A horrible and dramatic scene was witnessed by several witnesses in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary where the execution of a man sentenced to death took place, on the very day when President Joe Biden met Pope Francis in the Vatican.
The executioner injected the deadly cocktail of drugs into the veins of 60-year-old African American John Marion Grant. The man was pronounced dead after 21 minutes during which he faced a terrible agony made of uncontrolled convulsions and violent retching.
The effect of Midazolam, the first injected to make the condemned unconscious, was immediately felt on Grant, whose convulsions were so violent that they almost tore the strings that nailed him to the bed. He threw up at least twenty times, and only after 15 interminable minutes he lost consciousness. Then the executioner administered the other two drugs required by the protocol, one to stop the respiratory system and one to stop the heart. Immediately after there was the ascertainment of the death amid the tears of the family members who were present together with a group of journalists and the lawyers of the condemned. The latter denounce how Grant, who had admitted his crimes and had repented and repented, has never received the psychological assistance and mental care he would need in recent years. He had been sentenced to death in 2000: two years earlier he had killed an employee of a prison cafeteria where he was staying for minor offenses.
(Unioneonline / ss)
