FLORENCE, Ariz. (AP) — A condemned Arizona inmate gasped and snorted for more than an hour and a half during his execution Wednesday before he died in an episode sure to add to the scrutiny surrounding the death penalty in the U.S. 
 
 John Zemblidge, right, of Phoenix, leads a group of about a dozen death penalty opponents in prayer as they protest the possible execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood at the state prison in Florence, Ariz.... (Associated Press) 
 
 Robert Hungerford, of Phoenix, prays as he and a group of about a dozen death penalty opponents protest the possible execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood at the state prison in Florence, Ariz. on Wednesday,... (Associated Press) 
 
 A fence surrounds the state prison in Florence, Ariz. where the execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood was scheduled to take place on Wednesday, July 23, 2014. Arizona's highest court on Wednesday temporarily... (Associated Press) 
 
 Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne's office said Joseph Rudolph Wood was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m., one hour and 57 minutes after the execution started. 
 
 Wood's lawyers had filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court while the execution was underway, demanding that it be stopped. The appeal said Wood was "gasping and snorting for more than an hour." 
 
 Word that Justice Anthony Kennedy denied the appeal came about a half hour after Wood's death. 
 
 Wood, 55, gasped more than 600 times before he died. Defense lawyer Dale Baich called it a botched execution that should have taken 10 minutes. 
 
 Family members of the victims said they had no problems with the way the execution was carried out. 
 
 "This man conducted a horrific murder and you guys are going, let's worry about the drugs," said Richard Brown. "Why didn't they give him a bullet, why didn't we give him Drano?" 
 
 Wood looked at the family members as he delivered his final words, saying he was thankful for Jesus Christ as his savior. At one point, he smiled at them, which angered the family. 
 
 "I take comfort knowing today my pain stops, and I said a prayer that on this or any other day you may find peace in all of your hearts and may God forgive you all," Wood said. 
 
 The case has highlighted scrutiny surrounding lethal injections after two controversial executions, including that of an Ohio inmate in January who snorted and gasped during the 26 minutes it took him to die. In Oklahoma, an inmate died of a heart attack minutes after prison officials halted his execution because the drugs weren't being administered properly. 
 
 Arizona uses the same drugs — the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone — that were used in the Ohio execution. A different drug combination was used in the Oklahoma case. 
 
 States have refused to reveal details such as which pharmacies are supplying lethal injection drugs and who is administering them, because of concerns over harassment. 
 
 Woods filed several appeals that were denied by the U.S. Supreme Court, including one that said his First Amendment rights were violated when the state refused to reveal details such as the supplier of the drugs. 
 
 The Arizona Supreme Court also delayed the execution Wednesday morning to consider a last-minute appeal about whether Wood received inadequate legal representation at his sentencing. About an hour later, the state's high court allowed the execution to proceed. 
 
 Wood argued he has a First Amendment right to details about the state's method for lethal injections, the qualifications of the executioner and who makes the drugs. Such demands for greater transparency have become a new legal tactic in death penalty cases. 
 
 The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had put the execution on hold, saying the state must reveal the information. But the Supreme Court has not been receptive to the tactic, ruling against death penalty lawyers on the argument each time it has been before justices. 
 
 Wood's execution was Arizona's third since October and the state's 36th since 1992. 
 
 He was convicted in the 1989 shooting deaths of Debbie Dietz, 29, and Gene Dietz, 55, at an auto repair shop in Tucson. 
 
 Wood and Dietz had a tumultuous relationship during which he repeatedly assaulted her. Dietz tried to end their relationship and got an order of protection against Wood. 
 
 On the day of the shooting, Wood went to the auto shop and waited for Dietz's father, who disapproved of his daughter's relationship with Wood, to get off the phone. Once the father hung up, Wood pulled out a revolver, shot him in the chest and then smiled. 
 
 Wood then turned his attention toward Debra Dietz, who was trying to telephone for help. Wood grabbed her by the neck and put his gun to her chest. She pleaded with him to spare her life. An employee heard Wood say, "I told you I was going to do it, I have to kill you." He then called her an expletive and fired two shots in her chest. ||||| A convicted murderer in Arizona gasped and snorted for more than 90 minutes after a lethal injection Wednesday, his attorneys and witnesses said, dying in a botched execution that prompted the governor to order an investigation and the state Supreme Court to mandate that the materials used in the procedure be preserved. 
 
