The prolonged — some say "botched" — execution of double murderer Joseph Rudolph Wood last week in Arizona fanned the flames of the unending debate over whether vicious killers should suffer as they die for their crimes. In January, an Ohio inmate snorted and gasped for nearly a half hour before dying; in Oklahoma, a man died of a heart attack minutes after prison officials halted his execution because the drugs weren't being administered properly. Wood died by lethal injection Wednesday for the August 1989 slayings of his estranged girlfriend and her father. When it had continued for more than an hour, the condemned man's lawyers made a desperate appeal to state and federal courts to halt the execution. McCarthy was convicted of killing her 71-year-old neighbor in 1997 during a robbery of the retired psychology professor's home in Lancaster, Texas. Police say the former nursing home therapist beat Booth with a candelabra, stabbed her with a butcher knife, then cut off the elderly woman's finger to steal her wedding ring. McCarthy, who was linked to two other slayings, became Texas' 500th execution since capital punishment resumed there in 1982. In June 1993, his 14-year-old daughter Jennifer and Elizabeth Pena, 16, were rushing to make curfew on their way home from a party when they took a shortcut through a Houston neighborhood and stumbled into a gang initiation. What followed was what one prosecutor called a "feeding frenzy" of rape, torture and murder. The way that he killed my sister, and I think for someone just to get a needle put in their arm and be able to go to sleep and go to the next world, or whatever, is about as easy as it gets, you know?