A condemned prison inmate in the southwestern American state of Arizona gasped and snorted for more than an hour and a half during his execution.  This is the third American execution using a questionable cocktail of drugs that has gone awry.  And for the record, the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution specifically bans “cruel and unusual punishment”. 

Joseph Rudolph Wood was convicted of the 1989 shooting deaths of his girlfriend 29-year old Debbie Dietz and her father 55-year old Gene Dietz in Tucson, Arizona.  Witnesses described the gruesome and pathetic sight of a man strapped to a gurney, painfully trying to gulp air for an extended period of time, appearing like a fish pulled out of the water and left to die on dry land.  The physician overseeing the debacle couldn’t declare Wood dead until one hour and 57 minutes after the procedure began.

Wood’s case is the third botched execution in America this year.  In January, an inmate in Ohio snorted and gasped for the entire 26 minutes it took him to die.  In Oklahoma, the intravenous drugs did not work they way they were supposed to have, and the inmate complained of horrible pain until prison officials halted the execution.  That inmate died of a heart attack minutes later.

Why are American states torturing inmates to death?  In the past, the US obtained its lethal injection drugs from the UK and European suppliers.  But these nations are just a little more advanced socially, and they’ve recently refused to help the US kill its inmates when it is illegal to do so in their own countries.  In December 2011, the EU banned selling these drugs to America.

Despite several cases of US courts reversing wrongful convictions that prompted some states to halt executions for fear the government would kill innocent citizens, certain states – those dominated by conservative Republican Party politicians – insisted on carrying on with the death penalty.  But they didn’t have the correct drugs or the pharmaceutical knowledge to pull it off.  Simply put, the botched executions in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Ohio are the results of trial by error on human guinea pigs.