The US Supreme Court allowed the State of Arizona to execute Joseph Wood for committing a double murder ant it took the executioners two hours to do it. The execution made a mockery of the supposedly human method of lethal injection. States which insist on the death penalty are experiencing a raft of difficulties both pharmacological and legal since European suppliers cut off drug exports for use in executions. State authorities have had to turn to "compounding pharmacies" that are not FDA regulated for an alternate supply of lethal drugs. Wood gasped and snorted for more than an hour in the Florence, Arizona death chamber according to his lawyers. They filed an emergency stay of execution request based on his federal constitutional right to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment, but the governor said Wood died in a "lawful manner". Wood gasped for air more than 600 times before dying. Some of the pharmaceuticals used to kill capital offenders paralyze the lungs. Arizona said it would use a combination of midazolam and hydromorphone. The family members of Wood's victims were unconcerned with Woods' apparent suffering. A reporter witnessing the execution said Wood looked like "a fish gulping for air." One suggest he should have been shot, another claimed his gasping sounded like snoring. Woods' attorneys sought to have the state name the drugs' manufacturer, but the US Supreme Court rejected their appeal in a last minute decision. A federal judge has ordered local officials to preserve all physical evidence of Woods' execution. In his emergency request for a stay of execution Wood argued that an anesthetic (midazolam) recently introduced into the protocol could fail to render an inmate unconscious before injection of a lethal drug, thus subjecting him to a agonizing death. Arizona like other states experiencing difficulties with drug supplies turned to midazolam after it ran out of sodium thiopental. The US manufacturer stopped making it in 2009 and European companies are forbidden to export it for death penalty purposes by EU regulation.
The fact that the death penalty in the United States is a broken institution is so obvious that federal judges are ruling it unconstitutional. The latest ruling comes from California were federal judge Cormac J. Carney vacated the 1995 death sentence of Ernest D. Jones saying the system leaves inmates with uncertain fates often for decades making the system cruel and therefore violative of the Eight Amendment. Judge Carney observed in his opinion that executions in California are so infrequent and delays so extraordinary that the penalty is deprived of any deterrent or retributive effect. 285 inmates on California's death row have been waiting for death longer than Jones. A state commission reviewing the California death penalty came to the same conclusions as Judge Carney. Nevertheless, conservative states like Texas and Oklamhoma continue to insist on using it to placate victims' families bent on revenge and the politicians' vindictive constituents. Judge Carney's decision will be appealed, but in the interim no death penalty executions will be carried out in California.