 Joseph Rudolph Wood III's execution almost certainly will reinvigorate the national debate over the death penalty. He received an injection at 1:52 p.m. at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. The execution became so prolonged that reporters witnessing the execution counted several hundred of his wheezes before he was finally declared dead at 3:49 p.m. — nearly two hours after the procedure began. 
 
 The incident comes in a year in which lethal injections had already triggered controversy over botched procedures and secrecy. 
 
 Wood had fought without success to get more information about the drugs and the expertise of his executioners. His request, which was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, prompted one prominent appellate judge to call for the return of the firing squad. 
 
 The Arizona Supreme Court ordered officials to preserve the remaining drugs used in his execution and the drug labels. 
 
 Gov. Jan Brewer ordered the state Department of Corrections to conduct a full review, saying she was “concerned” about the length of time it took Wood to die. 
 
 Arizona Execution Takes Almost Two Hours A condemned Arizona inmate gasped for almost two hours during his execution Wednesday before he died. A condemned Arizona inmate gasped for almost two hours during his execution Wednesday before he died. See more videos 
 
 “One thing is certain, however, inmate Wood died in a lawful manner, and by eyewitness and medical accounts he did not suffer,” Brewer said in a statement. “This is in stark comparison to the gruesome, vicious suffering that he inflicted on his two victims — and the lifetime of suffering he has caused their family.” 
 
 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. 
 
 Wood's last words were to his victims' family, according to an Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution: “I take comfort knowing today my pain stops, and I said a prayer that on this or any other day you may find peace in all of your hearts and may God forgive you all.” 
 
 There was no gasping of air. There was snoring. He just laid there. It was quite peaceful. - Stephanie Grisham, spokeswoman, Arizona attorney general's office 
 
 It took so long for Wood to die after receiving an injection of midazolam combined with hydromorphone that his attorneys filed emergency appeals to save his life. 
 
 “At 1:57 p.m [officials] reported that Mr. Wood was sedated, but at 2:02 he began to breathe,” said the legal filing in federal court from public defender Jon M. Sands. “At 2:03 his mouth moved. Mr. Wood has continued to breathe since that time. He has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour. At 3:02 p.m. ... staff rechecked for sedation. He is still alive.” 
 
 A Wood attorney also went to the state Supreme Court, which was conducting a hearing by telephone when he was pronounced dead. 
 
 The question of whether he suffered divided those who watched the procedure. 
 
 Another attorney for Wood, Dale A. Baich, was among them. He said that during the 1 hour and 40 minutes Wood was gasping and snorting, he could not tell whether he was conscious. “There was no sound in the witness room, so we could not hear,” he said. 
 
 A spokeswoman for the Arizona attorney general's office who was also a witness disputed that. “There was no gasping of air. There was snoring,” Stephanie Grisham said. “He just laid there. It was quite peaceful.” 
 
 Baich responded: “My observation was that he was gasping and struggling to breathe. I couldn't tell if he was snoring. Even if he was snoring, it took two hours for him to die?” 
 
 Baich called for an independent investigation. 
 
 Wood's prolonged death drew an outcry from capital punishment opponents. 
 
 “It's time for Arizona and the other states still using lethal injection to admit that this experiment with unreliable drugs is a failure,” Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project, said in a statement. “Instead of hiding lethal injection under layers of foolish secrecy, these states need to show us where the drugs are [coming] from. Until they can give assurances that the drugs will work as intended, they must stop future executions.” 
 
 Megan McCracken of the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law concurred: “We see that when the state is allowed to carry out an execution with an experimental drug combination without scrutiny and oversight, the consequences are absolutely horrific.” 
 
 Wood's execution revived memories of those in Ohio and Oklahoma this year. 
 
 Ohio used the same drug combination to execute Dennis McGuire in January. Witnesses said that “McGuire started struggling and gasping loudly for air, making snorting and choking sounds which lasted for at least 10 minutes, with his chest heaving and his fist clenched.” Ohio executions are on hold while a federal court reviews the state's execution protocol. 
 
