Double shot to stop the twitching

Ford:
Published: Dec 17, 2006 12:30 AMModified: Dec 17, 2006 02:11 AM

Double shot to stop the twitching

Steve Ford, Staff Writer

Angels we have heard on high? Sure, and from some pretty low spots as well. None so low, in fact, as the Florida State Prison, where on Wednesday Angel N. Diaz was put to death, claiming to the end his innocence.

Florida no longer fries ... er, electrocutes ... its condemned, having grown tired of its reputation as a place where the executioner didn't seem capable of killing someone without those embarrassing flames. You're not going to set someone's head on fire with a lethal injection -- no muss, no fuss.

But then along comes someone like Angel Diaz to complicate things. He should have been unconscious and paralyzed no more than five minutes after the chemicals hit him, and dead within 15 minutes. Instead, as the Associated Press reported, he "took 34 minutes to die and appeared to be moving for most of that time."

The procedure -- oops, don't they do procedures in the hospital to try to heal you? -- began with Diaz blinking, mouthing words and grimacing. By the AP's account, "He appeared to move for 24 minutes after the first injection, at one point looking toward witnesses and another time licking his lips and blowing."

At some point the helpful death chamber team gave him a second dose of the lethal juice. Prison officials said the need for a double shot wasn't unusual since Diaz had liver trouble that slowed his metabolism. But a pharmacy professor scoffed at that explanation, as did a family member who said the man had been healthy. Then it turned out that the vein-jabbers had missed their target.

Diaz was sentenced to die for the murder of a Miami bar manager during a robbery he and an accomplice were accused of pulling. From this remove, there's no telling whether his protestations of innocence have any shred of merit; perhaps it means a little more when someone makes sure that "innocent" is among the very last words to come out of his mouth. Or perhaps for a murderer telling a lie is even easier than falling off a log.

Still, there's no denying that an execution which takes more than a half-hour to complete, with the condemned person quite possibly conscious enough to savor a substantial part of the ordeal, is a far cry from what most death penalty supporters have in mind when it comes to justice that is both fittingly severe and humane.

For those of us who could be classified as death penalty doubters, this Florida episode is just another illustration of how the process that ends with state-sanctioned killing can go awry, leading us into ethical swamps.
The glitch might be in the method and technique of execution, raising issues of cruelty. It might arise from ongoing questions of innocence. It might hinge on the fairness of a trial -- whether prosecutors were so eager to obtain a conviction that they withheld evidence that would have helped the defendant, or pressured a witness to provide damning testimony.

It's reasonable to conclude that Americans are becoming more sensitive to problems of this sort, if the declining frequency of death sentences is any guide.

The U.S. Justice Department reported last week that in 2005, 128 inmates were sent to death row. That amounted to the third straight year in which the figure had dropped, and it also was the lowest such total since 1973. Meanwhile, the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington noted that the number of death sentences has dwindled by about 60 percent from the 1999 level.

Public awareness of the exoneration of condemned inmates is one likely reason for the trend. Another is that more juries have the option of sentencing a murderer to life in prison without parole. Another is that legal assistance to defendants in capital cases has been improved -- finally.

In North Carolina, death penalty doubts already have led the state Senate to approve a two-year halt in executions. The House wouldn't go along, but it did agree to a study that's looking at fairness concerns. That was what elicited the suggestion from prominent Raleigh defense attorney Joseph B. Cheshire V that a statewide panel screen cases to determine in which ones the death penalty would be sought. The aim is to reduce disparities among counties in the way similar crimes are punished.
North Carolina also is one of the states where condemned inmates have challenged lethal injection as now carried out on grounds that it is unconstitutionally cruel. The risk is said to be that an inmate could remain conscious after being paralyzed, and then endure excruciating pain as the last of the three drugs in the death chamber "cocktail" stopped his heart.

It's not fun to contemplate what levels of agony Angel Diaz might have suffered as he lay there with the needle in his arm, waiting minute after everlasting minute to die. Was this justice? The better angels of our nature know the answer.

Editorial page editor Steve Ford can be reached at 919-829-4512 or at sford@newsobserver.com