Alabama death row inmate’s lawyer: “This was clearly a botched execution that can only be accurately described as torture”
By
Kate Randall
28 February 2018
New details have emerged about the attempted execution of Alabama death row inmate Doyle Hamm last week. Hamm, 61, who has spent more than half of his life on death row, was subjected to about two-and-a-half hours of torture Thursday night in the Holman prison death chamber before prison officials called off the execution.
Hamm was convicted and sentenced to death in 1987 for the robbery-murder of Patrick Cunningham, a motel clerk in Cullman County.
“It was a gory, botched execution,” said Bernard Harcourt, Hamm’s longtime attorney, and a professor at Columbia University law school. “They gave up when they could not find a vein.”
Harcourt had argued in appeals that because Hamm had cranial and lymphatic cancer and a history of drug use his veins could not support the lethal injection, and to attempt it would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, banned by the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution.
The gruesome spectacle in Alabama’s execution chamber was allowed to proceed after the US District Court in Birmingham prohibited the state from trying to access veins in Hamm’s arms and hands and ordered officials to try his lower extremities. The Eleventh Circuit US Court of Appeals in Atlanta required the presence of a doctor and ultrasound equipment. The twisted practice of capital punishment often enlists the services of unscrupulous medical professionals and doctors, who are sworn to “First, do no harm” and save lives, to participate in state killings.
It was the US Supreme Court that finally gave the go-ahead for the execution. The high court granted a temporary stay just before the…