Lawyers for a convicted double-murderer whose lethal injection in Arizona dragged on for two hours, while witnesses watched him gasping for breath and attorneys scrambled to halt the process, have called for an outside review of the “horrifically botched execution.”
The ordeal in putting Joseph Wood to death on Wednesday at a prison facility southeast of Phoenix marked the third instance this year of a lethal injection gone awry, after mishaps in Ohio and Oklahoma that renewed the U.S. debate over capital punishment.
“He gasped and struggled to breathe for about an hour and 40 minutes,” said Dale Baich, one of Wood’s lawyers, who watched the execution and tried in vain to stop it. He called for an independent inquiry.
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