Arizona's path to 1st execution in 8 years reflects 'relentless search' for ways to put condemned inmates to death
44 years after ASU student's brutal murder, family waits for justice. Her killer is scheduled for execution Wednesday.
The family of Deana Bowdoin has waited 44 years for justice.
Next week, the man who brutally murdered the 21-year-old Arizona State University honors student in 1978 is scheduled to be executed at the state prison in Florence.
It's the 1st execution in Arizona in 8 years, and it casts a spotlight on what one critic has called the state's "relentless search" for ways to put condemned inmates to death.
Arizona is moving ahead with executions again, even as most states are backing off.
Over more than a decade, Arizona's search for new execution methods has skirted the law, seen the state refurbish a gas chamber, and operated largely behind a veil of secrecy.
A botched execution in 2014 proved to be a turning point that tested the state's commitment to enforcing the death penalty.
'Gasping and gulping'
One dose of a lethal injection was supposed to kill Joseph Wood in 10 minutes.
"It was a clear gasp. It sort of looked like a fish opening and closing his mouth," said Michael Kiefer, a journalist at the Arizona Republic who was an execution witness.
According to Kiefer and other witnesses, the double-murder convict writhed for almost two hours before he died. He had been injected with 15 doses of a 2-drug cocktail.
"He was gasping and gulping," said Dale Baich, a federal public defender who represented Wood. Baich worked on death penalty cases for 25 years.
"We were actually arguing in front of a federal judge to stop the execution as it was going forward."
The appeal failed.
'To hell with you guys'
"Prior to the execution, the state said, one dose will do it," Baich said in an interview. "They were wrong."
Wood had murdered his ex-girlfriend and her father. Their relatives saw the execution very differently.
"He smiled and laughed at us and then went to sleep," Richard Brown, a member of the victims' family, told reporters.
"All you people that think these drugs are bad. Well, to hell with you guys."
A scramble for suppliers
For several years leading up to the Wood fiasco, Arizona had scrambled to buy execution drugs, often in Europe.
"Lethal injection was first introduced in this country in 1977," said Deborah Denno, a Fordham University professor who is an expert on execution methods.
"From that time, up to about 2009, most states used the same 3-drug formula. Starting in 2009, that 1st drug no longer became available."
Drugs at a driving school
Arizona's search for drugs had embarrassing results.
A year after the execution of Jeffrey Landrigan in 2010, documents in the United Kingdom revealed that Arizona prison officials obtained the lethal injection drugs from a tiny pharmaceutical company, housed in the back of a London driving school.
But that didn't deter state prison officials.
"After a federal judge in 2012 issued an order prohibiting the importation of the drugs in 2015, Arizona tried the same thing," Baich said.
"But this time the drugs were stopped at the border. What we have learned over the years is that the states should be transparent."
No answers on Wood's execution
The Wood execution resulted in a moratorium on capital punishment, as well as lawsuits against the state.
But it was hard to get answers about what happened to Wood.
"What we don't know is why 14 additional doses were administered," Baich said. "We don't know where the state got the drugs, we don't know who was making the decision to proceed after a backup dose of drugs didn't work."
The state never had to disclose the information after it abruptly announced the drugs wouldn't be used again, Baich said.
'Ever study the Holocaust?'
With the difficulty of getting execution drugs, an old execution method became new again. Arizona refurbished a gas chamber last used decades ago.
"Did anybody that was associated with this process ever study the holocaust?" said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
Condemned inmates can now be put to death with a lethal injection or with chemicals similar to the gas that killed millions in Nazi death camps. The inmate gets to choose.
"The gas chamber is the least effective method of execution. It's the most torturous," Denno said.
"I would go so far as to say every gas execution is per se torturous."
Executions plunge to a 20-year low
Arizona's 1st execution in 8 years comes as prosecutors nationwide are backing away from the death penalty.
Just 18 death sentences were imposed in 2021, down 94 % from the late 1990s peak, according to the Death Penalty Information Center
There were only 11 executions last year, down 89% from the peak.
Clarence Dixon, a 66-year-old Navajo man, is set to be executed with a single dose of the sedative pentobarbital.
The U.S. Justice Department quietly developed a network of pentobarbital suppliers before resuming federal executions two years ago, according to a Reuters investigation.
Arizona found its own supplier. An investigation by The Guardian revealed the state paid $1.5 million last year for 1,000 vials of pentobarbital sodium salt, shipped in "unmarked jars and boxes."
'The appropriate response'
Shortly after that disclosure, Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced he was putting executions on a fast track.
Brnovich, who is running for the U.S. Senate, tweeted at the time: Capital punishment... is the appropriate response to those who commit the most shocking and vile murders."
A 2nd execution is scheduled for next month
A repeat of Wood's execution?
Deborah Denno warns the Dixon execution could unfold much like Joseph Wood's 8 years ago.
