Does nothing embarrass the Governor of this state anymore?
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------from the NEW YORK TIMES------
Arizona Loose With Its Rules in Executions, Records Show
PHOENIX
— In an execution in 2010 in Arizona, the presiding doctor was supposed
to connect the intravenous line to the convict’s arm — a procedure
written into the state’s lethal injection protocol and considered by
many doctors as the easiest and best way to attach a line. Instead he
chose to use a vein in an upper thigh, near the groin.
“It’s my preference,” the doctor said later in a deposition,
testifying anonymously because of his role as a five-time executioner.
For his work, he received $5,000 to $6,000 per day — in cash — with two
days for practice before each execution.
That
improvisation is not unusual for Arizona, where corrections officials
and medical staff members routinely deviate from the state’s written
rules for conducting executions, state records and court filings
show. Sometimes they improvise even while a convict is strapped to a
table in the execution chamber and waiting for the drugs coursing
through his veins to take effect.
In
2012, when Arizona was scheduled to execute two convicted murderers,
its Corrections Department discovered at the last minute that the
expiration dates for the drugs it was planning to use had passed, so it
decided to switch drug methods. Last month, Arizona again deviated from
its execution protocol, and things did not go as planned: The convicted
murderer Joseph R. Wood III took nearly two hours to die, during which
he received 13 more doses of lethal drugs than the two doses set out by
the state’s rules.
While
it is unclear whether the constant changes have led to cruel and
unusual punishment, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit became so disturbed in 2012 about the expired drugs that it chastised the state,
saying Arizona “has insisted on amending its execution protocol on an
ad hoc basis.” While the court permitted the two executions to proceed
and they went off without a hitch, the Ninth Circuit nonetheless
observed that Arizona had a “rolling protocol that forces us to engage
with serious constitutional questions and complicated factual issues in
the waning hours before executions.”
Douglas
A. Berman, an expert on criminal sentencing at Ohio State University,
said corrections officials tended to have a cavalier attitude that might
now be backfiring on them. As Mr. Berman archly put it, “What’s the big
deal, as long as the guy ends up dead and I’m not literally torturing
the guy along the way?” Prison officials and execution teams, he said,
“don’t see any adjustment that they are making as likely to cause
unnecessary suffering or pain.”
There
are, however, signs that suggest otherwise. Mr. Wood, 55, gasped —
seemingly for air — more than 600 times before he died on July 23; his
execution is now the subject of an independent investigation
commissioned by the state. In January in Oklahoma, Michael Lee Wilson,
38, said, “I feel my whole body burning” right after the drugs used in
his execution — a mix meant to paralyze him, render him unconscious and
stop his heart — began flowing through his veins. He died moments later.
Courts
are starting to show frustration with the constant changes in the
protocols themselves, some of which have been prompted by the increasing
difficulty in obtaining execution drugs. On Aug. 8, a federal judge
extended a moratorium on lethal injections in Ohio over concerns with a
protocol change that the state had made this year.
Legal
cases in Arizona, which has been a particular target of death penalty
opponents, offer an unusual window on execution protocols and actual
practices. There have been 37 executions in Arizona since 1992, of which
14 were overseen by the current director of the Corrections Department,
Charles L. Ryan.
Mr.
Ryan, who has no medical training, has said in depositions that the
state’s protocol gave him virtually unlimited discretion to deviate from
the written guidelines, essentially making him the ultimate arbiter in
executions. He personally authorized the repeated doses of drugs given
to Mr. Wood, who had murdered his estranged girlfriend and her father.
Five of the 15 doses of lethal drugs were administered to Mr. Wood while
his lawyers pleaded to a federal judge to stop the execution, which by
then had dragged on for well over an hour.
“There’s
the protocol that’s in place and there’s what happens, and those aren’t
necessarily the same thing,” said Dale A. Baich, an assistant federal
public defender who represented Mr. Wood. “What we’ve learned from this
execution is that the Department of Corrections was making it up as it
went along.”
Mr.
Ryan has affirmed that the length of Mr. Wood’s execution — one hour
and 57 minutes — and the amount of drugs Mr. Wood received comply with
state law, which calls for the administration of “an intravenous
injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient
to cause death.” He declined a request for an interview; a spokesman,
Doug Nick, said this was because of the continuing search for an
independent team to assess Mr. Wood’s execution.
Document: Court Filings From Arizona Prisoners’ Lawsuit
Logs
detailing the sequence of events in the execution of Mr. Wood, as well
as hundreds of pages of filings and depositions linked to five other
executions in Arizona, describe a process whose rules are open to
interpretation. And the rules are frequently amended, as the Ninth
Circuit noted in its 2012 decision. Mr. Baich of the federal public
defender’s office said that as a result of the court’s concerns, the
Corrections Department had begun allowing witnesses to see through
closed-circuit monitors the intravenous lines being placed on convicts
during executions.
In
other cases that deviated from state protocol, criminal records for
members of execution teams went unchecked and a lack of qualifications
was ignored, according to a 2011 filing by the federal public defender’s
office. In four executions, a Corrections Department employee got to
lead the medical team in charge of setting intravenous lines even though
the employee could not recall inserting an IV line since the time he
trained as an emergency medical technician for the military years
earlier.
In
the 2011 execution of Donald Beaty, convicted of killing a 13-year-old
newspaper carrier in Tempe, Mr. Ryan, the corrections director, asked
the medical team about replacing one of the three drugs with another.
The medical team leader did so, concluding that the drugs were
“essentially equivalent” based on information he read in their packages
and on the Internet, according to a filing in a federal lawsuit brought
by another death row inmate.
In
a 2010 execution, according to the anonymous deposition by the doctor
who led the medical team, Mr. Ryan asked that the extra supplies of the
drugs be injected into the inmate’s body. “The director preferred that
all the chemicals be given, if possible,” the doctor said. He advised
against doing so, because if the patient’s heart had stopped, “the vein
might rupture, and then they would just go inside the abdominal cavity,”
the doctor testified. But Mr. Ryan “indicated he wanted us to try.”
When injecting the drugs proved problematic, the doctor recalled, “I
looked at him and I said, ‘I don’t think that this is a good idea.’ And
he said, ‘O.K., that’s fine, stop.’ ”
Mr.
Berman of Ohio State University said Arizona was not the only state
whose loose adherence to lethal injection protocols had led to problems
in the courts. After a series of problematic executions in Ohio, Judge
Gregory L. Frost of United States District Court stayed the execution of
a killer, Kenneth Smith, writing that the state had not stuck to its
own policies in carrying out executions and was “haphazard” in its
application of the process.
Judge
Frost went on, “Ohio pays lip service to standards it then often
ignores without valid reasons, sometimes with no physical ramification
and sometimes with what have been described as messy if not botched
executions.”
Dr. Jay Chapman,
who devised the first lethal injection protocol in Oklahoma in 1977,
has questioned the problems with executions in the years since. “It
seems to me that it would not be that difficult to find people that are
competent to carry out the tasks,” he said by telephone.
Fernanda Santos reported from Phoenix, and John Schwartz from New York.