 Then, in April, Oklahoma murderer Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack 43 minutes after his execution began — and after the state had called off his execution as he writhed and gasped. Details about the lethal drugs and those who administer them are kept secret in many states. Wood had launched a 1st Amendment attack on that veil of secrecy, arguing that the public has a right to know more about the state's gravest responsibility. 
 
 The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, halting his execution with a preliminary injunction Saturday. The U.S. Supreme Court lifted the injunction Tuesday. Arizona's state Supreme Court also allowed the execution to go ahead. 
 
 The chief judge of the 9th Circuit, Alex Kozinski, had supported Wood's execution but suggested that lethal drugs should be replaced with something more efficient, such as firing squads. 
 
 The latest botched execution could force the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the issue. Six years ago, the court rejected a “cruel and unusual punishment” challenge to lethal injections in a Kentucky case but left the door open for future challenges. 
 
 Among the witnesses were the victims' family. ||||| A photo provided by the Arizona Department of Corrections shows Joseph Rudolph Wood. (Photo: Arizona Department of Corrections) 
 
 The controversial drug that Arizona used to execute double-murderer Joseph Rudolph Wood on Wednesday took nearly two hours to kill him and left him snorting and gasping for breath. 
 
 One reporter who witnessed the execution, Troy Hayden of Fox 10 News, said it was "very disturbing to watch ... like a fish on shore gulping for air. At a certain point, you wondered whether he was ever going to die." 
 
 State officials and the victims' families, however, took issue with other witness descriptions, saying that Wood was not conscious after the first few minutes and that the noises he made sounded like snoring. 
 
 CLOSE According to Arizona Republic reporter Michael Kiefer, Wood was unconscious by 1:57 p.m.. At about 2:05, he started gasping. 
 
 The drawn-out execution — most take about 10 minutes — quickly drew international attention and criticism, spurring calls for a moratorium on executions and putting Arizona front and center in the contentious debate over lethal-injection drugs. 
 
 RELATED: Emergency motion for stay 
 
 The process at the state prison in Florence began about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday and dragged on long enough that, more than an hour after the execution started, Dale Baich of the Federal Public Defender's Office sent two other lawyers out to file an emergency motion asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to halt it, saying it violated Wood's Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. The motion noted that Wood "has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour" after being injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs. 
 
 Wood died before the appeals court responded. 
 
 "The experiment failed," Baich said to reporters as he left the execution chamber. In a statement later, he added that "Arizona appears to have joined several other states who have been responsible for an entirely preventable horror — a bungled execution." 
 
 U.S. District Judge Neil Wake granted a motion Wednesday requiring the state to preserve all physical evidence related to Wood's body. The motion directed the medical examiner to draw blood from the femoral subclavian veins and from the ventricles of the heart before 8 p.m. Wednesday. Wake earlier this month denied Wood's request for a preliminary injunction blocking the execution. 
 
 Gov. Jan Brewer said she was concerned by how long the execution took and directed the Department of Corrections to review the process. She released a written statement that "Wood died in a lawful manner" and did not suffer. Department of Corrections Director Charles Ryan said Wood remained "deeply sedated" until his death. 
 
 CLOSE Richard Brown claimed the media had more compassion for a convicted killer then the victim. 
 
 Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne declined to comment. His spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, disputed that Wood snorted or gasped for air. "He went to sleep and appeared to be snoring," she said. "This was my first execution, and I was surprised at how peaceful it was." 
 
 Wood was sentenced to death for the 1989 murders of his ex-girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, Eugene Dietz. 
 
 The victims' family members said the media were wrong to focus on the execution method rather than on the victims. "Everybody here said it was excruciating," said Jeanne Brown, Debra Dietz's sister. "You don't know what excruciating is. Seeing your dad lying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister lying there in a pool of blood, that's excruciating." 
 
 Her husband, Richard Brown, who said he witnessed the murders, said, "What I've seen today, you guys are blowing this all out of proportion about these drugs. 
 
 "Why didn't we give him a bullet? Why didn't we give him some Drano? These people that are on death row, they deserve to suffer a little bit." 
 
 Across the country, a majority of Americans support the death penalty, but that support appears to be waning. 
 
