Lethal injection comes under fire in Fla., Calif.

As a result of the chemicals going into Diaz’s arms around the elbow, he had a 12-inch chemical burn on his right arm and an 11-inch chemical burn on his left arm, Hamilton said.

Florida Corrections Secretary James McDonough said the execution team did not see any swelling of the arms, which would have been an indication that the chemicals were going into tissues and not veins.

Diaz’s attorney, Suzanne Myers Keffler, reacted angrily to the findings.

“This is complete negligence on the part of the state,” she said. “When he was still moving after the first shot of chemicals, they should have known there was a problem and they shouldn’t have continued. This shows a complete disregard for Mr. Diaz. This is disgusting.”

Earlier, in a court hearing in Ocala, she had won an assurance from the attorney general’s office that she could have access to all findings and evidence from the autopsy. She withdrew a request for an independent autopsy.

David Elliot, spokesman for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said the Diaz execution was just the latest in a long history of foul-ups on the state’s death row. “Florida has certainly deservedly earned a reputation for being a state that conducts botched executions, whether its electrocution or lethal injection,” Elliot said. “We just think the Florida death penalty system is broken from start to finish.”

Electric chair's ghoulish past
Florida got rid of the electric chair after two inmates’ heads caught fire during executions in the 1990s and another suffered a severe nosebleed in 2000. Lethal injection was portrayed as a more humane and more reliable process.

Twenty people have been executed by lethal injection in Florida since the state switched from the electric chair in 2000.

In the California case, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel said that the case under consideration there raises the question of whether a three-drug cocktail administered by the San Quentin State Prison is so painful that it “offends” the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Fogel said he was compelled “to answer that question in the affirmative.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld executions — by hanging, firing squad, electric chair and gas chamber — despite the pain they might cause, but has left unsettled the issue of whether the pain is unconstitutionally excessive.

California has been under a capital punishment moratorium since February, when Fogel called off the execution of rapist and murderer Michael Morales amid concerns that condemned inmates might suffer excruciating deaths.

Do drugs render inmates unconscious?
Fogel found substantial evidence that the last six men executed at San Quentin might have been conscious because they were still breathing when lethal drugs were administered.

He ordered anesthesiologists to be on hand, or demanded that a licensed medical professional inject a large, fatal dose of a sedative instead of the additional paralyzing agent and heart-stopping drugs that are normally used. But no medical professional was willing to participate.

Attorneys for Morales alleged in a lawsuit that Morales might appear unconscious after being injected with a sedative, but internally he would suffer excruciating pain, “burning veins and heart failure,” once the paralyzing and the death drug were administered.

Morales, 47, of Stockton, raped and brutally beat a 17-year-old Lodi girl 25 years ago.

California’s death row is the nation’s largest, with more than 650 inmates.

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