McCain: Botched Arizona Execution Was ‘Torture’

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is calling a botched lethal injection execution in his state “torture” after it took two hours for the death row inmate to die, gasping for breath during that period. Previous attempts to halt the execution in the courts were unsuccessful.

The long-time Arizona senator and former prisoner of war told Politico this week that the recent botched execution of convicted murderer Joseph Wood was “terrible.”


To understand why McCain called the botched execution torture, just look at how a reporter with The Arizona Republic described the execution:

“This was the fifth execution I’ve witnessed. They don’t look like much. The condemned person usually wears an expression of dumbfounded embarrassment and stares absurdly at the ceiling. Then, his eyes close slowly and he stops moving, except for a few chest-raising breaths that slow and then stop. The face slackens, the mouth gapes. It’s usually over in 10 or 11 minutes.


“The priest stopped praying and watched.

“Four minutes into the procedure, the doctor appeared on the other side of the window. He checked Wood’s eyes and pulse and then said over the microphone, ‘It is confirmed that he is sedated.'”

But then things went awry:

“Then at 2:05, Wood’s mouth opened. Three minutes later it opened again, and his chest moved as if he had burped. Then two minutes again, and again, the mouth open wider and wider. Then it didn’t stop.



While McCain called the execution described above “torture,” Gov. Jan Brewer, R-Ariz., has said the execution followed the letter of the law and delivered the punishment prescribed by the state.

The Arizona execution that McCain described as torture is the third such case to take place in recent months, with one in Oklahoma ultimately killing the inmate via heart attack and another in Ohio taking longer than the prescribed amount of time.

[Image via Flickr Creative Commons]