In 2014, there were four botched executions, including
one at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Okla.
This past year, the number of inmates executed in America was the lowest in two decades at 35, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
But death penalty states are having increasing difficulty obtaining the drugs they have used to execute inmates because pharmaceutical companies refuse to associate their drugs with killing people. This has forced states to seek new formulas using untested doses and find new compounding pharmacies to make their execution drugs. As a result, four executions in 2014 did not go well.
Michael Kiefer, a veteran reporter for the Arizona Republic, has over the years been witness to five Arizona executions. Last July, Kiefer was observing the execution of double murderer Joseph Wood. For Wood's execution, the Arizona Department of Corrections was using a different drug formula for the first time.
"We were escorted in," Kiefer says. "Everything seemed to go smoothly. You watch the catheters being inserted. Joseph Wood closed his eyes, his head went back. It looked like executions I'd seen before using thiopental and pentobarbital."
With those drugs, Kiefer says it normally took five to 10 minutes for a condemned man to die. But at the six-minute mark something unusual happened.
"Suddenly he opened his mouth," Kiefer says. "His mouth sort of made this funny round shape, and you could see this expulsion of air, and we all jumped. This was something different."
Wood had begun fighting for his life, taking large intermittent breaths.
"And then there was another and then another, and then it just kept going," Kiefer says. "I started putting little hash marks on my pad, my notepad, to see how many times he did this — 640 times."
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