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Arizona killer Joseph Wood dies almost two hours after execution began Arizona killer Joseph Wood dies almost two hours after execution begins
(35 minutes later)
A convicted killer gasped on the gurney as the state of Arizona attempted to execute him on Wednesday, before being declared dead almost two hours after the process began. The controversy engulfing the death penalty in the United States escalated on Wednesday when the state of Arizona took almost two hours to kill a prisoner using an experimental concoction of drugs whose provenance it had insisted on keeping secret.
Lawyers for Joseph Wood attempted to halt the execution in an emergency court motion, saying he had been "gasping and snorting for more than an hour". The state attorney general announced Wood had died before the court could rule on the motion. Joseph Wood took an hour and 58 minutes to die after he was injected with a relatively untested combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone. For more than an hour, he was seen to be “gasping and snorting”, according to an emergency motion to halt the execution, filed by his lawyers.
The developments echoed the botched execution of Clayton Lockett, who writhed and groaned on a gurney for nearly 45 minutes before eventually dying of a heart attack. The two-hour process in Wood's case appeared certain to revive the arguments surrounding the death penalty in the US, as a shortage of execution drugs has forced states to use untried methods and unregulated drugs. The attorney general of Arizona, Tom Horne, announced at 3.49pm local time that Wood was dead. The procedure had begun at 1.52pm, with sedation of the prisoner confirmed five minutes later.
The office of the Arizona attorney general, Tom Horne, said Wood was pronounced dead at 3.49 pm local time, one hour and 57 minutes after the execution started. According to the emergency motion, Wood was seen to be still breathing at 2.02pm, and the next minute his mouth moved. “He has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour,” his lawyers said. When the officials in charge of the execution checked the prisoner at 3.02pm – an hour and 10 minutes after the procedure began – he was confirmed still to be alive.
Only a few minutes earlier, his lawyers had attempted to have the process halted, in an emergency court application to the US district court in Arizona. "We respectfully request that this court stop the execution and require that the department of corrections use the lifesaving provisions required in its protocol," the lawyers said. One eyewitness, Michael Kiefer of Arizona Republic, counted the prisoner gasping 660 times. Another witness, reporter Troy Hayden, told the same paper that it had been "very disturbing to watch ... like a fish on shore gulping for air."
"He is still alive. This execution has violated Mr Wood’s eighth amendment right to be executed in the absence of cruel and unusual punishment," the court filing added. Wood, 55, was put to death for the 1989 murders in Tucson of his former girlfriend Debra Dietz and her father Eugene Dietz. The duration of the execution was extreme even in the contexct of recent botched judicial killings in the US. Clayton Lockett, who writhed and groaned on the gurney in Oklahoma in April, took 45 minutes to die – less than half the time it took in Wood’s case.
The hours leading up to the execution were marked by a frenzied legal battle over the secrecy imposed by state officials on the source of the drugs. It was put on hold several times – first by a federal appeals court, then by the state supreme court of Arizona – only to have the stays lifted and the procedure go ahead. Lockett's death provoked a nationwide and international outcry. In the fallout, President Obama was prompted to launch a review into the practice of the death penalty in the country that is still ongoing.
The US supreme court was asked to intervene, but on Tuesday night declined to do so without giving an explanation for its decision. The hours leading up to the execution were marked by a frenzied legal battle over the secrecy imposed by state officials on the source of the drugs. It was put on hold several times – first by a federal appeals court, then by the state supreme court of Arizona. On Tuesday the US supreme court removed the stay, allowing the execution of Wood to go ahead.
Wood's legal team had argued that as a member of the public, the death row inmate had a right to know under the first amendment of the US constitution about the source and nature of the drugs that were being used to kill him, as well as about the qualifications of the officials who would administer the lethal injections. The ninth circuit federal court of appeals agreed with Wood to the extent that it ordered a stay of execution to give time for proper legal reflection.
It was that stay of execution that the US supreme court lifted, without giving any explanation.
Condemnation of Arizona's handling of the execution was swift and caustic. In an impassioned statement, Wood's lawyer, Dale Baich, said: “Arizona appears to have joined several other states who have been responsible for an entirely preventable horror - a bungled execution. The public should hold its officials responsible and demand to make this process more transparent.”
He added: “We will renew our efforts to get information about the manufacturer of drugs as well as how Arizona came up with the experimental formula of drugs it used today.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been campaigning against death penalty secrecy in several states, said that Arizona had violated the first amendment, the eighth amendment and the bounds of basic decency.
“Joseph Wood suffered cruel and unusual punishment when he was apparently left conscious long after the drugs were administered. It’s time for Arizona and the other states still using lethal injection to admit that this experiment with unreliable drugs is a failure,” said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU's capital punishment project.
The Wood execution is certain now to provoke renewed debate about the concoctions of drugs used by death penalty states, as well as about the secrecy with which those states have shrouded the procedure. So far this year seven states have carried out executions - Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas – and all seven have introduced varying degrees of secrecy around their execution drugs.
The controversial measures follow a European-led boycott of the US death penalty that has blocked key drugs used in executions from reaching departments of correction. As supplies have run short, and expired, states have resorted to untried improvisations while insisting on hiding the identities of their suppliers in order to keep supply lines open.
Numerous legal challenges have been attempted in the courts arguing that such secrecy puts prisoners in danger because it prevents them from ensuring that the drugs being used to kill them are of sufficient strength and efficacy to do the job humanely without breaching their eighth amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. Successive courts – including the US supreme court, most recently on Tuesday night in the Wood case – have dismissed that argument as lacking in substance.
But the spectacle in Arizona of a prisoner taking almost two hours to die after he was administered drugs, the origin of which was kept secret, will can only bolster the cases of lawyers and anti-death penalty campaigners.
The midazolam-hydromorphone combination used on Wood was also used by Ohio in January to put to death Dennis McGuire. Expert anaesthetists had warned that the state was using too weak a dosage, yet Ohio officials went ahead – with the result that McGuire took 26 minutes to die.
Midazolam was also used in the botched execution of Clayton Lockett by Oklahoma in April.
In the lead-up to the Wood execution, Arizona refused to divulge any information about the drugs it intended to use. It only revealed that it had obtained federally approved medicines, signaling that the sedative and painkillers had been produced by licensed manufacturers.
Only two manufacturers of midazolam in America – Akorn and Sagent, both headquartered in Illinois – have failed to put distribution controls in place that prevent the chemical being sold to US corrections departments for use in executions.