WASHINGTON, May 2 (RIA Novosti), Lyudmila Chernova - A botched execution of an Oklahoma inmate has once again showed how vengeful and thoughtless states are regarding death penalty and how little they care about their constitution, claimed Ray Krone, Director of Membership and Training for Witness to Innocence and the 100th person exonerated from death row in the US.
“It’s outraging. The system in Oklahoma and the other states are just so adamant about carrying out executions, killing its own citizens, and they rush to do it,” Krone told RIA Novosti Thursday. “Taking a life is wrong. And now worst of all we proved that we can’t even do it right anyway even if we get the right person.”
On Tuesday, Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett died 43 minutes after he was administered a new, three drugs combination, which left him writhing and clenching his teeth on the gurney. The leading prison officials had to call off the proceedings before the inmate's eventual death less than half an hour after from a heart attack. The incident has caused worldwide outcry and scrutiny.
“Our government is just not capable of carrying out an execution in a fair and just way and according to the constitution, asserted Krone. “It’s cruel and unusual that we had the secrecy of the drugs, the secrecy of the procedure in Oklahoma.”
Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan law school called Tuesday’s execution very disturbing, adding that in the US in the last 25 years the authorities have tried to turn executions into a medical procedure that does not work well.
“The fact that state governments tried to do that reveals that it’s type of punishment that nobody is comfortable with. Nobody feels at ease with it,” Gross told RIA Novosti Thursday. “None of the people who provide medical services is willing to be involved in deliberate killing, including doctors, nurses, drug and pharmaceutical companies. And that’s why it happened this way.”
Gross is also the lead author of this study "Rate of False Conviction of Criminal Defendants Who Are Sentenced to Death" published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. According to its findings, among all the people who were sentenced to death in the US from 1973 through 2004 more than 4% were innocent.
“This is the first time in any context that researchers were able to come up with a reliable good estimate of the rate at which innocent people are convicted of serious crimes,” the professor emphasized.
The researchers were able to come up with a statistical estimate for a type of mistake which for many years people have said you can never the extent of.
“In some cases it’s a human mistake that cannot be avoided, in other cases no effort is made. And in many cases the convictions are caused by deliberate misconduct on the part of officials of the state. And that’s worse than mistake,” Gross said.
According to Ray Krone, the study proves how flawed the death penalty system is, as well as whole justice system.
