Deborah Denno quoted in a New York Times story about the Arizona attorney general’s call for a temporary halt to executions in the state, a day after the convicted killer Joseph R. Wood III died one hour and 57 minutes after his execution began — one of the longest times it has taken in the United States for drugs to kill a condemned man.
In the case of Mr. Wood, “Irrespective of whether there was suffering, just given the description, an execution is not supposed to take this long — it went on far longer than it was supposed to,” said Deborah W. Denno, a law professor at Fordham University and a death penalty opponent who has studied execution methods. And the reactions of Mr. Wood during the process, she said, “are atypical of an execution that’s supposed to be performed properly.”
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