In late July, the United States Supreme Court lifted a stay
issued by the Ninth Circuit that required the State of Arizona to
provide information about its lethal injection drug cocktail to inmate
Joseph Rudolph Wood. Mr.
Wood was executed that same day. His
death was characterized by reporters as taking more than two hours and he took
more than 600 gasps for air. Most
executions are complete in ten or eleven minutes. Mr. Wood’s lengthy execution comes on the
heels of another lengthy execution where Mr. Dennis McGuire took
more than 20 minutes to die in Ohio, and also repeatedly convulsed and
fought for breath after being injected.
An inmate in Oklahoma took
more than a half an hour to die in his execution.
