Oklahoma executes man after justices deny stay

Oklahoma executed an inmate Thursday after a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court refused to block it over concerns about the drug protocol being used.

State prison officials in McAlester, Okla., declared Charles Warner dead at 7:28 p.m. CT. The execution lasted 18 minutes.

"Before I give my final statement, I'll tell you they poked me five times. It hurt. It feels like acid," Warner said before the execution began. He added, "I'm not a monster. I didn't do everything they said I did."

After the first drug was administered, Warner said, "My body is on fire." He showed no obvious signs of distress.

Witnesses said they saw slight twitching in Warner's neck about three minutes after the lethal injection began. The twitching lasted about seven minutes until he stopped breathing.

The execution came after the Supreme Court said it wouldn't consider whether a sedative given to the inmate would be strong enough to render him so unconscious that he wouldn't feel other drugs killing him by stopping his lungs and heart.

Warner, 47, who was convicted in the murder and rape of an 11-month-old girl in 1997, was the first Oklahoma inmate to be put to death since April, when the botched lethal injection of Clayton Lockett caused him to struggle, groan and writhe in pain for 43 minutes.

A state investigation later blamed Lockett's ordeal on a failure by prison staff to realize that drugs had not been administered directly into the man's veins. The state has since changed its procedures and increased the strength of midazolam, the drug in question.

The court's five conservative justices denied the request for a stay of execution without comment. But the four liberal justices issued an eight-page dissent in which they questioned whether the drug protocol.

"The questions before us are especially important now, given states' increasing reliance on new and scientifically untested methods of execution," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote. "Petitioners have committed horrific crimes and should be punished. But the Eighth Amendment guarantees that no one should be subjected to an execution that causes searing, unnecessary pain before death. I hope that our failure to act today does not portend our unwillingness to consider these questions."

Warner's execution was to come within hours of another in Florida, where Johnny Shane Kormondy, 42, was awaiting death for killing a man during a 1993 home invasion. Both executions were to use the same combination of three drugs.

Lawyers for Warner and three other convicts set for execution in Oklahoma over the next seven weeks had sought the Supreme Court's intervention after two lower federal courts refused their pleas.

The lawyers claimed that midazolam, the first drug in the protocol, is not FDA-approved as a general anesthetic and is being used in state executions virtually on an experimental basis. Inmates who receive the drug may not be thoroughly rendered unconscious and could suffer painfully as the other drugs in the protocol are administered, they argued.

They said it was a factor not only in Lockett's execution but in two other gruesome deaths last January's execution of Ohio's Dennis McGuire, who made snorting noises for 20 minutes before dying, and July's execution of Arizona's Joseph Wood, who appeared to gasp hundreds of times during a death that took nearly two hours.

Those same concerns were raised by Sotomayor in her dissent. "I am deeply troubled by this evidence suggesting that midazolam cannot constitutionally be used as the first drug in a three-drug lethal injection protocol," she said, citing a "substantial body of conflicting empirical and anecdotal evidence."

The same four members of the court -- Sotomayor and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan -- also dissented in September in a Missouri execution that used the same drug.

Lawyers for Oklahoma responded that their opponents showed no real evidence that midazolam would not work as a general anesthetic. They noted that it has been used successfully in 10 previous executions.

The high court's ruling should make it easier for states that are scrambling to find necessary drugs to carry out executions. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, at least seven states rely on midazolam.

The justices ruled in 2008 that using three drugs in succession to kill an inmate does not violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The first drug would render the inmate unconscious, a second would paralyze him and a third would stop the heart.

The problem for states is that the first drug in that series was sodium thiopental, a fast-acting barbiturate no longer in supply as drugmakers and pharmacies -- particularly those in Europe opposed to the death penalty -- have cut off production. States then substituted midazolam, a psychoactive drug that is used as an anti-seizure medication and for sedation.

The high court has appeared increasingly wary of the death penalty over the past year, for a variety of reasons.

In May, the justices blocked the execution of a Missouri murderer because his specific medical condition made it likely that he would suffer from a controversial lethal injection.

Later that month, they ruled 5-4 that Florida must apply a margin of error to IQ tests, making it harder for states to execute those with borderline intellectual disabilities.

And in October, the court stopped the execution of yet another Missouri man over concerns that his lawyers were ineffective and had missed a deadline for an appeal.

Contributing: William M. Welch in Los Angeles; Associated Press