PHOENIX — Lawyers for Arizona death-row prisoners said Monday the state is ignoring provisions in its own execution protocol — all contrary to what a judge had been told would be done.
U.S. District Judge Neil Wake, who signed off on the constitutionality of the state's step-by-step execution protocol two years ago, is now being asked to impose restrictions because of how the state is actually implementing key provisions.
The inmates' lawyers accuse the state of injecting the fatal drugs into prisoners' groins and under a sheet and letting unvetted personnel help carry out executions.
Wake ruled in 2009 that lawyers in a different case hadn't shown that inmates' constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment were substantially jeopardized by execution processes that the attorneys argued might cause pain or other suffering.
During opening statements in the new trial that began Monday, inmate attorney Cary Sandman told Wake that previous assurances by Corrections Director Charles Ryan that the state would follow its protocol have proved unreliable.
With promises made and not kept, "you've misled this court, the parties and the public," said Sandman, a federal public defender.
Ryan, who was the first witness to testify, acknowledged that his department failed to conduct required criminal background checks of execution team personnel. The failure, he said, was not intentional.
Source: Deseret News, December 5, 2011
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