“It’s my preference,” the doctor said later in a deposition, testifying anonymously because of his role as a five-time executioner. For his work, he received $5,000 to $6,000 per day — in cash — with two days for practice before each execution.
That improvisation is not unusual for Arizona, where corrections officials and medical staff members routinely deviate from the state’s written rules for conducting executions, state records and court filings show. Sometimes they improvise even while a convict is strapped to a table in the execution chamber and waiting for the drugs coursing through his veins to take effect.
In 2012, when Arizona was scheduled to execute two convicted murderers, its Corrections Department discovered at the last minute that the expiration dates for the drugs it was planning to use had passed, so it decided to switch drug methods. Last month, Arizona again deviated from its execution protocol, and things did not go as planned: The convicted murderer Joseph R. Wood III took nearly two hours to die, during which he received 13 more doses of lethal drugs than the two doses set out by the state’s rules.
In the 2011 execution of Donald Beaty, convicted of killing a 13-year-old newspaper carrier in Tempe, Mr. Ryan, the corrections director, asked the medical team about replacing one of the three drugs with another. The medical team leader did so, concluding that the drugs were “essentially equivalent” based on information he read in their packages and on the Internet, according to a filing in a federal lawsuit brought by another death row inmate.
In a 2010 execution, according to the anonymous deposition by the doctor who led the medical team, Mr. Ryan asked that the extra supplies of the drugs be injected into the inmate’s body. “The director preferred that all the chemicals be given, if possible,” the doctor said. He advised against doing so, because if the patient’s heart had stopped, “the vein might rupture, and then they would just go inside the abdominal cavity,” the doctor testified. But Mr. Ryan “indicated he wanted us to try.”
In the 2011 execution of Donald Beaty, convicted of killing a 13-year-old newspaper carrier in Tempe, Mr. Ryan, the corrections director, asked the medical team about replacing one of the three drugs with another. The medical team leader did so, concluding that the drugs were “essentially equivalent” based on information he read in their packages and on the Internet, according to a filing in a federal lawsuit brought by another death row inmate.
In a 2010 execution, according to the anonymous deposition by the doctor who led the medical team, Mr. Ryan asked that the extra supplies of the drugs be injected into the inmate’s body. “The director preferred that all the chemicals be given, if possible,” the doctor said. He advised against doing so, because if the patient’s heart had stopped, “the vein might rupture, and then they would just go inside the abdominal cavity,” the doctor testified. But Mr. Ryan “indicated he wanted us to try.”
Source: The New York Times, Fernanda Santos, John Schwartz, August 17, 2014
Excerpts From Arizona Doctor’s Deposition on Executions
Following are excerpts from a deposition on Oct. 21, 2011, by an Arizona doctor who attended five executions as a “medical team leader” that sheds light on a process that is rarely presented in detail. The executions were between October 2010 and July 2011.
Aside from providing the official protocol for executions, most states do not disclose what happens in the execution chamber. The doctor, whose name was withheld in publicly available versions of the resulting 300-page document, answered questions from 8:36 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., and discussed execution methods, training and even the payment for his efforts.
Jeffrey A. Zick represented the state during the deposition, and Robin Konrad represented the interests of inmates as the federal public defender.
Q. Do you know in [Jeffrey] Landrigan’s execution whether any of the backup chemicals were administered?
A. Yes. I believe most of the -- the B bank chemicals were administered, I believe, about halfway through.
Q. And do you know why the backup chemicals were administered to Mr. Landrigan?
A. The director preferred that all the chemicals be given, if possible.
Q. And if the director preferred that all chemicals be given, why did you say it was stopped halfway through?
A. Because I told him that once there was no blood flow that you could rupture his inferior vena cava if you kept trying to push the chemicals in.
Q. And so the director wanted to administer the chemicals once Mr. Landrigan was deceased; is that correct?
MR. ZICK: Object to form.
THE WITNESS: I don’t know if I can — if I can say that that’s what he said. He— he preferred that the chemicals be given. I don’t know that he said he wanted them given once he was dead.
Q. BY MS. KONRAD: Did he consult with you before making the decision to administer the backup set of chemicals?
A. He told me that’s what he wanted done. And I — I — I believe that I explained to him that my concern would be that we wouldn’t, first of all, be able to give all of the chemicals, especially if he had – if the inmate had died. And I told him that I thought that it was possible that if the chemicals were pushed and pushed that you might have like a – the vein might rupture, and then they would just go inside the abdominal cavity. And he said, well, if — I mean, I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he indicated that he wanted us to try. And when we had trouble halfway through where the flow in the syringes was not, you know, easy at all, I — I looked at him and I said, I don’t think that this is a good idea. And he said, okay, that’s fine, stop.
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Source: The New York Times, August 18, 2014