That's the title of an article in the current issue of the peer-reviewed online journal Public Library of Science. LINK Here's the summary:
Lethal injection for execution has largely replaced other execution methods, in part due to the appearance of a peaceful death; however, available evidence indicates that some inmates actually suffer extreme pain. This has triggered legal challenges against lethal injection on the grounds that it violates the United States' constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Some jurisdictions collect comprehensive data on executions and outcomes, and some have modified their lethal injection protocols. Recently, jurists and lethal injection advisory panels have recommended specific changes to be instituted for future executions. Such use of biomedical inquiry to evaluate, modify, and “improve” protocols resembles human experimentation and should be scrutinized against accepted norms for ethical conduct of research, particularly given the vulnerable nature of the prisoner population. Although the regulations governing prisoner research vary by jurisdiction, the ethical framework for the modification of lethal injection protocols should be made clear prior to further investigation into how to “improve the process.”
Science Daily has this report on the article.
A team of medical, ethical, and legal scholars argues in PLoS Medicine that in some US states the modification of lethal injection protocols is tantamount to experimentation upon prisoners without the prisoners' consent and without any ethical safeguards.
Drs. Leonidas Koniaris and Teresa Zimmers (University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, USA) and colleagues lay out evidence obtained in litigation and from Freedom of Information act requests that suggests that at least 10 states are performing regimens that may be akin to human experimentation.
"The collective practice of lethal injection," say the authors, "has employed invasive testing of different drug protocols and devices, data collection and monitoring, and systematic review with outcome data being used to revise practice." Certain lethal injection inquiries, they say, may therefore constitute human subjects research.
While death row inmates have been stripped of the right to freedom and to life, say the authors, they maintain the right to bodily integrity and the right to refuse to be experimented upon. And yet in these 10 states, Koniaris and Zimmer's analysis finds that inmates were not asked for their consent to be included in lethal injection practices, which are essentially experimental in nature.
New Scientist has, "Does lethal injection amount to human experimentation?"
Lethal injection, widely used for carrying out the death penalty in the US, amounts to human experimentation, a group of researchers is claiming.
Following a six-month national moratorium on the controversial practice, the US Supreme Court ruled in April that executing prisoners using a deadly but supposedly painless drug cocktail did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the constitution.
However, the argument is far from settled. Legal challenges to the procedure are holding up executions in several states and new research figures are tangling the legal and ethical debate surrounding state-sanctioned killing even further.
Led by Teresa Zimmers of the University of Miami in Florida, US, a team of researchers is arguing that the practice constitutes human experimentation, and should be subject to the same stringent ethical standards currently used in biomedical research on people.
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