"States Swap One Drug For Another, And Botched Executions Follow," is by Greg Allen. It aired on Monday afternoon's NPR program, All Things Considered. There is audio at the link.
For years, most states relied on a three-drug protocol to carry out executions. The first one often was pentobarbital, a powerful drug that renders an inmate unconscious and that, in high enough doses, leads to death on its own. The second drug paralyzes the condemned person. The third stops his or her heart.
The problem for those who carry out the death penalty is that pentobarbital has become hard to find. U.S. drug companies no longer make it. European drug makers stopped exporting it to the U.S. In its place, Florida last year began using a drug never before tried in the U.S. for executions: Midazolam. That's the same drug used last week in the botched execution in Oklahoma.
Earlier this year, it was used by Florida's Department of Corrections to execute Paul Augustus Howell. That was after Howell went to the Florida Supreme Court, unsuccessfully, to challenge the drug's use in lethal injections. His lawyer, Sonya Rudenstine, says in Howell's case and two earlier executions, the inmates continued to move, even opening their eyes after they were supposed to be unconscious.
"Botched execution could renew 'cruel' challenges, is by AP Legal Affairs Writer Andrew Welsh-Huggins, via the Akron Legal News.
While officials later blamed a ruptured vein — not the drugs themselves — the case is raising questions about the ability of states to administer lethal injections that meet the Eighth Amendment requirement that punishments be neither cruel nor unusual.
Death penalty opponents such as the American Civil Liberties Union called for a moratorium on capital punishment. And the White House said the procedure fell short of the humane standards required when the death penalty is carried out.
In light of other apparently bungled executions around the U.S. in recent years, Jen Moreno, staff attorney at the Berkeley School of Law Death Penalty Clinic, said the risks are clear.
"To say that they're isolated incidents is mischaracterizing them, and what they really are is foreseeable consequences of using an inherently dangerous procedure," she said.
New York Magazine posts, "Lethal Injection Is Pretty Much the Worst Way to Execute People. So Why Do We Use It?" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.
Even under controlled circumstances like state executions — in which the executed has no freedom of movement, no ability to resist, in which the state is in complete control — human beings prove surprisingly resilient. Over the past century, 3 percent of hangings have been botched, and about 2 percent of electrocutions. More than 5 percent of gassings in state-operated gas chambers went awry. Lethal injections have become the most common mode of execution in the United States, but they are more error-prone still: 7 percent of them are botched. Which means that subsumed into the deep and difficult question of why we are executing prisoners at all is another question, more tangible but just as telling: Why are we killing them in the least effective way?
Lethal injection introduces a few particular complications. The drugs — chosen for their lethality — are not often used on human beings, and application is somewhat poorly understood.
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health has issued a news release, "New Paper Calls Upon States to Cease Experimenting with Lethal Injection Drugs and Comply with FDA Regulations." Here's the beginning of the release:
The Johns Hopkins Clinic for Public Health Law and Policy at the Bloomberg School of Public Health has crafted an evidence-based paper that presents a new perspective on the legality of the lethal injection process in the United States. The shortage of the combination of the three drugs previously used in States that use lethal injection to carry out capital punishment, in an attempt to comply with the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, has led to unregulated and experimental protocols in the lethal injection process that violate existing federal laws. The paper argues that state Departments of Corrections are violating U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigational new drug regulations by experimenting with lethal injection drugs when carrying out executions. The paper’s completion comes on the heels of the botched lethal injection execution that occurred recently in Oklahoma.
Earlier coverage from Oklahoma begins with the preceding post. You can also jump to lethal injection issues,
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