- The video begins with a humorous introduction about the Desert Rain Frog's unique sound.
- The main topic of the video is lethal injection and its controversial nature.
- The host discusses differing views on the death penalty and presents arguments against it.
- Lethal injection was introduced as a supposedly humane method of execution, but it is not performed by medical professionals.
- The procedure involves three steps, with the second and third drugs being described as horrifying and torturous.
- The first drug used to sedate the inmate, sodium thiopental, is no longer available and has been replaced by midazolam, which is a sedative but does not stop pain.
- The use of midazolam is justified in court by a non-medical expert witness, Dr. Roswell Lee Evans, who has limited experience and knowledge in the field.
- The video highlights the ethical and practical issues surrounding lethal injection as a method of execution.

- The video discusses the problems and failures associated with the use of lethal injection as a method of execution.
- It highlights the lack of expertise and knowledge of those involved in administering the drugs used in lethal injections.
- The case of Clayton Lockett is mentioned as an example of a botched execution using midazolam.
- The video criticizes the use of lethal injection as a means of making executions appear peaceful, when in reality they are brutal and violent.
- Alternative methods of execution are briefly mentioned, but none are deemed satisfactory or humane.
- The video argues that lethal injection is more about the comfort of those who support the death penalty rather than minimizing the pain of the inmates being executed.
- It concludes by questioning the morality of a society that continues to use such methods of execution.

John Oliver discusses the lethal injection process, which is definitely not as pleasant as talking about a squeaking frog.

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And if you're thinking, hold on, I don't care about the Desert Rain Frog, maybe this will change your mind.

This Desert Rain Frog, it sounds like a dog toy.

Is the sonorous war cry of a very angry frog.

And that's what it sounds like when it's mad.

Won't it be fun to learn more about that tonight?

I mean, unfortunately, we're not gonna be able to do that because our actual main story tonight is about lethal injection.

Only 3 more episodes with the greatest lead-in in modern television history, and I'm burning 1 of them on lethal injections.

And the reason I'm doing that is, it's a subject that doesn't come up very much, because frankly, no 1 wants it to.

For some reason, lethal injections aren't something that people want to think about.

There was 1 in Georgia just 3 nights ago.

And before we go any further, I know that there are differing views on the death penalty.

And some, like Wyoming State Senator Lynn Hutchings, believe it's justified for the weirdest possible reason.

The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and for me.

I'm grateful to him for a future hope because of this.

If it wasn't for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.

Your argument for the death penalty is that it got us a Jesus once, maybe 1 day if we kill enough people, we'll get another 1?

Now, for the record, so you know, my personal view on the death penalty is a little different to that, in that I don't think it should exist whatsoever.

There's actually no proof it has an effect on bringing down crime.

It's technically more expensive to execute someone than it is to keep them in prison for life, and I'd argue it's wrong.

It's a wrong, bad thing the government should not be able to do, which kind of makes my first 2 points irrelevant there.

Listing reasons why you don't support the death penalty can feel like listing reasons why you're not gonna fuck your mom.

I do understand that it can be hard to sympathize with people convicted of heinous crimes.

Although, I will say, according to 1 study, around 4 percent of people sentenced to death are actually innocent, which in itself, should give us pause about the whole enterprise.

It's the equivalent of, it would make things pretty weird with dad.

Not the main reason not to do it by any measure, and yet it should comfortably be disqualifying enough on its own.

But let's say that you don't care about any of those reasons.

There's still the question of how you do it.

And legal injection came into vogue because it was seen as a humane and painless method.

It gained popularity around 4 decades ago as states started getting queasy about the horrors inflicted by the electric chair.

1 state senator from Louisiana actually explained his vote to switch to legal injection back then pretty nicely.

I am for capital punishment, but I think that is a more humane way.

I have seen evidence in my committee this year, I've seen photos of persons that were electrocuted, and it is, I guess you'd say, kind of gross.

And, I think that this is probably a step in the right direction.

The electric chair actually set some people's heads on fire, so that's kind of an understatement.

Putting mayonnaise on pizza is kind of gross.

Otherwise, cute dogs with large erections are kind of gross.

--LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE --Frying a human being until their bodies are smoking husk is objectively horrifying.

But in any case, lethal injection was sold as something akin to surgery, a medical procedure in which a doctor helps a person gently go to sleep and then they just don't wake up.

The problem is, as you will see tonight, however much we want that to be the case, it just isn't.

