If you want ammunition against America’s death penalty, read two reports in Friday’s New York Times about the latest execution in Oklahoma. One is a grim description of what happened when Clayton Lockett was given a lethal injection on Tuesday, the other an analysis of the common three-drug protocol used to kill Lockett and inmates in several other states.

Since Lockett died of a heart attack 43 minutes into the botched attempt to kill him, it’s been revealed that he was actually tasered for resisting the preliminary X-rays apparently required for execution. That’s the first time any condemned prisoner has been shocked before they’ve been injected. Further, the initial reports that a vein in Lockett’s arm collapsed were untrue. Instead, a phlebotomist or a doctor—it’s not clear which one, but doctors aren’t supposed help with executions—tried to insert a line into Lockett’s femoral vein, which is in the groin. That’s a dicey thing to do, and apparently failed, leaking drugs into his tissues:

But Oklahoma officials said that problems with the IV delivery, not the drugs themselves, accounted for Tuesday night’s problems. Anesthesiologists said that while they sometimes use a femoral vein accessible from the groin when those in the arms and legs are not accessible, the procedure is more complicated and potentially painful. Putting a line in the groin “is a highly invasive and complex procedure which requires extensive experience, training and credentialing,” said Dr. Mark Heath, an anesthesiologist at Columbia University. Oklahoma does not reveal the personnel involved in executions. “There are a number of ways of checking whether a central line is properly placed in a vein, and had those been done they ought to have known ahead of time that the catheter was improperly positioned,” Dr. Heath said. Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist at the Emory University School of Medicine, said that the prison’s initial account that the vein had collapsed or blown was almost certainly incorrect. “The femoral vein is a big vessel,” Dr. Zivot said. Finding the vein, however, can be tricky. The vein is not visible from the surface, and is near a major artery and nerves. “You can’t feel it, you can’t see it,” he said. Without special expertise, Dr. Zivot said, the failure was not surprising.

And what’s below is an understatement:

David Dow, a death penalty appellate lawyer in Texas, said that prisoners sometimes resist leaving their cells, but that “it’s not something that happens regularly.” He expressed surprise that the medical staff administering the drugs did not have a second vein ready in case of problems with the first. “For a state that executes people,” he said, “they are awfully bad at it.”

This has been a mess. Not only was the execution botched, perhaps by incompetent technicians or doctors, but Oklahoma has been releasing incorrect information on what happened, and correcting it only bit by bit. The state should have waited for a full investigation, and then made it absolutely public. The secrecy is unwarranted.

If Lockett’s execution isn’t “cruel and unusual punishment”—a violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment—I don’t know what is. Because high-quality American and foreign pharmacies refuse to furnish drugs for this form of retributive execution, there’s not much quality control, and no guarantee of the dosage and purity of the drugs used (Oklahoma, of course, refuses to release that information and the source of the drugs). Also cruel and unusual is the customary use of three drugs in sequence instead of just one.