Death penalty states had great difficulty obtaining the combination of drugs needed to execute inmates in 2014. “This past year, the number of inmates executed in America was the lowest in two decades at 35,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Part of the reason is that many pharmaceutical companies refuse to associate their drugs with killing people.
In a 2014 NPR story, veteran reporter Michael Kiefer of the Arizona Republic observed an execution that did not go well. The execution of double murderer Joseph Wood by the Arizona Department of Corrections was another botched attempt of “using a different drug formula for the first time.”
What Kiefer and other witnesses saw was an execution that appeared to go smoothly, as they watched “the catheters being inserted,” Kiefer said. Wood closed his eyes, put his head back and waited for what would normally take five to 10 minutes for a condemned man to die.
However, this was not a typical execution. According to Kiefer, “It looked like executions I’d seen before using thiopental and pentobarbital.”
But at the six-minute mark something unusual happened. Suddenly, Wood opened his mouth.
“His mouth sort of made this funny round shape, and you could this see this expulsion of air, and we all jumped. This was something different,” Kiefer said.
Wood began fighting for his life, taking large intermittent breathes. Then there was another and then another, and then it just kept going. Kiefer said, “I started putting little hash marks on my pad, my notepad, to see how many times he did this – 640 times.”
The eyewitnesses looked at each other. Kiefer could see the panic on the faces of the prison personnel. No one spoke a word. Kiefer turned to the reporter sitting next to him and said, “I don’t think he’s going to die.” According to the story, he wondered if Wood was going to “open his eyes again.”
The executioner eventually came out, turned on the death chamber microphone and tried to reassure everyone that Wood was asleep, and it was OK. However, Kiefer tells a different story.
The sounds emanating from Wood were suddenly audible from behind the executioner’s voice. These noises added another layer of distress on everyone who was a witness. Nearly two hours later, after administering 15 dozes of “50 milligrams of midazolam, a sedative, and 50 milligrams of hydromorphone, a narcotic,” Wood died, Kiefer noted.
“A mess is good way to put it,” says Maurie Levin, a capital defense attorney in Texas who has been doing most of the lethal injection litigation in the state that is the runaway death penalty leader, the report said.
Pharmaceutical companies’ new stance has forced death penalty states to search for new drug combinations and new sources – compounding pharmacies, Levin said.
Pharmaceutical companies no longer want any association with the death penalty process for both moral and public relations reasons, “Their drugs are to be used for healing only,” NPR reported.
According to the NPR story, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the department of corrections sent a letter to a compounding pharmacy in Houston saying, “We promise you that we will keep this on the down-low.”
“Just like the big pharmaceutical companies, compounding pharmacies don’t want to be associated with executions either. So when the name of the pharmacy was disclosed in a court proceeding, the Houston compounding pharmacy was furious, embarrassed, and quit,” NPR reported.
And the pharmacy asked for their drugs back, and the prison refused to give them back,” Levin said.
Several states contend that identifying their drug suppliers should remain a state secret and not even judges should be able to find out. Jason Clark, a representative for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, argues, “It’s going to raise serious safety concerns for the business and its employees.”
A Texas judge rejected Clark’s argument, “ruling the name of the compounding pharmacy is public information.” The state immediately appealed. This decision has set the stage for a new front on the legal war over the death penalty, the report said.
“A clean and painless death by injection has played a major role in preserving capital punishment in America. If that becomes a problem, it could complicate the institution’s long-term survival,” the NPR story concluded.
