This is extremely disturbing:
Documents released Friday afternoon in the case of Arizona’s botched execution of Joseph Wood—who gasped for air and struggled, according to witnesses, repeatedly during the two-hour process—show that executioners used 15 separate doses of a new drug cocktail before Wood finally died. Lawyers had warned that the combination of 50 milligrams hydromorphone (a pain killer) and 50 milligrams of midazolam (a sedative) was rife with potential problems. (The state also has a long history of failing to follow its own protocol.) The documents suggest they were right.
Ian Millhiser is stuck by the fact that “Wood received 750 milligrams of both drugs”:
To put that in perspective, an anesthesiologist told the Associated Press that patients sedated prior to surgery typically receive no more than 2 milligrams of either drug.
Midazolam is not considered a “true general anesthesia” because patients treated with this drug often retain awareness. Indeed, one anesthesiologist told the Wall Street Journal that the states that use this drug in executions “literally have no idea what they’re doing to these people.”
Karen Siberd MD backs up that anesthesiologist. Sibert declares that there’s “no mystery about why the July 23 execution of Joseph Wood in Arizona took so long”:
The convicted murderer didn’t receive one component of the usual mixture of drugs used in lethal injection: a muscle relaxant. The traditional cocktail includes a drug such as pancuronium or vecuronium, which paralyzes muscles and stops breathing. After anyone receives a large dose of one of these powerful muscle relaxants, it’s impossible to breathe at all. Death follows within minutes.
But for whatever reason, the Arizona authorities decided not to use a muscle-relaxant drug in Mr. Wood’s case. They used only drugs that produce sedation and depress breathing. Given enough of these medications, death will come in due time. But in the interim, the urge to breathe is a powerful and primitive reflex.
This sort of incompetence is all too common. Serwer talks with death penalty expert Austin Sarat about it:
Lethal injections, Sarat said, were more likely than other methods to result in botched executions. In a study of U.S. executions that took place between 1890 and 2010, Sarat said, 7% of executions by lethal injection were botched, compared to 3% for all executions.
Previous Dish on Wood’s botched execution here.
The Dish 