And let's start with that idea that it's medical.

Because lethal injections aren't performed by medical personnel for a pretty obvious reason.

Today in the United States, it violates ethical codes for physicians to be involved.

So, usually the people who are involved in the executions are not physicians, and they're not properly trained to do an IV insertion, much less an execution.

Anyone who's been properly trained to perform a procedure like a lethal injection has also been trained never to do that.

Hippocrates didn't say, first, do no harm, second, do some harm.

♪ And the exclusion of medical personnel even extends to the design of our lethal injection process, because it wasn't developed by scientists in a lab.

It came about when legislators in Oklahoma tried to figure out how to do it, and couldn't get any doctors to work with them for obvious reasons.

So instead, they turned to the state's medical examiner, Jay Chapman, who warned them that he was an expert in dead bodies, but not an expert in getting them that way.

So I guess he wasn't an expert, just an enthusiast with a can-do attitude for killing people.

Even under the best of circumstances, lethal injection is being administered by amateurs.

And unfortunately, we're very much not under the best of circumstances.

And to understand why that's true, I'm afraid you're gonna have to understand some of the specifics of how lethal injections work.

While the actual protocol varies from state to state, most administer drugs in 3 steps.

First, they give an anesthetic to put the inmate to sleep.

Second, a paralytic to stop the limbs from moving around.

There's actually no medical reason for that.

It's just for the benefit of the people watching so that they won't see a body flail or convulse as the third drug initiates cardiac arrest.

And the really important thing to understand here is that the second and third drug in this procedure are both in their own ways, horrifying.

The third drug apparently feels like fire being poured into your veins.

And even the second drug, The 1, remember, that's only for the benefit of onlookers is nightmarish if you are not completely knocked out.

If the inmate is not unconscious, and the inmate receives a second drug that paralyzes the muscles, that is a horrible, horrible situation where you are awake, but you cannot move, you cannot breathe.

So you have this sensation of suffocating, essentially.

And you can't communicate to anybody that this is happening.

You could be fully aware, feel like you're suffocating, but unable to move or communicate, while fire is about to be injected into your veins.

And this somehow qualifies as more humane than an electric chair, which seems pretty debatable at best.

It's like saying, which movie has sexier CGI characters, Zootopia or Monsters, Inc.?

I mean, probably Monsters, Inc., but it's not clear cut.

And the question in and of itself is very disturbing.

So, if steps 2 and 3 are torture, the first drug in the sequence becomes critically important, because in theory, it's supposed to keep you from feeling the other 2.

Now, we used to use a drug for this called sodium thiopentol, but it stopped being made here in 2011, and it's no longer approved by the FDA for import into the country.

Although some states have tried to weasel around that restriction.

5 years ago, when Arizona needed drugs to execute an inmate named Jeffrey Landrigan, it purchased them illegally from a supplier operating out of this driving school in London.

That is the most lethal thing to come out of a British driving school since Prince Philip.

And even when that supply got cut off, States didn't give up.

They looked all over the place for replacement drugs.

Texas tried buying them from both a supplier in India that also made illegal party pills, and having them custom made by a small independent pharmacy, which also operated as a gift shop.

Which is just perfect if you want to pick up execution drugs, but also give the inmate a little goodbye gift.

I mean, you really absolutely shouldn't have.

-♪ ♪ -♪ Nowadays, most states have given up on sodium thiopentol, and instead, for that crucial first step, they use a drug called midazolam, which you should know is a sedative, not a general anesthetic.

So it relaxes you, but doesn't do anything to actually stop pain.

1 expert has called it a martini in a syringe, which sounds like, A, James Bond's rock bottom, and B, not nearly enough if I'm about to feel suffocated with fire in my veins.

And when called upon in court to justify using a sedative with no painkilling properties during a procedure this painful, states have relied almost exclusively on this man, Dr.

He's testified as the key expert witness in favor of midazolam on behalf of 6 different states, even though he's not actually a medical doctor.

He got his pharmacy doctorate after just 18 months of post-grad study before Midazolam even existed, and has basically been working as a college administrator since 1994.

And if you're thinking, well, hold on, how do you know he's not been conducting research on midazolam or a bunch of other anesthetics since then?

Well, just watch this sequence of questions that he answered during a deposition.

Have you been involved in research involving the use of midazolam?

Have you been involved in research involving the use of diazepam?

Have you been involved in research regarding the use of halothane gas?

Have you ever been involved in research regarding anesthetics of any sort?

