Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON
As renewed debate takes place in the United States over the ethics of executions, a medical review of dozens of executions added fuel to the dispute last week by concluding that the drugs used in the lethal injection process sometimes do not work properly, causing slow and painful deaths.

Time magazine reports that the study, published in the Public Library of Science online medical journal, claims that lethal injection as currently practiced probably violates constitutional bans on cruel and unusual punishment.

The analysis was based on reviews of executions in California and North Carolina. According to the Los Angeles Times, the study says some inmates feel pain but cannot cry out because of the paralyzing nature of the drugs, and others die of suffocation and are awake enough to realize it.

The study comes in the wake of a botched execution in Florida, where an inmate lived for 34 minutes and needed two doses of fatal drugs because the technicians who inserted the IV tube missed his vein, reports the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

“This raises the possibility people are being tortured and you can’t see it because they are paralyzed,” university of Miami surgery professor Leonidas Koniaris, who led the analysis, told the Washington Post. “I’m not sure a civilized society should be doing this.”

But Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice legal Foundation, an organization favoring capital punishment, argued that the drugs clearly work even if they take longer than expected.

“I don’t think the public worries too much about Jeffrey Dahmer feeling a little bee sting,” he told the Sun-Sentinel.