Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire appeared to gasp and convulse for roughly 10 minutes before he died Thursday by lethal injection using a new combination of drugs, reporters who witnessed it said.

McGuire was convicted in 1994 of the rape and murder of 22-year-old Joy Stewart, who was seven months pregnant. Her relatives were at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville to witness his death, according to tweets from television reporter Sheila Gray.

Columbus Dispatch reporter Alan Johnson said that the whole execution process took 24 minutes, and that McGuire appeared to be gasping for air for 10 to 13 minutes.

"He gasped deeply. It was kind of a rattling, guttural sound. There was kind of a snorting through his nose. A couple of times, he definitely appeared to be choking," WDTN quoted Johnson as saying.

The convicted murderer was pronounced dead at 10:53 a.m. ET.

The execution generated controversy because, like many states, Ohio has been forced to find new drug protocols after European-based manufacturers banned U.S. prisons from using their drugs in executions -- among them, Danish-based Lundbeck, which manufactures pentobarbital.

According to Ohio's corrections department, the state used a combination of the drugs midazolam, a sedative; and the painkiller hydromorphone.

Both the length of time it took for McGuire to die and his gasping are not typical for an execution, said Howard Nearman, an anesthesiologist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland.

"Why it took 24 minutes, I really can't tell you," he said. "It just makes you wonder -- what was given? What was the timing, and what were the doses?"

In an opinion piece written for CNN this week, a law professor noted that McGuire's attorneys argued he would "suffocate to death in agony and terror."

"The state disagrees. But the truth is that no one knows exactly how McGuire will die, how long it will take or what he will experience in the process," wrote Elisabeth A. Semel, clinic professor of law and director of the Death Penalty Clinic at U.C. Berkeley School of Law.

So while instituting additional procedural changes, Mr. Obama undertook no major overhaul of the surveillance programs he inherited. “He’s sitting on the other end of the pen now,” said the former Obama aide. “He has more information than he did then. And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration.”

Just weeks after the inauguration, Judge Reggie B. Walton issued a secret ruling reprimanding the N.S.A. for violating its own procedures. But when Mr. Obama was briefed, the case did not stir consternation. The president’s team instructed the Justice Department to fix the problem, but “this was not a central concern and he was very quick in knowing how to deal with it,” said a former administration official.

The calculus had shifted enough that Mr. Obama began presiding over a record number of leak prosecutions. When civil liberties advocates visited to press him to do more to reverse Mr. Bush’s policies, Mr. Obama pushed back. “He reminded me that he had a different role to play, that he was commander in chief and that he needed to protect the American people,” recalled Mr. Romero of the A.C.L.U.

...

Mr. Obama appointed a panel to review the programs. “The point we made to him was, ‘We’re not really concerned about you, Barack, but God forbid some other guy’s in the office five years from now and there’s another 9/11,’ ” said Richard A. Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism adviser who served on the panel. He had to “lay down some roadblocks in addition to what we have now so that once you’re gone it’ll be harder” to abuse spying abilities.

Werthless wrote:Capital Punishment is easy/easier to say 'no' to when the death is expensive (ie. appeals), torturous, and exacted with extended pain. What an awful event it must have been to witness that.

TenuredVulture wrote:I've never seen any evidence that it's an effective deterrent. To be fair (and I'm absolutely opposed to the death penalty) that could change if the death penalty were imposed more often.

JFLNYC wrote:They could kill two birds with one stone if they used firing squads made up of Colorado high schoolers.

Swiggers wrote:The thing about deterrents is that they work on people who are rational. Most killers aren't rational.

Houshphandzadeh wrote:I'm into the retributive aspects of capitol punishment

TenuredVulture wrote:I've never seen any evidence that it's an effective deterrent. To be fair (and I'm absolutely opposed to the death penalty) that could change if the death penalty were imposed more often.

drsmooth wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:I've never seen any evidence that it's an effective deterrent. To be fair (and I'm absolutely opposed to the death penalty) that could change if the death penalty were imposed more often.

I thought I had posted in the books thread* a review of The Faithful Executioner, a sort of biography of Franz Schmidt, executioner for the city of Nuremburg during the late 1500s-early 1600s. He lawfully did away with about 1 person every 6 weeks for close to 45 years. Extraordinary # of executions per capita back then; Nuremburg was home to fewer than 50,000 people at the time.

To say nothing of the considerably more numerous non-lethal public tortures

It's a good little book

*couldn't find it there though