Charles Warner Execution Stayed for 6 Months by OK Court of Appeals
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has granted inmate Charles Warner a six-month stay of execution following the botched execution of fellow inmate Clayton Lockett. The news comes one week before Warner's original two-week stay was due to expire.
"No one wants to see another prolonged, botched execution take place, so we are greatly relieved that the Court of Criminal Appeals stayed Charles Warner's scheduled execution, as both Mr. Warner and the State requested. As Department of Corrections Director Patton has indicated, before any new execution can take place, Oklahoma needs ample time to review and revise its protocol and fully train its staff. We await the results of an independent autopsy on Clayton Lockett, and expect full transparency from Oklahoma regarding all findings about what went wrong in Mr. Lockett's death," Warner's attorneys, Susanna Gattoni and Seth Day said upon the ruling.
The attorneys had been fighting to keep their client alive at least until the investigation into the botched execution of Lockett was finished. Warner was originally scheduled to be put to death just two hours after Lockett, but a number of things went wrong and Lockett did not die until after 40 minutes and apparently a great deal of pain and suffering. Warner's attorneys immediately requested a stay of execution, and a two-week stay was approved by the Oklahoma governor.
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That, however, would not be enough time for the investigation into Lockett's death to be fruitful. His attorney, along with Warner's, called for an independent investigation by a neutral third party. Right now, Lockett's body has been sent to Texas for a full autopsy, which will hopefully provide information as to what went wrong during the execution. Results are expected within six to eight weeks, but Lockett's attorney wants his own autopsy afterward.
Captain George Brown, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, told Tulsa World that a team of six investigators from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has been assembled to conduct the investigation.
"This team has a combined total of 94 years law enforcement experience, of which 64 years have been spent in criminal investigations," Brown said.
"The extreme secrecy surrounding lethal injection that led to Mr. Lockett's agonizing death must be replaced with transparency in order to ensure that executions are legal and humane," Gattoni and Day said.
