The controversy engulfing the death penalty in the United States escalated on Wednesday when the state of Arizona took almost two hours to kill a prisoner using an experimental concoction of drugs whose provenance it had insisted on keeping secret.



Joseph Wood took an hour and 58 minutes to die after he was injected with a relatively untested combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone. The procedure took so long that his lawyers had time to file an emergency court motion in an attempt to have it stopped. For more than an hour, he was seen to be “gasping and snorting”, according to the court filing.

The attempt to execute Wood had begun at 1.52pm, with sedation of the prisoner confirmed five minutes later. The office of the Arizona attorney general, Tom Horne, announced at 3.49pm local time that Wood was dead.

According to the emergency motion, Wood was seen to be still breathing at 2.02pm, and the next minute his mouth moved. “He has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour,” his lawyers said. When the officials in charge of the execution checked the prisoner at 3.02pm – an hour and 10 minutes after the procedure began – he was confirmed still to be alive.

One eyewitness, Michael Kiefer of Arizona Republic, counted the prisoner gasping 660 times. Another witness, reporter Troy Hayden, told the same paper that it had been "very disturbing to watch ... like a fish on shore gulping for air."

Mauricio Marin, a television reporter with Kold News 13, told the Guardian that Wood had appeared to be sedated with his eyes closed. But he said in an email that Wood was "gulping or gasping for air. His stomach moved at times while the gulping/gasping for air as if one would while breathing laying down."

Wood, 55, was put to death for the 1989 murders in Tucson of his former girlfriend Debra Dietz and her father Eugene Dietz.

"What I saw today with him being executed, it is nothing compared to what happened on Aug. 7, 1989," Jeanne Brown, Debra Dietz's sister, told an Associated Press reporter after the execution. "What's excruciating is seeing your father lying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister lying in a pool of blood."

The duration of the execution was extreme even in the contexct of recent botched judicial killings in the US. Clayton Lockett, who writhed and groaned on the gurney in Oklahoma in April, took 45 minutes to die – less than half the time it took in Wood’s case.



Lockett's death provoked a nationwide and international outcry. In the fallout, President Obama was prompted to launch a review into the practice of the death penalty in the country that is still ongoing.

The hours leading up to Wood's execution were marked by a frenzied legal battle over the secrecy imposed by state officials on the source of the drugs. It was put on hold several times – first by a federal appeals court, then by the state supreme court of Arizona. On Tuesday the US supreme court removed the stay, allowing the execution to go ahead.

Joseph Rudolph Wood. Photograph: AP Photograph: AP

Wood's legal team had argued that as a member of the public, he had a right to know under the first amendment of the US constitution about the source and nature of the drugs that were being used to kill him, as well as about the qualifications of the officials who would administer the lethal injections. The ninth circuit federal court of appeals ordered a stay of execution to give time for proper legal reflection.

The US supreme court lifted that stay on Tuesday, without giving any explanation.

Within a few hours of Wood being pronounced dead, senior officials in Arizona had begun a damage limitation exercise in which they tried to reassure the public that his execution had been painless. The governor, Jan Brewer, ordered an investigation but said the death had been lawful, adding that “by eyewitness and medical accounts he did not suffer. This is in stark comparison to the gruesome, vicious suffering that he inflicted on his two victims – and the lifetime of suffering he has caused their family.”

The state corrections department that carried out the execution insisted that it had followed protocol and that he had been in “deep sedation” throughout.



State officials came under pressure from the courts to preserve evidence. A federal court ordered the state to preserve Wood’s body and to draw down blood from six locations on it by a deadline of 8pm, as well as take tissue sample from his brain, liver and muscles. The supreme court of Arizona also stepped in and ordered that the labels on the bottles of drugs used be kept for future examination.

In an impassioned statement, Wood's lawyer, Dale Baich, said: “Arizona appears to have joined several other states who have been responsible for an entirely preventable horror - a bungled execution. The public should hold its officials responsible and demand to make this process more transparent.”

Baich said the state's investigation would be insufficiently independent. “Because the governor and the highest law enforcement official in Arizona have already expressed their view that Mr Wood did not suffer, and because the state of Arizona fought tooth and nail to protect the extreme secrecy surrounding its lethal injection drugs and execution personnel, the only way to begin to remedy this is with open government and transparency,” he said.

In a later interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, Baich said that he had witnessed 11 executions but never any that took so long. He accused Arizona of carrying out an experiment on his client even though state officials had been fully aware of a previous botched execution that had taken place in Ohio using the same drug combination. He pledged to continue the effort to find out who made the drugs used in the execution of his client.



The chief judge of the ninth circuit federal appeals court, Alex Kozinski, told the Guardian that he was not surprised by what had happened. “I have seen this coming for a long time. It's hard to watch these executions and not realise that these blunders are bound to happen,” he said.



In his dissenting opinion to the stay of execution issued by the appeals court this week, Kozinski argued that the use in executions of drugs designed to help sick people was an “enterprise doomed to failure”. On Wednesday, he told the Guardian that he had thought about the problems with lethal injections for a long time, and that though his criticisms were not geared specifically to the Wood case in particular, he had decided it was time to speak out.



The use of such drugs was, he said, “a complicated process that is not designed for executions. I had no idea how this would go down in the Wood case, but it's obvious that this is the kind of process where there tends to be these kinds of problems.”



The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been campaigning against death penalty secrecy in several states, said that Arizona had violated the first amendment, the eighth amendment and the bounds of basic decency.

“Joseph Wood suffered cruel and unusual punishment when he was apparently left conscious long after the drugs were administered. It’s time for Arizona and the other states still using lethal injection to admit that this experiment with unreliable drugs is a failure,” said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU's capital punishment project.

The Wood execution is certain now to provoke renewed debate about the concoctions of drugs used by death penalty states, as well as about the secrecy with which those states have shrouded the procedure. So far this year seven states have carried out executions - Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas – and all seven have introduced varying degrees of secrecy around their execution drugs.

The controversial measures followed a European-led boycott of the US death penalty that has blocked key drugs used in executions from reaching departments of correction. As supplies have run short, and expired, states have resorted to untried improvisations while insisting on hiding the identities of their suppliers in order to keep supply lines open.

Numerous legal challenges have been attempted in the courts arguing that such secrecy puts prisoners in danger because it prevents them from ensuring that the drugs being used to kill them are of sufficient strength and efficacy to do the job humanely without breaching their eighth amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. Successive courts – including the US supreme court, most recently on Tuesday night in the Wood case – have dismissed that argument as lacking in substance.

But the spectacle in Arizona of a prisoner taking almost two hours to die after he was administered drugs, the origin of which was kept secret, will can only bolster the cases of lawyers and anti-death penalty campaigners.

The midazolam-hydromorphone combination used on Wood was also used by Ohio in January to put to death Dennis McGuire. Expert anaesthetists had warned that the state was using too weak a dosage, yet Ohio officials went ahead – with the result that McGuire took 26 minutes to die.

Midazolam was also used in the botched execution of Clayton Lockett by Oklahoma in April.

In the runup to the Wood execution, Arizona refused to divulge any information about the drugs it intended to use. It only revealed that it had obtained federally approved medicines, signaling that the sedative and painkillers had been produced by licensed manufacturers.

Only two manufacturers of midazolam in America – Akorn and Sagent, both headquartered in Illinois – have failed to put distribution controls in place that prevent the chemical being sold to US corrections departments for use in executions.

• Witness to an Arizona execution: Joseph Wood's 660 gasps