The Obama administration has launched a review of execution procedures following last week’s botched killing of a death row prisoner in Oklahoma. Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack 43 minutes after he was injected with untested chemicals in his groin. Prison officials had called off the execution after Lockett remained conscious and convulsed on the gurney. In his first public comments on Lockett’s death, President Obama called the botched execution “deeply troubling” and said it raises “difficult and profound questions.”

President Obama: “In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems: racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence. And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied. So, I’ll be discussing with Eric Holder and others, you know, to get me an analysis of what steps have been taken, not just in this particular instance, but more broadly in this area. I think we do have to, as a society, ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions around these issues.”

The Justice Department review will focus strictly on the “federal protocol” for how executions are carried out, not the issues of race and wrongful convictions that Obama mentioned.