1, that guy is not an expert on anything he's

And 2, there's a lot of overlap between the names of sedatives and the names of alien races in self-published sci-fi novels.

Because I could definitely imagine a book in which the Madazolam unite with the Lorazapam to fight the evil Halothane and their minions the Pento-Barbatol.

It's probably already been optioned by HBO in their upcoming Game of Space Thrones.

In 2 weeks' time, this network is so deeply fucked.

Because when this shaved Santa here testified in support of using midazolam in a case that eventually went before the Supreme Court.

A full half of his 300-page expert witness report consisted of printouts from drugs.com.

And look, drugs.com is a highly useful resource for information, specifically information like this disclaimer reading, this material is not intended for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment." -$25,000.

It's frankly no wonder that many inmates do not want midazolam to be used in their execution.

In Arizona, some of them actually sued over exactly this, and the Department of Corrections hit on an ingenious solution to that, saying that inmates could simply bring their own execution drugs.

What with those drugs being restricted, and those prisoners being in prison.

It's basically telling a one-year-old to provide his own birthday cake.

I don't have the money, I can't drive, I can't even get out of this chair, and I'm somehow supposed to obtain my own fucking Fudgie the whale?

This is the worst birthday I've ever had!

And when the head of Arizona's Department of Corrections was pressed on that plan, he pretty quickly identified the problem.

You've never heard of a prisoner on death row in Arizona successfully purchasing federally regulated drugs for use in their own execution, have you?

Have you heard of any prisoner anywhere ever doing that?

No 1 in the history of America has ever done this, but I think our inmates can pull it off.

It is almost sweet how much he believes in the people he's in charge of putting to death.

And look, so far in this story, I've held off on describing specific cases to you, but there are many, many examples that show just how terribly things can go when all the factors you've seen so far tonight come together.

The list of botched executions is long, and it is horrendous, But let's just take 1 of them.

Oklahoma made him 1 of the first prisoners to be executed using midazolam.

And right from the start, things did not go as planned.

Executing Clayton Lockett with a new 3 drug combination took 43 minutes.

A phlebotomist tried inserting needles into Lockett's forearms, neck, foot, groin and buttocks.

Minutes after the execution began, Lockett's attorney, there is a witness, says his client kept trying to raise up, and at 1 point even said, -"Something's wrong."

-$$THEY WANTED TO HURRY UP AND GET IT DONE WITH AS LITTLE TRANSPARENCY AS POSSIBLE.

He's late for his Gig as a pendulet impersonator, but he's absolutely right.

Look, what happened in that room was by all accounts incredibly gruesome.

And the subsequent investigation revealed just how ill-prepared the people administering the injection really were.

The drugs were not delivered into his vein.

There was no emergency plan if something went wrong.

Regarding the use of midazolam, Mike Oakley from the corrections department said, I looked online, you know, went past the key WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks or whatever it is, and I did find out midazolam would render a person unconscious.

They looked up midazolam on WikiLeaks or whatever.

In fact, to make sure that that doesn't happen again, we actually bought Wikileaks or whatever dot com, which is now just a large banner reading, Madazlam doesn't keep you from feeling pain, please stop using it in executions.

You know, just to cut the tension a little bit.

He's angry about executions, as he well should be.

♪ -Lethal injection actually has the highest botch rate of any execution method.

So much so, last year, 2 inmates in Tennessee requested and were executed by the electric chair because they believed it would be less painful.

So, incredibly, in our desire to find a more humane method, we've ended up letting amateurs both invent and administer a form of unpredictable torture.

And even some ardent supporters of the death penalty, like this federal judge, will acknowledge that lethal injection just isn't what we like to think it is.

I think use of lethal injection is a way of lying to ourselves.

To make it look like executions are peaceful, are benign, are sort of like going to sleep.

You prefer firing squad to lethal injections.

First of all there, I desperately wish that Leslie Stahl had been around during the French Revolution.

Second, second, if hearing a federal judge endorse the guillotine makes you uncomfortable, just wait until you find out that he stepped down in the wake of numerous sexual misconduct claims, leaving me in the unenviable position of saying that me too judge who thinks we should be cutting off more heads actually makes some pretty interesting points.

Because the hard truth here is, there is no perfect way for the government to kill people.

And you're probably thinking of alternatives right now.

Can't we just do the same thing with executions?

It's hardest to kill a healthy person than someone near death.

