Recent Issues in Using Midzolam in Executions

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.

Scaling the Courthouse Steps: Recent Challenges to the Oklahoma State Capital Punishment Secrecy Laws

This article's purpose is to briefly highlight for practitioners some of the news about Oklahoma's ongoing capital punishment dispute and the potential ramifications it could have on capital punishment practitioners. 

On April 21, the Oklahoma Supreme Court issued a stay of execution order for death row inmates, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, in the wake of a constitutional challenge to Oklahoma’s state law preventing inmates from learning the source of the drugs used to kill them.