Back in 1989, Joseph Wood brutally murdered his estranged girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, Eugene Dietz. By nearly all accounts, their deaths were horribly barbaric. However, when the state of Arizona put Wood to death on Wednesday afternoon, the manner in which he died amounted to punishing one act of barbarism with another. A process that should have taken 15 minutes at most ended up taking almost two hours, prompting Governor Jan Brewer to order an internal review.
Wood was strapped to the gurney at Arizona Prison Complex-Florence and injected with a combination of midazolam and hydromorphone at 1:52 pm Arizona time. He wasn’t pronounced dead until 3:49 pm. For those of you keeping score, that’s 117 minutes. In that time, several witnesses said he gasped for air several times.
Michael Kiefer of The Arizona Republic counted 640 gasps, and believes it was almost certainly more than that since the attending doctor came in four times and blocked his view. At one point, he and his longtime friend, Troy Hayden of KSAZ-TV in Phoenix, wondered if Wood was going to die. Kiefer later described Wood’s execution as “death by apnea.” Hayden later said that Wood looked like “a fish on shore gulping for air.”
In an almost Kafka-like moment, Wood’s lawyers frantically tried to stop the execution just as it crossed the 90-minute mark. They filed an emergency appeal to the federal district court in Phoenix, and also called federal Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. In another last-ditch move, they called three justices on the Arizona Supreme Court. However, Kennedy refused to stop the execution, and Wood died before any other court could act.
It’s not that Arizona didn’t have any warning that this would happen. According to the National Institutes of Health, midazolam, a sedative, can make it hard to breathe and cause uncontrollable seizures and shaking. At least two other executions using the same cocktail used in Arizona has gone wrong in the past year. In Ohio, Dennis McGuire gasped and convulsed for 10 minutes when he was executed in January. And in April, Clayton Lockett twitched and convulsed for 43 minutes before the execution was halted; he ultmiately died of heart failure. A preliminary autopsy revealed that the IV was inserted wrong, causing the midazolam to go into Lockett’s muscle rather than his vein.
Wood’s lawyers apparently had the manner in which Lockett’s execution was botched in mind when they filed an appeal to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking a stay until they could learn more about the qualifications of the people slated to execute Wood. They also wanted to know where Arizona obtained the drugs. The Ninth Circuit sided with Wood on Saturday, but on Tuesday the Supreme Court overturned the stay.
On Wednesday morning, Wood appealed to the state supreme court, contending that the drug cocktail would not put him out completely and would therefore violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. However, the state supreme court denied his request. Wood’s attorney, Dale Baich, said in a statement that even though his client is now dead, he and his team will still press to find out how Arizona obtained these drugs.
The question of the drug source is a critical one, since Arizona has joined several states in turning to other cocktails after numerous drugmakers refused to replenish their supplies of sodium thiopental, the longtime drug of choice in lethal injections. These companies have bowed to a growing international consensus that the death penalty is inherently inhumane. From the looks of it, what happened yesterday only proves it. No matter how brutal the Dietzes’ deaths were, there is no reason to punish barbarism with barbarism.
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Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
