The entire process takes up to 12 minutes. .
Lethal injection is now considered to be the most popular method of execution in the United States and it was devised as another more human method of killing. Ironically, there is no humane way of killing; killing itself is inhumane. It was first used in Oklahoma in 1977 and is currently the sole method or option in 32 states. However, much like the electric chair and gas chambers, lethal injection has its share of the problem as well. In Texas, 1988, Raymond Landry was supposed to die. The tube carrying the poisons into Landry began to leak and it sprayed witnesses with the deadly chemicals. Landry was half-dead when the tubes were reinserted, and it took him 24 minutes to die a painful death. .
In that very state, eighteen years later, Thomas Grasso is led into a chamber of the Oklahoma Sate Penitentiary. He was tied down and an attendant stuck a needle, which was attached to tubes that extended through a hole in the wall, into Grasso's arm. On the other side of the chamber wall, three executioners began to feed chemicals into the tubes. The chemicals consisted of sodium thiopental, which would cause the convict to pass out, pancuronium bromide, which would freeze the lungs and potassium chloride, which would stop the heart. After five minutes, a doctor checked on Grasso and announced that he was dead. .
Grasso had admitted to killing two elderly people over a six-month period of time in Oklahoma and in New York City. On December 24th, 1990, Grasso had entered the home of Hilda Johnson of Tulsa, Oklahoma and beat her with a piece of wood and an electric iron and strangled her to death with a cord of Christmas lights. On July 3, 1991, Grasso robbed and strangled Leslie Holtz of New York City. Because the crimes occurred in two different states, Grasso was put on trial in New York, which did not have the death penalty, and Oklahoma, which did.
