Mother Jones
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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.
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