"The role of doctors in executions questioned," is the AP report, via the Columbia Tribune. Here's an extended excerpt:
Some of the nation's 32 death penalty states mandate doctor participation — including Oklahoma — but critics say what happened there proves a doctor's presence can't guarantee the process will go smoothly.
"Physicians have an ethical and moral responsibility to remain as far from the execution chamber as possible," said Jonathan Weisbuch of Phoenix, a death penalty opponent. He calls what happened in Oklahoma torture. "How dare they experiment on a living human being," Weisbuch said.
In Oklahoma on Tuesday, the execution team struggled to find a suitable vein for injecting the lethal drugs and a vein collapse prevented the drugs from working properly. Clayton Lockett, a convicted murderer, writhed before the execution was called off. He died later of an apparent heart attack. According to witnesses and a letter from the state's prisons chief, a physician checked the IV line, checked to see if Lockett was unconscious and reported that not enough drugs had been given to kill him — all violations of the American Medical Association's ethics policy.
The AMA says it's unethical for doctors to be involved except in a peripheral way. That's one reason why the number and identities of physicians who do participate are shrouded in secrecy. Ardis Hoven, the AMA's president, issued a statement Friday regarding Lockett's execution.
"No matter how one feels about capital punishment, it is disquieting for physicians to act as agents of the state in the assisting, supervising or contributing to a legally authorized execution," Hoven said. "The American Medical Association is troubled by continuous refusal of states to acknowledge the ethical obligations of physicians that strictly prohibit involvement in capital punishment."
Weisbuch says the Oklahoma case underscores why an execution moratorium is needed. He plans to ask the AMA to lobby for a ban at the group's policymaking meeting next month in Chicago. Similar attempts have failed. But whether Lockett's execution, drug shortages and concerns about their effectiveness will sway the AMA this time remain to be seen.
NPR's Weekend Edition posts, "Should Doctors Participate In Executions?" The segment is hosted by Rachel Martin, and features an interview with Ty Alper of the University of California Berkeley School of Law. There is audio at the link.
ALPER: Well, most medical associations - the American Medical Association and state-based medical associations have ethical guidelines that prohibit the participation of doctors in executions. But it's important to keep in mind that those are just the guidelines of those medical associations. And the majority of doctors are not members of those associations. So the guidelines don't have any enforcement teeth.
MARTIN: Some in the medical community say that doctors who participate in state executions should actually lose their licenses. This past weekend, a man named Sidney Wolfe, physician and consumer advocate, said, quote, "it's reprehensible when a physician deliberately participates in any way in the intentional killing of another human being by involvement in execution." You yourself oppose the death penalty. Do you agree with him?
ALPER: I don't agree with him. I think - I am opposed to the death penalty, And I don't think that we should be executing people. But if we are and particularly if we're going to do it in by way of procedures that are shrouded in secrecy, that use experimental combinations of drugs that have never been used before, then we need to have competent medical personnel involved.
And I think that courts should require that qualified competent medical personnel participate. That doesn't mean that any particular doctor should be forced to participate in an execution. But if a person is going to be executed, there should be qualified people on hand.
Time posts, "The Slippery Slope From Medicine to Lethal Injection," by Dr. Joel B. Zivot. He's an anesthesiologist and medical director of the Cardio-Thoracic and Vascular Intensive Care Unit at Emory University Hospital.
To suggest that Lockett’s execution was “botched” raises an ethical question for physicians who are asked how it can be improved. Doctors swear an oath, the Hippocratic Oath, that they are concerned with the relief of suffering in others. States that utilize lethal injection appeal to a doctor’s oath to lend assistance during execution in order to reduce suffering, but that’s a suspect and misplaced appeal. Inmates who are being executed are not patients, and yet it seems that lethal injection attempts to turn them into such. But if Lockett were my patient, my duty would be to cure his sickness and reduce his suffering. At no time would it be to seek his death over his life, even if he were dying from a terminal illness.
And:
The last drug given was potassium chloride. In sufficient quantities, this drug will stop the heart, though, again, not in an instant and not without pain. Oklahoma corrections claimed that Lockett died of a “massive heart attack.” Pending autopsy, that is mere speculation. My view, based on a review of events as best can be determined, was that Oklahoma executed Lockett by subjecting him to a painful and terrifying death by suffocation.
Earlier coverage from Oklahoma begins with the preceding post. Related posts are in the physician category index.
Comments