From [HERE] With a renovated death chamber, new training and a higher dose of drugs, Oklahoma on Thursday carried out its first execution since April, when the slipshod, prolonged killing of Clayton D. Lockett led the state to suspend lethal injections and change its procedures.

“Charles Frederick Warner was pronounced dead at 7:28 p.m.,” said Jerry Massie, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Corrections Department. “The execution has been carried out.” Lockett and Warner were both Black men. 

Officials here had waited to see whether the United States Supreme Court would grant a last-minute stay. But as the scheduled time passed, the court announced that it would not prevent Oklahoma from putting Mr. Warner to death.

A sharp dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and endorsed by three other members of the court, held that the drug combination being used in Oklahoma risked causing severe, unconstitutional suffering. But the other five justices voted without comment to deny the appeal for a stay.Mr. Warner, 47, had been sentenced to death for the sexual assault and murder of an 11-month-old girl in 1997.

According to journalists who witnessed the 18-minute procedure, it did not appear that Mr. Warner suffered great pain and he appeared to lose consciousness quickly. As the injections began, however, he said “my body is on fire.” Intravenous lines were inserted into each of his arms, and he called out that he had been “poked five times.”

In his final words, he apologized for the pain he had caused, saying: “I am not a monster.”

Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican, who is white, said in a statement issued shortly after the execution, “Justice was served tonight as the state executed Charles Warner for the heinous crime of raping and murdering an infant.”

The grisly details of Mr. Lockett’s execution on April 29 led to questions in Oklahoma and around the country about the reliability of lethal injections as a humane procedure and about the new combinations being tried as once-preferred drugs became scarce.

Federal district and appeals courts cleared the way for Oklahoma to resume lethal injections using a sedative that some medical experts say may not consistently put prisoners into the deep coma needed to avoid suffering.

Also on Thursday, Florida executed Johnny Shane Kormondy, 42, who was convicted of murdering a man during a 1993 home invasion. Mr. Kormondy was executed using the same three-drug combination challenged unsuccessfully by the Oklahoma prisoners’ lawyers.

Mr. Warner was originally scheduled to die in April, just two hours after Mr. Lockett. But his execution was postponed after the problems with Mr. Lockett’s lethal injection. Mr. Lockett seemed to wake and writhe in agony after a doctor failed to place the intravenous line in a vein, causing a sedative, a paralyzing agent and a caustic heart-stopping drug, to diffuse in his groin. He finally died 43 minutes into the procedure after a doctor seeking to reinsert a needle punctured an artery, resulting in what the prison warden later called “a bloody mess.

Backed by several medical experts, lawyers for Mr. Warner and three other men on death row here argued that the effects of high doses of midazolam, the sedative adopted by Oklahoma, were not known and were too unpredictable to justify the drug’s use. Midazolam was also involved in prolonged, possibly painful executions last year in Ohio and Arizona.

Oklahoma officials argued in a brief on Jan. 6 that “the citizens should not see their criminal justice system derailed” because of “baseless speculation of theoretical harms.”