It’s great that the president has announced an effort to review how the death penalty is applied in the United States. The botched execution in Oklahoma merits more than a state-level response. Across the country, the number of states that apply the death penalty is dwindling.

Yes — read that again — we’re almost to the end of this horrific practice, since the country is losing its thirst for state-applied death.

Have we become so moral? No. But increasingly, jurors, prosecutors and state legislators are seeing that it’s not effective, too expensive and too freighted with our history and current state of racism, inequality and brokenness — social, legislative and even judicial (blame TV’s “CSI” and “Bones” in part for selling the “magic elixir” of the perfect police/court coordination that always, always leads to the culprit).

But.

We don’t need a review. We already have the information. The case is clear and has been for some time. The death penalty is as antiquated as the rack. As useless as the workhouse. As cruel as the cross.

We need to get rid of the death penalty now and forever.

Need more?

Read how Clayton D. Lockett died on April 29. Better yet, peruse the Oklahoma Department of Correction’s own timeline (emphasis mine of the New York Times article).

Yes Clayton Lockett was a violent man. The fact of his guilt is clear. Some say his suffering is justified by the suffering he inflicted on his victim, Stephanie Nieman.

But justice is not revenge. Justice is not an eye for an eye. When the state inflicts the same pain and suffering as a murderer, it is no longer the people’s will but an arm of vengeance and cruelty in the people’s name. Lockett was rightly convicted of Nieman’s murder and rightly punished. But this gruesome death, any death inflicted by the state, is neither justice for Nieman or us, in whose name the state operates.

Early on the morning of Clayton D. Lockett’s scheduled execution, he defied prison officers seeking to shackle him for the required walk to get X-rays. So they shocked him with a Taser, Oklahoma’s chief of corrections stated in an account released Thursday of Mr. Lockett’s final day, before his execution went awry.

Once Mr. Lockett was in an examining room, the staff discovered that he had slashed his own arm; a physician assistant determined that sutures would not be needed.

Hours later on that Tuesday, as his 6 p.m. time for lethal injection approached, Mr. Lockett lay strapped on a gurney in the execution chamber.

Finding a suitable vein and placing an IV line took 51 minutes. A medical technician searched both of his arms, both of his legs and both of his feet for a vein into which to insert the needle, but “no viable point of entry was located,” reported the corrections chief, Robert Patton, in a letter to Gov. Mary Fallin that her office released. A doctor, the letter said, “went to the groin area.”…

With something clearly going terribly wrong, the doctor “checked the IV and reported that the blood vein had collapsed, and the drugs had either absorbed into the tissue, leaked out or both,” Mr. Patton wrote.

The warden called Mr. Patton, who asked, “Have enough drugs been administered to cause death?” The doctor answered no.

“Is another vein available, and if so, are there enough drugs remaining?” The doctor responded no again. Mr. Patton then asked about Mr. Lockett’s condition; the warden said that the doctor “found a faint heartbeat” and that Mr. Lockett was unconscious.

At 6:56, Mr. Patton called off the execution. Ten minutes later, at 7:06, “Doctor pronounced Offender Lockett dead,” the letter states.

OK Lockett death-page-001 OK Lockett death-page-002 OK Lockett death-page-003 OK Lockett death-page-004