--- title: Inside Oklahoma's Botched Execution | TIME description: What Happened To Clayton Lockett? canonical: https://time.com/video/WLYhcja9/ og:title: Inside Oklahoma's Botched Execution og:description: What Happened To Clayton Lockett? og:url: https://time.com/video/WLYhcja9/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/WLYhcja9/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Inside Oklahoma's Botched Execution twitter:description: What Happened To Clayton Lockett? twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/WLYhcja9/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Inside Oklahoma's Botched Execution > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Inside Oklahoma's Botched Execution [Watch (HLS stream): Inside Oklahoma's Botched Execution](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/WLYhcja9.m3u8) (5:11)  _Published 2014-05-02. What Happened To Clayton Lockett?_ --- Jul 27, 2023 4:36 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Oklahoma's Governor Says He Has Tested Positive for COVID-19](/video/2JVcJhRZ/) ### Oklahoma's Governor Says He Has Tested Positive for COVID-19 [Arizona's Agonizingly Long Execution](/video/Qy1Pe2rE/) ### Arizona's Agonizingly Long Execution [Oklahoma Botches Execution](/video/5bYam3AB/) ### Oklahoma Botches Execution --- ## Transcript The recent execution of Clayton Lockett went horribly awry. For about half an hour there were no witnesses. The only people who truly know what happened were the prison officials inside the execution chamber. [ MUSIC ]. The execution was scheduled to start around 6: 00 p. m and started a bit late. It started around 6: 23 p. m. The executioners brought Clayton Lockett in to the execution chamber and he was placed on a a gurney and strapped down. IV's were placed into his arm. The three drugs that they were going to give him were a drug that was the sedative to put him to sleep. A drug to stop his breathing. And a drug to stop his heart. After they injected Lockett with the sedative they checked a couple times to see if he was conscious. Took a couple times to determine that he was unconscious. That took about ten minutes. And at the end of that ten minutes, they decided to start injecting the other two drugs. Witnesses said that Lockett, at that point, was sedated and his eyes had glazed over and he had closed his eyes. A couple minutes after that is when things started going badly. Those in the viewing room, and I, I talked to a couple of his lawyers who were in the viewing room. They said that he started twitching and he started writhing and he, at one point, tried to lift his upper body off of the gurney. Clearly things were not going as planned. After a few minutes, the prison officials put down a curtain in between the visiting room and the execution chamber. At the same time, there were Oklahoma Department of Corrections Officials in the visiting room. And according to Lockett's lawyers, who I talked to extensively, the Department of Corrections Officials were on the phone. And it turns out they were on the phone with the Governor. And they grabbed the phone from the visiting room and pulled the cord out and pulled the phone out of the visiting room and shut the door. So people inside the visiting room couldn't hear what they were say. When they left the viewing room, they actually believed that Lockett was going to be revived. About a half hour later, at 7: 06 p. m ., prison officials announced that Lockett had died of a heart attack. It's unclear what happened in that roughly 25 minutes when those in the visiting room were shoveled out. When the curtain was drawn and when he was pronounced dead later that evening. A couple of things appear to have happened, this State did not give him enough medaseline. Enough of the sedative to put him to sleep properly. So he wouldn't feel the excruciating effects of the two other drugs that were meant to stop his breathing and to stop his heart. Another problem may have been the training that Oklahoma's prison guards and officials get. Sometimes it's volunteers within the prison. Sometimes it is physicians, but it's unclear. States have also been experimenting with different drug combinations. Because they can't get their hands on the previous drugs that were used in, in the standard three drug cocktail. A lot of states are, are basically experimenting. They are trying different drugs that have never been tried before. That have never been tried on humans. They've never been tried in these sorts of dosages. In Oklahoma, it's unclear where the drugs came from. There's a lot of secrecy around the sourcing of the drugs. It's unclear, the effects of them. Because even though anesthesiologists use these kinds of drugs everyday in an operating room. They don't use them with these, with the same dosages. They don't use them in these same combinations and so, what states are doing is really an experimentation. In the case of Clayton Lockett, the state used this particular three drug combination with this particular dosage for the first time ever. So it's unclear whether we'll ever really know how Clayton Lockett died. Prison officials said it was a heart attack, but it would take a, an autopsy to figure out exactly how that happened. And then if it truly was a heart attack. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] The problem with a lot of this is that the states are so secret. It's, it's very difficult to figure out what is actually happening with these inmates in the execution chamber. States don't allow outside medical professionals to perform autopsies. And so, not having a postmortem like that makes it very difficult to actually figure out what these drugs are, are doing to these inmates. Lethal injection opponents just look at the Lockett execution as just one more case that shows that. What was suppose to be our most humane method of of execution in the US may actually be the most inhumane. 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