Spared at the ​“Last Minute”: A Form of Psychological Torture

Tremane Wood was sched­uled to die at 10 a.m. local time on November 13. According to jour­nal­ist Hilary Andersson, who trav­eled to Oklahoma to observe the exe­cu­tion, the call from the gov­er­nor came at 9:59 a.m. Mr. Wood learned that his life would be spared at the lit­er­al ​“last minute.”

While Mr. Wood, his attor­neys, and his fam­i­ly expe­ri­enced over­whelm­ing relief in the after­math of the clemen­cy grant, accord­ing to Ms. Andersson, some also expressed shock at the tim­ing of the deci­sion. Mr. Wood’s son Brendan, an active-duty Army sol­dier, had dri­ven 18 hours from Fort Bragg to say good­bye to his father. 

Brendan sat ​“bolt upright, his voice crack­ing and tears stream­ing down his face,” Ms. Andersson wrote. ​“I think there needs to be pos­si­bly some pre­cau­tion in place, maybe even a bill that pre­vents last-sec­ond deci­sions like this,” Brendan told her. ​“I believe that a per­son whole­heart­ed­ly think­ing that they are about to take their last breath, and it com­ing down to sec­onds, min­utes before the deci­sion is made…I think it is cru­el and inhu­mane, men­tal tor­ture because at that point they are try­ing to find their peace and find a place where they aren’t going to go out in anguish.”

Federal law, U.S. mil­i­tary pol­i­cy, and inter­na­tion­al human rights law all ban ​“mock” or ​“sham” exe­cu­tions, clas­si­fy­ing them as a form of tor­ture. In a mock exe­cu­tion, offi­cials pre­pare for or sim­u­late a killing, such as fir­ing a weapon next to an individual’s head or bring­ing them to an exe­cu­tion cham­ber, in order to make the indi­vid­ual believe they are about to die. Legal schol­ar John Bessler has argued that aspects of the American death penal­ty sys­tem amount to tor­tur­ous mock exe­cu­tions because a cap­i­tal pris­on­er is repeat­ed­ly giv­en an ​“aware­ness of [his] impend­ing death and a help­less­ness to pre­vent it.” ​“To date, the Supreme Court has been nar­row­ly focused on whether exe­cu­tions car­ry a risk of excru­ci­at­ing phys­i­cal pain at the very moment of an inmate’s death,” Professor Bessler wrote in a 2018 law review arti­cle. ​“That nar­row focus, how­ev­er, total­ly ignores the severe psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ment asso­ci­at­ed with con­fine­ment on death row and that asso­ci­at­ed with death sen­tences and executions.”

A mock exe­cu­tion may not actu­al­ly inflict any observ­able phys­i­cal harm, though some­one who goes through a sham exe­cu­tion obvi­ous­ly expe­ri­ences extreme psy­cho­log­i­cal ter­ror dur­ing and after the ordeal. Just as the vic­tim of a mock exe­cu­tion is tor­tured (and is con­sid­ered a tor­ture vic­tim) despite the lack of any observ­able phys­i­cal indi­ca­tors that tor­ture has occurred, a per­son cap­i­tal­ly charged and sen­tenced to death suf­fers severe psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ment even if an exe­cu­tion is phys­i­cal­ly pain­less or avert­ed alto­geth­er through an appeal or executive clemency.

— Professor John Bessler (2019)

Observers have not­ed par­al­lels between mock exe­cu­tions and stays of exe­cu­tion. After prepar­ing to face his own death, a pris­on­er may expe­ri­ence not only immense relief, but seri­ous psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress when the exe­cu­tion does not pro­ceed. This dis­tress may be greater the clos­er the pris­on­er came to death. Stays have been grant­ed when pris­on­ers were already in the exe­cu­tion cham­ber and had nee­dles insert­ed in their arms.

Richard Glossip ate a ​“last meal” on three dif­fer­ent occa­sions; he did so twice in the same month, September 2015, only for Oklahoma to halt his exe­cu­tion both times due to a lack of prop­er lethal injec­tion drugs. His attor­ney Don Knight told NPR at the time that ​“repeat­ed­ly pulling his client back from the cusp of death at the last minute is cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment.” ​“When you see tor­ture, is it tor­ture? It looks like tor­ture,” Mr. Knight com­ment­ed. The Supreme Court ordered a new tri­al for Mr. Glossip on February 25 this year based on prosecutorial misconduct.

The Court also ruled in favor of Ruben Gutierrez this year on a pro­ce­dur­al ques­tion relat­ed to his quest for DNA test­ing, after grant­i­ng a stay of exe­cu­tion last sum­mer just 20 min­utes before he was sched­uled to die. Mr. Gutierrez was about to be led to Texas’ exe­cu­tion cham­ber when he heard the news. ​“He was vis­i­bly emo­tion­al,” said prison spokes­woman Amanda Hernandez. ​“He turned around to the back of the cell, cov­ered his mouth. He was tear­ing up, speech­less. He was shocked.” Like Mr. Glossip, this was not Mr. Gutierrez’s first time prepar­ing for death: the Supreme Court had ear­li­er grant­ed him a stay an hour before he was sched­uled to die in 2020.

