Once a week, for five or six hours at a time, a small team have been training in preparation for a grim exercise: on Thursday, they will resume executions, with the scheduled lethal injection of Charles Warner – Oklahoma’s first since the botched execution of Clayton Lockett nine months ago.

Warner was scheduled to die that same night in a rare double execution, but his was called off after witnesses watched Lockett struggle and groan on the gurney. Lockett died 43 minutes after the execution began, according to the state.

There was a problem with the IV in Lockett’s groin area that went unnoticed because it was covered with a sheet, according to a state investigation. The execution team’s death rehearsals – “a minimum of six scenarios each time”, US district court judge Stephen Friot wrote in a December court order, but occasionally seven or eight – will be tested on Thursday night in a new chamber, under new scrutiny, with the same lethal drugs in multiple places across the United States.

Attorneys for four death row inmates, including Warner, are asking the US supreme court for a stay. They argue that the first of three drugs in a lethal cocktail – midazolam – will not properly sedate a person, even if the drug is properly administered.

Florida, which has employed a similar three-drug combination, plans to execute convicted killer Johnny Kormondy, 42, also on Thursday night, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Warner, 47, was convicted of raping and killing 11-month-old Adrianna Waller in 1997.

Charles Warner is scheduled to die on Thursday night. Photograph: AP

One of Warner’s attorneys, Dale Baich, said the administration of the second drug, rocuronium bromide, without proper sedation would cause the condemned person to feel suffocated and panicked. The third part of the cocktail, potassium chloride, “would feel like liquid fire coursing through a person’s veins”, he said.

Mike Oakley, the corrections department’s former general counsel, said there was pressure before the Lockett execution to get a protocol in place. His research on midazolam included the internet and “Wiki leaks, or whatever it is”.

“You got an attorney general who is running for office,” Oakley said in a transcript of an interview given to the state’s department of public safety. “You’ve got a governor who is running for office. There’s pressure to get it done.”

Jennifer Moreno, staff attorney at the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic, said she questions whether Oklahoma is ready to proceed and whether the protocol includes the right drugs and dosages.

“You wonder: did they make the decisions they made just because they could get the drugs and wanted to get the execution done? As opposed to: did they do research and due diligence, and are these are appropriate drugs and appropriate doses?” she said.

Assistant attorney general John Hadden insisted midazolam is effective.

“It’s not as good as some other drugs in some respects, but it doesn’t mean that it’s unconstitutional or it’s ineffective,” he said in court, according to a transcript. “It merely means it doesn’t work the same. ‘Different’ is not unconstitutional.”

Hadden said a “massive” investigation was conducted after the Lockett execution, recommendations were issued and the corrections department “is confident that they have addressed every one of those and is ready to move forward. The state, as a whole, is committed to having a constitutional process.”

The state also upgraded its execution chamber, which Baich, Warner’s attorney, called “just window dressing”.

“The real problem remains: using midazolam as the first drug in the formula,” he said. “If Oklahoma was truly prepared, it would have moved forward with a drug combination that does not subject the prisoner to a risk of experiencing pain and suffering.”

The first execution this year in the United States was on Tuesday, when Georgia lethally injected 66-year-old Andrew Howard Brannan, a Vietnam veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, who was convicted of killing a sheriff’s deputy.

Death penalty opponents spoke at the Oklahoma capitol on Thursday, calling for an end to executions. They plan to hold a demonstration and vigil outside the governor’s mansion on Thursday evening.

Former Oklahoma state senator Connie Johnson said the death penalty fails to deter crime, is too costly, and too many people are wrongfully convicted. Johnson spoke beside a photo of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, who opposed violence.

Adam Leathers, a board member of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said the death penalty is “murder,” vengeance and against God’s law.

He said it “has absolutely nothing to do with justice for any victim of a crime”.

The state’s new protocol calls for five media witnesses, a reduction from 12. During the botched Lockett execution, the state drew blinds so journalists could not see what went on.

On the grounds of the state capitol building on Wednesday in Oklahoma City, two electricians welcomed the plan that Oklahoma would resume its carrying out of the death penalty.

“I say: go for it,” said Reggie Clark, 37. “If they have it coming, they do the crime, they should have to pay for it.”

Mark Hanes, 49,agreed. “I think it’s an eye for an eye,” he said. “They do a crime like that, I think they deserve it.”

Outside McAlester’s “Great American Experience” tourism office, 36-year-old locksmith Troy Hallford said he supports the death penalty “if for sure they are guilty without any doubt”.

“If they’re going to do it, they need to have a system that’s proven,” he said.

Down the street, artist Joanie Brooks, 48, removed painted Christmas decorations from the window of shop that sells jewelry, clothing and food. She also supports the death penalty.



“I guess nobody wants to see anybody die, that’s a horrible thing to think about, but I have to trust in the system, although it’s not flawless,” she said. “I would assume the majority of the system is correct. There may be an occasional person that that has happened to that didn’t deserve it, but I’m sure that’s rare. … There have to be consequences that are equal to the crime.”

Warner lived in Oklahoma City with baby Adrianna and her mother, Shonda Waller. The baby was found to have died from multiple injures to her head, chest and abdomen, and a doctor diagnosed physical and sexual abuse, according to documents.

A jury deliberated for about eight and a half hours and delivered a death sentence for Warner.

“The state and federal courts have consistently affirmed the jury’s determination,” Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt, and assistant attorney general, Robert Whittaker, said. “It is now time for justice to be served.”

Shonda Waller said in a January 2014 interview that she morally opposes the death penalty and her views are rooted in her Christian faith. When asked if Warner’s execution would honor her daughter, Waller said “definitely not.” .

“That would dishonor my daughter,” Waller said. “It would dishonor me and everything I believe in. I wouldn’t want to have to know about something like that because I wouldn’t want to know that my hand or what I went through personally is the reason why he is no longer living.

“When he dies, I want it to be because it’s his time, not because he’s been executed.”

She said she wants his sentence reduced to life in prison without parole. “[I]f they truly want to honor me, then they will do away with the death penalty for him and they will give him life in prison without the possibility of parole,” she said.

“If they want me to have to go back though the traumatic situation and having to deal with knowing that because what I went through someone else has had to die, then they will give him the death penalty.”