[JURIST] Oklahoma executed Charles Frederick Warner on Thursday after the Supreme Court [official website] failed to grant a last minute stay [opinion, PDF]. Mr. Warner was sentenced to death in 1997 for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. He requested the stay in light of Oklahoma’s botched execution [JURIST report] in April, which resulted in the prolonged killing of death row inmate Clayton D. Lockett. Mr. Warner’s execution was originally scheduled to occur in late April, but was postponed [JURIST report] after Mr. Lockett’s execution. Reports indicate [NYT report] that Mr. Warner’s execution went as planned. However, immediately before his death, Mr. Warner stated that his body felt like it was “on fire.” Four Supreme Court Justices opposed the majority’s decision to deny Mr. Warner’s request for stay. Justice Sonia Sotomayor [official profile] expressed in her dissent: “The Eighth Amendment guarantees that no one should be subjected to an execution that causes searing, unnecessary pain before death. I hope that our failure to act today does not portend our unwillingness to consider these questions.”

The controversy surrounding the contents of lethal injection drugs and execution protocol in the US has been a mainstream issue in politics and in courts around the US in 2014, especially since Lockett’s botched execution. In October a death row inmate in Alabama filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] claiming that the new lethal injection mix planned for use in his execution was unconstitutional. In September when Oklahoma addressed its lethal injection procedures, Governor Mary Fallin [official website] stood behind the death penalty for the most heinous crimes. In a June article JURIST Guest Columnist Andrew Spiropoulos of the Oklahoma City University School of Law discussed [JURIST op-ed] the tactical strategies of all parties involved in the Oklahoma Courts’ death penalty decisions.