 A 2013 Pew Research Center survey indicated that 55 percent of U.S. adults favor the practice, while 37 percent oppose it, a big drop from two years earlier, when 62 percent said they favored the death penalty for murder convictions and 31 percent opposed it. 
 
 Wednesday's execution began at 1:53 p.m., after Wood's last words, in which he thanked his attorneys, said he had found Christ and concluded, "May God forgive all of you." 
 
 According to Arizona Republic reporter Michael Kiefer, who witnessed the execution, lines were run into each of Wood's arms. Wood was unconscious by 1:57 p.m. At about 2:05, he started gasping, Kiefer said. 
 
 "I counted about 640 times he gasped," Kiefer said. "That petered out by 3:33. The death was called at 3:49. ... I just know it was not efficient. It took a long time." 
 
 The length of the process drew swift condemnation from death-penalty critics. 
 
 "The worst part about Joseph Wood's botched execution was, it was entirely predictable and avoidable," Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition To Abolish the Death Penalty, said in a statement noting that the same combination of drugs had been used in a problematic execution in Ohio earlier this year. 
 
 That was echoed by the Arizona director of the American Civil Liberties Union. 
 
 "Arizona had clear warnings from Ohio and Oklahoma," said Alessandra Soler, executive director of the ACLU of Arizona, calling for a moratorium on executions. "Instead of ensuring that a similar outcome was avoided here, our state officials cloaked the plans for Mr. Wood's death in secrecy." 
 
 The latest petition initially was filed in Pima County Superior Court after a federal appellate court's stay was lifted Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court. It argued that Wood had ineffective assistance of counsel during his trial, and also challenged Arizona's lethal-injection protocol and the drug cocktail used in executions. 
 
 Pima County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Lee dismissed Wood's first argument, but sent the question of Arizona's lethal-injection protocol to the state high court. 
 
 On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld Arizona's veil of secrecy around its lethal-injection drugs, permitting plans for the execution to proceed. 
 
 The high-court ruling knocked down a federal appeals court decision that the execution could not move forward unless the state turned over information about how the execution would be carried out. 
 
 Executions are public events. But in recent years, many states that still have capital punishment, including Arizona, have passed or expanded laws that shroud the procedures in secrecy. 
 
 The Arizona Department of Corrections planned to use a controversial drug, and it favors a controversial method of administering it, so Wood's attorneys demanded to know the qualifications of the executioners and the origin of the drugs to be used in the execution, claiming that Wood had a First Amendment right to the information. 
 
 On Saturday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. 
 
 The state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which lifted the stay without addressing the First Amendment issue. 
 
 State officials said in court filings that they need to maintain secrecy because publicity has made it more difficult to obtain the drugs needed to carry out executions. 
 
 Drug manufacturers have begun refusing to sell to departments of corrections, forcing the departments to experiment with new and less reliable drugs or to specially order them from compounding pharmacies, which in turn are harassed by anti-death-penalty activists. 
 
 "Prisoners who are sentenced to death for their crimes have every right to know what drugs are going to be used," said Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, "but it would be a bad matter of policy if the manufacturer of these drugs were identified. The very reason we have a new drug protocol is because of the pressure and threats applied to the companies ... forcing them to stop making it." 
 
 It was not the first time the Supreme Court has ruled against a stay of execution based on drug secrecy. In 2010, it ruled against an Arizona prisoner asserting his right to know about lethal-injection drugs that turned out to have been improperly obtained from overseas. 
 
 The U.S. District and Circuit Courts in Washington, D.C., later determined federal law had been violated, which the Arizona Attorney General's Office denies. 
 
 Jeanne Brown, whose sister and father were murdered by Joseph Rudolph Wood, speaks during a news conference with her husband, Richard Brown, after Wood's nearly two-hour long execution at the state prison in Florence on Wednesday, July 23, 2014. (Photo: AP) 
 
 "In most respects, what Mr. Wood is asking for is quite small," said Megan McCracken, a former federal defender who works with the University of California-Berkeley Death Penalty Clinic. "I think they don't want to set precedent about giving out information, and they don't want to come under scrutiny." 
 
