The state of Missouri was preparing on Tuesday to carry out the first execution in the US after the botched judicial killing of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, in which the prisoner suffered a gruesome death lasting 43 minutes.

With just hours to go before Russell Bucklew, 46, was due to be put to death with a lethal injection, questions continued to be asked about the secrecy with which the state has shrouded its procedures, particularly the source of the drugs it intends to use to kill him. The prisoner was scheduled to die at 12.01am CT on Wednesday at a state prison in Bonne Terre.

On Tuesday, Bucklew’s lawyers lodged a petition with the eighth circuit court of appeals calling for a stay of execution. They argued that the inmate’s rare congenital condition, known as cavernous hemangioma, had caused malformations of the veins in his face, head and throat that could easily rupture during the execution.

The petition said that his medical problem, combined with the one-size-fits-all procedure enshrined in Missouri’s death penalty protocol, could cause him to “cough and choke on his own blood. His vascular abnormalities could also impair the circulation of the lethal drug – leading to a prolonged and excruciating execution.”

Buklew’s lawyer, Cheryl Pilate, said: “The state does not have the right to torture a citizen to death. We can’t kid ourselves. Nothing about Mr Bucklew’s execution would be ‘humane’.”

Bucklew was sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of Michael Sanders and for the kidnap and rape of his former girlfriend, Stephanie Pruitt.



In an interview with the Guardian last week Bucklew expressed his fears that his execution would be botched in a repetition of the events in Oklahoma. “I'm sick about it not working on me. I'm afraid that it's going to turn me into a vegetable, that I’d be brain dead. You saw what happened down in Oklahoma,” he said.

Lockett was put to death by Oklahoma with a cocktail of three lethal drugs on 29 April. A reporter from the Guardian was among witnesses who watched as he thrashed on the gurney, writhing and groaning. President Barack Obama described the Lockett execution as “deeply troubling” and has initiated a department of justice review of death penalty procedures on the back of it.

If the execution goes ahead, it will be the seventh in Missouri in as many months, and the 75th since the state adopted lethal injections in the 1980s.

Like many death penalty states, Missouri is struggling to obtain supplies of its lethal injection drugs as a result of a stringent global boycott imposed by the European Commission and major pharmaceutical companies. In an effort to find new supply routes, the state began to buy the drug pentobarbital from compounding pharmacies that make up customised drugs to order without being subject to federal regulation.

The state also unilaterally imposed secrecy last October on how it acquired the drug, revising the definition of its anonymous execution team to include pharmacies and “individuals who prescribe, compound, prepare, or otherwise supply the chemicals for use in the lethal injection procedure”.

The refusal of the state to disclose any information about its drug supplies was challenged last week in Missouri court by the Guardian, Associated Press and three major local papers under the first amendment right to access to government practices. The legal action is still pending in the Cole County circuit court.

“This is going to be an important case whether the execution is stayed or goes forward. It’s a big moment for everyone now closely watching,” said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The eighth circuit federal appeals court has a track record of siding with the states over the death row petitioner, but it also has a feisty tradition of dissent. One judge in particular, Kermit Bye, has spoken out vociferously against the use of compounding pharmacies and the secrecy surrounding the drugs.

Should the eighth circuit reject the petition, Bucklew’s lawyers will almost certainly take their argument for a stay of execution to the US supreme court. In recent months, the highest judicial panel in the nation has shown an increasing willingness to contemplate challenges to the conduct of death penalty states, with the number of dissenting justices rising to four out of the nine in the recent case of Jeffrey Ferguson, put to death by Missouri in March.

On that occasion, the four justices in the minority who supported a stay of execution were justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Should the Bucklew case be taken all the way to the supreme court on Tuesday night, much attention will be paid to Anthony Kennedy, traditionally the swing vote on the court, whose backing would be needed to achieve the fifth vote for a stay.

Anxiety over what could happen to Bucklew has been intensified by the expert opinion of Joel Zivot, a professor of anaesthesiology and surgery at Emory university school of medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. He examined Bucklew on death row last week, and concluded that “there is no way to proceed with Mr Bucklew’s execution without a substantial risk to Mr Bucklew of suffering grave adverse events during the execution, including hemorrhaging, suffocating or experiencing excruciating pain.”

Noting the prisoner’s partially obstructed airway and the complications caused by his hemangiomas, Zivot said that had Bucklew been facing a normal medical operation, the only way to properly perform it would have been “in a hospital with a fully equipped surgical suite and the ability to do an emergency tracheostomy if necessary”.