It took Angel Nieves Diaz 34 minutes to die from the time the two executioners inserted the IV tubes into each arm and began pumping the chemicals into his body. His eyes widened. His head rolled. He appeared to speak.
"It was my observation that he was in pain," Neal Dupree, a lawyer for Diaz and a witness to the execution, wrote in an affidavit.
The faint signs of movement from the body strapped to the trolley continued for 24 minutes.
"His face was contorted, and he grimaced on several occasions. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down continually, and his jaw was clenched," he said.
Diaz's execution in Florida on Dec. 13 for the murder of the manager of a topless bar was the last in the state for some months to come. Almost immediately after his body was removed from the execution chamber, it became clear that the execution had gone wrong.
The cocktail of three chemicals that was meant to have sent him to oblivion within moments had led to a painful, lingering death. After a report from the medical examiner found 30cm-long chemical burns on Diaz's arms, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, opened an inquiry into his death and suspended all executions, granting the more than 370 people on Florida's death row at least a temporary reprieve.
Although the brutality of Diaz's death merited attention across the US, what has gone almost unnoticed is that the death penalty, once an article of faith for conservatives, is now in retreat.
The penalty remains the law in 38 states, but last year saw the lowest number of executions in a decade -- 53 including Diaz. The number of condemned fell to its lowest level since the restoration of capital punishment in 1976 -- 114, compared with 317 in 1996.
Ten states have suspended executions, and for the first time last week, one state -- New Jersey -- announced it was leaning towards abolition.
"The death penalty is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency," an official commission reported.
New Jersey would be the first to take such a step since capital punishment was restored.
"The death penalty is on the defensive," said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.
"Its flaws are much more obvious now. If you are for the death penalty you are going to have to say how are we going to avoid executing innocent people," he said.
Dieter attributes much of the declining taste for the death penalty to science, with DNA and other new technologies used to establish innocence in cases after conviction. More than 120 people have been freed from death row because of doubts about their conviction, including at least a dozen because of DNA testing.
Such doubts led George Ryan, the conservative Republican governor of Illinois, to impose a moratorium on executions seven years ago, after more than a dozen wrongful convictions were overturned.
His conversion came about when journalism students at Northwestern University produced a taped confession exonerating a man who had been on death row for 17 years.
Other inmates on death row were later cleared by DNA, and subsequent investigations.
"Juries make mistakes. Prosecutors make mistakes. If you are for the death penalty you have to say `we are going to lose innocent lives, but it is worth it,'" Dieter said.
In Florida, executions are on hold because of public queasiness about lethal injection following Diaz's botched execution.
As the medical examiner discovered, technicians missed the veins when they were inserting the intravenous tubes into Diaz's arms, and he needed a second injection to die. Death penalty opponents say such excruciating deaths are to be expected in US prisons.
Human Rights Watch reports that one of the three chemicals in the mix of lethal injections has been banned for use on animals because of fears that it masks, rather than relieves, pain.
In New Jersey, where there have been no executions since the state restored the death penalty 25 years ago, the argument came down to the high cost of legal appeals while keeping people on death row. An official commission last week concluded it did not work.
"There is no compelling evidence that the New Jersey death penalty rationally serves a legitimate penological intent," it said.
The judiciary has also turned against the death penalty, with the Supreme Court barring the execution of the insane, people with learning difficulties, or minors, and lower courts turning to alternative sentences. Thirty-seven of the 38 states that retain the death penalty now have life without parole.
Death penalty opponents say that such lifelong prison terms make it increasingly difficult to argue that the death penalty is the last defense against a convicted killer going free. In the last few years, juries in celebrated capital cases have balked at imposing the final punishment.
Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted last year over the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, got life in a maximum security jail. So did Gary Ridgeway, the Green River serial killer from Washington state, who admitted to murdering 48 people and received a life term with no parole. If one of the worst serial killers in history does not deserve the death penalty, the argument goes, who does?
"There are indications of change even in places like Texas and Virginia," which perform the most executions in the US, Dieter said.
Those developments came too late for Diaz, as did the outrage over lethal injection.
But for Suzanne Keffer of the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, his lawyer for the last eight years, his suffering may produce some good.
"If you can look at it this way, that something good may come out of this ... it certainly may be a benefit," she said.
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