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The Ugly Business of Lethal Injection
Attorneys trying to prevent the cruelty of a botched execution are challenging states' efforts to conduct experiments on their clients with new execution drugs.
The pretense of lethal injection as a peaceful and painless way to execute prisoners is unraveling, and this may change the face of the death penalty in the United States.
In September 2009, the state of Ohio tried to execute Romell Broom. The execution team, with Broom's cooperation and even assistance, poked and prodded him with needles for more than two hours but was unable to find a usable vein. It wasn't the first bungled lethal injection in Ohio, but it was the first to end with the inmate still alive. 
"Eager prosecutors and prison officials, with the support of compliant courts, have managed to keep death chambers active." (photo: World Coalition Against the Death Penalty)
Since 1977, states have adopted the Orwellian practice of staging executions to look like benign medical procedures. This charade was designed to obscure reality. But now botched executions, such as Broom's, and increasingly pointed objections from the pharmaceutical industry, have focused attention on the legally and ethically dubious ways lethal injection actually works.
In March 2010 Hospira Inc., the sole Food and Drug Administration-approved manufacturer of sodium thiopental, formally asked Ohio prison officials and other states not to use the drug for executions. This plea fell on deaf ears, so in January 2011 Hospira ceased its production.
A mad scramble for a new source ensued. But in a globalized pharmaceutical marketplace, the search for sodium thiopental collided with the rest of the world's growing opposition to the death penalty. Novartis, a Swiss-based drug company, quickly announced that it would prevent the export of its generic version of sodium thiopental to the United States.
Several states acquired it from Dream Pharma, a small distributor operating out of a driving school in London, but much of it was confiscated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency due to its questionable origins. Nebraska purchased its new sodium thiopental from Kayem, a supplier in India. Like Hospira and Novartis, Kayem tried to disassociate itself from lethal injection, stating that it would no longer sell the drug for use in executions, which it said aren't consistent with the "ethos of Hinduism." In the end Nebraska destroyed its newly purchased supply.
Without reliable sources of sodium thiopental, states have turned to a new anesthetic, pentobarbital, manufactured by Denmark-based Lundbeck. On June 23 of this year, Roy Blankenship was put to death in Georgia with Lundbeck's drug, even though the company had declared it was "not safe" and asked the Peach State not to use it. Pentobarbital, like sodium thiopental, is an anesthetic, and its purpose in executions is to render the prisoner unconscious so that the killing drugs that follow do not cause excruciating pain. Instead, Blankenship reacted strongly to this anesthetic, jerking his head, blinking rapidly, lunging and mouthing inaudible words.
Rather than halting executions temporarily to conduct a full investigation of what happened to Blankenship, the state responded to this debacle by agreeing to another death row inmate's demand that the next execution be videotaped. The inmate wanted to prove that this drug could cause pain and suffering.
This response illustrates the relentless enthusiasm with which Georgia and some other states pursue executions. Eager prosecutors and prison officials, with the support of compliant courts, have managed to keep death chambers active. There have been more than 90 executions since the bungled lethal injection attempt of Romell Broom.
But this may soon change. Attorneys trying to prevent the cruelty of a botched execution will continue to challenge states' efforts to conduct experiments on their clients with new execution drugs. In fact, states with small death rows and few executions, seeing costs but no benefits to being associated with such a sordid spectacle, will likely opt out by abolishing capital punishment outright, following the examples set by New Jersey, New Mexico, and Illinois.
Recent developments have permanently destroyed the myth of the humane execution. Lethal injection has been exposed as an ugly business, designed to divert attention from the even uglier reality that states are carrying out deliberate pre-meditated killings.
And in the end, that's what's wrong with capital punishment.
17 Comments so far
Show AllThat's right; There is no such thing as a humane way of executing people. Execution by lethal injection, whether successful or not, has proved to be no more humane than the use of the gallows, the gas chamber, the electric chair, or a rifle squad for the execution of criminals. Lethal injection has been proven to be just as inhumane as the above-mentioned other methods of execution, if not more so.
Agreed. Also no humane way to execute the billions of animals consumed by slaughterhouses, laboratories, and animal shelters every year.
How true! Why is mankind so much in love with sadism?
These lethal injection ceremonies bear a lot of resemblance to the "medical experiments" carried out by the Nazis and Japanese during WWII. I'm sure they had reasons for doing so that made as much sense to them as state-sanctioned murder does to those who support this sort of activity now, but just because there is apparent justification for an action doesn't make it right.
If there was no death penalty, there would be no problem...here is yet another manufactured 'crisis'. Lets join the rest of the sane world and just just abolish judicial killing. Its really could be that easy.. Does any one know how the California prison hunger strikers are getting on?
It's time to start looking at nitrogen asphyxiation as a means of capital punishment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_asphyxiation
Sorry but the US government has proven itself over and over again to be too corrupt, too incompetent, and in the case of some of its agents, too delusional to have the power to choose which of its citizens lives or dies.
