Deborah Denno quoted in an Irish Times story about the Arizona attorney general’s call for a temporary halt to executions in the state, a day after convicted killer Joseph Wood died one hour and 57 minutes after his execution began — one of the longest times it has taken in theUnited States for drugs to kill a condemned man.
In the case of 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 Denno, a law professor at Fordham University and a death penalty opponent who has studied execution methods extensively. And the reactions of Wood during the process, she said, “are atypical of an execution that’s supposed to be performed properly.”