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Lawyers Fight to Halt Ohio Execution Condemned as Human Experimentation
Lethal injection involves anaesthetic used on pets • Change of method follows previous failures in state
Lawyers acting for a prisoner on death row in Ohio were scrambling to delay his scheduled execution tomorrow morning using a new method of lethal injection that is widely used to put down pets. The procedure has never been tried out on humans and is tantamount, critics say, to human experimentation.
The death chamber in Lucasville, Ohio. The state opted for the new procedure after a botched attempted execution in September. (Photograph: Kiichiro Sato/AP) Barring last-minute appeals and stays of execution, Kenneth Biros, 51, will be put to death using a massive overdose of an anaesthetic. It would be the first time that a single-drug lethal injection had been administered, in contrast to the triple-drug cocktail that has become the norm in the 37 American states that have death row prisoners.
Opponents of the death penalty and lawyers involved in the Biros case have decried the move towards the single-drug method as over-hasty.
Tim Sweeney, Biros's lawyer, said: "This truly is experimentation and a more careful look needs to be taken by the courts before this new method can be used."
Sweeney and his legal team were launching last-minute attempts to persuade the courts to postpone the execution while further thought is given to the method. They were appealing to the federal appeals court and potentially to the supreme court.
Under the new so-called protocol, Biros would be administered an overdose of the anaesthetic thiopental sodium, one of the three drugs used in the lethal injection cocktail that is the most popular current technique.
If that failed, a back-up would be used involving the injection of two other chemicals, midazolam and hydromorphone, into muscles. That back-up method, in particular, has never been tested, and the qualities of the two chemicals are unknown at high doses.
Ohio opted for the new protocol in the wake of a gruesome incident in September in which an execution was botched - the third such incident in three years in the state. Romell Broom, a rapist and murderer, spent two hours on the gurney as officials tried to find a vein that would hold an intravenous drip through which the poisons that would kill him could be introduced.
During that time, Broom tried to help his executioners find a vein, turning over on his side and rubbing his arm, and he was later seen to be in distress and weeping. A doctor was called in to help apply the drip - in contravention of ethical guidelines that say doctors should not be involved in executive killings.
After 18 attempts the execution was called off and Broom was returned to death row, where he remains.
Ohio then moved rapidly to propose the single-drug method, despite the fact that no doctors could be found who would vouch for the new technique.
Charles Wille, a state prosecutor, told Associated Press: "Somebody has to be first. This plan is consistent with a long history of states attempting to take a very difficult social responsibility and make it less difficult."
Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Centre in Washington, said that it was only because of the extraordinary nature of executions in the US that Ohio would be permitted to test out a new method on humans. "In other countries or in any medical field there would be all kinds of restrictions about doing things to experiment on human beings. It would never be allowed."
Under the Nuremberg Code, which stemmed from Nazi medical experiments, doctors must abide by strict rules relating to human experimentation, including that any test must be voluntary and for the social good. But executions are not covered by the code.
Brian Evans, a campaigner against the death penalty with Amnesty International USA, said Ohio's proposed technique "looked like human experimentation". He pointed out it still relied on finding a vein - the problem that had given rise to the new method in the first place.
Critics have also suggested that Biros, the prisoner due to dietomorrow, has been carefully chosen to inspire as little public sympathy as possible. He was guilty of a crime that was so horrifying prosecutors called him a "poster child for the death penalty". In 1991 he stabbed and beat a 22-year-old woman, Tami Engstrom, to whom he had offered a lift in north-eastern Ohio. He then dismembered her body and buried parts around the state.
Technically, states can still chose to kill inmates through hanging, the electric chair, lethal gas and the firing squad, but lethal injection is the norm.
The US supreme court ruled last year that the three-drug cocktail was constitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts briefly referred in that judgment to the prospect of using a single anaesthetic, commenting that it "has problems of its own, and has never been tried by a single state".
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28 Comments so far
Show AllA single dose worked in Bhopal.
What next? What new violation of the human spirit will the US attempt?
The majority (37 out of 50) of US states have a 'Death Row' and active execution programs.
20% of the US population supports the use of torture outright, and 50% support 'intensive interrogation' tactics including waterboarding.
Your police are little more than paramilitary thugs in the pay of the celebrity/Corporate/political Elite, who routinely use TASERs and other pain inducing methods (LRAD, tear gas, rubber bullets) on unarmed and peaceful protestors, and round up thousands and detain them in unsanitary, overcrowded, and hellish 'holding pens' until such time that the Elite have cleared the area and given the all clear.
