Don't expect Arizona's controversial execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood to put a damper on the death penalty, attorney and veteran legal analyst Kendall Coffey tells
Newsmax TV.
"I don't think the Supreme Court is all of a sudden going to get meaningfully involved in terms of how executions are conducted," Coffey said Thursday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
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Witnesses said Wood, 55, gasped for more than 90 minutes as lethal drugs were pumped into him during his execution Wednesday for the 1989 double murder of a man and his daughter. A lawyer for the state insisted Wood was comatose and in no pain.
Wood's execution came 25 years after the crimes were committed.
"Inevitably, there is pain associated with putting someone to death, but it's not supposed to be needless pain … extended pain," said Coffey, a founding member of Coffey Burlington PL in Miami.
"At the end of the day, nobody really knows whether there's this kind of pain involved or not … Some states may go back to electrocution because there really were not constitutional problems with that," Coffey said.
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