TULSA, OKLA--A ninth grader in Tulsa has won his class' science medal for developing a three-drug protocol to put inmates to death on death row in the "Sooner State," as its residents proudly call Oklahoma.
Richie Westerman, who submitted his project to the contest, has come up with a three-drug protocol that 1) knocks out the prisoner with a heavy dose of barbiturates; 2) injects a drug (unnamed) to paralyze the inmate, while 3) stopping the inmate's heart with the third of the three-drug protocol
This drug combination, which Richie is not releasing to the press, pending a patent on his new invention, is supposed to avoid the kind of botched execution that took place last week in McAlester, OKLA, as the prisoner, Clayton Luckless, rose from the gurney, murmured something, gasped, and then died, forty-three minutes later, of a heart attack. No one saw what happened to Mr. Luckless after the first few minutes, since curtains were drawn for the remainder of what the prison warden solemnly called Mr. Luckless' "end of life event."
Said Richie, who tried out his drug protocol on the class' Red Tailed Boa Constrictor, Nibbles: "My drug protocol is much more efficient than the one used last week to put Mr. Luckless to death. It only took Nibbles thirty-four minutes to die, and he only writhed in pain for ten minutes of that."
Republican Gov. Mary Fallen, who overruled the Oklahoma Supreme Court last week to carry out Mr. Luckless' execution, is very excited about the new three-drug protocol used in Riche Westerman's science project. Said Gov. Fallen: "Of course, we have to use due caution when trying out this new drug protocol. First, we'll try it on a couple of black death row inmates, and if that works, we'll try it out on maybe one or two Hispanic inmates; and once the bugs are worked out, we'll try it out on some of our white inmates on death row. After all, we've got a whole slew of prisoners just waiting to meet their Maker!"
