Oklahoma Execution Irregularities Mirror Previous Errors By Arizona Involving Same Corrections Official

Robert Patton (pictured), the director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections who oversaw the botched execution of Clayton Lockett, the use of the wrong third drug in the execution of Charles Warner, and the failed execution of Richard Glossip, was also involved in a number of Arizona executions that violated that state’s execution protocol, a BuzzFeed investigation revealed.

Lockett was Oklahoma’s first execution under Patton, just two months after he became corrections director. For the previous five years, he was part of the team that planned and oversaw executions in Arizona. A 2011 deposition given by Patton in a federal court challenge to Arizona’s execution protocol disclosed similar failures to adhere to state execution protocols.

BuzzFeed reports that, three years before the Lockett execution, Patton had been involved in several Arizona executions in which corrections personnel could not find an arm vein suitable for execution and instead, as in Lockett’s execution, inserted the IV into an artery in the executed prisoner’s groin. In direct violation of Arizona’s execution protocol, the executioners covered the IV with a sheet, risking that officials would be unable to detect problems with the IV.

In investigating the Lockett case, the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety found that the same deviation from Oklahoma’s protocol prevented executioners from discovering problems with the IV until Lockett began to move during the execution, at which point prison personnel discovered clear liquid and blood under the sheet and noticed that Lockett had swelling “between the size of a golf ball and tennis ball” at the IV insertion site. Patton then called off the execution, but Lockett died 45 minutes after the execution began.

In his 2011 deposition, Patton admitted that he never checked the forms that identified which drugs and what amounts of those drugs were to be used in Arizona executions. In January 2015, using the wrong third drug in its three-drug protocol, Oklahoma executed Charles Warner. An investigation into that execution is ongoing, and state officials have not said who was aware at the time that the wrong drug was being used. The state also halted the execution of Richard Glossip in September when prison officials became aware two hours before the execution that they had obtained the same wrong drug.

(C. McDaniel, “Execution Mistakes Followed Corrections Director From Arizona To Oklahoma,” BuzzFeed, November 11, 2015.) See Lethal Injection.