 Sen. Ed Ableser, D-Tempe, called the execution barbaric and said: "This one is really on (Brewer's) shoulders. She can sign an executive order, put a stay on executions and let the Legislature find a better way to deal with violent criminals who deserve the maximum penalty, but one that is not cruel and unusual." 
 
 Dan Peitzmeyer, president of Phoenix-based Death Penalty Alternatives, said, "Actions like this might not cause us to totally repeal the death penalty. But it should sure as hell cause us to bring a moratorium to it and take a sincere look at what we're doing." 
 
 Executions by lethal injection using barbiturates such as pentobarbital more typically take about 10 minutes. But the European and American manufacturers refuse to supply it for executions. With the drug unavailable for death penalties, Arizona became the latest of four states to turn to another sedative, midazolam, first used for execution less than a year ago. 
 
 Arizona used it in combination with a narcotic, hydromorphone. Midazolam, by itself or with hydromorphone, has led to flawed, drawn-out executions in three other states. 
 
 Wood's attorneys had fought its use before the U.S. Supreme Court and then in a last-minute appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court, saying the drug was "experimental" and had not been proven to be effective. 
 
 Wood had been scheduled to die at 10a.m. Wednesday, but the state Supreme Court halted the process to consider a last-minute petition for post-conviction relief. The court lifted its temporary stay shortly before noon, clearing the way for his execution later in the day. Witnesses were told when the stay was issued to return by 1 p.m. 
 
 One day earlier, it was uncertain whether the execution would go forward. Wood's attorneys had filed for a preliminary injunction to stop the execution unless Arizona revealed where it had obtained the midazolam and divulged the qualifications of the medical team that would administer it. 
 
 In October and January, midazolam was used in executions in other states. Both times, witnesses said that the condemned prisoners appeared to gasp for breath and took longer to die than with the barbiturates that were used until they became unavailable. 
 
 And in April, an Oklahoma inmate was executed using the drug, but the medical person inserting the catheter into a groin artery completely punctured it, sending the drug into the soft tissue beneath. The man writhed in pain for more than 40 minutes before dying of an apparent heart attack. 
 
 Wood's attorneys asked for information with those incidents in mind. A U.S. District Court judge denied a stay. But on Saturday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted it, with the condition that it would be vacated if the state turned over the information. The Arizona Attorney General's Office appealed the 9th Circuit ruling and the U.S. Supreme Court threw it out Tuesday afternoon. 
 
 Wood chose not to have a special "last meal" Tuesday night, instead eating the sausage and mashed potatoes that the rest of the prisoners were served. 
 
 In 1989, Wood was living with Debra Dietz, who supported him and paid for the apartment they shared. But Wood was abusive, and after Dietz moved out of the apartment, he stalked her. 
 
 On Aug. 7, 1989, Wood became enraged when Dietz wouldn't take his calls. He went to the auto body shop where Dietz worked for her father. Eugene Dietz was on the phone when Wood reached the body shop; Wood waited for him to hang up and then shot him in the chest without saying a word. 
 
 Wood then hunted down Debra Dietz and shot her twice in the chest. 
 
 Megan Finnerty and Megan Cassidy contributed to this article. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1rCfKsD ||||| Convicted killer 'gasped and snorted' as officials attempted to execute him, as lawyers filed an emergency motion to halt the process 
 
 The controversy engulfing the death penalty in the United States escalated on Wednesday when the state of Arizona took almost two hours to kill a prisoner using an experimental concoction of drugs whose provenance it had insisted on keeping secret. 
 
 
 
 Joseph Wood took an hour and 58 minutes to die after he was injected with a relatively untested combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone. The procedure took so long that his lawyers had time to file an emergency court motion in an attempt to have it stopped. For more than an hour, he was seen to be “gasping and snorting”, according to the court filing. 
 
 The attempt to execute Wood had begun at 1.52pm, with sedation of the prisoner confirmed five minutes later. The office of the Arizona attorney general, Tom Horne, announced at 3.49pm local time that Wood was dead. 
 
 According to the emergency motion, Wood was seen to be still breathing at 2.02pm, and the next minute his mouth moved. “He has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour,” his lawyers said. When the officials in charge of the execution checked the prisoner at 3.02pm – an hour and 10 minutes after the procedure began – he was confirmed still to be alive. 
 
