Clayton Lockett Archives - Victory Girls Blog

May 5, 2014

What Disturbs Obama Should Bother Us All

There is no question that the execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma last Tuesday was botched from a medical standpoint. According to the state’s prison chief, officials tried for over an hour to find a suitable vein in Lockett to place the IV, finally settling for one in his groin area. Whoever placed the IV did not see that the line had become dislodged from the vein, and the lethal drugs were being leaked into the body instead of going directly into the bloodstream. After the execution was called off, Lockett ended up dying of a massive heart attack 10 minutes later. According to the same report from the prison chief, Lockett refused breakfast and lunch on the day of his execution. Would it be out of the realm of possibility to think that he was dehydrating himself to make his veins harder to access and use?

Before you feel sorry for the manner of Lockett’s death, let’s review the crime that he confessed to committing on June 3, 1999. The young woman he murdered, Stephanie Neiman, had just graduated from high school:

Neiman was dropping off a friend at a Perry residence on June 3, 1999, the same evening Clayton Lockett and two accomplices decided to pull a home invasion robbery there. Neiman fought Lockett when he tried to take the keys to her truck.

The men beat her and used duct tape to bind her hands and cover her mouth. Even after being kidnapped and driven to a dusty country road, Neiman didn’t back down when Lockett asked if she planned to contact police.

The men had also beaten and kidnapped Neiman’s friend along with Bobby Bornt, who lived in the residence, and Bornt’s 9-month-old baby….

Lockett later told police “he decided to kill Stephanie because she would not agree to keep quiet,” court records state.

Neiman was forced to watch as Lockett’s accomplice, Shawn Mathis, spent 20 minutes digging a shallow grave in a ditch beside the road. Her friends saw Neiman standing in the ditch and heard a single shot.

Lockett returned to the truck because the gun had jammed. He later said he could hear Neiman pleading, “Oh God, please, please” as he fixed the shotgun.

The men could be heard “laughing about how tough Stephanie was” before Lockett shot Neiman a second time.

“He ordered Mathis to bury her, despite the fact that Mathis informed him Stephanie was still alive.”

A confessed killer suffered before his death? I don’t know if this makes me a good person or not, but it really doesn’t keep me up at night that an evil man got hurt before he paid the penalty for his crime.

It bothers President Obama, though. Even though he admits that Lockett was guilty, the president took the opportunity yet again to worry about the “inequalities” in the justice system.

“In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems — racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied.”

I get tired of the constant grandstanding by President Obama every time there is a news event that comes up that he thinks he can make a little political capital on. The death of Trayvon Martin and the arrest of Professor Gates comes to mind immediately. We are then treated to the president’s pontificating about how horrible these events are, and lectured on why he believes that they are so horrible, and if you disagree, then you are obviously not as educated and sensitive as he is.

You know what DIDN’T bother President Obama? At least, I can presume that these events didn’t bother the president too much, because he doesn’t like to talk expansively about them. The murder of countless black children by abortionist Kermit Gosnell. The murder of a sitting American ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya. The murder rate in his hometown of Chicago (though thankfully, rates have declined for the first quarter of this year. If we are to judge the president by what he tells us bothers him, then we can reasonably infer that these crimes that he doesn’t talk about really don’t give him much pause.

And that bothers me. A lot.