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Alabama’s execution problems are part of a long history of botched lethal injections

Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College, The Conversation on

Published in Political News

Lethal injection’s critics told the commission that the method would actually be easily botched, especially if doctors did not conduct the procedure. And even when done right, those in favor of the death penalty as the ultimate sentence further argued that it would be too humane. It would take the dread out of death and dampen capital punishment’s deterrent effect.

Ultimately, lethal injection’s opponents prevailed, aided by the medical community’s unwavering stance against it. Doctors “did not want the syringe, which was associated with the alleviation of human suffering, to become an instrument of death.”

For nearly 100 years after New York’s decision, no jurisdiction in the United States authorized execution by lethal injection. But the early debate over lethal injection foreshadowed arguments that were heard in 1977 during Oklahoma’s consideration of this execution method.

Proponents echoed Bleyer and declared that executions using this method could be accomplished with “no struggle, no stench, no pain.”

This time they won.

The specific drugs to be used in lethal injection – the anesthetic sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant – would not be chosen until four years later. Although the original law only called for those two drugs, a third drug was soon added: potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest.

 

Together, these three drugs would make up what became the “standard” three-drug, lethal injection protocol. And what started in Oklahoma spread quickly. Lethal injection soon became the execution method of choice across the United States in every state that had the death penalty.

But right from the start, administering lethal injections proved to be a complex procedure that was difficult to get right. In fact, the first use of lethal injection by Texas in 1982 gave a foretaste of some of the problems that would later come to characterize the method of execution.

The Texas team charged with executing a prisoner named Charles Brooks repeatedly failed in their efforts to insert an IV into a vein in his arm, splattering blood onto the sheet covering his body. And after the IV was secured and the drugs began to flow, Brooks seemed to experience considerable pain.

The difficulties in Brooks’ execution and in subsequent lethal injections result from the fact that medical ethics do not allow doctors to take part in choosing the drugs or administering them. In the place of doctors, prison officials are responsible for the lethal injection procedure. In addition, dosages of the drugs used are standardized rather than tailored to the needs of particular inmates as they would be in a medical procedure. As a result, sometimes the lethal injection drugs don’t work correctly.

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