Joseph Wood – (image source: AP/Arizona Department of Corrections)The ruling came from The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Saturday. Arizona is set to execute Joseph Wood on Wednesday, but as of now, that execution is on hold until the source of the drugs are revealed.
Joseph Wood, who killed his estranged girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, Eugene Dietz, in Tucson in 1989, is scheduled to die July 23.
But his attorneys at the Federal Defender’s Office in Phoenix filed suit claiming he had a First Amendment right to know who supplied the drugs that will be used to kill him and the qualifications of the executioners who will carry it out.
Two of the judges in a panel of three sided with Wood; the third dissented.
At issue is a new drug combination that Arizona has turned to because it cannot obtain the drugs it normally uses for executions. That combination, and one of the drugs in particular, a Valium relative called Midazolam, has caused apparent “flawed executions,” as the court called them, in Ohio and Oklahoma.
