Officials in Arizona have released documents that revealed the massive amount of drugs that were used for the botched execution of convicted killer Joseph Wood.
During a 90 minute ordeal, in which the death row inmate was said to have struggled to breath, executioners injected him 15 times with an experimental cocktail of hydromorphone and midazolam.
Under the state's execution protocol, an inmate can only be injected with 50 milligrams of each drug. Wood was given a total dosage of 750 milligrams each for the two drugs.
The revelations came from the Arizona Department of Corrections. The agency released the documents to Wood's attorneys about two weeks after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer ordered an inquiry into Wood's execution.
It was the first time that the state had used a combination of the two drugs to perform executions. Midazolam is usually used for treating acute seizures and as a sedative before operations. Hydromorphone, on the other hand, is a narcotic pain killer commonly used in hospital settings.
"We can't tell at this point whether he suffered, but what we do know is that the experiment failed. The department said one dose of this drug combination would be enough to kill a prisoner, and it was not enough... Under the Arizona protocol, if the prisoner remains conscious, a backup set of drugs can be administered, but there's nothing in the protocol that permits fourteen additional doses to be administered when the prisoner is unconscious," Dale Baich, Wood's counsel, said.
Wood was given the death sentence in 1989 for the double murder of his ex-girlfriend Debbie Dietz and her father Gene Dietz.
Last June, he, along with five other death row inmates, sued the state for withholding information about the drugs that would be used for his execution and the qualifications of the people who would administer the lethal drugs. The inmates claim that their First Amendment rights had been violated.
On July 20, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Wood, putting his execution on hold and ordering the state to reveal the kind of drugs that would be used for his execution. That decision was overturned by the Supreme Court, allowing the state to go on with Wood's execution on July 23.
