In the recent pro­longed exe­cu­tion of Joseph Wood in Arizona, the state appar­ent­ly veered from its exe­cu­tion pro­to­col when it employed 15 dos­es of lethal injec­tion drugs, rather than just a sin­gle dose fol­lowed by a sec­ond appli­ca­tion, if nec­es­sary, as stat­ed in its reg­u­la­tions. There have been numer­ous oth­er instances in which the state appeared to depart from its pro­to­col. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit crit­i­cized the state in 2012, say­ing Arizona ​“has insist­ed on amend­ing its exe­cu­tion pro­to­col on an ad hoc basis,” and that it had a ​“rolling pro­to­col that forces us to engage with seri­ous con­sti­tu­tion­al ques­tions and com­pli­cat­ed fac­tu­al issues in the wan­ing hours before exe­cu­tions.” In anoth­er instance, the fed­er­al pub­lic defend­er office said the Department of Corrections failed to check the crim­i­nal back­ground of exe­cu­tion team mem­bers and ignored a lack of qual­i­fi­ca­tions. One employ­ee lead­ing the med­ical team in four exe­cu­tions could not recall insert­ing an IV since he was trained as an emer­gency med­ical tech­ni­cian years ear­li­er. In a 2011 exe­cu­tion, the med­ical team leader replaced one exe­cu­tion drug with anoth­er after con­clud­ing that they were ​“essen­tial­ly equiv­a­lent,” based on read­ing the drug pack­ag­ing and infor­ma­tion on the Internet, accord­ing to a suit brought by a death row inmate. Dale Baich, an attor­ney who rep­re­sent­ed Joseph Wood, said, ​“There’s the pro­to­col that’s in place and there’s what hap­pens, and those aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly the same thing. What we’ve learned from this exe­cu­tion is that the Department of Corrections was mak­ing it up as it went along.”

Charles Ryan, direc­tor of the Arizona Department of Corrections, said in a depo­si­tion that the state’s pro­to­col gives him broad dis­cre­tion to devi­ate from the writ­ten exe­cu­tion pro­ce­dures. Ryan, who has no med­ical train­ing, autho­rized the addi­tion­al dos­es giv­en to Wood.

(F. Santos and J. Schwarz, ​“Arizona Loose With Its Rules in Executions, Records Show,” New York Times, August 17, 2014). See Lethal Injection and Arbitrariness.

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