Across America, death row inmates have been pumped with untested concoctions of lethal injection drugs in what amounts to grisly human guinea pig experiments.
In some cases, the drugs have taken longer than expected to work, resulting in excruciatingly drawn out deaths for the inmates and gruesome spectacles for the watchers.
In other cases, the drugs haven’t worked at all.
Death penalty state prisons are saddled with the reality that the old ways of killing aren’t available any more and the new ways are proving inefficient, cruel and inhumane.
Last week, with a lethal cocktail fizzing through his veins, Rodney Scott Berget asked his executioners at South Dakota State Penitentiary, “is it supposed to feel like this?”
Berget’s execution, for killing prison officer Ronald Johnson with a pipe and encasing his head in plastic wrap, had been delayed hours for a last ditch legal battle over his mental capacity to be put to death by the state.
Three months earlier over in the “cornhusker state”, Carey Dean Moore heaved and gasped and then turned purple until Nebraskan officials drew a curtain around him for 14 minutes.
It was the first time the opioid fentanyl had been used in a lethal injection and it did exterminate the “taxi driver killer” Moore.
But what happened in the mystery quarter hour behind the curtain remains unexplained.
Five days before that, child killer Billy Ray Irick thrashed about and turned a dark purple before finally succumbing.
Strapped down in a white prison jumpsuit and black socks, Irick was first injected with Midazolam, a sedative.
Irick had fought execution for three decades since he raped, sodomised and strangled the seven-year-old girl he was babysitting, Paula Dyer.
Officers then injected Irick with vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride, to stop his lungs and heart.
As the drugs took effect, he coughed, choked and gasped for air before his face darkened and he died.
Numbers wise, 2018 has not been a bumper year for executions, just 19 so far with two more scheduled, compared with 35 in 2014.
But the dying has been grim and often macabre, leaving state officials in a quandary of how to more efficiently kill humans.
In the 1990s, lethal injection gained popularity across America, replacing the electric chair and older methods such as the gas chamber and firing squad.
The most common lethal injection drug was the anaesthetic sodium thiopental, used with pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.
All but one of the 35 US states that carry out executions used sodium thiopental but in 2011, the drug’s sole US manufacturer, Hospira, stopped making it.
Hospira ceased production in its North Carolina drug plant because of contamination and quality control problems.
When it tried to move production to a “state of the art” facility near Milan, the Italian government said it would only license manufacture if the drug was not used in executions.
Several US states’ attempts to obtain the drug from other European manufacturers met with refusals to supply it for death penalty use.
The state of Oklahoma immediately switched to the drug pentobarbital, but a federal judge ruled it fell “short of the level of risk” considered cruel and unusual punishment.
Different states began searching for different drugs, sparking court challenges.
The dilemma facing state executioners is epitomised in the twice postponed execution of Nevada killer, Scott Dozier.
Sentenced to death for murdering a fellow meth dealer, Dozier is urging state officials to execute him.
In 2002, Dozier shot 22-year-old Jeremiah Miller in a Las Vegas strip motel and sawed his body into pieces.
Eight days before Dozier was scheduled in July to become Nevada’s first inmate executed in a decade, the state switched lethal injection drugs.
The new three drug protocol comprised fentanyl, the sedative midazolam and the paralytic cisatracurium.
A Nevada trial court declared it unconstitutional.
Midazolam has been involved in a number of botched executions, notably that of Dennis McGuire.
In 2014 in Ohio, McGuire received a two drug injection of midazolam and hydromorphone and took 25 minutes to die.
In 1989, McGuire had raped and stabbed to death 30 weeks pregnant newlywed Joy Stewart, 22.
After he was administered the drugs, McGuire’s stomach swelled up, as if he had an instant hernia.
He made alarming snorting noises for several minutes, struggled and gasped audibly for air, as his daughter and Ms Stewart’s family watched on.
Normally, lethal injection results in movement in the early moments of the execution, after which the condemned person lies still.
McGuire lay motionless for five minutes, before the snorting and gulping began.
Other problematic executions include Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, Joseph Wood in Arizona, and Ronald Smith in Alabama.
Clayton Lockett’s execution, on April 29, 2014 in Oklahoma State Penitentiary, was described as “a horror movie”.
Lockett, 38, was convicted of the 1999 killing of 19-year-old high school graduate Stephanie Neiman.
Prison officers had to Taser Lockett to get him to the death chamber.
Once there, doctors pricked him more than 16 times in attempts to get an IV line inserted for the lethal injection.
When a doctor tried to insert a second intravenous line into Clayton Lockett’s groin, he hit the femoral artery and blood began squirting over the execution chamber.
Lockett lived for 43 minutes, convulsing and writhing on the gurney before finally dying of a heart attack.
Also in 2014, Joseph Wood’s death by execution only came after he had been injected 15 times with massive amounts of drugs as he lay gasping and gulping in Arizona’s death chamber.
Two years later, Ronald Bert Smith took 13 minutes to die, heaving and coughing, in punishment for the 1994 slaying of convenience store clerk Casey Wilson.
April in Alabama was the month America’s oldest death row inmate, 83-year-old Walter Leroy Moody, was finally put to death.
In December 1989, Moody made a bomb out of steel pipe, powder and 80 nails and mailed it to Judge Robert Vance’s home.
The execution began at 8.16pm and ended at 8.42pm.
Moody kept his eyes closed and did not respond when given a verbal consciousness check, or respond when asked to give his last words.
His chest moved, his jaw dropping and fingers on his left fingers fluttering.
Robert Earl Butts Jr. was put to death at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison for the 1996 murder of a 25-year-old corrections officer.
Asked for a final statement before his execution, Butts declined to offer a prayer and said, “I’ve been drinking caffeine all day”.
Injected with pentobarbital, he said, “It burns, man” as the drugs flowed, then took a series of deep breaths until there was no movement and he was pronounced dead.
The last person executed in Florida was Eric Scott Branch, who went down screaming on the death gurney in February.
Lying strapped to the death bed, Branch began arguing with correctional officers, telling them to get the Florida state governor and state attorney general to come and kill him.
The guards turned on the lethal injection process and as the drug began to flow into Branch’s veins, he began to squirm and shout.
Then he screamed: “Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!”
Branch was pronounced dead at 7.05pm.
Branch had been sentenced to die for the brutal rape and killing of 21-year-old Susan Morris, a video production student at the University of West Florida.
On the evening of July 29, 1995, 15-year old Tiffany Harville went missing from her home in Selma, a city in southern central Alabama.
Police charged a man, Rod Suttle who was known as “Tie” with Tiffany Harville’s murder, but the charges were dropped.
In April, 1997 a 20-year-old male in custody at the local county jail told a police officer he had information about Ms Harville’s death.
Dominique Ray said Tie had cut the girl’s throat and stabbed her in the head in the presence of three other, complicit females.
Four months later, another man Marcus Owden came forward, saying he had been reading the Bible and needed to confess.
It proved that he and Ray had been alone with Ms Harville and the man had raped her.
The men then robbed the girl of $7 and took her underwear.
Owden was sentenced to life in prison, and Dominique Ray received the death penalty.
Owden also confessed to a role in those killings, saying the Mabins brothers were shot after they refused to join a gang organised by Owden and Ray.
A version of this story first appeared on news.com.au
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