Outrage across ideological spectrum in Europe over Oklahoma's botched execution

The criticism spanned Europe’s ideological divide, outraging conservatives and liberals. Alice Arnold, a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, a right-leaning newspaper in Britain, wrote that “America is missing the point,” which is about “the very concept of killing in cold blood” and not about the method.

“I am proud to be British today, proud that I live in a country where this barbarism does not exist, but we must remember this atrocity occurred not in some far-off, third-world dictatorship,” Ms. Arnold wrote. “It happened in America, land of the free.”

Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, a member of Spain’s Parliament from the governing, conservative Popular Party, said that “botched or not, unnecessarily gruesome or technically flawless, executions are unacceptable.”

Mario Marazziti, who coordinates a global campaign for a moratorium on the death penalty for the Sant’Egidio Community of lay Roman Catholics, called lethal injection “unusually cruel and inhuman.” Despite the claims, he said, “it is never a ‘clean’ procedure,” but it represents what he termed “the moral and scientific bankruptcy of ‘clean’ capital punishment.”