Death penalty debate rages after lengthy US execution
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AMERICA’S death penalty debate raged yesterday after it took nearly two hours for Arizona to execute a prisoner who lost a Supreme Court battle challenging the experimental lethal drug cocktail.
Convicted killer Joseph Wood gasped and snorted during the 117 minutes it took him to die on Wednesday after he was injected with a relatively untested combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone, witnesses said.
It marked the third time so far this year that a United States inmate took more than the usual 10 minutes to die by lethal injection.
Wood “gasped and struggled to breathe,” his attorney Dale Baich said after the execution in the southwestern US state.
So drawn out was the procedure that Wood’s lawyers fielded an emergency motion during the execution to try to cut it short and revive their client. Wood, who was convicted for the 1989 murders of his girlfriend Debbie Dietz and her father Gene, finally died at 3:49pm. But the victims’ family rejected claims that Wood had died an agonizing death.
“You don’t know what excruciating is. What’s excruciating is seeing your dad lying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister lying there in a pool of blood,” Jeanne Brown said.
“That’s excruciating. This man deserved it. I don’t believe he was gasping for air. I don’t believe he was suffering.”
Just a day before he was put to death, the Supreme Court had denied Wood’s request to halt the execution because of the state’s secrecy over the nature of the drug cocktail.
“The worst part about Joseph Wood’s botched execution was, it was entirely predictable and avoidable,” said National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty executive director Diann Rust-Tierney.
She noted that the lethal drug cocktail used in Wood’s execution had only been used once before, in Ohio, where it took inmate Dennis McGuire 26 minutes to die in January.
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