FLORENCE, Ariz. — U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake was attending a ceremony for a judicial colleague when he received an urgent — and unusual — request: Lawyers for a condemned inmate wanted him to stop an execution that didn’t seem to be working.

“He has been gasping, snorting, and unable to breathe and not dying,” lawyer Robin C. Konrad told the judge over the phone Wednesday, according to a transcript. “And we’re asking — our motion asks for you to issue an emergency stay and order the Department of Corrections to start lifesaving techniques.”

The judge asked his law clerk to quickly locate a phone number for an attorney for the state so he could find out what was happening. They conferenced in Jeffrey A. Zick, who was getting updates from the scene from Arizona’s corrections chief.

What followed provided a window in to the nearly two-hour execution of 55-year-old Joseph Rudolph Wood as the defense lawyer pleaded to stop it and the Arizona attorney assured the judge everything was fine. In the middle of the arguments, Zick informed them that Wood had died.

The execution brought new attention to the death penalty debate in the U.S. as opponents said it was proof that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. State officials and family members of Wood’s two murder victims said there was nothing wrong with the execution.

Department of Corrections Director Charles Ryan read a statement Thursday outside his office in which he dismissed the notion that the execution was botched, calling it an “erroneous conclusion” and “pure conjecture.” He did not take questions from reporters.

He said IV lines in the inmate’s arms were “perfectly placed” and insisted that Wood felt no pain. He also said the Arizona attorney general’s office will not seek any new death warrants while his office completes a review of execution practices ordered by Gov. Jan Brewer.

Wood’s lawyer Dale Baich called it a “horrifically botched execution” that should have taken 10 minutes.

Wood gasped more than 600 times over an hour and a half. During the gasps, his jaw dropped and his chest expanded and contracted.

An Ohio inmate gasped in similar fashion for nearly 30 minutes in January. An Oklahoma inmate died of a heart attack in April, minutes after prison officials halted his execution because the drugs weren’t being administered properly.

States have scrambled in recent years to find alternative drugs because of a shortage rooted in European opposition to capital punishment. Arizona uses a combination of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a painkiller.

Anesthesiology experts say they’re not surprised that the combination of drugs took so long to kill Wood.

“This doesn’t actually sound like a botched execution. This actually sounds like a typical scenario if you used that drug combination,” said Karen Sibert, an anesthesiologist and associate professor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Sibert was speaking on behalf of the California Society of Anesthesiologists.