Children as young as ten, and elders in their late eighties have been TASERed, often with lethal results, and yet the company who makes these torture implements is able so get away by claiming 'proprietary data' if an inquiry is even hinted at. The police, instead of learning how to reduce the risk of harm to themselves and the public, now routinely reach for their 'less lethal' (but often deadly) deterrents first, instead of using human communication and empathy. It is now common for police of any stripe to refer to the public as 'civilians', often with military levels of contempt.
Your courts are bought and paid for by the wealthy and Corporations. A rich man can literally get away with murder. A poor man receives *no* justice.
You employ mercenaries (Xe/Blackwater) in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and your own Constitution, both abroad and domestically.
Your 'entertainment' is overloaded with graphic, bloody and extremely violent imagery and themes, and human sexuality (when it is touched on at all) is depicted as wrong/sinful, degrading, violent, or little more than corporate pornography.
Your churches and places of worship are virtually cut off from nature, and increasingly your forms of worship are growing more materialistic and greedy as well as intolerant and racist.
You deride original and creative thought, while at the same time doing your best to capitalize and consumerise anything outside the mainstream. That which you can't, you ignore. You treat the free thinker, the questioner as a freak, an outcast.
Is it any wonder your empire is in decline? In Collapse?
Thanks, that's a pretty good summary of the good ol' US of A. Unfortunately, these days even the good that we do is overshadowed by our overall horribleness.
Galenwainwright -unfortunately Canada is trying hard to catch up, under the current 'get tough on everything' fundamentalist mentality Harper leadership.
We are, regrettably, handmaidens to the ideological barbarian.
Please, can we stop making a distinction between "waterboarding" and "torture"?
Why don't they try using an overdose of heroin? Oops almost forgot, heroin is illegal.
good suggestion morphine is legal and used a the time to empty beds in hospices.
Absolutely! Frankly, I would like t see a reversal of policy. Legalize heroin for treating those addicted to it like civilized countries such as Switzerland do and outlaw state santioned murder. (although I do have mixed opinions about using capital punishment for...oh, say war criminals who go starting wars to make their legacy in the history books appear more, er...glorious.)
Isn't that basically what they're doing? Overdosing him on anaesthetic?
I think we (and the lawyers fighting this) are wandering from the point a bit. The important point is that capital punishment is wrong, and no matter how painless they make it I will oppose it. To complain based on the METHOD of execution when my real objection is that the execution is occurring in tv first place is disingenuous.
The point is whether execution is moral or not. If it is, trying to find a more painless way to do it is a good thing. If it is not, then no matter how painful or painless they make it it will still be grotesque.
we are a truly disgusting nation which believes somehow that State murder is good. an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
and the one eyed jack becomes king.
How absolutely horrible. Galenwainwright is right about U.S. We have been led to the slaughter by greed- ours and by those who provide us the substances and 'entertainment' that we are addicted to. Collapse? You betcha.
doing the peoples work should be life imprisonment as
execution leaves blood on all our hands! we have become
a nation of flat earthers. brother and sister as husband
and wife kind of stupid.
"Lawyers acting for a prisoner on death row in Ohio were scrambling to delay his scheduled execution tomorrow morning using a new method of lethal injection that is widely used to put down pets."
Someone should call the SPCA...
This is such a waste of time. Just throw him out of a helicopter. It worked every time in Vietnam.
Or one shot fired to the temple fired from a US supplied Hammerless Centennial Air-weight.
Like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCUefMvJb08&feature=related
General Nguyen was a paid US ally.
Isn't nice to know that images like this are now sterilized from the general populace, and deliberately excised from the curriculum of todays students? Don't want the little darlings to know that their government is involved with torture or other war crimes now, do we?
This is so hideous... yet, if I remember right, I heard on Democracy Now that the current lethal injection method used on humans used to be used on animals, but was abandoned because the current method used on animals is less inhumane. Remember vets practice this millions of times every year. Abolish the death penalty for humans and animals.
I am not sure how anyone can read this and not be disgusted.
The State likes lethal injection because it makes the act of killing look benign. It turns the violent act of killing and retribution into a medical procedure. The state should take responsibility for its violent acts: if it still wants to execute criminals, it should call for it to be done in town squares, urban centers, shopping malls, in the most heinous way possible. That would actually be more truthful. Sadly, the people would probably like it, and some nice reality shows would spin off from it.
Much of this thinking is influenced by Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish and Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals. Required reading on this subject in understanding the State's denial of its own violence.
I am unfamiliar with Foucalt and would disagree that Nietzsche would have approved of such practices.
A better understanding could be gained from reading Rene Girard, 'Violence and the Sacred' and 'Things hidden Since the Foundation of the World'.
Nietzsche doesn't approve of capital punishment. He merely points out the hypocrisy of States that commit violence while at the same time denying they are violent. And that is my point about lethal injection: it's a way of being violent while not appearing to be so. This makes violence "acceptable" to most people.
