Daily Star
A Death Row inmate famous for surviving a horror execution that lasted hours has now died.
Doyle Lee Hamm’s ‘botched’ execution involved being stabbed repeatedly with a needle by doctors who failed to find a usable vein for his lethal injection.
He had been sent to the death chamber for shooting Patrick Cunningham in an armed robbery in Alabama in 1987.
His brother said watching the execution fail in 2018 was excruciating to endure. But Hamm is now dead after dying of natural causes aged 64.
And since the 1970s more than 1,500 people have been put to death in the USA – without even considering the thousands killed by the state before the 20th century.
But despite the frequency of the procedure, things don’t always go to plan and not every execution is a smooth one.
Condemned prisoners like Hamm have suffered horrific extended deaths due to malfunctioning equipment, medical incompetence and sometimes just sheer bad luck.
These eight botched executions have made the history books for turning what was meant to be a quick death into an agonising ordeal.
Willie Francis survived the electric chair
Willie Francis never made it past the age of 18 after his teenage years were ravaged with tragedy and violence.
He was just 16 when he was ordered to die after being convicted of murdering his old boss, pharmacy owner Andrew Thomas in 1945.
One year later he was strapped into an electric chair in Louisiana, aged 17.
Convinced he was about to take his final breath, jolts of painful electrical currents shot through his body.
However, the electric chair was not set up properly and a traumatised Francis remarkably survived.
But executors successfully killed him one year later after a US Supreme Court appeal failed.
Alva Campbell avoided lethal injection
Alva Campbell suffered a similar fate to Doyle Lee Hamm after executors failed to find a vein for lethal injection.
The convicted murderer was reportedly “overwhelmed” by the experience before he died of natural causes one year later in 2018.
Campbell was sentenced to death after fatally shooting Charles Dials in a brutal carjacking in 1997.
This happened after the Ohio killer had already served 20 years for an earlier murder.
He was found unresponsive in his cell aged 69 after his health deteriorated from lung and prostate cancer.
Jimmy Lee Gray ‘died banging his head against gas chamber wall’
Jimmy Lee Gray’s horrific rape and murder of a three-year-old sent him to the gas chamber in 1983, becoming the first person executed in Mississippi since the state reinstated the death penalty.
One of the reporters watching wrote of how Gray began thrashing his head around as he breathed in the toxic fumes, striking his head on an iron bar behind his chair.
Officials cleared the observation room but not before everyone had the chance to see Gray was badly injuring himself.
According to reports, astounded reporters counted his moans.
This botched execution prompted Mississippi to make lethal injection the state’s only method — although as the next ill-fated inmate will prove, that’s hardly failsafe either.
Wesley Ira Purkey’s ‘drowning’ sensation
Sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a teenager, Wesley Ira Purkey suffered far more during his execution than the average lethal injection recipient.
The 68-year-old’s autopsy reveals fluid quickly entered his lungs and trachea causing “a near-drowning” sensation during the procedure in July 2020.
Expert Dr Gail Van Norman said the flash flood-like filling of Purkey’s lungs could only occur when a person was still alive and strapped to the injection table.
“It is a virtual medical certainty, that most, if not all, prisoners will experience excruciating suffering, including sensations of drowning and suffocation from pentobarbital,” she told news.com.au.
Joseph Wood ‘gasped for air for over an hour’
Just a few years earlier another killer suffered through a botched lethal injection that saw him “gasp and snort for more than an hour”.
Joseph Wood was sentenced to death for killing his ex-girlfriend and her father in 1989 but wasn’t executed until 2014.
A combination of midazolam and hydromorphone, which had been used only once previously, was injected into Wood’s body 15 times although one dose should have been sufficient.
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