On Sunday, November 29, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a seg­ment on Arizona​’s 2‑hour botched exe­cu­tion of Joseph Wood (pic­tured). As described by 60 Minutes, Wood’s ​“exe­cu­tion with a new cock­tail of drugs was sup­posed to take 10 min­utes. It took almost two hours, the longest exe­cu­tion in U.S. his­to­ry.” On July 23, 2014, Arizona gave Wood 15 con­sec­u­tive dos­es of mida­zo­lam and hydro­mor­phone, the same drug com­bi­na­tion that had been used in the botched exe­cu­tion of Dennis McGuire in Ohio six months ear­li­er. Witnesses to Wood’s exe­cu­tion report­ed that he gasped and snort­ed more than 600 times dur­ing the 2‑hour pro­ce­dure. Prison offi­cials had esti­mat­ed that the drugs would take about 10 min­utes to kill Wood. Prior to the exe­cu­tion, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had ordered the state to release infor­ma­tion about the source of the drugs and the train­ing of those who would car­ry it out, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the deci­sion and allowed the exe­cu­tion to pro­ceed under a veil of secre­cy. Dale Baich, one of Wood’s attor­neys, said, ​“I’ve wit­nessed a num­ber of exe­cu­tions before and I’ve nev­er seen any­thing like this. Nor has an exe­cu­tion that I observed tak­en this long.” 

(Bill Whitaker, ​“The Execution of Joseph Wood,” 60 Minutes, November 29, 2015.) See Botched Executions.

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