Botched execution #5: Roy Willard Blankenship

June 23, 2011: Roy Willard Blankenship is put to sleep by sodium thiopental, but dies with his eyes wide open. 

Roy Blankenship spent over three decades on death row, maintaining he was innocent until the end after being convicted for a 1988 murder. Roy grew up in West Virginia with an abusive, alcoholic step father after his father died in an accident, according to court papers. He also struggled with alcohol abuse himself.

In a sworn affidavit filed after Roy's execution, Dr David Waisel, Associate Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School, stated:  “…I can say with certainty that Mr. [Roy] Blankenship was inadequately anesthetized and was conscious for approximately the first three minutes of the execution and that he suffered greatly."“Critically”, he added, eyewitness accounts stated that Mr Blankenship’s eyes “were open throughout”.

According to Dr Waisel, Roy's eyes should not have remained open after the injection of the anaesthetic pentobarbital, which Georgia was using in an execution for the first time. In response to opinions reported in the media that Mr Blankenship could have been ‘faking it’, Dr Waisel points out that “one cannot fake eyes-wide-open at death.”
 
Roy was executed using the new execution drug pentobarbital (also known as Nembutal), which has largely replaced the previously-used anaesthetic sodium thiopental in most executing states. Sodium thiopental has become scarce in the US in the last few months, following the halting of domestic production.
 
Concerns have been raised over the safety of the new execution protocols involving pentobarbital, and accounts are starting to emerge of apparently botched executions resulting from the use of a new and untested drug. Reports of the execution in Alabama of Eddie Duval Powell on 16 June – the second in that state using pentobarbital – show that his behaviour during the process was similar to that of Mr Blankenship, including the jerking of the head and expressions of apparent surprise and discomfort.

To learn how healthcare professionals can help stop execution by lethal injection please contact Maya Foa.