 One eyewitness, Michael Kiefer of Arizona Republic, counted the prisoner gasping 660 times. Another witness, reporter Troy Hayden, told the same paper that it had been "very disturbing to watch ... like a fish on shore gulping for air." 
 
 Mauricio Marin, a television reporter with Kold News 13, told the Guardian that Wood had appeared to be sedated with his eyes closed. But he said in an email that Wood was "gulping or gasping for air. His stomach moved at times while the gulping/gasping for air as if one would while breathing laying down." 
 
 Wood, 55, was put to death for the 1989 murders in Tucson of his former girlfriend Debra Dietz and her father Eugene Dietz. 
 
 "What I saw today with him being executed, it is nothing compared to what happened on Aug. 7, 1989," Jeanne Brown, Debra Dietz's sister, told an Associated Press reporter after the execution. "What's excruciating is seeing your father lying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister lying in a pool of blood." 
 
 The duration of the execution was extreme even in the contexct of recent botched judicial killings in the US. Clayton Lockett, who writhed and groaned on the gurney in Oklahoma in April, took 45 minutes to die – less than half the time it took in Wood’s case. 
 
 
 
 Lockett's death provoked a nationwide and international outcry. In the fallout, President Obama was prompted to launch a review into the practice of the death penalty in the country that is still ongoing. 
 
 The hours leading up to Wood's execution were marked by a frenzied legal battle over the secrecy imposed by state officials on the source of the drugs. It was put on hold several times – first by a federal appeals court, then by the state supreme court of Arizona. On Tuesday the US supreme court removed the stay, allowing the execution to go ahead. 
 
 Joseph Rudolph Wood. Photograph: AP 
 
 Wood's legal team had argued that as a member of the public, he had a right to know under the first amendment of the US constitution about the source and nature of the drugs that were being used to kill him, as well as about the qualifications of the officials who would administer the lethal injections. The ninth circuit federal court of appeals ordered a stay of execution to give time for proper legal reflection. 
 
 The US supreme court lifted that stay on Tuesday, without giving any explanation. 
 
 Within a few hours of Wood being pronounced dead, senior officials in Arizona had begun a damage limitation exercise in which they tried to reassure the public that his execution had been painless. The governor, Jan Brewer, ordered an investigation but said the death had been lawful, adding that “by eyewitness and medical accounts he did not suffer. This is in stark comparison to the gruesome, vicious suffering that he inflicted on his two victims – and the lifetime of suffering he has caused their family.” 
 
 The state corrections department that carried out the execution insisted that it had followed protocol and that he had been in “deep sedation” throughout. 
 
 
 
 State officials came under pressure from the courts to preserve evidence. A federal court ordered the state to preserve Wood’s body and to draw down blood from six locations on it by a deadline of 8pm, as well as take tissue sample from his brain, liver and muscles. The supreme court of Arizona also stepped in and ordered that the labels on the bottles of drugs used be kept for future examination. 
 
 In an impassioned statement, Wood's lawyer, Dale Baich, said: “Arizona appears to have joined several other states who have been responsible for an entirely preventable horror - a bungled execution. The public should hold its officials responsible and demand to make this process more transparent.” 
 
 Baich said the state's investigation would be insufficiently independent. “Because the governor and the highest law enforcement official in Arizona have already expressed their view that Mr Wood did not suffer, and because the state of Arizona fought tooth and nail to protect the extreme secrecy surrounding its lethal injection drugs and execution personnel, the only way to begin to remedy this is with open government and transparency,” he said. 
 
 In a later interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, Baich said that he had witnessed 11 executions but never any that took so long. He accused Arizona of carrying out an experiment on his client even though state officials had been fully aware of a previous botched execution that had taken place in Ohio using the same drug combination. He pledged to continue the effort to find out who made the drugs used in the execution of his client. 
 
 
 
 The chief judge of the ninth circuit federal appeals court, Alex Kozinski, told the Guardian that he was not surprised by what had happened. “I have seen this coming for a long time. It's hard to watch these executions and not realise that these blunders are bound to happen,” he said. 
 
