In news coverage of the botched execution of a man in Oklahoma, it was sometimes hard to discern why Clayton Lockett was on the executioner's table.
Her name was Stephanie Neiman, a 19-year-old recent high school graduate back in 1999 when Lockett decided 19 years was as long as she needed to live. Neiman drove a female friend to 23-year-old Bobby Bornt's house. What the two women could not have known was three men -- Lockett, his cousin and another man -- had tied Bornt up and beat him while his 9-month-old child slept elsewhere in the house.
Bornt owed money to Lockett. When Neiman's friend went inside, the men struck her with a shotgun, then made her call Neiman to the house. The trio of assailants raped Neiman's 18-year-old friend over and over, assaulted Neiman then hauled everyone -- including the baby -- to a rural area. A defiant Neiman refused to say she would not call police, so Lockett forced her to watch as one of the men dug a grave.
Lockett shot Stephanie Neiman with a 12-gauge shotgun. As she lay in agony, he had to take time clear up a mechanical problem with the gun. Once everything was back in order, he shot her again. While she still breathed, Lockett told this colleagues in this crime to bury her. They did. And she died in the grave.
A jury found Lockett, who had already spent time in prison, guilty of first-degree murder, conspiracy, first-degree burglary, three counts of assault with a dangerous weapon, three counts of forcible oral sodomy, four counts of first-degree rape, four counts of kidnapping and two counts of robbery by force and fear.
Last week, 15 years after Lockett's horrendous crime, the state of Oklahoma finally surpassed all the legal roadblocks tossed up by anti-death penalty advocates and reached his execution date. Had the state performed its duty well, Lockett would have made one final batch of headlines. That's not the way it turned out.
Oklahoma inaugurated a new three-drug cocktail designed to first sedate the inmate so he feels nothing. A second drug causes paralysis to stop breathing and a third induces heart failure. The new drug mix was necessary because European pharmaceutical companies squeamish about carrying out the death penalty have decided to impose their morality on the United States.
The execution did not go smoothly. Lockett writhed on the gurney and struggled to speak as the drugs took affect. What state officials realized too late was an intravenous line into Lockett's veins had failed. It wasn't the new drug mix that failed; it was its delivery. Lockett, according to Oklahoma City's KFOR, forced out the words "man," "I'm not" and "something's wrong" before state officials called off the execution. Locket died of a heart attack, no doubt induced by the third drug.
Richard W. Garnett, a former Supreme Court law clerk who now teaches criminal and constitutional law at the University of Notre Dame, told CNN the botched process in Lockett's scheduled death will likely "prompt many Americans across the country to rethink the wisdom, and the morality, of capital punishment."
I'm not convinced. The unforeseen complications will give new energy to death penalty opponents, whose own efforts to make society's ultimate punishment not work can at least partly be blamed for the convoluted mechanisms states must go through to properly carry out lethal injections.
If the populations of states decide they do not want to carry out the death penalty, it's their right to make that decision. But criminal justice policy in Arkansas or any of the United States shouldn't be dictated by Europeans or by the roadblocks to the majority's will thrown up by legally skilled opponents of the death penalty.
I agree wholeheartedly that Clayton Lockett's execution -- no killer's execution -- should be painful. I'm sorry he suffered in his final moments on this earth. The process needs to be refined.
Let's not, however, shed a tear that the man responsible for such atrocities has died.
That it took so long for Lockett to die -- measured in years, not a few extra minutes -- is indeed the tragedy.
GREG HARTON IS OPINION PAGE EDITOR FOR NWA MEDIA.
Commentary on 05/05/2014