Besides, remember, doctors and drug companies won't be involved in executions.

Okay, well, what about just overdosing them on opioids?

Well, we've actually tried that, and 1 execution took 2 hours, with the inmate gulping like a fish out of water.

We tried cyanide gas in 1992, and it was so horrifying, the Attorney General vomited, and the prison warden claimed he'd resign if forced to conduct another 1.

The latest idea is nitrogen gas, which seems like it's got problems of its own.

But at the end of the day, coming up with different ideas to do this is a bit like coming up with positions in which you'd feel least guilty fucking your mom.

Oh, missionary, that's good for her hips, but you're looking right at her.

Standing up, mom hates standing for any length of time.

Reverse cow mom, that's probably your best bet, but it's still appalling, and the fact is, you shouldn't be fucking doing it in the first place.

There's no way to do this and make it okay.

-♪ ♪ -() What I'm trying to say here is...

If the thing that's making you comfortable with lethal injection is that it's humane, it isn't.

Because the fundamental fact to understand about lethal injection is, it is a show.

It is designed not to minimize the pain of people being executed, but to maximize the comfort of those who want to support the death penalty without confronting the reality of it, which is that it's violent, and it's brutal, and it's never going to be anything other than that.

And you might say, well, I don't care what happens to death row inmates.

But I would argue that lethal injection isn't about who they are, It's about who we are.

And if, after everything you've heard tonight, you still think we should be the kind of society that tortures people to death in this manner, then I guess you're arguing that we should be like someone who looks at that list of reasons not to fuck their mom and does it anyway.

Which is really just a long way of me saying, if we keep executing people by lethal injections or any other method, we are some real motherfuckers.


Speaker 0: -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ The Desert Rain Frog. And if you're thinking, hold on, I don't care about the Desert Rain Frog, maybe this will change your mind.

Speaker 1: This Desert Rain Frog, it sounds like a dog toy.

Speaker 0: But actually,

Speaker 1: this... Is the sonorous war cry of a very angry frog.

Speaker 0: -... How fucking great is that? And that's what it sounds like when it's mad. How does it sound when it's happy? What a frog!

Won't it be fun to learn more about that tonight? I mean, unfortunately, we're not gonna be able to do that because our actual main story tonight is about lethal injection. That's right. That's right. Only 3 more episodes with the greatest lead-in in modern television history, and I'm burning 1 of them on lethal injections.

And the reason I'm doing that is, it's a subject that doesn't come up very much, because frankly, no 1 wants it to. For some reason, lethal injections aren't something that people want to think about. But they happen frequently in America. There was 1 in Georgia just 3 nights ago. And before we go any further, I know that there are differing views on the death penalty.

Some believe it's a deterrent to crime. Some believe it's righteous justice. And some, like Wyoming State Senator Lynn Hutchings, believe it's justified for the weirdest possible reason.

Speaker 2: The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and for me. I'm grateful to him for a future hope because of this. If it wasn't for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.

Speaker 0: So what? Wait. Your argument for the death penalty is that it got us a Jesus once, maybe 1 day if we kill enough people, we'll get another 1? Is that it? We'll get a bonus Jesus?

Let's just keep rolling the dice. Papa needs a new pair of Jesuses. Now, for the record, so you know, my personal view on the death penalty is a little different to that, in that I don't think it should exist whatsoever. There's actually no proof it has an effect on bringing down crime. It's technically more expensive to execute someone than it is to keep them in prison for life, and I'd argue it's wrong.

It's a wrong, bad thing the government should not be able to do, which kind of makes my first 2 points irrelevant there. Listing reasons why you don't support the death penalty can feel like listing reasons why you're not gonna fuck your mom. Well, let's see here. We don't have much chemistry. She lives 300 miles away.

Oh, and... Oh, yeah, she's my mom! -♪ I'm a woman... ♪ -♪ I'm a woman... ♪ Still, still, I do...

I do understand that it can be hard to sympathize with people convicted of heinous crimes. Although, I will say, according to 1 study, around 4 percent of people sentenced to death are actually innocent, which in itself, should give us pause about the whole enterprise. It's the equivalent of, it would make things pretty weird with dad. Not the main reason not to do it by any measure, and yet it should comfortably be disqualifying enough on its own. But let's say that you don't care about any of those reasons.

Let's say you support the death penalty. There's still the question of how you do it. And legal injection came into vogue because it was seen as a humane and painless method. It gained popularity around 4 decades ago as states started getting queasy about the horrors inflicted by the electric chair. 1 state senator from Louisiana actually explained his vote to switch to legal injection back then pretty nicely.

