(Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Friday said the botched execution of a murderer in Oklahoma raises questions about the death penalty in the United States and he will ask the U.S. attorney general to look into the situation.
"What happened in Oklahoma is deeply troubling," he said.
Yes it does raise questions. Hopefully we'll be getting some answers too.
Obama cited uneven application of the death penalty in the United States, including racial bias and cases in which murder convictions were later overturned, as grounds for further study on the issue.
"And this situation in Oklahoma just highlights some of the significant problems," he said at a news conference.
"I'll be discussing with (Attorney General) Eric Holder and others to get me an analysis of what steps have been taken - not just in this particular instance but more broadly - in this area," he said.
"I think we do have to, as a society, ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions around these issues."
These questions are not all that difficult for me personally but I know I'm a little weird that way. The adjectives I've seen lately describing the recent "botched" execution event in Oklahoma are insufficient to fully describe the horror and shame of it ... horrific, gruesome, appalling and so on.
I am hopeful that President Obama's DoJ will come up with some answers that will have a profound impact on the future of the executions processes and practices nationwide. I'm pretty much done with the insanity of this country's continued love affair with the death penalty.