An appeals court ruled on Saturday that Arizona must divulge details about the drugs and qualifications of the medical personnel it plans to use to kill a death-row inmate, Joseph Wood, on Wednesday. If such details are not made available, the execution will be stopped.

Wood killed his estranged girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, Eugene Dietz, in Tucson in 1989.

A majority of judges on the 9th US circuit court of appeals sided with Wood's attorneys’ argument, that he had a right to know who supplied the drugs the state intended to use to kill him and the qualifications of the executioners who would carry out the sentence.



The judges did not weigh in on the “ultimate merits” of Wood’s case but said the case presented “serious questions” that justified the postponement.

“We recognise that the State has a strong interest in carrying out its criminal judgments,” the court ruled. “But the State’s argument ignores the ongoing and intensifying debate over lethal injection in this country, and the importance of providing specific and detailed information about how safely and reliably the death penalty is administered.”

The state filed a warrant of execution in April and said it intended to use the drugs Midazolam and Hydromorphone in the execution. Midazolam has been linked to a series of botched executions in Florida, Ohio and Oklahoma.

States have turned to the drug following the imposition of European Commission restrictions on the export of anaesthetics used to execute people in the US.



The state had argued that the it was not mandated to hand over all information about the planned execution and that state law shielded the identity of executioners.



But the court argued that Arizona’s recent history of executions reinforced its belief that it was in the public interest to force the state to disclose more details about the execution. The judges cited the case of Donald Beaty, who was executed in 2011 for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl, writing: “the State announced 18 hours before the execution that it intended to switch to the use of a drug that it had never tested and in the use of which it had never trained its executioners.”

In two other cases, that of Robert Towery and Robert Moormann, the judges wrote, the state “changed its written execution protocol at the last minute, then changed course yet again, informing the court just hours before argument that it was switching the method of execution ‘because it discovered at the last minute that the originally planned drugs had expired’ a month before”.

“We, and the public, cannot meaningfully evaluate execution protocol cloaked in secrecy. It is in the public’s interest that Wood’s injunction be granted,” the judges concluded.

The court granted a conditional preliminary injunction, staying Wood’s execution until the state provides him with the “name and provenance” of the drugs to be used in the execution and the qualifications of the medical personnel who will carry it out.

“Once he has received that information,” the judges wrote, “the injunction shall be discharged without more and the execution may proceed.”