Accounts conflict with executioners’ on lethal injections
CHICAGO — Executioners who put 13 inmates to death in the last months of the Trump administration likened the process of dying by lethal injection to falling asleep and called gurneys “beds” and final breaths “snores.”
But those tranquil accounts are at odds with reports by The Associated Press and other media witnesses of how prisoners’ stomachs rolled, shook and shuddered as the pentobarbital took effect inside the U.S. penitentiary death chamber in Terre Haute, Ind.
The sworn accounts by executioners, which government filings cited as evidence the lethal injections were going smoothly, raise questions about whether officials misled courts to ensure the executions scheduled from July to mid-January were done before death penalty opponent Joe Biden became president.
Questions about whether inmates’ midsections trembled as media witnesses described were a focus of litigation throughout the run of executions. Inmates’ lawyers argued it proved pentobarbital caused flash pulmonary edema, in which fluid rushes through quickly disintegrating membranes into lungs and airways, causing pain akin to being suffocated or drowned. The U.S. Constitution prohibits execution methods that are “cruel and unusual.”
During the Sept. 22 execution of William LeCroy, convicted of killing Georgia nurse Joann Lee Tiesler in 2001, the 50-year-old’s stomach area heaved uncontrollably immediately after the pentobarbital injection. It lasted about a minute, according to reports.
Executioner Eric Williams stood next to LeCroy as he died. But Williams made only cursory reference to “the rise and fall” of LeCroy’s abdomen in his account. Shortly after serving in five of the recent executions, Williams was named the interim warden of the high-profile New York City lockup where Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019.
“During the entirety of the execution, LeCroy did not appear to be in any sort of distress, discomfort, or pain,” Williams wrote. “A short time after he took a deep breath and snored, it appeared to me that LeCroy was in a deep, comfortable sleep.”
The distinctive jerking and jolting was visible in at least half the executions, according to media accounts. Among multiple executioner accounts, none described any such movements.
When Donald Trump’s Justice Department announced in 2019 that it’d resume executions after a 17-year hiatus, it said it would use pentobarbital alone. Manufacturers were no longer willing to supply the combination of drugs used in three federal executions from 2001 to 2003, explaining they didn’t want drugs meant to save lives to be used for killing.
One point of contention during the litigation was whether, even if pulmonary edema did occur, inmates could feel it after they appeared to be knocked out. Experts for the prisoners said the drug paralyzes the body, masking the pain prisoners could feel as they died.
William Breeden, a spiritual adviser in the chamber when 52-year-old Corey Johnson was executed Jan. 14 after his 1992 conviction of killing seven people, said in a filing the next day that “Corey said his hands and mouth were burning” after the injection. Federal Bureau of Prisons attorney Rick Winter said in response that neither he nor anyone in a government witness room heard that.
Some pain doesn’t necessarily mean an execution method violates prohibitions against “cruel and unusual” punishment, the Supreme Court ruled in 2019. The Constitution, the 5-4 majority opinion said, “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death — something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people.”
Government lawyers sought to discredit the journalists’ accounts.
In an Oct. 8 filing, government expert Kendall Von Crowns, who didn’t witness the executions, relied on executioners’ descriptions to suggest journalists misperceived what they saw. He noted that LeCroy’s executioner “does not state that there was any irregular or uncontrolled heaving.” It was more likely, he said, that journalists saw “hyperventilation due to the anxiety associated with his impending death.”
In an evidentiary hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 18 — when eight executions had yet to be carried out — government attorneys objected when inmates’ lawyers asked Crowns about media reports of midsection movements in three of the first five executions.
After Judge Tanya Chutkan overruled them, Crowns suggested what reporters saw was called agonal breathing — involuntary intakes of air in the final moments before death.
What media witnesses described was consistent with pulmonary edema, an expert for inmates’ legal teams, Gail Van Norman, argued in a filing after LeCroy’s execution. She said that as fluid blocks airways, it throws the chest, diaphragm and abdomen off their usual rhythm, “giving the appearance of the chest and abdomen rocking opposite of one another, or a heaving abdomen.”