By Brendan O’Brien

(Reuters) – Arizona is preparing to execute its first execution since 2014. A prisoner convicted for killing a student was scheduled to die eight years after the last state lethal injection. Lawyers described it as a botched attempt.

Clarence Wayne Dixon was sentenced for fatally stabbing and killing Arizona State University student Deana Bodoin. Dixon died at 10:10 a.m. in Florence, Arizona.

Arizona will be the first state to execute Dixon since Joseph Wood was executed in 2014. The two-drug injection that killed Wood took almost two hours to take effect. Witnesses claimed that Dixon gasped and snorted his way to death. Wood, according to the corrections authorities was in a state of comatose. He never felt pain.

Afterwards, Arizona halted executions. A federal judge approved sweeping changes to the death penalty protocol, which included an agreement not to use certain drugs. It stated that it would restrict the ability of the Department of Corrections director to alter drugs, and give a prisoner the opportunity to challenge drug modifications.

While legal and ethical concerns swirl about capital punishment, several state governments as well the U.S. Federal government have been unable to acquire drugs that are used in lethal injection drug drugs in recent years.

Dixon was sentenced in 2008 to death. This was 30 years after Bowdoin died. It was not solved until 2001, when investigators discovered that Dixon’s DNA had been matched with the evidence from the scene. Dixon was currently serving life imprisonment for 1986 sexual assault.

Robert Olson, Pinal County Superior Court judge, ruled that Dixon was mentally competent to be executed. Olson claimed that Dixon was suffering from schizophrenia and had displayed “sophistication” in his thinking, despite the fact that Dixon believed he was being executed to execute him for an 1985 sexual assault offense. This was an entirely different case than the 1986 assault on a woman.

United States Supreme Court ruled execution of persons with disabilities is against the Constitution.