Oklahoma state medical examiner Dr Jay Chapman had been tasked with finding the best way to kill someone.
Warning: This story contains details which may be upsetting for some readers.
The US Supreme Court had suspended capital punishment a few years earlier, with the sentences of the hundreds waiting on death row reduced to life in prison.
Now, in 1977, it was back on the table. A death row inmate named Gary Gilmore had opted for the firing squad over the electric chair.
His execution — ultimately by firing squad — prompted debate about what the most “humane” execution method really was.
State officials turned to a then 32-year old Dr Chapman for a solution.
“At that time, we put animals to death more humanely than we did human beings,” Dr Chapman told the Guardian in 2015.
“So the idea of using medical drugs seemed a much better alternative.
“We simply took the standard set for anaesthesia in surgical procedures … to lethal levels recommended by a toxicologist.”
Dr Chapman’s solution was simple, comprised of three injections: sodium thiopental to sedate, then pancuronium bromide to paralyse, then potassium chloride to stop the heart.
The method was approved in Oklahoma, followed by Texas.
It wouldn’t be long before they’d get their first chance to see it in action — in the form of 40-year-old convicted killer Charles Brooks Jr.
Charles Brooks Jr finds himself on Death Row in Texas
By the time Texas followed Oklahoma in adopting lethal injection, Charles Brooks Jr had already committed the crime which would see him sentenced to die.
In 1976, Brooks had gone to a used car dealership and asked the mechanic, David Gregory, for a test drive.
Once the two men were in the car, Brooks picked up his accomplice, Woody Loudres, and Gregory was put in the car boot.
At a nearby motel, Gregory was tied up and shot in the head. Neither Loudres or Brooks ever revealed who fired the gun.
Later Loudres would receive a 40-year prison sentence, while Brooks was sentenced to death in 1978.
Reporting at the time suggested Brooks was “considered bright and personable”.
Before the crime, he had been raised by a well-off family in Fort Worth and was a star football player at his high school, marrying his high school sweetheart.
When he was moved to death row, according to Texas Monthly reporter Dick Reavis, his belongings were brought in cardboard boxes.
He did not unpack them, instead sifting through them each time he needed something.
“The first item he fished out was a small black clock radio,” Reavis wrote in 1983.
“From time to time he opened one of the dozen cans of Dr Pepper he had ordered over the weekend from the Ellis [prison] commissary.
“Charlie had done a prisoner’s best to stock up on pleasures he might never taste again.”
How a 'more palatable' method became the execution standard
Since 1976, there have been 1,459 executions via lethal injection, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.
All 27 states, along with the US Military and the US federal government, have authorised the method.
In South Carolina the default method remains electrocution, however inmates can opt for lethal injection if the necessary drugs are available.
A 2006 Human Rights Watch report suggested lethal injection was “more palatable” to the general public, but noted states had a “lack of care” in developing their methods.
“According to Dr Jay Chapman, the architect of Oklahoma’s [lethal injection method], he ‘didn’t care which drug killed the prisoner, as long as one of them did',” the report said.
Multiple states now opt for a single large dose of an anaesthetic, similar to animal euthanasia, while others continue a three-injection protocol.
Both are not foolproof.
Lethal injection, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre, has the highest rate of being botched.
In a 2022 annual review, the organisation found 35 per cent of the 20 executions attempts carried out that year were “visibly problematic”.
In one case executioners in Alabama took three hours to properly insert an IV line.
In 2024 the DPIC reported at least two men who had survived botched lethal injection executions in 2022 had been successfully executed.
A total of 43 prisoners have been executed across the United States in 2025, 35 by lethal injection, five by lethal gas and three by firing squad.
Three more death row inmates — two in Florida and one in Tennessee — are scheduled for execution before the end of the year.
'It was perhaps a minute, perhaps two minutes'
Brooks learned his last chance for mercy had been unsuccessful shortly after noon on December 6, 1982.
A three-judge panel of the Fifth US Circuit Court had met in New Orleans that morning to consider his appeals, and had turned him down.
As his lawyers continued to draft follow-up appeals, he resigned himself to finding a chess opponent.
“Charlie liked to tell visitors that there were three pursuits in his prison life: Islam, law, and chess,” Mr Reavis wrote.
“Not until two o’clock did the convict find a willing player, a guard known … as a skilled hand at the game.
“It took Charlie half an hour to do it, but he buried the guard’s reputation.”
His niece visited, as did his Muslim spiritual adviser.
He ate his final meal of T-bone steak, fries, ketchup, biscuits, peach cobbler and iced tea, and asked to be left alone for a few hours to write letters.
Then he was rolled on a gurney into the death chamber at the Huntsville Unit, and the execution went forward at 12.09am.
The almost three dozen witnesses in the chamber appeared shaken by the experience.
“He was flexing his right fist, open, then closed, open and closed,” Mr Reavis wrote.
“After a moment, a look of absolute, unmitigated terror took over his face … He did not whimper, or make any sound."
“It was perhaps a minute, perhaps two minutes, before he felt death creeping in.”
At 12.16am on December 7, 1982, Charles Brooks Jr was pronounced dead.
As of 2016, the three syringes, the saline drip bag and the IV catheter used in the 1982 execution were on display at the Texas Prison Museum.