Speaker 3: I am for capital punishment, but I think that is a more humane way. I have seen evidence in my committee this year, I've seen photos of persons that were electrocuted, and it is, I guess you'd say, kind of gross. And, I think that this is probably a step in the right direction.

Speaker 0: Kind of gross? The electric chair actually set some people's heads on fire, so that's kind of an understatement. Putting mayonnaise on pizza is kind of gross. Otherwise, cute dogs with large erections are kind of gross. --LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE --Frying a human being until their bodies are smoking husk is objectively horrifying.

But in any case, lethal injection was sold as something akin to surgery, a medical procedure in which a doctor helps a person gently go to sleep and then they just don't wake up. The problem is, as you will see tonight, however much we want that to be the case, it just isn't. And let's start with that idea that it's medical. That is more than a bit of a stretch. Because lethal injections aren't performed by medical personnel for a pretty obvious reason.

Speaker 4: Today in the United States, it violates ethical codes for physicians to be involved. So, usually the people who are involved in the executions are not physicians, and they're not properly trained to do an IV insertion, much less an execution.

Speaker 0: Yeah, of course. Anyone who's been properly trained to perform a procedure like a lethal injection has also been trained never to do that. Hippocrates didn't say, first, do no harm, second, do some harm. -♪

Speaker 5: Do some harm ♪ -♪ Do some harm

Speaker 0: ♪ And the exclusion of medical personnel even extends to the design of our lethal injection process, because it wasn't developed by scientists in a lab. It came about when legislators in Oklahoma tried to figure out how to do it, and couldn't get any doctors to work with them for obvious reasons. So instead, they turned to the state's medical examiner, Jay Chapman, who warned them that he was an expert in dead bodies, but not an expert in getting them that way. But he helped them anyway. So I guess he wasn't an expert, just an enthusiast with a can-do attitude for killing people.

Even under the best of circumstances, lethal injection is being administered by amateurs. And unfortunately, we're very much not under the best of circumstances. And to understand why that's true, I'm afraid you're gonna have to understand some of the specifics of how lethal injections work. While the actual protocol varies from state to state, most administer drugs in 3 steps. First, they give an anesthetic to put the inmate to sleep.

Second, a paralytic to stop the limbs from moving around. There's actually no medical reason for that. It's just for the benefit of the people watching so that they won't see a body flail or convulse as the third drug initiates cardiac arrest. And the really important thing to understand here is that the second and third drug in this procedure are both in their own ways, horrifying. The third drug apparently feels like fire being poured into your veins.

And even the second drug, The 1, remember, that's only for the benefit of onlookers is nightmarish if you are not completely knocked out.

Speaker 6: If the inmate is not unconscious, and the inmate receives a second drug that paralyzes the muscles, that is a horrible, horrible situation where you are awake, but you cannot move, you cannot breathe. So you have this sensation of suffocating, essentially. And you can't communicate to anybody that this is happening.

Speaker 0: Yeah. You could be fully aware, feel like you're suffocating, but unable to move or communicate, while fire is about to be injected into your veins. And this somehow qualifies as more humane than an electric chair, which seems pretty debatable at best. It's like saying, which movie has sexier CGI characters, Zootopia or Monsters, Inc.? I mean, probably Monsters, Inc., but it's not clear cut.

And the question in and of itself is very disturbing. So, if steps 2 and 3 are torture, the first drug in the sequence becomes critically important, because in theory, it's supposed to keep you from feeling the other 2. Now, we used to use a drug for this called sodium thiopentol, but it stopped being made here in 2011, and it's no longer approved by the FDA for import into the country. Although some states have tried to weasel around that restriction.

Speaker 7: 5 years ago, when Arizona needed drugs to execute an inmate named Jeffrey Landrigan, it purchased them illegally from a supplier operating out of this driving school in London.

Speaker 0: Holy shit! That is the most lethal thing to come out of a British driving school since Prince Philip. And... And even when that supply got cut off, States didn't give up. They looked all over the place for replacement drugs.

Texas tried buying them from both a supplier in India that also made illegal party pills, and having them custom made by a small independent pharmacy, which also operated as a gift shop. Which is just perfect if you want to pick up execution drugs, but also give the inmate a little goodbye gift. Oh, wow! An oven mitt with googly eyes on it? You shouldn't have, Barbara.

