Arizona wants condemned to bring own lethal drugs

Joseph Wood was supposed to die about 10 minutes after his jailers released a combination of midazolam and hydromorphone into his bloodstream.

Instead, for nearly two hours, the death row inmate snorted and gasped, breathing like a “fish gulping for air.” An hour into the execution, his attorneys were on the phone with the Supreme Court, unsuccessfully pleading for an emergency stay.

Wood’s 2014 death prompted a review of execution procedures in Arizona and underscored a problem death penalty states have faced for a halfdecade: It’s getting harder to put people to death in the United States.

Companies that manu- facture the most common lethal injection drugs have stopped shipping them to death penalty states, distancing themselves from a practice many view as barbaric.

Some medical professionals have taken a similar stance, saying their duty is to save lives, not end them.

So death penalty states have improvised, taking a closer look at firing squads and other, older execution methods. They’ve used compounded cocktails of deadly drugs or ones that are less effective, experts say. But instead of sending inmates to a peaceful end, the drugs have occasionally led to horror stories of agonizing executions that further soured public opinion.

Now Arizona has responded with a new — and some say bizarre — solu- tion to this quandary:

Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs.

The state’s manual for execution procedures, which was revised last month, says attorneys of death row inmates, or others acting on their behalf, can obtain pentobarbital or sodium Pentothal and give them to the state to ensure a smooth execution.

“I’m flabbergasted,” said Dale Baich, one of Wood’s attorneys, who is still embroiled in a death penalty lawsuit against the state. “I can’t comprehend why the Arizona Department of Corrections did what it did and what it was thinking.”

The department did not respond to requests to detail the rationale of its new policy or say whether it was the result of criticism following Wood’s death.