 
 
 In his dissenting opinion to the stay of execution issued by the appeals court this week, Kozinski argued that the use in executions of drugs designed to help sick people was an “enterprise doomed to failure”. On Wednesday, he told the Guardian that he had thought about the problems with lethal injections for a long time, and that though his criticisms were not geared specifically to the Wood case in particular, he had decided it was time to speak out. 
 
 
 
 The use of such drugs was, he said, “a complicated process that is not designed for executions. I had no idea how this would go down in the Wood case, but it's obvious that this is the kind of process where there tends to be these kinds of problems.” 
 
 
 
 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been campaigning against death penalty secrecy in several states, said that Arizona had violated the first amendment, the eighth amendment and the bounds of basic decency. 
 
 “Joseph Wood suffered cruel and unusual punishment when he was apparently left conscious long after the drugs were administered. It’s time for Arizona and the other states still using lethal injection to admit that this experiment with unreliable drugs is a failure,” said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU's capital punishment project. 
 
 The Wood execution is certain now to provoke renewed debate about the concoctions of drugs used by death penalty states, as well as about the secrecy with which those states have shrouded the procedure. So far this year seven states have carried out executions - Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas – and all seven have introduced varying degrees of secrecy around their execution drugs. 
 
 The controversial measures followed a European-led boycott of the US death penalty that has blocked key drugs used in executions from reaching departments of correction. As supplies have run short, and expired, states have resorted to untried improvisations while insisting on hiding the identities of their suppliers in order to keep supply lines open. 
 
 Numerous legal challenges have been attempted in the courts arguing that such secrecy puts prisoners in danger because it prevents them from ensuring that the drugs being used to kill them are of sufficient strength and efficacy to do the job humanely without breaching their eighth amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. Successive courts – including the US supreme court, most recently on Tuesday night in the Wood case – have dismissed that argument as lacking in substance. 
 
 But the spectacle in Arizona of a prisoner taking almost two hours to die after he was administered drugs, the origin of which was kept secret, will can only bolster the cases of lawyers and anti-death penalty campaigners. 
 
 The midazolam-hydromorphone combination used on Wood was also used by Ohio in January to put to death Dennis McGuire. Expert anaesthetists had warned that the state was using too weak a dosage, yet Ohio officials went ahead – with the result that McGuire took 26 minutes to die. 
 
 Midazolam was also used in the botched execution of Clayton Lockett by Oklahoma in April. 
 
 In the runup to the Wood execution, Arizona refused to divulge any information about the drugs it intended to use. It only revealed that it had obtained federally approved medicines, signaling that the sedative and painkillers had been produced by licensed manufacturers. 
 
 Only two manufacturers of midazolam in America – Akorn and Sagent, both headquartered in Illinois – have failed to put distribution controls in place that prevent the chemical being sold to US corrections departments for use in executions. 
 
 • Witness to an Arizona execution: Joseph Wood's 660 gasps
– Another botched execution? Arizona executed a murderer today, but it took Joseph Rudolph Wood nearly two hours to die, reports the Arizona Republic. It took so long that Wood's lawyers filed an emergency appeal to stop the procedure after an hour because they say their 55-year-old client was still gasping for air at that point, reports the Guardian. According to the court filing cited by the LA Times, the lethal injection began at 1:52pm local time. Five minutes later, the state said Wood was sedated, "but at 2:02 he began to breathe," wrote the attorneys. "At 2:03 his mouth moved. Mr. Wood has continued to breathe since that time. He has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour. At 3:02 p.m. At that time, staff rechecked for sedation. He is still alive." The execution continued, and Wood was pronounced dead at 3:49pm, one hour and 57 minutes after the procedure began. The details of what happened aren't out yet, but the case is drawing immediate parallels to the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma. Wood's lawyers had tried to stop the execution from taking place, arguing that he had the right to know where the lethal drugs were coming from, but the US Supreme Court allowed it to proceed. Wood murdered his girlfriend and her father in 1989, and the AP quotes a relative of the victims unmoved by the idea that Wood suffered any discomfort. "This man conducted a horrific murder and you guys are going, 'Let's worry about the drugs,'" said Richard Brown. "Why didn't they give him a bullet, why didn't we give him Drano?"