© National Archives and Records Administration/Colourized by Mads MadsenGerman Gen. Anton Dostler is tied to a stake before his execution by a firing squad in Italy in December 1945.
Dennis McGuire clearly knew something was wrong. At 10:34 a.m. on Jan. 16, as a crowd at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility looked on, the convicted murderer began gasping for air. Then McGuire
began to make snorting and choking sounds. For the next 10 minutes, as a combination of midazolam (a relaxant similar to Valium) and hydromorphone (an analgesic related to morphine) coursed through his veins, McGuire's chest and stomach heaved as the oxygen in his blood dwindled. Death was approaching, but slowly.
Watching a man gradually suffocate may have come as a surprise to some people in the gallery, but it didn't surprise David Waisel, an associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, who had predicted this would happen. Ten days earlier Waisel had presented U.S. district court judge Gregory Frost with a nine-page declaration explaining that the state of Ohio planned to use an improper dose of midazolam - a short-acting benzodiazepine that's often used to induce sedation and amnesia before a medical procedure - to kill McGuire. "In light of the insufficient dose of midazolam," Waisel wrote, "it is substantially likely that McGuire will be
aware of this agony and horror." Based on his expertise, he felt there was a "substantial, palpable, objectively intolerable risk of experiencing the
agony and horrifying sensation of unrelenting air hunger" during the execution, suggesting that "McGuire will remain awake and actively conscious for up to five minutes, during which he will increasingly experience air hunger as the drugs suppress his ability to breathe." I
t turns out Waisel may have undershot things; Dennis McGuire took nearly 30 minutes to die.