Clayton Lockett died of an apparent heart attack 43 minutes after a failed execution in Oklahoma City. Ever since, the focus has been on reviewing state procedures of how executions are conducted.
However, friends of the woman Lockett was convicted of murdering want people to remember the viciousness of his crime.
Lockett was convicted of shooting 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman and watching as two of his accomplices buried her alive in 1999. Neiman and a friend had interrupted the men as they robbed a home in Perry, Oklahoma.
FILE - This file photo combo of images provided by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections shows Clayton Lockett, left, and Charles Warner. Lockett and Warner, two death row inmates whose executions were delayed while they challenged the secrecy behind the state's lethal injection protocol, are scheduled to die Tuesday, April 29, 2014, in Oklahoma's first double execution in nearly 80 years. (AP Photo/Oklahoma Department of Corrections, File)
As KFOR-TV reports, “downtown Perry, Oklahoma is probably the last place you will find sympathy for Lockett.”
“What that guy got, he deserved,” Marilee Macias told the news station.
Another Perry resident said she has “no sympathy at all” for Lockett.
Tiajuana Hammock, who has reportedly known the Neiman family for years, says she watched the family’s entire world fall apart. To anyone who feels sorry for Lockett, she wants them to “sit back and think” and imagine if it were their child who was savagely murdered.
“Who cares if he feels pain? You know honestly, he’s getting away a lot easier than how his victim did, how Stephanie did,” local April Sewell echoed.
Parents of Lockett's victim, Stephanie Neiman, send this message about the execution. @kfor pic.twitter.com/3TbBMb5vO4
— courtney francisco (@cjfrancisco) April 30, 2014Lockett, 38, had been declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of three drugs in the state's new lethal injection combination was administered Tuesday. Three minutes later, he began breathing heavily, clenching his teeth. The blinds were lowered to prevent those in the viewing gallery from watching, and the state's top prison official later halted the proceedings. Lockett died of a heart attack shortly thereafter, the Department of Corrections said. Officials later blamed a ruptured vein for the problems with Lockett's execution.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
