MOSCOW, July 31 (RIA Novosti) – A Russian rights ombudsman has accused the United States of conducting illegal human experiments, violating major international laws, following reports of a botched execution in an Arizona prison.
“There’s been a spike in such executions across the United States that are nothing else than illegal human experiments, which violate international laws,” Russian Foreign Ministry human rights commissioner Konstantin Dolgov wrote on Twitter.
This comment came in the wake of reports of a grisly incident at an Arizona prison in which a death row inmate was administered a cocktail of untested lethal drugs that was unable to kill him for nearly two hours.
Joseph Wood, a 55-year-old convicted murderer, was executed last Wednesday. Witnesses said he gasped and snorted 660 times after the drugs were introduced through intravenous tubes.
His attorneys earlier sought to postpone the execution, demanding the state disclose what injection the prison authorities planned to use.
“Arizona authorities carried out an experiment to test a new lethal [injection],” Dolgov claimed, stressing it ran counter to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN Convention Against Torture and various recommendations of the UN Human Rights Council.
The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned the execution, saying, “No government should experiment with human life.”
“We know the combination was experimental. And now we know that instead of working, the drugs took nearly two hours to kill Joseph Wood,” ACLU said in a statement.
This latest in a string of botched executions took place in Arizona on July 23. In April, Oklahoma botched the execution of Clayton Lockett who writhed in pain for more than 45 minutes while the state tried to kill him.