When Guantanomo detainees on hunger strikes were forcibly having feeding tubes shoved down their throats, Rumsfeld claimed they were getting medical treatment, or some such clap trap.
[if it still wants to execute criminals, it should call for it to be done in town squares]
Saudi Arabia does just that. They execute their murderers in a part of the town that becomes known as 'chop chop square'. To be fair, they also chop off the hands of those who are convicted of theft in that same square. I think that the fundamentalist Taliban also used public executions, but am kinda sure Iran doesn't do public executions.
In central America the Aztec's used to cut the hearts out of people, perhaps that might serve as a way to return to 'traditional' methods of executions. We could also start butchering the corpses of the crooks, murderers and scum and use the meat to feed the poor.
An old adage goes that if you put a man in the gutter, you'll end up right there with him. That's what capital punishment does to any human society, when it eventually ends up being misused for political reasons, and the means used for carrying it out become more and more barbaric, as the classic example of Nazi Germany showed.
So, how many deaths will be enough to satisfy peoples' blood lust, or to suit the electoral convenience of the politicians? 2? 200? Or 2891 (as at Ploetzensee prison alone in Berlin during Hitler's time)? Small wonder it was that in Germany it was decided that in the rebuilding of democracy after the Second World War, capital punishment would have no place whatsoever. They banned it under their Basic Law (Article 102) in 1949.
It wouldn't surprise me if this turns out to be the US route to abolition. The Germans decided that as far as the death penalty is concerned the only way to mend it is to end it.
Period.
I am flatly opposed to capital punishment yet still do not understand why such a sick circus is made of carrying it out when an oxygen-free environment is a simple and sure thing. My plan for my own end if terminally ill is simple and certain - demerol, a plastic bag and some duct tape with the Bach G minor mass via headphones.
Jack Kevorkian's later methods of using carbon monoxide are arguably better.
This "new" technique is well-proven in the US, because it is carried out on 800 dogs and cats in county and city "shelters" every hour, 24/7/52. That's over 7,000,000 dogs and cats every year.
It's called euthasol.
I am not in favor of death penalties. But if we are going to do it then we should do it right. The current lethal injection techniques are barbaric, with the subject in agony, but cannot show it because the drugs paralyze. The electric chair is also barbaric because too much electricity is used. The heart is not stopped, but the subject is simply boiled to death. This methods are only marginally better than stoning to death. Almost anything would be better:-
* An overdose of anesthetic is going to be much better, including heroin overdose. This would be my preferred method.
* A correct dose of electricity would simply stop the heart. It would be quick and effective.
* Slitting the throat would be effective, and quick.
* Firing squad method is instantaneous if the brain is hit.
* Hanging and guilotine are both effective and instantaneous.
[I am not in favor of death penalties.]
I am, but I don't agree that the state should execute anyone. The death penalty should mean that you stay in jail until you're dead, then you get buried there. That's a humane death penalty. But now I'm going to poke a bit of fun...
[The electric chair is also barbaric because too much electricity is used. The heart is not stopped, but the subject is simply boiled to death. This methods are only marginally better than stoning to death. Almost anything would be better:-]
I suppose we could put them in a microwave oven. Or actually use a pot of boiling oil... If we really want to do the barbaric thing I like the idea of cutting their hearts out and stuffing the heart into a stone idol while the executed person is still aware of what's going on.
[* An overdose of anesthetic is going to be much better, including heroin overdose. This would be my preferred method.]
That's a somewhat cleaner way of doing an execution, but to really be sure of an overdose death with heroin you're going to need to give them a few shots of booze. And some of those who we would want to execute might just have a higher tolerance to drugs like heroin, so even with the booze it might not kill them.
[* A correct dose of electricity would simply stop the heart. It would be quick and effective.]
Why not a chamber filled with co2 gas, sure they might flop about a bit before finally dropping dead, but they would be dead and it's not a painful way to go. (I've been told, as I'm still alive and not tried to kill myself by electricity or gas I can't say for sure, and no one who's ever died in such a manner has come back and told me that it didn't hurt at all...)
[* Slitting the throat would be effective, and quick.
* Firing squad method is instantaneous if the brain is hit.
* Hanging and guilotine are both effective and instantaneous.]
Now those are just messy ways of offing someone. In each case you're going to be spilling a lot of blood and other matter around the execution place, someone would have to clean it up (even if it was just to shovel up the sand).
Hanging people is not always effective, nor is it instantaneous. If you don't break the person's neck when they're dropped they choke to death. If you miscalculate some of the variables involved in hanging a person you could tear their heads off or see the rope break and not kill the person.
Silly objections over. The primary objection with any execution is that it's final, if the jury or judge oopsed, if the evidence was faulty, there's no way to take back the event.