Last July he was offered his final meal, the right to make a final statement, and a dose of Ativan before the courts intervened and granted a stay of execution 90 minutes before his scheduled death.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who halted Mr. Zimmerman's execution 20 minutes before it was to be carried out, was in the majority in the 5-to-4 decision to lift the stay.
A20 Court Stays Texas Execution Just minutes before his scheduled execution, the Supreme Court granted Delma Banks Jr., 44, a black man sent to death row after an all-white jury convicted him in the murder and robbery of a white teenager 23 years ago, an indefinite stay.
The ongoing chaos in the nation's system of capital punishment -- the string of executions, last-minute appeals to the Supreme Court and other dysfunctions of recent weeks -- might have offered its own counter-argument.
The director of the Oklahoma department of corrections, Robert Patton, officially called off the execution after 33 minutes because it was not working, but 10 minutes after that Lockett was pronounced dead.
I'd been told that a "normal" execution lasted five minutes – this experimental two-drug concoction had taken 26 minutes.
Ohio's department of corrections originally put the official length of the execution at 15 minutes, but later in the day revised that to 25 minutes.
Of course, these three apparent complaints have nothing on the death of Dennis McGuire, the Ohio death row inmate whose execution took 26 minutes to complete, with the man gasping, convulsing and struggling to breathe for more than 11 minutes of that time.
They stopped the execution around 22 minutes after it began.
His execution took 14 minutes – shorter than McGuire's, but nonetheless double the normally expected time.