"The 1st lethal injection execution occurred in 1982, and that injection was botched," she said. "That's always been a problematic method of execution. But it's only gotten worse over the past decade, because of this scramble and experimentation with drugs." "There's every reason to expect that the execution of Clarence Dixon, for example, is going to be very similar to the botched execution of Joseph Wood."
Dixon's attorneys have argued that he's schizophrenic and doesn't understand why he faces execution. So far, legal efforts have failed to block the scheduled execution.
Dixon was connected to Deana Bowdoin's murder almost 30 years after her death. A cold case detective with Tempe police used DNA evidence to track down Dixon.
'Traumatic for families'
In 2008, Dixon was sentenced to death for raping and killing Bowdoin in her Tempe apartment.
"It can be very challenging, very traumatic for families," Colleen Clase, a victims' rights attorney at Arizona Voice for Crime Victims.
"It can be traumatic to be in a courtroom where the offender is being made out to be the victim when they are the victims."
Clase's organization has helped people like Deana Bowdoin's surviving sister, Leslie Bowdoin James, seek justice by asserting their rights as crime victims.
Deana's sister at 42 hearings
"I would bet that I'm the only one in this room that attended every one of 42 hearings, every day of trial, and I followed and watched this inmate during every moment of those proceedings," James said at a recent commutation hearing for Dixon.
"Leslie has always been very active," Clase said.
James has issued this statement: "I will never stop thinking of Deana, but I look forward to the resolution of Dixon's criminal matter through the imposition of punishment."
I asked Clase how crime victims move on after an execution.
"Closure is not the right word," she said. "But there will be a close to the criminal proceedings. The emotional damage is always going to be there for any victim of any crime... the victimization itself is always going to be there."
Source: 12news.com, Staff, May 8, 2022
Judge rules Jewish residents can't sue to block executions using cyanide gas
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joan Sinclair pointed out that the Jewish Community Relations Council of Phoenix is not contesting the constitutionality of the death penalty. In fact, she said, the lawsuit the group filed along with two of its members does not even challenge the use of lethal gas by the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.
Instead, Sinclair said, the only issue is the use of cyanide gas, called Zyklon B. The judge said that's not for her to decide.
"The state constitution specifically allows for the use of lethal gas in death penalty cases," she wrote. And Sinclair said judges are required to give "deference" to state agencies in how to carry out the duties they are charged by state law with enforcing.
"Moreover, plaintiffs are essentially requesting a change in the law to exclude cyanide gas," Sinclair continued. "This is a policy decision better left to the legislature."
Attorneys for challengers argued this isn't just an academic debate.
First, they argued psychological injury, charging that Jewish resident and taxpayers would effectively be forced "to subsidize and relieve unnecessarily the same form of cruelty used in World War II atrocities."
"Many of these survivors are horrified at being taxed to implement the same machinery of cruelty that was used to murder their loved ones," the lawsuit states.
That, said Sinclair, is not sufficient grounds to sue.
"This is not a distinct and palpable injury to those plaintiffs outside of an allegation of generalized harm that is shared alike by a large class of citizens," the judge wrote.
Sinclair was no more impressed by the financial arguments.
The lawsuit cited documents, obtained through public records requests, showing the department purchased a potassium cyanide brick for $1,529 in December 2020 and sodium hydroxide and sulfuric acid days later for $687. Dropping the cyanide into the acid creates the lethal gas.
The state also has been spending an undetermined amount of money to test and make repairs to the gas chamber as it prepared for the possibility that someone on death row might opt to choose that method of execution instead of lethal injection.
Sinclair acknowledged that taxpayers are entitled to sue to stop the illegal expenditure of public funds.
"But this is only true where the connection between the injury and the putatively illegal act is not too remote," she wrote.
"Here, the connection is quite remote." Sinclair said. And the judge said at least some of that is there appears to be no immediate chance that the gas chamber is going to be used in the immediate future.
She pointed out that Arizona voters abolished the use of lethal gas in 1992, replacing it with lethal injections. That followed gruesome reports of the execution of Don Harding, who took 11 minutes to die.
But that 1992 constitutional amendment, approved by a ratio of more than 3-to-1, preserved that right for those already on death row to choose either option.
There are 17 there now who qualify out of more than 100 who face death sentences. But Sinclair pointed out that hasn't happened.
One of those, Clarence Dixon, set to be executed this coming week for the murder of an Arizona State University student in 1978, failed to pick a method. That defaulted to lethal injection.
Frank Atwood, who is set to die June 8, has until May 19 to choose. He was convicted of the 1984 slaying of Vicki Lynne Hoskinson, an 8-year-old Tucson girl who disappeared while riding her bicycle to mail a letter for her mother.
Sinclair also said the amount of money spent by the state so far on the chemicals is "nominal."
There was no immediate response from attorneys for the plaintiffs.
Source: fronterasdesk.org, Staff, May 7, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde