Lethal Conjecture (Page 1 of 5)

The official witnesses were given front-row seats to view the execution. The back two rows were filled with reporters who waited for the brown curtains to open and reveal Angel Nieves Diaz, covered with a sheet up to his chin and strapped to a gurney with intravenous tubes placed in each arm. The tubes ran through holes in the chamber’s wall into the next room where two executioners with no medical training would each be paid $150 cash to administer his death penalty.

Diaz was executed in Florida by lethal injection on Dec. 13, 2006, and required two rounds of the fatal drug cocktail when the first injection failed to kill him. According to witness accounts, the drugs were not injected into his veins as was the proper procedure, but were mistakenly placed in the soft tissue of his arms, resulting in foot-long chemical burns and a 34-minute death that lasted twice as long as lethal injection deaths usually take. Associated Press writer Ron Word, who has witnessed all 20 lethal injection executions in Florida, reported the process usually takes 10 minutes. “Seconds after the chemicals began flowing, Diaz looked up, blinked several times and appeared to be mouthing words,” he wrote. “A minute later, he began grimacing, later licking his lips and blowing. He appeared to move for 24 minutes after the first injection … It seemed like he would never die.”

The proper lethal injection procedure is seemingly straightforward. First comes the dose of sodium pentothal, a swift barbiturate intended to send the inmate into an unconscious sleep in less than two minutes. The second injection, pancuriom bromide, is a muscle relaxant so that skeletal muscles, including the diaphragm, are paralyzed. This keeps the inmate from twitching or moaning during the execution. The final ingredient is potassium chloride, mixed potently enough to stop the beating of the human heart.

Diaz was convicted for the 1979 fatal shooting of Joseph Nagy, a manager of a Miami topless bar, who was killed during a robbery by three men, one of whom was Diaz. Witnesses say he maintained his innocence, even while strapped to the execution gurney.

Though the prison spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said he suffered no pain and needed a second dose of the drugs because of slowed metabolism due to liver disease, the autopsy showed another story. “In Florida, the autopsy has proven [Diaz] had not received anesthesia,” says Kelley Henry, assistant federal public defender representing Philip Workman, whose execution is scheduled for May 9 in Tennessee. “They freaked out after the first round of injections and skipped the first syringe, so he suffocated and his heart stopped, which everyone agrees is absolutely terrifying and torturous.”

After Diaz’s botched execution, Gov. Jeb Bush banned all executions in Florida with 395 men and two women on death row. Florida is currently overhauling its capital punishment proceedings and protocol.

As a state that has 102 prisoners on death row — six of those from Knox County —Tennessee has had plenty of capital punishment issues of its own, culminating with Gov. Bredesen’s recent moratorium on executions scheduled to end May 2 as Knoxville Voice went to press. After Gov. Bush decided to review Florida’s manual, Bredesen followed suit by initiating Tennessee’s freeze on executions Feb. 1. At that time, the Tennessee execution manual was in a state of disrepair — a copy and paste job that spliced bits of information from the former process of the electric chair with the lethal injection procedure. Amounts of each drug to be administered were not even mentioned, nor were there any training requirements for those administering the drugs, which could easily have resulted in botched executions.

When the Associated Press reported these “deficiencies” in February, Bredesen issued Executive Order 43, which charged Commissioner of Corrections George Little with “ a comprehensive review of the manner in which death sentences are administered in Tennessee … to utilize all relevant and appropriate resources, including but not limited to scientific and medical experts, legal experts, and correction professionals, both from within and outside of Tennessee.” The May 2 deadline for revisions provided only 90 days for a complete edit of the state’s execution procedures — a process that has taken other states longer than a year.