From [DPIC] A private autopsy of Alabama death-row prisoner Joe Nathan James, Jr. suggests that unqualified corrections personnel subjected him to a torturous, hours-long execution process in a botched execution that experts say was the longest since the advent of lethal injection forty years ago.

The autopsy findings, described by reporter Elizabeth Bruenig in an August 15, 2022 exposé in The Atlantic, document multiple failed attempts to set an intravenous execution line, puncture wounds in Mr. James arm muscles that appear to be unrelated to efforts to insert the IV, multiple unexplained incisions, and bleeding and bruising around Mr. James’ wrists where he was strapped to the gurney. Bruenig called the execution “lengthy and painful," and a doctor who attended the autopsy said the execution team that carried it out “was unqualified for the task in a most dramatic way.”

The report belies the representation by ADOC Commissioner John Hamm that “nothing out of the ordinary” occurred during the three-hour period between the scheduled start of James’ execution at 6:00 p.m. on July 28, 2022 and the time the curtain to the execution chamber was opened at 9:02 p.m. to reveal a motionless and nonresponsive James on the execution gurney.

The autopsy, which was conducted August 2, 2022, several days after the official post mortem examination, was funded by the human rights organization Reprieve US on behalf of James’ family. Bruenig, who witnessed the private autopsy, along with noted Emory University anesthesiologist Joel Zivot, wrote that James’ “hands and wrists had been burst by needles, in every place one can bend or flex” during a “lengthy and painful death.“ The “carnage” on his body, she said, indicated that “[s]omething terrible had been done to James while he was strapped to a gurney behind closed doors without so much as a lawyer present to protest his treatment or an advocate to observe it.”

Reprieve executive director Maya Foa estimated that the execution took between three and three and a half hours to carry out from the time the execution team first attempted to insert the intravenous execution line. Reprieve’s review of 275 botched U.S. executions since 1890 found that it was the longest botched execution on record. 

Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robert Dunham said in a statement that “There is no question that this is another botched execution, and it is among the worst botches in the modern history of the U.S. death penalty.” It is the longest botched lethal-injection execution in the 40-year history of that execution method, followed by Alabama’s 2½-hour failure to establish an execution line in the aborted February 2018 execution of Doyle Ray Hamm.