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Dennis McGuire, first inmate put to death by two-drug combination, gasps repeatedly, takes 15 minutes to die
Prison authorities are increasingly drawing a curtain over their scramble for execution drugs.
Prison authorities are increasingly drawing a curtain over their scramble for execution drugs.
A condemned Ohio inmate appeared to gasp several times and took more than 15 minutes to die Thursday as he was executed with a combination of drugs never before tried in the U.S.
Dennis McGuire's attorney, federal public defender Allen Bohnert, called his client's death "a failed, agonizing experiment by the state of Ohio."
McGuire's attorneys had attempted to halt his execution last week, arguing that the untried method put him at substantial risk of "agony and terror" while straining to catch his breath in a medical phenomenon known as air hunger.
McGuire made loud snorting noises during one of the longest executions since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999.
David Waisel, professor of anesthesia at Harvard University, told Al Jazeera that based on the execution reports, he thinks McGuire's snorting sounds indicate that he wasn't completely asleep while the drugs were taking effect.
Waisel described the feeling of air hunger as "the incredible need to take a breath and being unable to. You’re starving to breathe," he said. Waisel compared it to playing sports and having the air knocked out of you. "It's an awful feeling."
The state used intravenous doses of two drugs, the sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone, to put McGuire to death for the 1989 rape and fatal stabbing of a pregnant woman, Joy Stewart. The method was adopted after supplies of a previously used execution drug dried up because the manufacturer put it off limits for capital punishment.
The execution drug cocktail — which uses two chemicals in short supply among hospitals in the U.S., according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists — was chosen as prison authorities scramble to find replacement lethal injection ingredients. Pharmaceutical firms in both Europe and America have increasingly objected to their products' use in the death chamber, leading to new mixes, often purchased from semi-regulated compound pharmacies.
Maya Foe, of the legal rights charity Reprieve, had described the planned execution as “shocking,” adding that it was tantamount to “human experimentation at its most cruel and unusual.”
"Ohio was warned by leading experts that experimenting on people in this way risked causing them serious suffering, and the evidence suggests that this has been borne out. How many more botched executions do we need to see before executioners stop using humans as guinea pigs?" Foe said.
Dennis McGuire's attorney, federal public defender Allen Bohnert, called his client's death "a failed, agonizing experiment by the state of Ohio."
McGuire's attorneys had attempted to halt his execution last week, arguing that the untried method put him at substantial risk of "agony and terror" while straining to catch his breath in a medical phenomenon known as air hunger.
McGuire made loud snorting noises during one of the longest executions since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999.
David Waisel, professor of anesthesia at Harvard University, told Al Jazeera that based on the execution reports, he thinks McGuire's snorting sounds indicate that he wasn't completely asleep while the drugs were taking effect.
Waisel described the feeling of air hunger as "the incredible need to take a breath and being unable to. You’re starving to breathe," he said. Waisel compared it to playing sports and having the air knocked out of you. "It's an awful feeling."
The state used intravenous doses of two drugs, the sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone, to put McGuire to death for the 1989 rape and fatal stabbing of a pregnant woman, Joy Stewart. The method was adopted after supplies of a previously used execution drug dried up because the manufacturer put it off limits for capital punishment.
The execution drug cocktail — which uses two chemicals in short supply among hospitals in the U.S., according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists — was chosen as prison authorities scramble to find replacement lethal injection ingredients. Pharmaceutical firms in both Europe and America have increasingly objected to their products' use in the death chamber, leading to new mixes, often purchased from semi-regulated compound pharmacies.
Maya Foe, of the legal rights charity Reprieve, had described the planned execution as “shocking,” adding that it was tantamount to “human experimentation at its most cruel and unusual.”
"Ohio was warned by leading experts that experimenting on people in this way risked causing them serious suffering, and the evidence suggests that this has been borne out. How many more botched executions do we need to see before executioners stop using humans as guinea pigs?" Foe said.
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