Inmate’s drawn-out death shocks activists

John Zemblidge (right) of Phoenix leads a group of death penalty opponents in prayer as they protest against the execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood at the state prison in Florence, Arizona, on July 23, 2014.

John Zemblidge (right) of Phoenix leads a group of death penalty opponents in prayer as they protest against the execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood at the state prison in Florence, Arizona, on July 23, 2014.

Published Jul 24, 2014

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Phoenix, Arizona - An Arizona inmate took almost two hours to die by lethal injection on Wednesday and his lawyers said he “gasped and snorted” before succumbing in the latest botched execution to raise questions about the death penalty in the United States.

The execution of convicted double murderer Joseph Wood began at 1.52pm local time at a state prison complex, and the 55-year-old was pronounced dead just shy of two hours later at 3.49pm, the Arizona attorney general's office said.

During that time, his lawyers filed an unsuccessful emergency appeal in federal courts that sought to have the execution halted and their client given life-saving medical treatment.

The appeal said the procedure violated his constitutional right to be executed without suffering cruel and unusual punishment.

“He gasped and struggled to breath for about an hour and 40 minutes,” said one of Wood's attorneys, Dale Baich.

“Arizona appears to have joined several other states who have been responsible for an entirely preventable horror: a bungled execution. The public should hold its officials responsible.”

Wood had been one of six death row inmates who sued Arizona last month arguing that secrecy surrounding the drugs used in other botched executions in Ohio and Oklahoma violated their rights.

But on Wednesday, the Arizona Supreme Court cleared the way for him to be put to death, lifting a hold after reviewing a last-minute appeal that involved demands for more information about the lethal drug cocktail to be used in the execution.

The execution had previously been put on hold by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which said on Saturday that Wood could suffer “irreparable harm” unless the state divulged information about the drugs and the qualifications of the medical staff conducting the execution.

Anti-death penalty campaigners expressed horror over Wood's drawn-out death. Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project, said Arizona had broken constitutional rights, and the bounds of basic decency.

“It's time for Arizona and the other states still using lethal injection to admit that this experiment with unreliable drugs is a failure,” she said in a statement.

Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said Wood's execution had been shocking, cruel and entirely predictable.

“Americans have had enough of the barbarism,” she said.

In January, convicted rapist and murderer Dennis McGuire was put to death in Ohio using a sedative-painkiller mix of midazolam and hydromorphone, the first such combination administered for a lethal injection in the United States. The execution took about 25 minutes to complete, with McGuire reportedly convulsing and gasping for breath.

In Oklahoma in April, convicted killer Clayton Lockett writhed in pain and a needle became dislodged during his lethal injection at a state prison. The execution was halted, but Lockett died about 30 minutes later of a heart attack. - Reuters

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