I mean, you really absolutely shouldn't have. What the fuck is wrong with you? -♪ ♪ -♪ Nowadays, most states have given up on sodium thiopentol, and instead, for that crucial first step, they use a drug called midazolam, which you should know is a sedative, not a general anesthetic. So it relaxes you, but doesn't do anything to actually stop pain. 1 expert has called it a martini in a syringe, which sounds like, A, James Bond's rock bottom, and B, not nearly enough if I'm about to feel suffocated with fire in my veins.

And when called upon in court to justify using a sedative with no painkilling properties during a procedure this painful, states have relied almost exclusively on this man, Dr. Roswell Lee Evans. He's testified as the key expert witness in favor of midazolam on behalf of 6 different states, even though he's not actually a medical doctor. He got his pharmacy doctorate after just 18 months of post-grad study before Midazolam even existed, and has basically been working as a college administrator since 1994. And if you're thinking, well, hold on, how do you know he's not been conducting research on midazolam or a bunch of other anesthetics since then?

Well, just watch this sequence of questions that he answered during a deposition.

Speaker 8: Have you been involved in research involving the use of midazolam? No. Have you been involved in research involving the use of diazepam? No. Have you been involved in research regarding the use of halothane gas?

No. Have you ever been involved in research regarding anesthetics of any sort?

Speaker 0: No. Okay. Okay. So, 2 things are pretty clear there. 1, that guy is not an expert on anything he's

Speaker 5: supposed to be an expert on.

Speaker 0: And 2, there's a lot of overlap between the names of sedatives and the names of alien races in self-published sci-fi novels. Because I could definitely imagine a book in which the Madazolam unite with the Lorazapam to fight the evil Halothane and their minions the Pento-Barbatol. In fact, you know what? I might not even have to imagine that. It's probably already been optioned by HBO in their upcoming Game of Space Thrones.

In 2 weeks' time, this network is so deeply fucked. But... But wait, but wait. It gets even worse. Because when this shaved Santa here testified in support of using midazolam in a case that eventually went before the Supreme Court.

A full half of his 300-page expert witness report consisted of printouts from drugs.com. And look, drugs.com is a highly useful resource for information, specifically information like this disclaimer reading, this material is not intended for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment." -$25,000. It's frankly no wonder that many inmates do not want midazolam to be used in their execution. In Arizona, some of them actually sued over exactly this, and the Department of Corrections hit on an ingenious solution to that, saying that inmates could simply bring their own execution drugs. Which is pretty difficult, isn't it?

What with those drugs being restricted, and those prisoners being in prison. It's basically telling a one-year-old to provide his own birthday cake. How the fuck am I supposed to do that? I don't have the money, I can't drive, I can't even get out of this chair, and I'm somehow supposed to obtain my own fucking Fudgie the whale? This is the worst birthday I've ever had!

-$1,000,000. Unbelievable! -$1,000,000. And when the head of Arizona's Department of Corrections was pressed on that plan, he pretty quickly identified the problem.

Speaker 5: You've never heard of a prisoner on death row in Arizona successfully purchasing federally regulated drugs for use in their own execution, have you? No. Have you heard of any prisoner anywhere ever doing that?

Speaker 0: Not yet. Ooh! Not yet? No 1 in the history of America has ever done this, but I think our inmates can pull it off. It is almost sweet how much he believes in the people he's in charge of putting to death.

And look, so far in this story, I've held off on describing specific cases to you, but there are many, many examples that show just how terribly things can go when all the factors you've seen so far tonight come together. The list of botched executions is long, and it is horrendous, But let's just take 1 of them. Clayton Lockett, back in 2014. Oklahoma made him 1 of the first prisoners to be executed using midazolam. And right from the start, things did not go as planned.

Speaker 9: Executing Clayton Lockett with a new 3 drug combination took 43 minutes. A phlebotomist tried inserting needles into Lockett's forearms, neck, foot, groin and buttocks. Minutes after the execution began, Lockett's attorney, there is a witness, says his client kept trying to raise up, and at 1 point even said, -"Something's wrong."

Speaker 10: -$$THEY WANTED TO HURRY UP AND GET IT DONE WITH AS LITTLE TRANSPARENCY AS POSSIBLE. THIS IS WHAT THEY GET.

Speaker 0: Yeah, that attorney is right. He's late for his Gig as a pendulet impersonator, but he's absolutely right. Look, what happened in that room was by all accounts incredibly gruesome. And the subsequent investigation revealed just how ill-prepared the people administering the injection really were.

