Most of us have read with horror and revulsion the details of the botched execution of Clayton Lockett, who the State of Oklahoma executed on Tuesday, April 29.  The lethal drugs and injection protocol, which Oklahoma had refused to divulge, worked so badly that Mr. Lockett was left writhing in pain, gasping for air and fighting for life for so long and in such obvious agony that the prison finally shut the blinds so the witnesses would be spared from watching the scene.

According to the prison, Mr. Lockett died of a heart attack some 45 minutes after the execution began.  Because the scene was too awful for even the witnesses to watch, we'll never know for sure what actually happened.

It might be hard to see how something like this could possibly lead to anything good, but perhaps such a horrible event will change some hearts about the state-sponsored evil of the death penalty.  God does work in mysterious ways, after all.

Minnesota had a similar botched execution more than 100 yeaers ago, and it was the State's last.  In 1906 Minnesota executed William Williams by hanging. Unfortunately the deputies who set up the gallows forgot to consider that both the rope and Mr. Williams' neck would stretch when he was hung, and Mr. Williams' feet hit the floor after the trap door opened.  It took two deputies to keep his feet off the ground while he choaked to death for 14 and a half minutes. Everyone who saw the event was repulsed.

That was Minnesota's last execution because the horror of the botched execution galvanized public opposition to the death penalty in Minnesota and the death penalty was repealed in 1911.

Perhaps the 45-minute agony Clayton Lockett endured will do the same.  Archbishop Paul Oakley of Oklahoma City suggested as much in his statement after the tragedy, saying that perhaps the event will "lead us to consider whether we should adopt a moritorium on the death penalty or even abolish it altogether."

That's hardly a call to the baricades for a war on the death penalty, and, given the Church's public opposition to the death penalty in this county, one might have hoped for more.  But at least it is a move in the right direction.

This tragic botched execution, like the one in Ohio earlier this year, happened because there is simply no "humane" way to kill another human being.  Corporations and governments around the globe have realized that and refuse to be parties to this insult to human life-- depriving states like Oklahoma of the drugs previously used for the "three-drug cocktail" by refusing to allow export or sale of the drugs.

If we truly value human life-- if we oppose abortion and euthanasia and assisted suicide-- logic, and moral reaon, commands that we oppose the death penalty.  It is an evil that stains the hands of us all, because in carrying out the execution the government acts as the agent for all of us.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln said it best: "Blood cannot restore blood, and government should not act out of  revenge."