(OSV News photo/courtesy Jenevieve Robbins, Texas Department of Criminal Justice handout via Reuters)

It is this that is intended, an execution regime 
death row prisoners must propose an alternative 
killing method preferred to lethal injection, 
prison officials providing forms to opt-in 
for suffocation. The death penalty works as a deterrent, 
it permanently incapacitates extremely violent 
offenders, serves the important societal goal 
of just retribution, reaffirms society’s moral outrage 
at the wanton destruction of human life, 
the Attorney General decrees, fast-tracking 
a rule reintroducing firing squads and electrocutions 
in federal executions. This, to save the Republic, 
this for the glory of the state, they, the inheritors of, 
for them, a great tradition, in their murderous insistences 
they, the United States, conduct a killing spree,   
July 14, 8:07 a.m., Daniel Lewis Lee…July 16, 
8:19 a.m., Wesley Ira Purkey…July 17, 4:36 p.m., 
Dustin Lee Honken…August 26, 6:29 p.m., 
Lezmond Charles Mitchell…August 28, 4:32 p.m., 
Keith Dwayne Nelson…September 22, 9:06 p.m., 
William Emmett LeCroy Jr….September 24, 6:46 p.m., 
Christopher Andre Vialva…November 19, 11:47 p.m., 
Orlando Cordia Hall…December 10, 9:27 p.m., 
Brandon Bernard…December 11, 8:21 p.m., Alfred Bourgeois… 
January 13, 1:31 a.m., Lisa Montgomery…January 14, 
11:34 p.m., Cory Johnson…January 16, 1:23 a.m., 
Dustin John Higgs. Things in Oklahoma are happening 
not as planned, the instant the first drug, midazolam, 
is injected into John Grant, convulsing so much 
his entire upper back lifts off the gurney, vomiting, 
the prison medical staff enter the death chamber 
to remove his vomit, it takes fifteen minutes for John Grant 
to be declared unconscious after vecuronium bromide, 
paralyzing his body, and potassium chloride, stopping 
his heart, are given him by the state. 
 

Lawrence Joseph is the author of seven books of poems, most recently A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He has also written two books of prose, Lawyerland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose (University of Michigan Press). He retired as Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law and lives in New York City.

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