A new medical study says that lethal injection, the accepted practice of putting prisoners to death in the United States, can possibly result in a very slow death. It can be extremely painful, and some inmates may actually be conscious, unable to move, as they suffocate.
Public Library of Science (PLoS), an online medical journal, published the study. This organization includes influential and highly respected persons in the fields of medicine and science, including Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, and a co-recipient of a Nobel prize.
This particular study was prompted last year when a federal judge in California ordered doctors to assist in the killing of Michael Morales. Morales was convicted of raping and murdering a teenage girl. Doctors refused, and the legal arguments in this case are still ongoing.
While most Americans are under the impression that lethal injection is a humane form of death, the authors of this study state that no scientific group has ever been able to validate such a claim. That is why doctors and health professionals are barred from participating in executions due to medical ethics.
The PLoS study followed dozens of executions. They found that each inmate receives the same dosage of anesthetic. There is no variance based on the person’s weight or other key factors that doctors typically utilize when administering medications. The authors of the study say that there were inmates that received too small an amount of anesthetic. There were also cases when the anesthetic wore off before death had occurred.
“You wouldn’t be able to use this protocol to kill a pig at the University of Miami” without proving that it was as effective as stated, said Teresa Zimmers, a biologist who led the study.
There are 37 states that currently rely on lethal injection. Each of these states uses identical dosages of the three-chemical cocktail for every prisoner: thiopental, an anesthetic; pancuronium bromide, a nerve blocker and muscle paralyzer; and potassium chloride, a drug to stop the heart. The latter two injections could possibly kill all by themselves. However, the anesthetic is given first to take the inmate into an unconscious state so the other drugs can do their jobs.
Yet based on the size of the inmates and the average length of time for death to occur – 10 to 14 minutes – there were certainly prisoners who suffered.
“The person would feel either asphyxiation or the burning sensation associated with the potassium,” said Dr. Leonidas Koniaris, a surgeon and co-author at the University of Miami. “The potassium would cause extreme discomfort, something like being put on fire.”
Sometimes, once was not enough for the drug cocktail to be effective. The study witnessed at least one inmate in California who required a second dose. The warden at that facility reported that additional doses were used in at least two other executions.
Many state officials continue to claim that the process is reliable and legal.
Yet, in the wake of the study results, 11 of the 37 states have chosen to either put a hold on the use of lethal injection or begin its own effectiveness study.
The authors of the study ask that the death penalty be abolished, saying, “There is no humane way of forcibly killing someone.
Persons who support the death penalty view this study as being “more like political science than medical science,” said Mike Rushford, president of Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento.
Steve Stewart, a prosecuting attorney in Clark Country, Indiana, says that this issue can be resolved simply by just giving a higher dose of the anesthetic. Yet, he does not think this would satisfy the opponents of the death penalty, who see all methods as cruel.
“It doesn’t matter a whole lot to me,” Stewart said, “that someone may have felt some pain before they were administered poison as a method of execution.”
