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Arizona fails in challenge to inmate's execution delay Top judge attacks lethal injection as Arizona fails in death penalty appeal
(about 1 hour later)
A federal appeals court has denied the state of Arizona in its latest attempt to challenge the postponement of an inmate's execution, prompting state officials to say they will take the case to the US supreme court. One of America’s top judges has launched a dramatic attack on the use of medical drugs in executions, stating that the attempt to disguise the brutality of the death penalty by giving condemned prisoners the appearance of serenity in their final moments is “doomed to failure” and that the country should return to the firing squad.
Arizona had requested a hearing before an 11-judge panel to argue that it should be able to move forward with the execution of a death row inmate. The sharply-worded statement from Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the ninth circuit federal appeals court, came as the court on Monday denied Arizona’s attempt to challenge the postponement of an inmate’s execution over the secrecy of its capital punishment procedures. Arizona state officials say they will now appeal to the US supreme court.
A three-judge panel of the same court had granted Joseph Rudolph Wood's request to delay his execution until Arizona reveals details about the two-drug combination intended to put him to death. Kozinski’s statement represents one of the most high-profile attacks on the US death penalty. It adds to the sense of crisis surrounding the sentence in the wake of a European-led boycott of lethal injection drugs that has forced states to adopt increasingly desperate measures including new drug protocols and secrecy laws.
Wood's lawyers argued prison officials violated their client's constitutional rights by refusing to provide the information. In his statement, Kozinski says that the decision made in the 1970s to move from the traditional methods of judicial killing - such as the electric chair, gas chamber, hanging and firing squad – to lethal injections using medical drugs was misguided. “Subverting medicines meant to heal the human body to the opposite purpose was an enterprise doomed to failure,” he writes.
The state denied Wood has that right. He adds that in his opinion the “enterprise is flawed”. He says that drugs are being used “to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful – like something any one of us might experience in our final moments … But executions are, in fact, nothing like that. They are brutal, savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that reality. Nor should it. If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf.”
More soon … Kozinski’s radical conclusion is that it would be better for America to return to more primitive techniques in taking life. “The firing squad strikes me as the most promising. Eight or 10 large-caliber rifle bullets fired at close range can inflict massive damage, causing instant death every time. Sure, firing squads can be messy, but if we are willing to carry out executions, we should not shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood. If we, as a society, cannot stomach the splatter from an execution carried out by firing squad, then we shouldn’t be carrying out executions at all.”
Paradoxically, Kozinski’s radical critique of the modern death penalty is contained in a dissent to the latest ruling from the ninth circuit appeals court that in effect prevents the state of Arizona from carrying out an execution on Wednesday. The court, with Kozinski dissenting, on Monday declined to re-hear the case of Joseph Wood, who had been scheduled to die by lethal injection for the 1989 murders of his estranged girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, Eugene Dietz, in Tucson.
In an earlier sitting, a three-judge panel of the same court ordered a stay of execution in the case. In what could turn out to be a groundbreaking ruling, the panel said that Arizona could not go ahead with the execution unless it revealed details about the combination of two medical drugs with which it intended to kill Wood on the grounds that the prisoner had a first amendment right to access to government proceedings.
The first amendment legal challenge was similar in its argument to a lawsuit brought by the Guardian and other news organisations in Missouri that argues that the public have a first amendment right to know how drugs are being used to kill prisoners. That legal challenge is still pending in the Missouri state courts.
Kozinski’s strongly critical remarks come just days after a federal judge in California ruled that the state’s death penalty was unconstitutional. US district judge Cormac Carney found that the years that death row inmates waited to be executed violated the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Kozinski alludes to the Californian ruling in his dissent. He writes: “The decade-long inability (or perhaps unwillingness) of California state officials to come up with an execution protocol” has “effectively putting the state’s death chamber out of commission”.