Nationwide anger surrounding the use of relatively untested drugs in lethal injections was reignited this week after Arizona death row inmate Joseph Wood (55) took 117 minutes to die, visibly gasping for breath throughout the apparently excruciating procedure, according to witnesses.
Although Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said that she had ordered a full review of the execution, she added that Wood, convicted of a double murder in 1989, “died in a lawful manner.”
Wood was given a cocktail of lethal drugs Midazolam and Hydromorphone.
His execution will add to the growing list of botched procedures in the U.S. after prisons in multiple states began deploying new lethal drugs in the face of shortages of the traditional drugs used, such as the sedative sodium thiopental.
On April 29 death row inmate Clayton Lockett was strapped down to a gurney in Oklahoma and administered the lethal injection after officials fumbled and struggled to find a vein into which they could pump the drugs.
The procedure was botched so badly that Lockett died of an apparent heart attack shortly thereafter, when the prison guards stopped the execution and lowered the blinds in the death chamber so the witnesses could no longer view the procedure.
On Wednesday although Wood’s execution was supposed to take ten minutes, he snorted and struggled for breath more than 600 times before he died, according to both his lawyers and reporters witnessing the procedure.
One reporter, Troy Hayden of Fox 10 News, said it was “very disturbing to watch ... like a fish on shore gulping for air. At a certain point, you wondered whether he was ever going to die.”
Wood’s lawyers argued the extended execution process violated his right to be executed in the absence of cruel and unusual punishment.
However Ms Brewer said: “By eyewitness and medical accounts he did not suffer. This is in stark comparison to the gruesome, vicious suffering that he inflicted on his two victims, and the lifetime of suffering he has caused their family.”
Commenting on the procedure Maya Foa, Director of anti-death-penalty group Reprieve 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.”
She added that because the state, like others in the U.S. pushed forward and cloaked the procedure, including the source of the drugs used, in secrecy, “The result was an exercise in torture.”