Expert Calls Arizona’s First Execution in Eight Years ​‘Botched’ After Witnesses Report Problems Inserting IV

In an exe­cu­tion an expert has char­ac­ter­ized as ​“botched,“ Arizona Department of Corrections per­son­nel failed for 25 min­utes to set an intra­venous line in Clarence Dixon​’s arms on May 11, 2022 before per­form­ing a bloody and appar­ent­ly unau­tho­rized ​“cut­down“ pro­ce­dure to insert the IV line into a vein in his groin. It was the first exe­cu­tion the state had car­ried out after a near­ly eight-year hia­tus fol­low­ing the botched two-hour exe­cu­tion of Joseph Wood on July 23, 2014. 

Fox News media wit­ness Troy Hayden report­ed that the exe­cu­tion team had trou­ble insert­ing the IV line and that Dixon appeared to be in pain and gri­maced dur­ing the inser­tion process. He said that after about 25 min­utes, the exe­cu­tion team cut into Dixon’s groin to place the IV line there. Associated Press reporter Paul Davenport, who also wit­nessed the exe­cu­tion and saw the inci­sion being made, said at the post-exe­cu­tion news con­fer­ence that exe­cu­tion team mem­bers had ​“to wipe up a fair amount of blood“ from Dixon’s groin. Taylor Tasler, a media wit­ness from Phoenix NBC affil­i­ate KTAR, report­ed that Dixon gasped after the drugs were admin­is­tered, los­ing con­scious­ness shortly thereafter.

Lethal-injec­tion experts said the amount of time it took to set the IV line was indica­tive of seri­ous prob­lems. ​“It’s a sign of des­per­a­tion (on the part of the exe­cu­tion team), and it’s a sign of an unqual­i­fied exe­cu­tion­er,” Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno said. Austin Sarat, an Amherst College pro­fes­sor and author of Gruesome Spectacles: The Cultural Reception of Botched Executions in America, said ​“the repeat­ed efforts to place the IVs were seri­ous prob­lems in the exe­cu­tion itself.” Sarat not­ed that Dixon’s exe­cu­tion appeared to have vio­lat­ed Arizona’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col, which, he said, allows ​“periph­er­al IV catheters or a cen­tral femoral line as deter­mined by the Director act­ing upon the rec­om­men­da­tion of the IV Team Leader” but does not include a ​“cut-down” to insert an IV in the groin. 

Michael Radelet, a University of Colorado-Boulder soci­ol­o­gist and long­time death-penal­ty researcher, said, ​“I would clas­si­fy it as a botch, rec­og­niz­ing that not every­one would agree with that. But things did not go right.” Dixon’s exe­cu­tion, Sarat said, ​“shows yet again that lethal injec­tion is by no means a humane process.”

Dixon’s exe­cu­tion reflects con­tin­u­ing seri­ous prob­lems in Arizona’s exe­cu­tion process. Lawyers for Frank Atwood, whom the state is sched­uled to put to death on June 8, 2022, reviewed 14 pri­or Arizona lethal-injec­tion exe­cu­tions and found that IV inser­tion took from 7 to 54 min­utes, with IV place­ment in half the exe­cu­tions tak­ing 23 min­utes or more.

Defense lawyers say that these prob­lems are exac­er­bat­ed by the lack of trans­paren­cy about Arizona exe­cu­tions. Dixon’s lawyer, assis­tant fed­er­al pub­lic defend­er Amanda Bass, said “[s]ince Arizona keeps secret the qual­i­fi­ca­tions of its exe­cu­tion­ers, we don’t know whether the fail­ure to set two periph­er­al lines in Mr. Dixon’s arms was due to incom­pe­tence, which result­ed in the unnec­es­sar­i­ly painful and inva­sive set­ting of a femoral line.” The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry did not respond to media requests for infor­ma­tion about the train­ing of the exe­cu­tion team mem­bers tasked with insert­ing the IV.

Arizona’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col was the sub­ject of lit­i­ga­tion after Wood’s botched exe­cu­tion, in which he report­ed­ly gasped and snort­ed more than 640 times as exe­cu­tion­ers inject­ed him with 15 dos­es of the two drugs used at the time. The state reached a deal in 2017 to aban­don that two-drug pro­to­col, replac­ing it with a sin­gle drug, the bar­bi­tu­rate pen­to­bar­bi­tal. In 2020, the state set­tled a media access law­suit after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the media had a First Amendment right to wit­ness exe­cu­tions but not to know the iden­ti­ty of the state’s drug sup­pli­er. 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. 

In April 2021, a heav­i­ly-redact­ed invoice obtained by The Guardian showed that, in October 2020, Arizona ordered 1,000 vials of pen­to­bar­bi­tal. Each one-gram vial cost the state $1,500, for what the news­pa­per described as a ​“jaw-drop­ping” total of $1.5 mil­lion. Two months lat­er, anoth­er Guardian inves­ti­ga­tion revealed Arizona had ​”refur­bished” its gas cham­ber and spent more than $2,000 to acquire ingre­di­ents to exe­cute pris­on­ers with cyanide gas, the same gas used by the Nazis to mur­der more than one mil­lion men, women, and chil­dren dur­ing the Holocaust.

Later in 2021, the Arizona Attorney General’s office sought to short­en judi­cial review in the cas­es of Dixon and Atwood after learn­ing that the shelf life of the drugs it intend­ed to use in the exe­cu­tions would expire before the exe­cu­tions could be carried out. 

Atwood is chal­leng­ing his June 8 sched­uled exe­cu­tion, for which he must choose between cyanide gas or lethal injec­tion. Atwood’s lawyers argue that both meth­ods would result in uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. They point to the lengthy IV inser­tion process and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of femoral vein access as poten­tial sources of excru­ci­at­ing pain in Atwood’s exe­cu­tion, giv­en Atwood’s spinal con­di­tion, dis­abil­i­ty, and overall frailty.