John Marion Grant waited to be killed.
Executioners strapped him to the gurney.
Then they injected him with a sedative.
John was being executed by lethal injection.
It's supposed to be the humane, less cruel way to die.
But John began to vomit and shake.
It went on for around 15 minutes before he was declared dead.
It had been violent and likely painful.
I have accompanied
six human beings to execution.
It's such a fallacy of an argument
to claim that you can kill
a conscious, imaginative human being...
humanely.
For decades, lethal injection has been marketed
as the safe, sanitized face of executions in the United States.
But it turns out the science behind it
might be wrong.
To call this science —
the profession of medicine
has nothing officially to do with this.
First of all, when it comes to capital
punishment, race plays an outsize role in who is sentenced to die.
In fact, Black defendants are more likely to receive death sentences
than their white counterparts.
It reminds me of,
I'm just going to be honest,
mostly Black people being lynched
and mostly white people
watching on with glee.
It's an important disparity to consider when we talk about the death
penalty in the U.S.
Until the 1980s, the most common method of executing prisoners in the U.S.
was electrocution.
Take a moment to think about what that would be like.
The death is excruciating. It's violent.
Some prisoners even caught on fire while being electrocuted.
And the horrible spectacle of humans burning alive
began to impact public opinion on the death penalty.
In response, lawmakers looked for an alternative,
cleaner, quieter, less painful method of killing.
That's where the idea to kill by lethal injection came from.
To keep the prisoner
from feeling any pain, executioners would administer three drugs.
First, they would inject something
to knock the person unconscious, usually an anesthetic or sedative.
Second comes some sort of paralytic meant to cease all movement in the body.
And finally, a drug to stop the heart, usually potassium chloride.
But here's something that shocked us while researching this piece:
the man responsible for coming up with the three-drug cocktail?
He says he acted on a hunch.
By his own admission,
Dr. A. Jay Chapman did no research before coming up with the idea.
And Chapman later admitted he was, quote, "an expert in dead bodies
but not an expert in getting them that way."
His speculation became the legal blueprint
for states adopting lethal injection across the country.
The idea of lethal injection is that —
was to create a method of execution
that would, at least outwardly,
appear to not be cruel.
That's Dr. Joel Zivot.
He's an anesthesiologist
and an expert on lethal injections
who says he's "agnostic" about the idea
of the death penalty itself.
For a long time, people believed that
lethal injection was the best method
because it was not cruel,
because it appeared to be
the same thing as
falling off asleep and then dying.
But as we saw, that clearly was not the case with John Marion Grant,
who was sentenced to death in Oklahoma for the 1998 murder of Gay Carter.
And his violent death was not an exception.
Before the state killed Grant, Oklahoma hadn't executed
anyone in six years, after a string of botched killings.
And in many autopsies across the U.S.,
examiners found the prisoners lungs were filled with fluid.
The death here is more akin to
death by drowning,
where a person's lungs fill with
fluid and they choke,
and they may have awareness of this,
and that's how they die.
They die of suffocation.
Many people who endured lethal injections have suffered long and painful deaths.
Lack of training for staff or rushed executions are also sometimes to blame.
Hours before John was supposed to be executed, the Supreme Court
lifted a stay on his death put in place by a lower court.
Oklahoma wasted little time before rushing him into the execution chamber.
We may have been sold the myth of the painless execution,
but many people on death row know how painful it could be.
It's the separation of people from the suffering
that allows it to happen.
You don't see it. You're not close.
It's a secret ritual.
It happens behind prison walls.
Sister Helen Prejean is an anti-death penalty advocate
who has served as a spiritual adviser to death row prisoners.
How can you not call this by its name?
Which is torture.
So some prisoners have asked to be killed a different way.
The vast majority of executions for the last 40 years
have used lethal injection,
but other methods are still on the books. Like electrocution,
which one medical examiner said essentially "cooks" the brain.
Still, some say they would prefer that execution method because the electric chair
usually takes around two minutes to kill someone.
Lethal injection has taken over two hours in some cases.
And in certain states, people can choose the gas chamber
or even death by firing squad.
Death row prisoners joined together to file a federal lawsuit
in 2014 challenging Oklahoma's execution protocol.
And no state is more infamous
for botching executions than Oklahoma.
Initially, one of those prisoners was Donald Grant,
no relation to John Marion Grant.
But Donald was dropped from the lawsuit when he failed to pick an alternative
execution method.
He definitely was very, very anxious until the end.
Prior to his execution,
other executions had been botched.
Donald's older brother, Joe Robinson, was there to witness his execution.
It looked like a...
almost like
a movie theater or something like that.
And we were told exactly where to sit.
So we were up close, up close.
Donald was sentenced for killing Brenda McElyea and Felicia Suzette Smith,
two hotel workers, in 2001.
After his final clemency request was denied,
Oklahoma executed him in 2022.
I would be the last [person] to try to, like, minimize
or explain away, like,
my brother's crimes or anybody's crimes.
So, you know, I am anti-death row.
I'll say that.
But I think it is a crime for the state
to take someone's life.
You know, it's like,
"Do as I say, but not as I do."
Media witnesses say Grant's execution was "uneventful."
But what does that even mean?
It's hard to know because states are making it
so hard to figure out if an execution goes wrong.
For the three decades after legalization, states
used the three-drug cocktail with little variation to the original mix.
That is until a wrench in the supply chain
and a shift in public
sentiment sent states scrambling.
In 2011, the sole U.S. manufacturer
of a key lethal injection drug stopped production -
which brings us to how states decided to make ends meet using shady legal work.
Initially, states borrowed from each other, with California,
Arizona, Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia sharing their supplies.
But it wasn't enough.
So some U.S. states
started experimenting with new, untested drugs.
The Supreme Court has allowed,
massively, experimentation
with states to use different drugs
to try to kill people.
Like Texas, which changed its lethal injection procedure in 2012
to rely on only one drug:
a sedative called pentobarbital.
Still, prison officials struggled to procure it.
The state's prison employees have even been accused of lying
to pharmacies and falsifying documents to obtain the execution drug.
In one case, Texas prison officials
allegedly claimed the drug was for a prison hospital
that closed down almost 30 years before they placed their order.
Other states turned to foreign companies to close the gap.
But when the European Commission noticed the influx of U.S.
prisons buying drugs from European drugmakers,
it banned the export of drugs for use in execution.
And as a consequence
of all of these problems,
the state and states who do
this, instead of opening their doors
to public discussion and scrutiny,
have passed secrecy laws.
And so, in fact, it becomes harder and
harder to investigate the truth of this.
Today, 24 states have secrecy codes or laws on the books
to hide those who participate in execution —
from the drugmaker
to the pharmacy
to the person who inserts the IV.
The lack of transparency is compounded by new state policies
that account for incidents like vomiting, contortions and other side effects.
In this way, states preempt calling executions botched by basically listing
anything that might potentially happen as "protocol."
Around the world, executions are declining.
And in the U.S., lawmakers in at least 14 states
are considering legislation to limit or ban the death penalty.
But some states are going in the opposite direction.
Like Oklahoma, where officials announced execution dates for 25 prisoners.
It's just cruel.
And the fact that, you know,
we're talking one a month.
I mean, that is insane.
In 2022, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit
where Oklahoma prisoners contested the state's lethal injection protocol.
The judge ruled that the state's method of killing does not
defy the Eighth Amendment and is not cruel.
But can state-sponsored killing ever be anything else?
You cannot ever identify
a human being's worth
by the worst thing they've ever done.
But see, here's the thing:
Once, in our minds, we posit
or we say we believe that
the killing of a human being
is not cruelty,
then all this happens.