Clarence Dixon is scheduled to die on Wednesday. His execution will end Arizona’s nearly eight-year capital punishment suspension that followed the botched lethal injection of another murderer, who observers said “gulped like a fish on land” for almost two hours before finally taking his last breath.
Ultimately, it isn’t about valuing human life but about how much each human life is worth. And in Arizona, a convict’s life seems to have very little value.
The state provided such poor health care to prisoners, a decade-long lawsuit alleges, that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. A collective of women in and out of prison wrote in a series of recently released reports that “at best we are treated as if we don’t matter.” They describe an arbitrary enforcement system that requires them to “jump through hoops to appease officers’ egos.” The number of self-harm incidents among incarcerated Arizonans more than tripled between 2015 and 2019, pointing to a profound level of desperation.
And of the more than 100 people on death row in Arizona, about 20 have exhausted all legal appeals. They are just waiting for their turn to die.
Their wait lengthened, temporarily, in 2014, when Arizona had to halt executions after Joseph Wood’s drawn-out death following multiple injections of hydromorphone, an opioid that suppresses breathing, and midazolam, a sedative. It’s the same combination used in another disastrous execution in Ohio several months prior. State corrections officials went with it anyway.
Arizona has since agreed never to use midazolam again. But because pharmaceutical companies don’t want to see the products they manufacture used to end lives and thus make the acquisition of drugs for capital punishment difficult, the state has had to improvise. Corrections officials have bought and stockpiled the active ingredient for pentobarbital, a heavy sedative, and then hired compounding pharmacies to make it bespoke in injectable form.
The issue is that we don’t know what’s going to happen when the compounded drug starts coursing through Dixon’s veins, given all the unanswered questions about its potency, sterility and even expiration date. It’s possible something will go wrong — and not just this time. Frank Atwood, 65, is next on the execution list, already scheduled to die on June 8 for the 1984 kidnapping and killing of an 8-year-old girl.
Not all conservatives suffer this disconnect on valuing life. In Ohio, some of the Republicans who are pushing to ban abortion are also leading a charge to abolish capital punishment. One of them is state Rep. Jean Schmidt, who once supported the death penalty but now holds that every life is sacred, “no matter how much we do in our life that’s horrific.”
Schmidt considers herself a values conservative and is a self-described “Trump supporter all the way.” They’re fitting descriptors, too, for Arizona’s Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich. But his conservative values don’t line up quite the same way. Brnovich is antiabortion, yes, but since the start of this year, he has been locked on a mission to resume executions — making Dixon and Atwood his first targets.
I contacted his office and requested an interview. I wanted to understand the reasoning behind the segmentation he’s able to make when deciding who dies, when they die and why. His spokeswoman, Katie Conner, told me he wasn’t available but released a statement on his behalf: “Every society is ultimately judged on how it treats the most vulnerable. Our office has and will continue to protect innocent lives to the fullest extent of the law.”
Brnovich is right: Dixon and Atwood aren’t innocent. They’re abhorrent human beings who committed unspeakable crimes — kidnapping, rape, murder. But they’re also vulnerable. Dixon is blind, schizophrenic and so out of touch with reality he thinks he’s being executed because of a government conspiracy. Atwood will use a wheelchair to get to the execution chamber.
But that’s not how Brnovich sees it. That’s not how Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, sees it, either. To them, executions are just about delivering justice and upholding the law.
To me, they’re about an unspoken scale where some lives matter more than others.
