The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution clearly states that Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. The Amendment was originally designed for the federal government, but the section about cruel and unusual punishment was adopted by the states.
The execution that happened in Arizona yesterday is clearly the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
When describing Arizona execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood, a reporter Troy Hayden of Fox 10 News, said it was “very disturbing to watch … like a fish on shore gulping for air. At a certain point, you wondered whether he was ever going to die.”
The process at the state prison in Florence began about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday and dragged on long enough that, more than an hour after the execution started, Dale Baich of the Federal Public Defender’s Office sent two other lawyers out to file an emergency motion asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to halt it, saying it violated Wood’s Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. The motion noted that Wood “has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour” after being injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs.
Wood died before the appeals court responded.
“The experiment failed,” Baich said to reporters as he left the execution chamber. In a statement later, he added that “Arizona appears to have joined several other states who have been responsible for an entirely preventable horror — a bungled execution.”
