Joseph Rudolph Wood. Photograph courtesy Arizona Department of Corrections/AP.

About eight minutes after executioners in Arizona began administering the drugs that were supposed to kill Joseph Rudolph Wood, witnesses heard Wood make a sound like a gasp, and then another. Since Wood was supposed to already be unconscious—and would presumably be dead at any moment—Michael Kiefer, a reporter for the Arizona Republic, who was among the witnesses, began counting the gasps. He started with the first few, at about 2:05 P.M. local time; by the time his tally was done, and Wood had been declared dead, at 3:49 P.M., he had counted six hundred and forty gasps. Each one, as another reporter, for a local Fox affiliate, described, sounded “like a fish on shore gulping for air.” Wood stayed alive for almost two hours, long enough for his lawyers to call Justice Anthony Kennedy, of the Supreme Court, on the phone to ask him to stop the execution. (He would not.) They also filed an emergency motion to the District Court, after 3 P.M., saying, “He is still alive. This execution has violated Mr. Wood’s Eighth Amendment right to be executed in the absence of cruel and unusual punishment.” They appended a protocol for reviving him. But he died soon after.

The execution was botched—there is no other way to put it, though Arizona officials tried. “He went to sleep and appeared to be snoring,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the state’s Attorney General, said. “This was my first execution, and I was surprised at how peaceful it was.” It is hard to know what sort of unquiet she pictured—how she thought the violence of the moment would declare itself. Other witnesses, according to press accounts, found it profoundly disturbing, though each might have a different reason why.

Relatives of Eugene and Debra Dietz, the father and daughter Wood killed, were disturbed by the recoiling of those around them. The Dietz family knew what it meant to have someone killed in front of witnesses. Wood had been in a relationship with Dietz, who was twenty-nine years old and worked in her family’s auto-repair shop; she left him because he physically abused her, and got an order of protection. She had lived with threats for months before she died. Wood came to the shop; he shot Eugene Dietz, and then, after a physical struggle with her seventy-year-old uncle, chased Debra down and shot her, too. Before he did, according to a witness, he said, “I told you I was going to do it. I have to kill you.” He also shouted, “Bitch.” He also fired his gun at some police officers, who fired, too, and wounded him, which is how the shooting ended.

That was in the summer of 1989. How one connects the brutality of those two scenes is the central question of the death penalty; it always has been. We are not getting what we think we should from the death penalty—not deterrence, not fairness or sentencing uninfluenced by race or class. We are not getting satisfaction, in the sense of seeing the justice system do its job right. It took twenty-five years to execute Wood, owing to arguments about the adequacy of his counsel, whether the jury should have heard that he had beaten Dietz on earlier occasions, and, finally, whether he or the public had a right to know exactly which drugs would be used to kill him. He lost, but the manner of his death suggests, at the very least, that there needs to be more transparency about the means of execution. (This is not the first time this year that an execution has been drawn out and, for want of a better word, gruesome.) It has become hard for states to get what they need to kill people; companies don’t really want to go into the business, or if they do they don’t want to advertise it. That is not tenable, when we are all being asked to be complicit in a death. Or perhaps it is a reminder that we might choose not to be.

Debra Dietz’s brother-in-law, in a moment of frustration, asked why anyone cared whether Wood had to gasp. “Why didn’t we give him a bullet? Why didn’t we give him some Drano?” It’s a question that can be too quickly dismissed by a quick retreat to the Eighth Amendment, and the pretense that executions can be a civilized, quiet sleep. What is the difference? We don’t want to be torturers, and we shouldn’t be, for our own sakes, too; we want the condemned to hand over their lives, in a clean transaction. Our sympathies are complicated by the actual staging of an execution, even when it involves the death of a very bad man, and in that way it robs the family of the victims, too. “You don’t know what excruciating is,” Debra Dietz’s sister said to reporters after witnesses used that word. “Seeing your dad lying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister lying there in a pool of blood—that’s excruciating.” And yet we can’t make the planned killing of a person anything other than what it is.