When Arizona executed Joseph Wood last week, witnesses said he repeatedly gasped for air during an execution that dragged on for nearly two hours. Wood's lawyers have demanded, and the state has agreed to, an investigation into whether a new and largely untested combination of lethal drugs caused Wood to suffer unnecessarily.
But it's possible that Arizona may discover that the real problem with Wood's execution wasn't the lethal pharmaceuticals, but the people administering them.
Human error was the culprit in
Oklahoma's botched execution of Clayton Lockett earlier this year. After spending more than an hour trying to find a vein, his executioners accidentally delivered the lethal drugs into his soft tissue rather than into his blood stream, causing him to writhe in pain until the procedure was halted. He died shortly thereafter of a heart attack. In Wood's case, a
preliminary autopsy concluded that the IV lines were set properly, but further results won't be available for a few weeks.
Amherst College political science professor Austin Sarat, author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty, estimates that more than 7 percent of the 1,000 lethal injection executions between 1990 and 2010 have been botched. That's a higher rate than executions employing the gas chamber or the electric chair, methods courts have deemed unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment.
Arizona is a good example of why lethal injections so often go awry. Court records show that the state has a long history of staffing its execution teams with unqualified or marginally qualified people, often in violation of its own rules requiring the use of experienced medical personnel.
In 2007, a group of Arizona death row inmates
sued the state over its execution practices, arguing its procedures were unconstitutional because they were likely to cause inordinate suffering. During the litigation, defense lawyers unearthed background information about the people carrying out executions, as well as creating the lethal injection protocol in the first place.
Source: Mother Jones, S. Mencimer, August 1, 2014
