Here are brief excerpts from each of the media accounts.
The Arizona Republic prints,"Reporter describes gruesome scene of Arizona execution," by Michael Kiefer.
Wood's attorneys filed motions in state and federal courts expressing concerns over the drugs and the Arizona Department of Corrections' refusal to provide information about the specific batches of the drugs that it had obtained.
The execution was stayed twice. The first stay was lifted Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court. A second stay was imposed Wednesday morning, which pushed the execution back from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The Arizona Supreme Court lifted it before noon Wednesday.
At the start of Wood's execution, none of those concerns seemed warranted.
Then at 2:05, Wood's mouth opened. Three minutes later it opened again, and his chest moved as if he had burped. Then two minutes again, and again, the mouth open wider and wider. Then it didn't stop.
He gulped like a fish on land. The movement was like a piston: The mouth opened, the chest rose, the stomach convulsed. And when the doctor came in to check on his consciousness and turned on the microphone to announce that Wood was still sedated, we could hear the sound he was making: a snoring, sucking, similar to when a swimming-pool filter starts taking in air, a louder noise than I can imitate, though I have tried.
It was death by apnea. And it went on for an hour and a half. I made a pencil stroke on a pad of paper, each time his mouth opened, and ticked off more than 640, which was not all of them, because the doctor came in at least four times and blocked my view.
"AP reporter's account of Arizona execution," is by Astrid Galvan, of Associated Press.
Officials administered the lethal drugs at 1:52 p.m. Wood's eyes closed.
About 10 minutes later, the gasping began.
Wood's jaw dropped, his chest expanded, and he let out a gasp. The gasps repeated every five to 12 seconds. They went on and on, hundreds of times. An administrator checked on him a half-dozen times. He could be heard snoring loudly when an administrator turned on a microphone to inform the gallery that Wood was still sedated, despite the audible sounds.
As the episode dragged on, Wood's lawyers frantically drew up an emergency legal appeal, asking federal and state courts to step in and stop the execution.
"He has been gasping for more than an hour," the lawyers pleaded in their filings. "He is still alive."
"Witness to a 2-hour Arizona execution: Joseph Wood's final 117 minutes," is by Mauricio Marin for the Guardian's Comment is free.
I saw a man who was supposed to be dead, coughing – or choking, possibly even gasping for air. I knew this because Wood's stomach moved at the same time, just like it would if you were lying down and trying to breathe. Then another of those gulps – those gasps for air, movements just from the throat area and sometimes from the stomach, too.
I started looking at the priest's watch to keep track of time. Five, 10, 20 minutes ... an hour had passed. I started to wonder: Will this get called off? Will this ever stop?
I continued to scribble on my state-issued notepad, counting the gulps and gasps of the man on the gurney. I counted 660. This went on for over an hour and a half.
During that time, medical staff checked Wood six times in total, looking at his eyes, feeling for a pulse on his neck, informing us over the loud speaker that he was still sedated. His eyes were still closed.
Earlier coverage of Arizona's botched execution begins with the preceding post. Additional coverage, in the next posts.
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