Still Doing Fine, Oklahoma

After a six-year moratorium following the triumph of humanity that was the Lockett experiment, the Christian state of Oklahoma has resumed its love affair with killing drugs. A convict with the usual convenient racial profile had the privilege of testing the state's hundred-thousand-dollar death chamber, and suffered only fifteen minutes of convulsions before being declared unconscious. Compared with Lockett's forty-three-minute exit, this constitutes an improvement of four minutes and forty seconds for every single one of the half-dozen years which the Christian state of Oklahoma has spent pondering the problem. Doubtless this enviable rate of progress explains why the department of corrections subsequently corrected events for the record, proclaiming that the execution took place "in accordance with protocols and without complication."