ALSO SEE: Outrage After US Execution Lasts Two Hours

It's Time to End Our State-Sponsored Barbarism

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

24 July 14

If we're going to be the only purportedly advanced Western nation that allows our government to kill people, we really ought to stop the pretense that we're doing it because we are just, and because our methods are more civilized.

ou may have missed it -- but not if you check in with Kindly Doc Maddow, who was on it from jump -- but we had another exercise in state-sponsored barbarism this week, this time in where-the-fck-else, Arizona. A condemned convict named Joseph Rudolph Wood III -- and why always with the middle names in these cases? -- was given the drug cocktail that was supposed to kill him, the ingredients of which we cannot know about because Arizona needs to keep the elements of the concoction secret so we don't know that it's rat poison or polonium or something. One of the last things Wood did on this earth was to sue to learn the precise poisons with which Arizona intended to kill him. This had some interesting results. Wood got himself an injunction, which the Supreme Court lifted because that's what the Supreme Court does in these cases. A very famous appeals court judge named Alex Kozinski opined that lethal injection had become such an inhumane crapshoot that we'd all be better off if we returned to firing squads. By such small steps, etc., etc.

Anyway, Wood's appeals and requests were all 86'd, so he was given the drug cocktail that was supposed to make him die.

And it did.

Two hours later.

It took Wood so long to die that his lawyers were still filing appeals while he was "gasping and snorting' on the gurney. One of them was on the phone when Wood finally died. In case you were wondering, that's the pie-in-the-face of this ghoulish burlesque.

Gov. Jan Brewer ordered the state Department of Corrections to conduct a full review, saying she was "concerned" about the length of time it took Wood to die. "One thing is certain, however, inmate Wood died in a lawful manner, and by eyewitness and medical accounts he did not suffer," Brewer said in a statement. "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."

That's the soundbite, if you're an idiot.

It's also something of a barefaced non-fact, especially the non-suffering part.

"At 1:57 p.m [officials] reported that Mr. Wood was sedated, but at 2:02 he began to breathe," said the legal filing in federal court from public defender Jon M. Sands. "At 2:03 his mouth moved. Mr. Wood has continued to breathe since that time. He has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour. At 3:02 p.m. ... staff rechecked for sedation. He is still alive."

Opinions vary.

A spokeswoman for the Arizona attorney general's office who was also a witness disputed that. "There was no gasping of air. There was snoring," Stephanie Grisham said. "He just laid there. It was quite peaceful." Baich responded: "My observation was that he was gasping and struggling to breathe. I couldn't tell if he was snoring. Even if he was snoring, it took two hours for him to die?"

And thus, again, does this country's ridiculous adherence to the death penalty make public officials -- and, by extension, the rest of us -- look like moral buffoons. A guy takes two hours to die from an injection of who-knows-what-we-can't-tell-you and the ensuing debate is over whether he was gasping or snoring? This makes the law a freak show, and our collective morality a clown show of epic proportions. If we're going to be the only purportedly advanced Western nation that allows our government to kill people, and we are, now that Belarus has bailed on the whole thing, we really ought to stop the pretense that we're doing it because we are just, and because our methods are more civilized. We look like fools.

Once again, the reason states with the death penalty keep their drugs of choice secret is because pharmaceutical companies have declined to be accessories before the fact of judicial killing. No company in America even makes sodium thiopental, one of the key potions in the original execution protocols, any more. So ambitious governors, abetted by their bloodthirsty legislatures and cheered on by an aroused public, go shopping for whatever they can find elsewhere. They may be buying stuff in back alleys, for all we know.

Officials in Oklahoma, for instance, have even taken to using petty cash when they purchase individual drugs for the cocktail in order to cover their tracks. The idea is to make it harder for lawyers to challenge the legality of their lethal injections by simply hiding the details.

The secrecy surrounding what goes into the IV lines is purely political ass-covering, and political ass-covering in this particular context is utterly obscene, and any judge that upholds a law that keeps the ingredients of death secret is doing so because that judge wants to see executions proceed, period. That includes the Nine Wise Souls, who can't be bothered because nobody shot a corporation full of poison and killed it yet. Kindly Doc Maddow has taken to calling this human experimentation, which is precisely what it is. This is the Nuremberg Code, developed after World War II, and after the trials in which we hung a bunch of Nazi doctors. This is the last part of the first principle of the Code.

The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

One thing I object to is that this has been called a "botched" execution. It actually was not. This wasn't Clayton Lockett, who died in agony in Oklahoma after the death squad blew out the vein through which he was supposed to be poisoned. This time, the procedure worked the way it was supposed to work. Only the mystery drugs didn't, C'est la guerre, to paraphrase Jan Brewer, who intends to continue her secret medical experimentation on death-row inmates, because this is America, where we are nothing if not just.