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The Lethal Injection Drug Cocktail That Botched Yet Another Execution

Lethal injection with midazolam and hydromorphone doesn't give a painless execution for the inmate, nor for witnesses.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

A two-drug cocktail of a sedative called midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone had never been used for an execution in Arizona until yesterday. But it had been used before: last October in an execution in Florida that witnesses noted was “longer than usual.”

The same drug pair was used in January for the execution of Dennis McGuire in Ohio, who spent 26 minutes gasping air before he died, which lead to a reexamination of the state's death penalty procedures. But yesterday's execution of Joseph Wood was the longest yet. Wood gasped for air “like a fish,” according to witnesses, before being declared dead an hour and 57 minutes after the procedure began.

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Before the execution there had been legal pushback: Wood's lawyers had argued that the state should disclose the source of the lethal injection drugs and the qualifications of the people who would administer the drugs, but a stay of execution put in place by the 9th District Court of Appeals was lifted by the Supreme Court of the United States with minimal explanation.

This was the fourth botched execution in America this year. It fit a familiar patter: lawyers for the inmates argued that the state should disclose where it got the lethal injection drugs, how they will be administered and how the methods were determined, in order to insure that the state is acting with due diligence. A legal back-and-forth follows, but in the end the state performs the execution. Just as in Ohio and twice in Oklahoma, the results were not what the state had planned.

In addition to the executions in Florida and Ohio, midazolam was also used in the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April. The AP reports that dosage of the drug varies from the 10 milligrams used in McGuire's execution to 500 milligrams that Florida now requires. How Arizona determined that it would use 50 milligrams in its execution procedures was something that Wood's lawyers wanted the state to reveal, in order to prove that it had done adequate research.

By not doing practicing due diligence, the lawyers argue, the death penalty becomes cruel and unusual punishment and therefore a violation of the inmate's Eighth Amendment rights. Wood's attorney also argued that by not disclosing the source of the lethal injection drugs, Arizona was violating Wood's First Amendment rights.

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Wood was executed for the double murder of his estranged girlfriend and her father in 1989. Family members of Wood's victims were present at the execution and said that the focus on Wood's well-being and the drugs being used was misplaced and that, even though Wood didn't suffer, he deserved to.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer insisted that Wood "died in a lawful manner and by eyewitness and medical accounts he did not suffer,” but also said she was concerned by the length of the execution and is ordering an internal investigation.

Michael Kiefer, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, published an eyewitness account of the execution, and said that as he entered the execution chamber, Wood "grinned, and seemed to laugh" at the family of his victims before he jerked his head back to look at the ceiling. Wood seemed sedated after about four minutes. Executions usually take 10 to 15 minutes, but after about 10 minutes Wood's mouth began opening and his chest began moving.

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.

Wood's lawyer, Dale Baich, called for an independent investigation into what happened in the “horrifically botched execution.”

"The fact is that Mr. Wood's conviction and sentence were found to be lawful by the courts, but his execution violated this country's ban on cruel and unusual punishment,” Baich said in a statement after the execution. “Because the Governor and the highest law enforcement official in Arizona have already expressed their view that Mr. Wood did not suffer, and because the state of Arizona fought tooth and nail to protect the extreme secrecy surrounding its lethal injection drugs and execution personnel, the only way to begin to remedy this is with open government and transparency. An independent investigation, led by someone outside of the Department of Corrections and outside of the executive branch of state government, must fully explore the practices which led to tonight's horrifically botched execution."

Following the botched execution of Clayton Lockett by the state of Oklahoma, a few executions were delayed and President Obama ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to examine death penalty protocol. Since then, five prisoners have been executed.

Before Wood was executed, a federal judge said that we needed to drop lethal injection, because all it does it give comfort to the state and public in "a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful." Lethal injection with midazolam and hydromorphone, though, doesn't appear to give a painless execution for the inmate, nor for witnesses.