Trials set in Arizona lethal-injection cases
Executions have been on hold in Arizona since July 2014, when the state miscalculated whether a new combination of drugs for lethal injection would kill efficiently.
Death-row prisoner Joseph Rudolph Wood gasped and snorted on the execution gurney for nearly two hours as executioners hired by the Arizona Department of Corrections pumped 15 doses of drugs into him. A single dose was supposed to be lethal.
A U.S. District Court judge in Phoenix immediately thereafter imposed a temporary injunction on state executions, pending investigation and thorough litigation by attorneys representing other death-row prisoners against the state’s execution methods.
Meanwhile, a second federal lawsuit was filed in October 2014 by a coalition of media outlets, including The Arizona
Republic, demanding transparency in execution policies.
Trials have been set in both cases, for July and September, respectively, meaning that the earliest an execution could be carried out would be October or November — assuming the state can find suitable drugs to perform them.
Corrections officials have avowed in court filings that they do not possess the fast-acting barbiturates, sodium thiopental or pentobarbital, that are listed in its official execution protocol, and neither is currently available from pharmaceutical manufacturers for use in executions.
The media case will first go to trial July 25-27, before Judge G. Murray Snow. That lawsuit already has resulted in changes to the state’s execution protocol. Snow ordered that Corrections officials allow journalists and other witnesses to watch over closed-circuit TV as the prisoner is walked into the death chamber and strapped to the gurney. In previous executions, the camera went on only when the prisoner already was strapped down.
Snow also ordered that a camera be installed above the control board holding the syringes that the execution medical team pushes into the catheters that are inserted into the prisoner. That change came into effect because witnesses to the Wood execution were unaware that more than one dose had to be injected.
But questions remain in the lawsuit as to revealing the qualifications of the medical team and the quality and origins of the drugs, information that Corrections officials have kept close to the vest.
In its defense, Corrections points to an Arizona statute shielding the identity of executioners and argues that it extends to providers of drugs as well, and that revealing such information opens the department to challenges from anti-death-penalty activists intent on shutting down further access to the drugs.
The original case was filed on behalf of death-row prisoners facing execution, and it challenges the manner in which prisoners are executed and the tendency for the department to unilaterally change the protocol shortly before executions take place.
It will go to trial Sept. 11, likely for two weeks, before Judge Neil Wake, who has presided over many lethal-injection cases in recent years and who imposed the current injunction against executions.
That case has also resulted in