OK Tortured Him to Death Because He Refused Suicide

Before the state of Oklahoma put John Marion Grant through the 12-minute ordeal of convulsions, vomiting, and heaving that eventually concluded with the 60-year-old’s death, it gave him a choice: How would he like to die?

There were a number of options. There was pentobarbital, the barbiturate most recently made infamous by the Trump administration’s last-minute federal-execution spree; sodium thiopental, a near-extinct anesthetic once used in medicine and, prompting its eradication from the market, lethal injections; compounded versions—meaning iterations made without FDA approval—of either drug; the state’s preference, a three-drug cocktail starting with midazolam, a benzodiazepine used for sedation and seizure control and the occasional overtly inhumane execution; or a firing squad, the good old-fashioned kind of killing in which the killers at least pay their prey the respect of no pretense.

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