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| Joseph Wood |
A convicted killer gasped on the gurney for more than an hour as the state of Arizona attempted to execute him on Wednesday, before being declared dead almost two hours after the process began.
Attorneys for Joseph Wood attempted to halt the execution in an emergency court motion, saying he had been "gasping and snoring for more than an hour". The state attorney general announced that Wood had died before the court could rule on the motion
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.
"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 laywers said.
"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 said.
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.
Even the US supreme court was asked to intervene, but on Tuesday night declined to do so without giving an explanation for its decision.
Arizona inmate takes two hours to die in botched execution using experimental two-drug cocktail
The state of Arizona today took one hour and 57 minutes to kill a prisoner in a botched execution, which was carried out using the same combination of drugs as those used in the botched execution of an Ohio prisoner earlier this year.
Joseph Wood, 55, was eventually pronounced dead at 3.49pm local time after he had been seen ‘gasping and snorting’ over an hour into his execution, according to an emergency stay filed mid-execution by his lawyers as they saw what was happening.
Wood was executed using the drugs Midazolam and Hydromorphone, a combination that has been used only once before in an execution that also went badly wrong in Ohio in January. Dennis McGuire was seen struggling and gasping for breath during an execution that took over 25 minutes.
The botched execution of Wood follows that of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in April. Both states insisted on conducting the executions behind a veil of secrecy, refusing to name the manufacturers of the drugs or provide critical details which could have helped assure their quality.
Like Lockett, Wood had received a stay just moments prior to the execution so that the court could consider the issue of the experimental drugs. However that stay was then lifted and Wood’s execution began at 1.52pm local time.
There are just a handful of manufacturers of both Midazolam and Hydromorphone which do not yet have comprehensive distribution controls in place to ensure their medicines are used to improve and save the lives of patients, and are not sold to prisons to end the lives of prisoners in potentially torturous executions. International human rights NGO Reprieve has worked extensively with pharmaceutical companies, the majority of which have taken steps to protect their medicines from abuse in executions like this one.
Maya Foa, Director of Reprieve’s Death Penalty Team, said: “The State of Arizona had every reason to believe that this procedure would not go smoothly; the experimental execution ‘cocktail’ had only been used once before, and that execution too was terribly botched. Despite the evidence, the state pushed ahead, jettisoning due process and cloaking the procedure in secrecy. The result was an exercise in torture. No one in the medical profession or industry wants anything to do with executions. Manufacturers and medics have long protested the abuse of medicines (which are designed to save lives) in executions designed to end them. How many more botched executions must we witness before states finally take heed?”
Source: Reprieve, July 23, 2014
Lawyers demand outside probe of two-hour Arizona execution
(Reuters) - Lawyers for a convicted double-murderer whose lethal injection in Arizona dragged on for two hours, while witnesses watched him gasping for breath and attorneys scrambled to halt the process, have called for an outside review of the "horrifically botched execution."
The ordeal in putting Joseph Wood to death on Wednesday at a prison facility southeast of Phoenix marked the third instance this year of a lethal injection gone awry, after mishaps in Ohio and Oklahoma that renewed the U.S. debate over capital punishment.
"He gasped and struggled to breathe for about an hour and 40 minutes," said Dale Baich, one of Wood's lawyers, who watched the execution and tried in vain to stop it. He called for an independent inquiry.
An Arizona Republic journalist who witnessed the event said he counted Wood gasping for air about 660 times before the 55-year-old inmate fell silent.
During that time, defense attorneys took the extraordinary step of filing emergency court petitions seeking to cut short the procedure and resuscitate their client, arguing Wood was being subjected to unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.
But U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy denied the appeal, and Wood was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m. local time, one hour and 57 minutes after the execution had officially begun.
State Corrections Director Charles Ryan disputed suggestions that Wood had suffered, saying in a statement that once sedated - five minutes into the procedure - the inmate "did not grimace or make any further movement."
Ryan characterized Wood's breathing as "sonorous respiration, or snoring," and said execution team members with whom he conferred during the process assured him "unequivocally that the inmate was comatose and never in pain or distress."
He added that the time it takes to complete an execution varies for each individual.
