State sanctioned torture and murder

The story (via ABC News) is disturbingly familiar:

An inmate's execution with lethal drugs in Arizona today took almost two hours as the man gasped and snorted, prompting his lawyers to request an emergency halt to the procedure.

"The execution of Joseph Wood commenced at 1:57 p.m. at the Arizona State Prison Complex (ASPC)-Florence and he was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m.," Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne said in a statement.

Wood's attorneys filed a motion for emergency stay of the execution after Wood was reported “gasping and snorting for more than an hour,” according to court documents they filed. Justice Anthony Kennedy denied the appeal about a half hour after Wood's death, the Associated Press reported. An AP reporter who witnessed the execution saw Wood gasp more than 600 times before he died. 

But Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary for state's AG, said the claims being made by the media witnesses and defense attorneys are not accurate. "He went to sleep, and looked to be snoring. This was my first execution and I was surprised by how peaceful it was. There was absolutely no snorting or gasping for air." 

"The experiment using midazolam combined with hydromorphone to carry out an execution failed today in Arizona. It took Joseph Wood two hours to die, and he gasped and struggled to breath for about an hour and forty minutes," said Dale Baich, one of Joseph Wood’s attorneys.

Is this what we have become? Regardless of the nature of the man's crime, which was brutal, does anyone deserve to die like this? More importantly, are we willing to torture a person to death under the guise of "justice"? This is part of the insanity that seems to infect our country---that there are those who may be treated as shabbily as we can manage, while we claim a moral high ground. This is horrible, and no amount of rationalization can change that. Capital punishment must stop!