Death row prisoner Joseph Wood left gasping for air in two hour botched execution

 
Lethal injection: officials insist that Joseph Wood was never in pain after being given a cocktail of drugs
David Gardner24 July 2014

Death row prisoner Joseph Wood took almost two hours to die in a botched execution that has re-ignited the capital punishment debate in the United States.

The double murderer gasped and snorted for more than an hour and a half before he stopped breathing.

The execution in Phoenix, Arizona ended at 3.49pm yesterday — one hour and 57 minutes after Wood was administered a cocktail of lethal drugs.

Shocked witnesses said Wood, 55, who shot his estranged girlfriend and her father in 1989, gasped 600 times during the drawn-out death, although officials insisted he was never in pain. But the debacle sparked furious protests from anti-death penalty campaigners. Critics said it raised grave questions about the two-drug combination Arizona uses for lethal injections.

Wood’s lawyers filed emergency appeals in a bid to stop the process.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said she was launching a full review of the state’s executions, admitting she was concerned how long it took for the drugs to work. Wood’s defence lawyer Dale Baich said he should have been dead in less than 10 minutes.

“Arizona appears to have joined several other states who have been responsible for an entirely preventable horror — a bungled execution,” said Mr Baich. Recent controversial lethal injections include an Ohio inmate who gasped during the 26 minutes it took him to die in January. Arizona uses the same drugs that were used in the Ohio execution.

“States have been scrambling to find new sources of drugs. They have been experimenting,” said Megan McCracken, of the University of California School of Law’s Death Penalty Clinic. “These procedures are unreliable and the consequences are horrific.”

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