Likewise, the Equal Justice Initiative has sug­gest­ed that a botched exe­cu­tion may amount to tor­ture when a pris­on­er sur­vives, not only because of poten­tial phys­i­cal pain, but because of the psy­cho­log­i­cal sim­i­lar­i­ties to a mock exe­cu­tion. ​“Most peo­ple can’t pos­si­bly imag­ine the agony of being cred­i­bly told that on this date, at this hour you will be killed, only to go through the process of an exe­cu­tion and be phys­i­cal­ly abused before being sent back to your cell,” said EJI Executive Director Bryan Stevenson. In 2022, Kenneth Smith laid on a gur­ney for hours while Alabama offi­cials stabbed him with nee­dles in an attempt to find a vein. After the failed attempt, he was diag­nosed with PTSD, vom­it­ed fre­quent­ly, and stopped sleep­ing due to night­mares of being tak­en back to the death cham­ber. Mr. Smith argued that a sec­ond exe­cu­tion attempt would be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly cru­el and unusu­al, but Alabama exe­cut­ed him by nitro­gen gas in 2024.

Mr. Wood’s clemen­cy grant appears to be one of the ​“lat­est” in recent mem­o­ry, pos­si­bly in the entire mod­ern era of the death penal­ty. Others receiv­ing clemen­cy short­ly before their sched­uled exe­cu­tions include Julius Jones (four hours, Oklahoma, 2021), Jimmy Meders (six hours, Georgia, 2020), and Thomas ​“Bart” Whitaker (less than one hour, Texas, 2018). Mr. Wood ​“had men­tal­ly worked him­self up to face the end, to go in there and be strapped to the table and exe­cut­ed,” said his lawyer Amanda Bass Castro Alves. When told he got clemen­cy, ​“he just col­lapsed on to the floor, just lit­er­al­ly col­lapsed. The pres­sure that he was under being lift­ed just took every­thing out of him.”

Just a few hours after learn­ing his life was spared, Mr. Wood was found ​“unre­spon­sive” in his new cell. He was rushed to the hos­pi­tal, where doc­tors deter­mined he was suf­fer­ing from ​“dehy­dra­tion and stress.” Mr. Wood said that he wasn’t sure what hap­pened, but he believed he had fall­en off his bunk and lost con­scious­ness after not hav­ing any­thing to eat or drink since his ​“last meal” the night before.

Given the trou­bling cir­cum­stances of Mr. Wood’s case, the grant of clemen­cy by Governor Kevin Stitt, despite the last-minute tim­ing, was a deci­sion that many call ​“coura­geous and cor­rect.” Clemency has long been called the ​“fail-safe” of the death penal­ty sys­tem, and recent polls show that clemen­cy is increas­ing­ly polit­i­cal­ly pop­u­lar.

Death Penalty News Addendum:

The following piece is excerpted from Death Row Diary, by William Van Poyck. Mr. Van Poyck -- who always maintained his innocence -- was executed for murder by the state of Florida on June 12, 2013. The text below is one of the dispatches he wrote during the last two years prior to his own execution. Mr. Van Poyck's letters were posted online with the help of his sister. 

"The phone on the wall rings and you're told it's time to die."

"Robert Waterhouse was scheduled for execution at 6:00 pm this evening.  

"In accordance with the established execution protocol he was strapped to the gurney and the needles were inserted into each arm about 45 minutes prior to his appointed time.  

"Just before 6:00, however, he received a 45-minute stay which morphed into an almost 3-hour endurance test as he remained on the gurney as the seconds, minutes and then hours slid by at an excruciatingly slow pace,  waiting for someone to tell him if hope was at hand, if he would live or die. 

"Just before 9:00 he received his answer, the plungers were depressed, the syringes emptied and he was summarily killed.  Here on the row we can discern the approximate time of death when we see the old white Cadillac hearse trundle in through the back sally port gate to pick up the body, the same familiar 1960's era hearse I've watched for almost 40 years, coming in to retrieve the bodies of murdered prisoners, which used to happen on a regular basis back when I was in open population.  I've seen a lot of guys, both friends and foes, carted off in that old hearse. 

"Anyway, pause for a moment to imagine being on that gurney for over three hours, the needles in your arms.  You've already come to terms with your imminent death, you are reconciled with the reality that this is it, this is how you will die, that there will be no reprieve.  

"Then, at the last moment, a cruel trick, you're given that slim hope, which you instinctively grasp.  Some court, somewhere, has given you a temporary stay.  

"You stare at the ceiling while the clock on the wall ticks away.  You are totally alone, not a friendly soul in sight, surrounded by grim-faced men who are determined to kill you.  Your heart pounds, your body feels electrified and every second seems like an eternity as a kaleidoscope of wild thoughts crash around frantically in your compressed mind. After 3 hours you are drained, exhausted, terrorized, and then the phone on the wall rings and you're told it's time to die."

(Source: Death Row Diary, William Van Poyck, February 15, 2012)

NB: The original title of the Death Penalty Information Center article is "Spared at the ​“Last Minute”: A Form of Psychological Torture?"

Source: Death Penalty Information Center,  Leah Roemer, November 20, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde