WASHINGTON, May 1 (RIA Novosti), Lyudmila Chernova - The botched execution of death row inmate Clayton Lockett in the US state of Oklahoma was a ghastly and cruel incident that proved prisoners in US are treated as guinea pigs, Kirk Bloodsworth, the first US death row prisoner to be exonerated by DNA told RIA Novosti Wednesday.
“You can't keep using people as guinea pigs and trying to figure out how your stuff works, it's not right,” Bloodsworth said.
“It is constitutionally cruel and unusual. I mean you can't have a man just taking so long to die with a process that they have no idea about, this stuff hasn't been tested. […] America needs to stop this, and the sooner the better,” he stressed.
Bloodsworth reminded about the recent study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States revealing that 1 in 25 death row inmates is likely to be innocent.
“There have been 144 people in the US that have been found innocent, and innocence matters,” he asserted, adding that there is always a chance to kill an innocent person.
“It's a failed policy it never works and the risk of executing an innocent person is far too great to keep it going. America needs to do away with the death penalty and so does everybody else that still has it.”
Robert Blecker, Professor of criminal law at New York Law School and the author of the recently published book ‘The Death of Punishment,’ who is in favor of the death penalty said that lethal injection was a terrible method.
“I am against lethal injection not because it might cause pain but because it certainly causes confusion,” Blecker told RIA Novosti Wednesday.
“The FDA should have nothing to do with this. We are not trying to treat an illness, we are trying to punish a crime. The condemned gets wheeled in lying on a gurney wrapped in white sheets with an IV on his arm surrounded by medical technicians and his loved ones watching,” he explained.
“I have witnessed an execution, and I also was with my father-in-law when he died from incurable and incredibly painful cancer in a hospice. And that final scene was so similar to the execution scene that it made me shudder,” Blecker said.
He also stressed that punishment should fit the crime. “We should be concerned that those commit relatively trivial crimes are not being punished the same way that those who are committing very serious crimes are being punished. We should be concerned not only with whether he lives or dies, but how he lives until he dies.”
On Tuesday, Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett died 43 minutes after he was administered a new, three-drug combination, which left him writhing and clenching his teeth on the gurney. The leading prison officials had to call off the proceedings before the man's eventual death less than half an hour after from a heart attack.
The incident with the botched lethal injection came amid a nationwide debate over the lawfulness of the three-drug practice and whether it violates the US constitution that prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment."
