Dec. 22--Arizona plans to stop employing the drug combination it used to execute an inmate who took nearly two hours to die, the head of the state Department of Corrections said Monday.
In July, inmate Joseph Rudolph Wood III was injected with 15 separate doses of the drug combination -- hydromorphone and midazolam -- because the initial dose didn't seem to be enough to kill him, according to documents the Corrections Department released to Wood's attorney.
An independent review found that throughout the July 23 execution, Wood "was fully sedated, was totally unresponsive to stimuli, and as a result did not suffer," Corrections Department Director Charles L. Ryan said Monday in a statement.
However, Ryan told Gov. Jan Brewer in a letter Monday that the department will stop using that drug protocol. Instead, it will add two three-drug combinations as options. One-drug protocols -- using either pentobarbital or Sodium Pentothal -- will also remain options, Ryan said, although the state has recently been unable to procure those chemicals.
Wood, 55, was sentenced to death in 1991 for the August 1989 shooting deaths of his estranged girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, Eugene Dietz, in Tucson.
This post will be updated.
