“…repeatedly gasped for one hour and 40 minutes before dying,,,,
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If that doesn’t stop America’s barbaric executions, I don’t know what will. Certainly the Supreme Court is pushing to enter the hall of shame.
At 1:52 p.m. Wednesday, one day after the United States Supreme Court overturned a stay of execution granted by a federal appeals court last Saturday, the execution of Joseph R. Wood III commenced.
But what would normally be a 10- to 15-minute procedure dragged on for nearly two hours, as Mr. Wood appeared repeatedly to gasp, according to witnesses… …NYT
Witnesses reported the long horror even as the state of Arizona claims the victim did not suffer. During the first hour of Wood’s long death, his lawyers phoned the federal district court and Justice Kennedy at the Supreme Court to tell them the victim was still alive. The courts didn’t respond before Wood finally died. The state of Arizona’s officials said he wasn’t gasping, just “snoring.”
Governor Jan Brewer expressed some concern. But not much. And standing behind all this was the highest court of the land.
Mr. Wood’s lawyers won a short-lived victory on Saturday, when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, said his execution must be delayed until the state revealed the source of the drugs and specific details about the training of those carrying out the execution.
But on Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court overturned the stay. ...NYT
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The barbarities are not limited to the state of Arizona. New Mexico is suffering from the same symptoms. This time it’s teenagers brutally beating the homeless.
The assailants kicked and beat them, Mr. Eskeets said, using their hands and whatever else they could find — a metal pipe, wooden sticks, cinder blocks. Mr. Eskeets eventually broke free and ran away. His cousin, whose name he said was Al Gorman, and another homeless man he knew only as Cowboy, ended up dead. The police said they had both been disfigured beyond recognition by the thrashing, which included having their heads smashed repeatedly with the cinder blocks.
Someone directed the officers to a stucco house on the other end of the lot, where a 15-year-old boy came to the door wearing shorts splattered in blood. Later, the boy told detectives that he, his 16-year-old half brother and their friend Alex Rios, 18, had taken turns assaulting the men. According to a criminal complaint, the teenagers had been “randomly attacking homeless people for over a year” and, by the 15-year-old’s estimates, they had beat up more than 50 since moving to the stucco house some months ago, as if it were a distraction, or a sport. ...NYT