It's time to grow up and end the death penalty, a practice for which there is no rational basis.
That's nonsense.Lack of oxygen is extremely uncomfortable to the point of pain; the feeling is like someone's crushing your chest and attempts to breathe are accompanied by panic. Used to be a technique of inducing dental anesthesia by giving the patient 100% nitrous oxide until (s)he turned blue. It was done to me when I was a kid, and I've never forgotten it. Elevated carbon dioxide produces no such symptoms and as long as there's enough oxygen, is not all that unpleasant until you start really hyperventilating. At any rate, it takes several minutes to develop--you're killed by the hypoxia well before the level of CO2 can get high enough to do anything.
But that's really a side issue. There's no clean way to kill a person. Since in every case capital punishment is both cruel and unusual, there should be no constitutional excuse for it. That it's been accepted for all these years in so many states is unconscionable. If we should ever make any attempt at being a civilized country, one of the first steps should be to abolish it.
The only way to have a just and fair death penalty is to avoid executing them. Sending someone to jail until they die, and then burying them behind the prison walls is an option. Why kill them at all, when by letting them live and grow old and finally die in a box is a far more effective punishment than a mere execution.
Executing a murderer lets the murderer get out of jail without paying for the crime.
Eggs-act-ly!
Death penalty advocates have various rationalizations for their position, but their purported reasons are lies. The motivation that drives death penalty supporters is not justice but a combination of vengeance, hatred, and sadism - the desire to punish, to inflict harm. Death penalty proponents would never admit it, but they don't really even care whether the person being executed is actually guilty.
If death penalty advocates really did care about justice, they would have changed their position in light of the many cases in which DNA evidence has proven that innocent people have been convicted of murder. The few honest ones, including some judges, have already done so.
Evans brings up another important clue in this regard with his mention of "staging executions to look like benign medical procedures." If issues of humanity were really a consideration, the guillotine would be the obvious method of choice, as it is reliable and instantaneous, causing no suffering. The guillotine is shunned because it's graphic; it leaves no room to doubt the barbarity of what is being done. Lethal injection looks benign in comparison, but because it causes drawn out suffering, is actually more barbaric. It provides the sadists with a way to indulge their perversion and betrays a stone hearted absence of humanity.
But the most blatant expression of the monstrous character of the death penalty proponents, is that of the right wing Supreme Court. Their position is that death row convicts have no right to potentially exculpatory DNA testing. Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Alito, and Thomas should just come right out and say it: "We don't care a whit about justice. We're driven by contempt. We're in it for the thrill of punishment."
Well stated, mlb.
Regarding "We don't care a whit about justice. We're driven by contempt. We're in it for the thrill of punishment.":
Another way of putting it might be, "We don't care a whit about justice. We only care about power."
It's those rooting at executions, from the bleachers to the skyboxes, not necessarily the hands-on technicians who accomplish the gruesome task, who experience that incomparable frisson of delight that comes when one gives oneself over to the diabolical ecstasy of momentary absolute, if vicarious, power and control.
There is no good method by which to carry out death sentences. Please consider the following commentary by Camus:
"An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."
Albert Camus---"Reflections on the Guillotine, Resistance, Rebellion & Death" (1956).
[Had Camus lived later and in the U.S., he might better have said "...confined him at his mercy for decades".]
However much or little physical pain is experienced by the condemned at the moment of execution, the real torture is his knowing that at a certain time, date, and place, he will be rendered completely helpless and killed by some particular method by persons who are "just doing their job". If he has friends or family among the witnesses, they will be devastated. Even friends or family members who are not present will suffer the loss of a loved one; they, who committed no crime, will endure a punishment that lasts beyond the execution. According to several former wardens, even those prison employees who volunteer to be part of the execution team (who may at the time tell themselves "all I did was strap down his left ankle") eventually suffer psychologically, realizing what they have done. Further, as a nation we all suffer when "our" government pursues false solutions to serious problems, and especially when it claims the "crown jewel of state power" which contradicts the notion of an "unalienable right to life".
The only solution is to join the civilized nations, which have already abandoned this ancient barbarity.
Here is a link to a list of the world's nations grouped according to their death penalty status:
http://www.handsoffcain.info/bancadati/index.php?tipotema=arg&idtema=15000611
If the Powerful Several were no longer able to put millions of people to death at all times, here slowly there quickly, meaning would drain from their persons, their wills would wilt, they would die and their bodies would shrivel.
You've gone right off the deep end haven't you. Sorry to see that. Get well soon.
Without justice for all, there is no justice for the one. This is another distraction to keep people from the "big" picture like what their gov. is doing DELIBERATELY to peoples all over the world and how here in the exceptioal US of A the vast majority of folks behind bars and subject to death by any means are of color. That, not even shown in this picture or mentioned. Racism, subtle, but ever there. What is the percentage of death penalty cases in the whole prision population? There is money in live bodies in jail. Tony