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Source: Reuters, David Schwartz, July 24, 2014
Reporter describes gruesome scene of Ariz. execution
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| Arizona Death Chamber |
FLORENCE, Ariz. — The first glimpse was from above, framed by two closed-circuit TVs.
Joseph Rudolph Wood was strapped to a gurney in an orange jumpsuit as prison medical staff prepared to set intravenous lines in his arms.
It was 1:30 in the afternoon at Housing Unit 9, the small, one-story, free-standing stucco building where executions are carried out at the Arizona Prison Complex-Florence. The viewing room is 15 feet by 12 feet, painted in calming tones of blue, with three rows of risers that climb from the big window that looks into the lethal-injection chamber in front to the bay windows of the gas chamber behind.
Federal law requires that witnesses to executions see every phase, including the setting of IV lines. But in Arizona, it's done on camera.
Wood's eyes flitted back and forth, and his eyebrows arched as men in scrubs, their faces out of camera range, fussed with blood-pressure cuffs and trays of IV needles. The lines went in easily. They don't usually; Arizona is one of three states that will surgically cut a catheter into a condemned man's groin after failing to find veins in the arms or hands, a process used in nine of the past 14 executions.
Then, the curtains opened.
According to Arizona Republic reporter Michael Kiefer, Wood was unconscious by 1:57 p.m.. At about 2:05, he started gasping.
Then at 2:05, Wood's mouth opened. Three minutes later it opened again, and his chest moved as if he had burped. Then two minutes again, and again, the mouth open wider and wider. Then it didn't stop.
He gulped like a fish on land. The movement was like a piston: The mouth opened, the chest rose, the stomach convulsed. And when the doctor came in to check on his consciousness and turned on the microphone to announce that Wood was still sedated, we could hear the sound he was making: a snoring, sucking, similar to when a swimming-pool filter starts taking in air, a louder noise than I can imitate, though I have tried.
It was death by apnea. And it went on for an hour and a half. I made a pencil stroke on a pad of paper, each time his mouth opened, and ticked off more than 640, which was not all of them, because the doctor came in at least four times and blocked my view.
I turned to my friend Troy Hayden, the anchor and reporter from Fox 10 News, who was sitting next to me. Troy and I witnessed another execution together in 2007, and he had seen one before that, so he also knows what it looks like.
"I don't think he's going to die," I said.
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Source: USA Today, Michael Kiefer, The Arizona Republic, July 24, 2014
Witness to a 2-hour Arizona execution: Joseph Wood's final 117 minutes
Inside the chamber, I counted 660 gulps. The priest's watch counted 117 minutes. The death penalty was not supposed to go like this.
You want to be prepared to watch a man who has been prepared to die. Wednesday afternoon was scheduled to be the state of Arizona's first time using this particular combination of lethal-injection drugs. But this was also my first time witnessing a state execution, so I made sure the state prison staff here had a notepad ready, and I asked my colleagues what it was supposed to be like.
It's all very clinical, I was told. The end of death row usually lasts about 10 minutes.
This was not what I saw inside the execution chamber when Joseph Wood died. That took 117 minutes, and it was clear that nothing was as it was supposed to be.
After going through prison security, and waiting for hours because of a last-minute appeal to the Arizona supreme court, prison staff escorted us – just a handful of witnesses – across the vast yard and into the small place where a killer was about to be killed. The family of Debra and Eugene Dietz, whom Wood brutally shot and killed at a Tucson autobody shop in 1989, followed. We were all seated under televisions, with images of Wood strapped to the gurney above.
The curtains opened. The medical staff checked the man's veins. He said his last words – "God forgive you all" – and the lethal drugs began to flow, at 1.52pm. James Wood appeared to fall asleep, albeit strapped down to a table, and he looked straight ahead at the wall. The first 10 minutes went according to plan.
Then, a hard gulp. I looked over to my left: the priest praying the rosary. To my right: the family watching on. Then dead ahead: the side of Wood's stomach appeared to move, even after the Arizona state prison's medical staff had announced he was sedated.
I saw a man who was supposed to be dead, coughing – or choking, possibly even gasping for air.
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Source: The Guardian, Mauricio Marin, July 24, 2014
