Arizona Department of Corrections Says It Is Ready to Resume Executions

Arizona cor­rec­tions offi­cials have announced that the state has pro­cured a sup­ply of an exe­cu­tion drug and is now able to resume exe­cu­tions after a near­ly seven-year hiatus.

David Shinn, direc­tor of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry (ADCRR), noti­fied Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich that the prison had obtained pen­to­bar­bi­tal and ​“now stands ready to com­mence the execution process.”

The last exe­cu­tion in Arizona took place on July 23, 2014, when the state inject­ed 15 dos­es of mida­zo­lam and hydro­mor­phone into Joseph Wood over the course of a two-hour exe­cu­tion. Witnesses report­ed that Wood gasped and snort­ed more than 600 times dur­ing the exe­cu­tion. The same two-drug pro­to­col had been impli­cat­ed in Ohio’s botched exe­cu­tion of Dennis McGuire ear­li­er in 2014. Subsequent lit­i­ga­tion forced the state to aban­don that exe­cu­tion pro­to­col. It announced plans to use a sin­gle-drug pro­to­col of the bar­bi­tu­rate pen­to­bar­bi­tal but could not obtain a sup­ply of the drug. Prisoners also chal­lenged the state’s secre­cy statute. After a mixed rul­ing by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the media had a First Amendment right to wit­ness the exe­cu­tion but not to know the iden­ti­ty of the drug sup­pli­er, the suit was set­tled on June 26, 2020. Under that set­tle­ment, the state agreed to allow wit­ness­es to see and hear the entire­ty of the exe­cu­tion, while keep­ing the iden­ti­ty of its drug suppliers secret.

An esti­mat­ed 22 Arizona death-row pris­on­ers have exhaust­ed their appeals and face possible execution.

ADCRR did not say how much pen­to­bar­bi­tal it had obtained and, in keep­ing with the state’s secre­cy pol­i­cy, did not reveal the source of the drugs. In October, the state said it had found a com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy that would sup­ply the drugs. Major phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies that pro­duce pen­to­bar­bi­tal and oth­er exe­cu­tion drugs have expressed their oppo­si­tion to the use of their prod­ucts in exe­cu­tions and have imple­ment­ed dis­tri­b­u­tion restric­tions to pre­vent pris­ons from pur­chas­ing the drugs. Arizona joins Texas and oth­er states in pur­chas­ing pen­to­bar­bi­tal from com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment also used com­pound­ed pen­to­bar­bi­tal in the 13 exe­cu­tions it car­ried out in 2020 and 2021, but it is unclear who sup­plied the drug.

Arizona had pre­vi­ous­ly engaged in ille­gal prac­tices in its efforts to pur­chase exe­cu­tion drugs. In 2015, the Food and Drug Administration seized a ship­ment of sodi­um thiopen­tal at the Phoenix air­port. The state had attempt­ed to import the drug from Harris Pharma, a sup­pli­er in India that had false­ly claimed to have pro­duced the drug, when it had actu­al­ly pur­chased it from anoth­er man­u­fac­tur­er and resold it at a significant markup.

Dale Baich, chief of the fed­er­al defend­er cap­i­tal habeas unit in the Arizona fed­er­al defender’s office, said his team will need more time to deter­mine whether to chal­lenge the state’s new plan in court. ​“As more infor­ma­tion becomes avail­able, we will con­tin­ue to assess the sit­u­a­tion with regard to the safe­ty and effi­ca­cy of the drugs, the legit­i­ma­cy of the sup­ply and the readi­ness of the (cor­rec­tions) depart­ment to go for­ward,” Baich said.

Recent autop­sy stud­ies and evi­dence from the fed­er­al exe­cu­tions have shown that most pris­on­ers exe­cut­ed with pen­to­bar­bi­tal expe­ri­ence flash pul­monary ede­ma, a con­di­tion in which their lungs fill with flu­id while they are still con­scious, caus­ing them to expe­ri­ence what doc­tors say is an excru­ci­at­ing sen­sa­tion likened to water­board­ing and drowning.