All three of Oklahoma's recent attempts to execute prisoners have gone wrong. In the most horrific instance, an inmate sat up and talked to his executioners after they had declared him unconscious. Chris McDaniel notes that these executions, under the watch of Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton, seem to have followed Patton from his previous stint overseeing executions in Arizona.
During his time in Arizona, Patton also admitted to several deviations from the protocol. He allowed an executioner to participate in several executions in 2010 and 2011 even though the person did not have the required qualifications, and he did not do the proper criminal background checks on the executioners. “That was an was oversight on my part,” he said in the deposition. And he said that, to his knowledge, no one checked the professional licenses of the executioners.
So is being a state-sanctioned executioner something that would require a background check or, since even the best-case scenario is that someone ends up dead, more of a catch-as-catch-can sort of thing? If we're going to let any passing yahoo do it, then states could sell lottery tickets and a great many people would sign themselves up to be the one to do the deed. For $10 a pop, win a chance to kill someone legally. It's the wanting to have qualifications—and then not bothering to check them—that seems a bit off.
He also fessed up to not checking whether the proper drugs were being used for executions, which is a bit problematic since Oklahoma's second botched execution involved administering the wrong drug ...