell was calling from the death chamber. Patton asked her, “Has enough drugs been administered to cause death?” He heard Trammell repeat the question. He heard the doctor say no. “Is there another vein available, and if so do you have another set of chemicals back there?” Again, Trammell repeated the question; again the doctor said no. “I wanna be real clear with this, Warden, and I want you to ask the doctor specifically. Has enough drugs entered the inmate’s system to cause death?” A third time, he heard Trammell repeat the question. A third time, the answer was no. Patton hung up the phone and huddled in the hallway with the state secretary of safety and security and two members of the attorney general’s office. Someone briefly floated the idea of using the drugs reserved for Charles Warner’s execution. Patton spoke on the phone with the governor’s general counsel, Steve Mullins, in Oklahoma City. Mullins asked Patton, “Do you want to stop the execution?” “Yes.” “You have the authority to stop the execution,” he told Patton. When they hung up, Mullins called the governor—the basketball game was now an hour from tip-off—to brief her. At 6:56, a call came in to the death chamber. Patton had instructions for the warden. He said something like “stand down,” which Trammell didn’t quite understand. “Do you mean to stop?” Yes, he said, stop the execution.
– Two videos circulating on social media showed a Georgia man being assaulted by two cops during a traffic stop this week, and now those cops have been fired, the AP reports. Robert McDonald was canned Thursday after the first video came to light involving motorist Demetrius Bryan Hollins, the Gwinnett County PD says. Michael Bongiovanni was let go later that day after a second video emerged, per the Washington Post. "The revelations uncovered in this entire investigation are shocking," read a Gwinnett PD statement tweeted Thursday night. Hollins, 21, had been pulled over in Lawrenceville around 4pm Wednesday by Bongiovanni, the police say, and as shown in a video that appeared on the Everything Georgia Twitter feed, Bongiovanni punched Hollins in the face after Hollins came out of the car with his hands up. The other video shows McDonald rushing over as Hollins was lying in the street and slamming his foot into Hollins' head. Hollins' lip and nose appeared to be bloodied in his booking photo. Bongiovanni's incident report said he had pulled Hollins over for a busted brake light and a lack of signaling while changing lanes. The officer said Hollins had started to "act strange," yell, and resist directions, and he remembered similarly disruptive behavior from a previous arrest. Hollins was released on bond Thursday after he was charged with the original citations, in addition to driving with a suspended or revoked license and registration and possessing less than an ounce of pot. (A California cop has been accused of pummeling a pedestrian—an incident that was also caught on video.)