In America about 3,000 inmates wait to hear when they will be executed in a room like this[PA]Then he shot her in the shoulder, pushed her into the grave and shot her again in the chest before ordering his friend to bury her alive.
Nevertheless the punishment meted out to him this week in Oklahoma, which executes more people per capita than any other US state, is in danger of making the American judicial system look crueller than Lockett himself.
Given an experimental threedrug injection that was supposed to kill him quickly and painlessly, the 38-year-old regained consciousness about 15 minutes into the procedure on Tuesday night and started twitching and writhing in agony.
He appeared to be in such pain that the blinds separating the death chamber from the viewing room were closed and the execution was called off.
But 43 minutes after the first injection he died of a heart attack. A lawyer said he had effectively been tortured to death.
In the US, which is one of 58 countries in the world to retain the death penalty but the only Western industrial democracy to still have it, the botched execution has given a boost to the campaign to abolish these judicial killings.
It's also, for better or worse, the direct result of action by the European Union and other countries to ban the export of a drug called sodium thiopental, originally developed as an anaesthetic, because of concern about its use in capital punishment.
Thirty two out of the 50 US states still have capital punishment.
The US carries out the fifth largest number of executions in the world after China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
Thirty nine people were put to death there last year and just over 3,000 are on death row.
There is also a clear racial component: studies have shown that while there are equal numbers of black and white murder victims, 80 per cent of the people executed since 1977 were convicted of murders involving white victims.
A horribly botched execution in the US this week comes after the EU bans the export of deadly drugs [PA]As the horribly botched execution of Clayton Lockett shows, the killing of prisoners with a cocktail of drugs is a grotesque business
In 2011 Hospira, the last US supplier of sodium thiopental, stopped making the drug and the EU announced an export ban.
Sales were also banned by India.
Since the drug only has a four-year shelf life stocks have dwindled and capital punishment states - mainly Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Ohio, Arizona and Virginia - have had to look for new compounds.
But since the state authorities have no way of testing the drugs before they use them death-row inmates have become human guinea pigs.
Aside from the grisly consequences on view in Oklahoma this week that puts states at risk of violating the US constitution, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment and requires that a "safe" execution method must not inflict too much pain.
Unsurprisingly that has opened the way to legal challenges by death row prisoners.
To sidestep these, states such as Oklahoma have attempted to pass secrecy laws to prevent the inmates' lawyers getting access to the details of their lethal injections.
In Oklahoma this has become the subject of a frenzied controversy.
When a court ruled the law unconstitutional, conservative politicians threatened to impeach the judges and Republican governor Mary Fallin stepped in to order Lockett's execution.
It went ahead using an untried cocktail of drugs. But the result fell so obviously foul of the "cruel and unusual" rule that Governor Fallin herself ordered a two-week delay in the execution of Charles Warner, a prisoner who maintains his innocence and was also scheduled to die on Tuesday night.
The American Civil Liberties of Oklahoma said the state's execution processes were like "hastily thrown together human science experiments" and leading constitutional lawyer Erwin Chemerinsky commented: "For the state to inflict such great suffering is the very definition of cruel and unusual punishment. Courts must step in and prevent executions with such untested protocols that have the potential for inflicting such terrible suffering.
The lethal injection given to Clayton Lockett meant he died in agony [PA]Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty in Washington DC, says this week's incident should be seen in the context of the death penalty "waning dramatically" in the US, with a dwindling number of states actually using it and a dwindling number of jurisdictions within those states - in other words it's only used in certain counties.
As its use becomes more rare, she says, its manifestations become more extreme.
"They wanted to rush it through in Oklahoma and that's why you get these bad results," she says.
"Rather than paying attention to the very clear signal that's being sent by the international community and a growing segment of the American public, the response has been to act in secrecy, in haste and by brute force."
She notes that public support has fallen from a high of 80 per cent in the mid-1990s to around 55 per cent now and she says the 90 million Americans who are opposed to the death penalty are embarrassed and outraged that their country is so far out of step with the rest of the Western world.
"This has been a catalyst for change and having laid the thing bare, it's going to hasten the day when it ends," she says.
But hasn't the EU's export ban made things worse rather than better, increasing the suffering of individual death row prisoners and prompting states which have no intention of giving up the death penalty to search for more innovative ways of dispatching condemned inmates?
Campaign group Amnesty International is unrepentant. "It's right that pharmaceutical companies stop any export of drugs for use in lethal injections in the US," says Allan Hogarth, the group's UK head of policy and government affairs.
"As the horribly botched execution of Clayton Lockett shows, the killing of prisoners with a cocktail of drugs is a grotesque business, just like everything else connected with the premeditated cruelty of the death penalty.
Oklahoma shouldn't just postpone other planned executions it should impose a total ban on them."
What's more, since the EU banned the export of the chemicals to the US, a moratorium on capital punishment has been imposed in 12 states.
So Lockett's ghastly demise may yet turn out to be a further nail in the death penalty's coffin.
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