One Hr After Commencing Execution The Man was still Alive
Lawyers for Arizona death-row prisoner Joseph Wood said in court papers Wednesday that an hour after his execution began he was still alive — and they asked the court to stop the proceeding. "He has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour," lawyers wrote in a petition to the Arizona federal court. Wood — who was condemned to death for fatally shooting his girlfriend and her father in 1989 — challenged the execution on the grounds that the state was violating the First Amendment by keeping the source of the lethal-injection drugs secret. An appeals panel agreed with him, but the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay of execution.
Wood, 55, was scheduled to be killed with a combination of midazolam and hydromorphone, the same drugs used in an Ohio execution in which the inmate seemed to struggle for air and took 25 minutes to die. His execution date had been put on hold several times as the case wound its way through last-minute appeals. One of those decisions was notable for a dissent in which the chief judge of a federal appeals court said the guillotine would be better than lethal injection for executions.
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