utting Inmates Down Like Dogs and Making It Hurt: Ann Woolner
Commentary by Ann Woolner
Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- An IV line in a vein, a few pushes of a syringe, and the condemned man drifts off to sleep before his heart stops. How cruel could that possibly be?
Gone are the nooses and firing squads, the gas chambers and Old Sparky, a common nickname for the electric chair. No more reports of flames shooting out from inmates' heads.
Those convicted of the cruelest of killings are now dispatched into the next world as comfortably as a surgery patient who died on the operating table, or a family pooch taken to that mythical farm in the country. Or so it would seem.
From the arguments this week at the U.S. Supreme Court over lethal injections, you would think our standard of decency so exquisitely evolved and the debate over execution methods so refined that remaining differences hardly matter.
Is monitoring adequate? After rendering the inmate unconscious, should executioners paralyze him so that he doesn't twitch or convulse? Is mere risk of pain unconstitutional?
Surely this is yet another ploy by those imaginative death penalty opponents to foil the system and keep their monstrous clients alive another day, another year, as Justice Antonin Scalia suggested.
To hear this week's argument, you wouldn't know that it's likely that executioners have repeatedly, if unintentionally, inflicted agonizing pain on conscious prisoners too paralyzed to move, too suffocated to cry out.
Prolonging Execution
Executions that are supposed to take 10 to 15 minutes have dragged on much longer. In Ohio, it took 86 minutes to kill Joseph Clark.
``It don't work,'' Clark said over and over, lifting his head and shaking it when he was supposed to be unconscious. Nineteen puncture wounds, much moaning and almost an hour and a half later, he was dead.
Beyond the scarcity of healthy veins among death row inmates, the critical problem is that, if the first of the three drugs that most states use, a barbiturate, is given in too small a dose or slips through an IV leak, a punctured vein or a misplaced catheter, the inmate will be conscious when the next two drugs are pushed into his body.
The second one will paralyze him. The third drug, which stops the heart, will burn and inflict unspeakable agony if he is conscious.
That is precisely what happened in several executions, the evidence seems to show.
No Medical Background
Many death chamber personnel have no medical background, don't read the protocol and get no training, according to testimony in several cases and official findings in Florida.
Ethical guidelines discourage medical personnel from aiding in death, but Missouri had an actual doctor, Alan Doerhoff, overseeing 54 of its executions until a federal judge ordered him off the job.
It turns out that Doerhoff had been sued for malpractice more than 20 times by his count, reprimanded by the state medical board for misrepresenting that fact and kicked out of two hospitals.
Dyslexic, he couldn't say for sure how much of what drug he had given to which inmate, he testified. He did acknowledge he sometimes gave half the anesthesia he was supposed to give.
None of that came up in this week's argument.
The justices are reviewing an appeal by two death row inmates in Kentucky, a state with relatively well-trained staff and no history of botched executions. Only one person has been lethally injected in Kentucky, a decade ago. It went fine, as best as anyone can tell.
A Poor Test Case
This is the case for you if you want the Supreme Court to ignore problems surrounding lethal injections. If you think the court should at least consider evidence this method can and does go disastrously awry, it's the wrong case.
Evidence of botched executions elsewhere was ruled irrelevant at an early stage of the Kentucky litigation, so the high court has slim information on them.
The justices do know that, unless the inmate is rendered completely unconscious by the first drug, he will suffer a horrendous death while appearing to be at peace.
Veterinarians generally use only a lethal dose of that first, painless drug to put down animals, finding no need to paralyze them or to use a potentially pain-inducing drug to stop the heart.
Angel Diaz no doubt wished for such a humane death when he was executed in Florida in 2006. Afterwards, burned flesh and foot-long blisters where two IVs had been inserted in his arms resulted when the catheters punctured his veins, according to a governor's commission on lethal injections.
The commission said it couldn't be sure Diaz suffered, though witnesses reported signs of consciousness.
Autopsy Results
Likewise, autopsies have reported punctured, collapsed or missed veins in some cases, making it possible that at least some anesthesia missed its mark.
During Tyrone Gilliam's execution in Maryland in 1998, an IV leaked, creating a puddle on the floor and a possibility that he never received the full dose of anesthesia, the state conceded during litigation.
In California, log reports on vital signs indicate that six out of the last 11 inmates executed may have been partially conscious, as the staff couldn't properly interpret their own readings.
In Oklahoma, witnesses reported Lloyd LeFevers lifting his head and looking like he was gasping for air when he was supposed to be unconscious. An autopsy found that drugs probably leaked into tissue.
This isn't about whether it is constitutional to impose death. It is about whether it's constitutional to do it as carelessly as it is done in this country, risking excruciating pain, when a single, lethal dose of barbiturate would do the job with no chance of hurting the condemned.
It's what veterinarians do for dogs.
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Ya know, I was with you up til this point.
