Lisa McCalmont; challenged lethal injections
LOS ANGELES - Lisa McCalmont, an Oklahoma lawyer who played a key role in the legal battle challenging the execution of inmates by lethal injection, has died. She was 49.
Ms. McCalmont killed herself at her home in Norman, Okla., about midnight Nov. 1, according to friends. She was found by her husband, Craig Dixon, a geophysicist. She did not leave a note before hanging herself.
Friends and associates, some who had known her for years and others who had worked closely with her in recent months, said they were mystified about why Ms. McCalmont decided to take her own life just two months before the lethal-injection issue was due to be considered by the Supreme Court.
In that case, the Supreme Court is considering whether the constitutional bar against cruel and unusual punishment prohibits using means for carrying out a method of execution that create an "unnecessary risk of pain as opposed to only a substantial risk of the wanton infliction of pain."
Ms. McCalmont was the lead lawyer in the federal challenge to the lethal-injection process in Oklahoma, the first of 37 states to adopt the procedure involving a three-drug cocktail. In that case, she asserted that Oklahoma designed a procedure for carrying out an execution "that purports to induce death only after a condemned prisoner has been rendered unconscious and unable to experience pain." But "in reality," Ms. McCalmont contended, the policies and practices devised by Oklahoma officials "unnecessarily risk conscious suffering and pain during execution and deliberately ignore and are indifferent to the health and safety of condemned prisoners" in violation of the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
A federal judge in Oklahoma City rejected the state's efforts to dismiss the case. Then, last spring, that case was formally put into abeyance for a year "to allow the [Oklahoma] Department of Corrections to effectuate the terms of the settlement," according to Ms. McCalmont's published resume. A lawyer for the Oklahoma attorney general's office declined to comment on any changes the state had made in its lethal-injection procedures.
In addition, Ms. McCalmont had "made presentations to capital defense attorneys at national and regional conferences, which were intended to help lawyers understand the scientific and legal issues involved in challenging lethal injection protocols," said Elisabeth Semel, director of the death penalty clinic at the University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. (In recent months, Ms. McCalmont had been working as a special resource counsel on lethal injections issues at the death penalty clinic.)
Other lawyers said Ms. McCalmont provided guidance on such cases in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
Moreover, Ms. McCalmont prepared a detailed briefing book on the controversy, which could be used to explain the issue to lay people.
A native of Philadelphia, Ms. McCalmont attended high school at the American School in London before going on to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., where she earned a degree in geology, graduating with honors in 1979. She did graduate study in the field before becoming a geologist for Conoco Inc. for 10 years. She worked on projects ranging from an assessment of drilling possibilities in west Texas to geophysical analysis of Conoco's position in a gas field in the North Sea.
"Lisa always asked for and got the most challenging, most high-profile projects," her husband said. The couple married in 1991 after she returned from a stint working in Scotland.
In 1993, Ms. McCalmont decided to make a career change and enrolled at the University of Tulsa College of Law. Once again, she was a star student, finishing second in a class of 203. She became editor in chief of the school's law journal and upon graduation garnered a clerkship with federal appeals court Judge Stephanie Seymour in Tulsa.
She moved back to Houston and worked with three law firms where she concentrated on intellectual property cases.
But in 2003, Ms. McCalmont and her husband moved back to Oklahoma, bought a large house in Norman, started restoring it, and raising bearded collies. She joined the federal public defender's office in nearby Oklahoma City.
Earlier this year, Ms. McCalmont and her colleagues persuaded the federal appeals court in Denver that one of her clients, Glenn D. Anderson, had received constitutionally deficient representation during the penalty phase of his triple-murder trial and the death sentence was vacated. Subsequently, Ms. McCalmont and the state attorney general's office held negotiations and Anderson agreed to accept a sentence of life without possibility of parole. "That was the accomplishment of which she was most proud," Dixon said.
In addition to her husband, she leaves her parents, William McCalmont and Alice Patricia Starrett McCalmont of 
