OKLAHOMA CITY - The head of Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections told Gov. Mary Fallin on Thursday that he needs more oversight of execution procedures and said it took officials 51 minutes to find a suitable vein before the botched execution on an inmate earlier this week.

Clayton Lockett died of an apparent heart attack 10 minutes after prison director Robert Patton halted the execution. The chief of prisons said Lockett had an intravenous tap placed at his groin because suitable veins couldn’t be found elsewhere. That vein collapsed, and Patton said Lockett didn’t have another vein that was suitable - and that the state didn’t have another dose of the drugs available anyway.

The IV line was covered by a sheet because it had been placed at Lockett’s groin, Patton said in his letter to the governor. The line’s becoming dislodged from the vein wasn’t discovered until 21 minutes after the execution began and all of the execution drugs had been injected into the line.

“The drugs had either absorbed into tissue, leaked out or both,” Patton wrote. “The director asked the following question, ‘Have enough drugs been administered to cause death?’ The doctor responded, ‘No.’

After the doctor attending the execution found a faint heartbeat, Patton ordered the execution stopped. Lockett died anyway.

Oklahoma’s execution rules call for medical personnel to immediately give emergency aid if a stay is granted while the lethal drugs are being administered, but it’s not clear whether that happened. The report does not say what occurred from when Patton called off the execution at 6:56 p.m. to Lockett’s being pronounced dead at 7:06 p.m.

The report also indicated that on his last morning, Lockett fought with guards who attempted to remove him from his cell and he was shocked with a stun gun. After being taken to a prison infirmary, a self-inflicted cut was found on Lockett’s arm that was determined not to require stitches. The report also notes that Lockett refused food at breakfast and lunch.

Madeline Cohen, an attorney for an inmate who had been scheduled to be executed two hours after Lockett, said Oklahoma was revealing information about the events “in a chaotic manner.”

“As the Oklahoma Department of Corrections dribbles out piecemeal information about Clayton Lockett’s botched execution, they have revealed that Mr. Lockett was killed using an invasive and painful method - an IV line in his groin,” Cohen said in a statement. “Placing such a femoral [thigh-region] IV line requires highly specialized medical training and expertise.”

The second execution set for Tuesday night, of inmate Charles Warner, was initially rescheduled for May 13. Patton on Thursday called for an indefinite stay. Cohen said she agreed that an indefinite stay was necessary.

Fallin, who has ordered one of her Cabinet members to investigate the botched execution, said Thursday that she was willing to issue a 60-day stay for Warner, the longest allowed under state law, if needed to complete the inquiry.

“If it does require more time, then, yes, I think they should take more time,” Fallin said Thursday. “We need to get it right.”

If 60 days isn’t adequate, Oklahoma’s attorney general said he would request an additional stay from the courts to ensure no executions are carried out until the review is complete.

In recommendations to the governor, Patton also said it was wrong to leave “all responsibility and decision-making” to the warden of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester, where executions are carried out.

“Those decisions should rest on upper management and ultimately on the Director of Corrections,” Patton wrote in a four-page letter detailing Lockett’s last day. He shared the letter at a Board of Corrections meeting Thursday.

The director said the state should conduct a full review of execution procedures, and he said he intended to contact other states to ensure that Oklahoma “adopts proven standards.”

He also recommended that Oklahoma give Warner an indefinite stay of execution because once new protocols are written, “staff will require extensive training.”

Patton also asked for an external review of what went wrong at Lockett’s execution.

“While I have complete confidence in the abilities of my Inspector General and his staff, I believe the report will be perceived as more credible if conducted by an external entity,” he said.

“We look forward to a thorough review and a rewrite of the protocols for the state of Oklahoma in carrying out executions,” Patton said after the letter, which urged an indefinite stay on the next execution, was released. “I do not know how long that investigation will take. There is no timeline for the review, nor is there a timeline for the rewrite of the protocols. There is an active warrant in two weeks for an execution. I do not know if that will be completed by that time.”

He refused to answer additional questions about the execution.

Lockett’s execution Tuesday was to have started at 6 p.m., but a phlebotomist couldn’t find a suitable place for an intravenous line on Lockett’s arms, legs, feet and neck. Ultimately, he placed an IV line at Lockett’s groin and covered the area with a sheet, the letter said. A timeline released by Patton notes the phlebotomist working from 5:27 p.m. to 6:18p.m.

The execution started at 6:23 p.m. but by 6:44 p.m., Lockett hadn’t died. Typically inmates die in about 10 minutes.

According to the timeline accompanying Patton’s letter to Fallin, a doctor attending the execution said that, after a vein collapsed, Lockett did not absorb a fatal dose of three execution drugs and the state didn’t have enough on hand to try again.

Patton stopped the execution at 6:56 p.m., but 10 minutes later Lockett suffered what appeared to be a heart attack. Autopsy results are pending.

Lockett and Warner previously had sued the state for refusing to disclose details about its execution drugs, saying it violated the Constitution’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. They argued that without knowing who manufactures the execution drugs, they had no way of ensuring that the drugs would work as intended.

The case placed Oklahoma’s two highest courts at odds and prompted calls for the impeachment of state Supreme Court justices after the court last week issued a rare stay of execution. The high court later dissolved its stay and dismissed the inmates’ claim that they were entitled to know the source of the lethal drugs.

Death-penalty opponents have said Lockett’s botched lethal injection raises questions about the use of the punishment in Oklahoma and elsewhere.

In Texas, which also has an execution scheduled for May 13, prison officials said Thursday that they had no plans to change execution procedures.

Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the execution of Robert James Campbell, convicted in the 1991 abduction and murder of a Houston bank employee, will go forward as planned.

A spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry agreed with that decision, saying Texas’ protocol for executions hasn’t led to problems.

“Gov. Perry has great confidence in our state’s criminal-justice system and those responsible for administering executions,” spokesman Travis Considine said.

But Maurie Levin, a defense lawyer who was involved in recent legal battles to disclose the compounding pharmacy making Texas’ execution drug, said the botched Oklahoma execution demonstrates the need for greater transparency and broader oversight in Texas, which executes more people than any other state and many countries.

“There’s absolute relevance to Texas,” she said. “The problem is lack of accountability.” Information for this article was contributed by Sean Murphy and Lindsey Tanner of The Associated Press; by Jerry Markon, Mark Berman, Lindsey Bever, Scott Wilson and Rachel Weiner of The Washington Post; and by Tim Eaton of the Austin American-Statesman.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/02/2014