The most telling moment in Oklahoma’s botched execution of Clayton Lockett came six minutes after the purportedly lethal drugs had begun to enter the condemned man’s body through an intravenous tube. It was a moment that pointed up the contradictions, incoherence, and bad faith of the death penalty as it is practiced in the United States, the only advanced democracy on earth that retains it.

Bailey Elise McBride, an Associated Press reporter assigned to cover Lockett’s death, took note:

Besides lowering the blinds to block the view of the execution chamber, the prison authorities cut off the microphone, thus silencing the sounds. They did these things because the prisoner was quite gruesomely suffering. He was supposed to have been unconscious by then (and an attending doctor had declared him so at 6:33), but he plainly was not. He writhed and twitched. He bared his teeth in a grimace. He tried to lift his head. His body convulsed. He struggled against the straps that held him down. He tried to speak, mumbled, and at length cried, “Oh, man.” Then the blinds came down and the microphone switched off.

The execution was halted. Behind the blinds, frantic efforts were made to revive the prisoner and save his life. Whether he was conscious during these efforts has not been disclosed. But, thirty-six long minutes later, he died—of a heart attack. As Jack Shafer acidly observed, Oklahoma’s executioners had accidentally killed Clayton Lockett while trying to put him to death.

The classic justifications for the death penalty have not changed much over the centuries. There is retribution—an eye for an eye, a life for a life. There is deterrence—this is what awaits you if you transgress. And there is awe—a graphic demonstration of the ultimate power of the state. It was true, at some times and in some places, that if the only purpose of a given execution was the irreversible removal of a particular politically inconvenient person, a cup of hemlock might be offered or an invitation to open a vein extended. But most of the time, for most of the history of so-called civilization, it was taken for granted that in order to serve its broader goals, capital punishment had to be public, it had to be spectacular, and it had to be humiliating. Very often, it had to be agonizing: the stake and the fire, drawing and quartering, the cross and the nails.

The quicker methods of judicial killing—the headsman’s axe, the hangman’s rope, the firing squad, the guillotine—minimized the duration of physical agony but retained the didactic violence and the public spectacle. The twentieth century saw the gradual growth of a sense of shame, even if it was unacknowledged. Executions became private (they were carried out behind prison walls, with few witnesses) and “modern” (the electric chair was a state-of-the-art appliance). They aspired to be hygienic and, grotesquely, “humane.” The apotheosis of all this is lethal injection, a grim parody of a medical procedure.

In Oklahoma, the witnesses included, besides McBride, a few of her journalist colleagues, and the prisoner’s lawyers, members of the family of Stephanie Neiman, Clayton Lockett’s victim. Her murder had been inhumanly, sadistically horrific. The criminal was unrepentant. Yet when his suffering on the gurney mounted to what was still only a fraction of what his victim’s had been, the executioners rang down the curtain. To be sure, they did so in part to save themselves from further embarrassment. But surely they also wished to spare the victim’s family the distress of continuing to watch another human being dying in agony.

As a deterrent, capital punishment has never been effective. As a demonstration of the power of the state it is abhorrent. But even as retribution it is more apt to excite pity than to offer satisfaction.

Above: The Oklahoma State Penitentiary; April 30, 2014. Photograph by Nick Oxford/The New York Times/Redux.