Executed Arizona Man Given 15 Times Standard Dose, Lawyers Say

Phoenix, Arizona: Lawyers for an inmate who was executed last month by lethal injection said Friday that his executioners injected him with 15 times the standard dose of a sedative and a painkiller during a procedure that lasted nearly two hours before their client was declared dead.

The execution of the inmate, Joseph R. Wood III, which was the fourth troubled one in the nation this year, renewed debate over the death penalty and prompted Arizona's attorney general to order a temporary halt to executions in the state. The Arizona Department of Corrections announced Friday that it was seeking an outside investigator to conduct an independent inquiry into Wood's execution.

Wood was executed July 23 for the murders of his girlfriend and her father in 1989. He was injected with a two-drug combination of hydromorphone, an opioid painkiller that suppresses breathing, and midazolam, a sedative.

"The Arizona execution protocol explicitly states that a prisoner will be executed using 50 milligrams of hydromorphone and 50 milligrams of midazolam. The execution logs released today by the Arizona Department of Corrections show that the experimental drug protocol did not work as promised," Dale A. Baich, one of the lawyers who represented Wood, said in a statement.

Referring to the Corrections Department, he added, "Instead of the one dose as required under the protocol, ADC injected 15 separate doses of the drug combination, resulting in the most prolonged execution in recent memory,"

Wood was injected with 750 milligrams of hydromorphone and 750 milligrams of midazolam in all.

Prison officials had estimated that it would take 10 minutes for the combination of drugs to kill Wood, but once a vein had been tapped and the drugs began to flow, it took an hour and 53 minutes before he was declared dead. Some witnesses to the execution said that Wood gasped - seemingly for air - more than 600 times as he died. Other witnesses disputed that account, and Arizona officials said Wood was completely sedated and never suffered.

Baich, an assistant federal public defender, said an independent investigation by a nongovernmental authority was needed.

The director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Charles L. Ryan, said Friday that he had set in motion such an inquiry, starting with the search for an outside investigator to lead the effort.

"I am committed to a thorough, transparent and comprehensive review process," Ryan said in a statement. "This will be an authoritative review to ensure that fact-based conclusions are reached regarding every aspect of this procedure, including the length of time it took for the execution to be lawfully completed."

Ryan justified the use of repeated doses of the drugs by citing a state law authorizing "an intravenous injection of substance or substances in lethal quantity sufficient to cause death."

Medical experts said the amount of the drugs used in Wood's execution was unprecedented and its effect unknown. Dr. Joel Zivot, an assistant professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University Hospital, said there was inherent danger in repurposing drugs "designed to treat patients, to cure diseases," because there was no dosage "indicated or prescribed as having the intent to kill."

"They're making this up as they go along," Zivot said in a telephone interview.

Zivot said that midazolam acts "like a key in a lock," attaching to a receptor in the body and causing sedation. Once the receptor is saturated, he said, "it doesn't matter if you give the person 500 additional doses or 5 million doses. It won't have any more effect."

Deborah W. Denno, a law professor at Fordham University and a death penalty opponent who has studied execution methods, said Friday that the use of numerous doses of drugs whose efficacy as an execution method had already been in question "demonstrates yet again the extraordinary level of reckless disregard and incompetency that departments of corrections bring to the execution process."

Arizona is one in several states using midazolam and hydromorphone in lethal injections. That two-drug combination was picked as a replacement to a three-drug protocol that included medication that acted to stop the heart. States were forced to seek alternatives after manufacturers of the three-drug mixture refused to continue selling it to them.

As part of a standard procedure, the state released to Wood's lawyers the documents related to the execution - 331 pages, including logs detailing the amount of drugs he received, his reactions and the work of the medical team. The defense team then shared with the media the logs pertaining to the execution.

Death penalty experts have said that it was one of the longest executions ever in the United States.

The documents showed that Ryan personally directed the execution team to use the additional doses. In his statement, Ryan said the doses ensured that "the inmate remained deeply sedated throughout the process and did not endure pain.''

"The inmate's sedation level was continually monitored and verified by the IV team," Ryan said. The intravenous team included a doctor, he said.