Speaker 11: The drugs were not delivered into his vein. They went into the tissue. There were no backup drugs that night. There was no emergency plan if something went wrong.

Speaker 12: Regarding the use of midazolam, Mike Oakley from the corrections department said, I looked online, you know, went past the key WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks or whatever it is, and I did find out midazolam would render a person unconscious. So we thought it was okay.

Speaker 0: It's true. They looked up midazolam on WikiLeaks or whatever. Which is just not ideal, is it? In fact, to make sure that that doesn't happen again, we actually bought Wikileaks or whatever dot com, which is now just a large banner reading, Madazlam doesn't keep you from feeling pain, please stop using it in executions. And of course, we also added that frog.

You know, just to cut the tension a little bit. If you click on him, he squeaks. See? See? He's angry about executions, as he well should be.

What a frog! -♪ Oh... ♪ -Lethal injection actually has the highest botch rate of any execution method. So much so, last year, 2 inmates in Tennessee requested and were executed by the electric chair because they believed it would be less painful. So, incredibly, in our desire to find a more humane method, we've ended up letting amateurs both invent and administer a form of unpredictable torture.

And even some ardent supporters of the death penalty, like this federal judge, will acknowledge that lethal injection just isn't what we like to think it is.

Speaker 1: I think use of lethal injection is a way of lying to ourselves. To make it look like executions are peaceful, are benign, are sort of like going to sleep. And they're not. They're brutal things.

Speaker 5: Now, you have proposed alternatives. You prefer firing squad to lethal injections.

Speaker 1: Never fails.

Speaker 5: But you also said the guillotine?

Speaker 1: That's right.

Speaker 5: Really? The guillotine?

Speaker 0: Come on.

Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's 100% effective.

Speaker 0: Okay, okay, okay. So just... Sure, but just... Okay. First of all there, I desperately wish that Leslie Stahl had been around during the French Revolution.

Really? The guillotine? Come on. Robspeare, Look at me. Look at me.

Look at your old friend Leslie. Come on. Come on. Come on. Second, second, if hearing a federal judge endorse the guillotine makes you uncomfortable, just wait until you find out that he stepped down in the wake of numerous sexual misconduct claims, leaving me in the unenviable position of saying that me too judge who thinks we should be cutting off more heads actually makes some pretty interesting points.

Because the hard truth here is, there is no perfect way for the government to kill people. And you're probably thinking of alternatives right now. Oh, what about assisted suicide? Can't we just do the same thing with executions? Well, no.

It's hardest to kill a healthy person than someone near death. Besides, remember, doctors and drug companies won't be involved in executions. Okay, well, what about just overdosing them on opioids? Well, we've actually tried that, and 1 execution took 2 hours, with the inmate gulping like a fish out of water. Well, what about cyanide?

We tried cyanide gas in 1992, and it was so horrifying, the Attorney General vomited, and the prison warden claimed he'd resign if forced to conduct another 1. I could list methods all night long. The latest idea is nitrogen gas, which seems like it's got problems of its own. But at the end of the day, coming up with different ideas to do this is a bit like coming up with positions in which you'd feel least guilty fucking your mom. Oh, missionary, that's good for her hips, but you're looking right at her.

Standing up, mom hates standing for any length of time. Reverse cow mom, that's probably your best bet, but it's still appalling, and the fact is, you shouldn't be fucking doing it in the first place. There's no way to do this and make it okay. -♪ ♪ -() What I'm trying to say here is... If the thing that's making you comfortable with lethal injection is that it's humane, it isn't.

Because the fundamental fact to understand about lethal injection is, it is a show. It is designed not to minimize the pain of people being executed, but to maximize the comfort of those who want to support the death penalty without confronting the reality of it, which is that it's violent, and it's brutal, and it's never going to be anything other than that. And you might say, well, I don't care what happens to death row inmates. They're bad people. But I would argue that lethal injection isn't about who they are, It's about who we are.

And if, after everything you've heard tonight, you still think we should be the kind of society that tortures people to death in this manner, then I guess you're arguing that we should be like someone who looks at that list of reasons not to fuck their mom and does it anyway. Which is really just a long way of me saying, if we keep executing people by lethal injections or any other method, we are some real motherfuckers. -♪ You're a... -♪

Speaker 5: You're a... You

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Lethal Injections: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)