Are the drug companies watering down the drugs used for lethal injections?
The surreal national debate over the death penalty reached a climax of sorts Wednesday afternoon in a prison execution chamber in Florence, Ariz. Double murderer Joseph Wood was put to death by lethal injection shortly after his lawyers went to the Supreme Court raising questions about the drugs that would be used to kill him.
The justices turned Wood down, but his attorneys were right to raise concerns. It turned out Wood’s execution took two hours, as he lay unconscious on a gurney, gasping and waiting for the drugs to work.
Coming after other botched lethal injections in Oklahoma and Ohio, the Wood execution gave renewed energy to activists calling for an end not only to executions by lethal injection but by all other means as well.
“The death penalty simply has no place in this country,” said Brian Stull, an attorney for the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. “As method after method of state-sponsored killing has been deemed barbaric and archaic, states are left scrambling to invent new ways to execute.”
In this case, Arizona scrambled to find drugs to execute Wood because anti-death penalty activists like Stull have pressured pharmaceutical companies to stop supplying effective drugs to executioners.
Still, the Wood fiasco could start a new and productive debate on capital punishment, in part because it spurred an extraordinary statement from a well-respected federal judge.
Alex Kozinski, chief of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, was one of the jurists who listened to Wood’s plea for a stay of execution based on concerns about the lethal injection drugs. The court issued a stay, over Kozinski’s dissent, sending the case to the Supreme Court, which ultimately allowed the execution to proceed.
Kozinski focused his dissent on the broader issue of lethal injection. Older, now-abandoned methods — hanging, firing squads, the electric chair, the gas chamber — were all devised specifically to kill people, he wrote, and did so pretty well. But lethal injection took drugs originally intended to save lives and used them to kill.
“Subverting medicines meant to heal the human body to the opposite purpose was an enterprise doomed to failure,” Kozinski wrote. Using drugs for executions was “a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful.”