Thirty-seven US states have selected potentially excruciating chemicals, and many have delegated administration of those drugs to unfit personnel. As a result, it is virtually certain that inmates have needlessly suffered painful deaths and that more will continue to do so.
In January, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that will set the standard for determining whether the pain and suffering inflicted during lethal injection violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Governments thus might be required to take greater care in administering lethal injections.
The prevailing method of lethal injection employs three drugs that simultaneously create a risk of terrific pain and conceal that pain from all observers. The first chemical is a volatile, difficult-to-administer anesthetic. The second paralyses all the inmate’s muscles, including his diaphragm. The third burns intensely as it courses through the veins toward the heart, where it induces cardiac arrest. Insufficiently anesthetised inmates thus lie paralysed while experiencing conscious suffocation and searing pain before death. As the states have selected drugs that are so sensitive to error, however, it is imperative that they employ the right people to administer them. States try to conceal their personnel’s qualifications, but some details have begun to emerge.
If they fail to employ people capable of, among other things, correctly mixing the drugs and setting the intravenous lines, states are inviting problems. The paralysing drug usually hides the execution team’s mistakes, but occasionally the errors are in plain, gruesome view.
What is intolerable, though, is for states to insist on retaining those same chemicals and personnel once they have been alerted to the significant risk of profound suffering. Numerous states have done exactly this — and then sought to conceal all information about their procedures.
Regardless of one’s views on the death penalty, carrying out executions is a solemn responsibility that should be approached with care and deliberation. Government’s failure to act responsibly is a disservice not only to inmates but to the citizens who have made the death penalty state policy. As a federal judge in California explained, if the state wants to resume executions, its refusal to recognise its procedure’s many problems is “self-defeating”.
It is outrageous that states and the federal government have elected to carry out executions with dangerous, painful chemicals and then abdicated responsibility for the procedures to untrained, unqualified personnel. Government owes its citizens a transparent, careful reconsideration of this deeply flawed procedure that, as currently constituted, is bound to fail.
Los Angeles Times
