Although Arizona offi­cials have claimed that Joseph Wood was ​“brain dead” dur­ing his two-hour exe­cu­tion on July 23, promi­nent med­ical experts from around the coun­try strong­ly dis­agreed. David Waisel, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of anaes­the­sia at Harvard med­ical school, said a per­son who is brain dead will stop breath­ing unless kept alive on a ven­ti­la­tor. ​“There is no way any­one could ever look at some­one and make that kind of diag­no­sis. He was still breath­ing, so he was not brain dead. This is an exam­ple where they threw out a term that has a pre­cise med­ical def­i­n­i­tion, but they did­n’t know what it means.” Dr. Chitra Venkat, clin­i­cal asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of neu­rol­o­gy and neu­ro­log­i­cal sci­ences at Stanford University, said, ​“If you are tak­ing breaths, you are not brain dead. Period. That is not com­pat­i­ble with brain death, at all. In fact, it is not com­pat­i­ble with any form of death.” And Dr. Robert D. Stevens (pic­tured), asso­ciate pro­fes­sor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, not­ed, ​“Any type of breath­ing, gasp­ing, what­ev­er it is, imme­di­ate­ly indi­cates that the patient is not brain dead.” Columbia University anes­the­si­ol­o­gist Mark Heath called the use of mida­zo­lam (part of Arizona’s lethal injec­tion reg­i­men) ​“a failed experiment.”

Dr. Heath point­ed out that 4 of the 12 exe­cu­tions in which mida­zo­lam has been used around the coun­try ​“did not real­ly go as you’d expect or want.” He added, ​“The com­mon theme is that in all of them the pris­on­er seems to go to sleep but keeps mov­ing or breath­ing for long after you’d expect that to happen.”

(E. Pilkington and A. Holpuch, ​“Experts decry ​‘failed exper­i­ment’ with new death penal­ty drug com­bi­na­tions,” Guardian, July 25, 2014). See Lethal Injection and New Voices.

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