All appeals exhausted, Guv says K.M.A., strapped into the gurney, death warrant already read. Just moments before the plunger machine is set in motion, halfway into his final statement the condemned has a heart attack.
Are there any protocols for this?
Perform CPR, revive him and then kill him? Just let it go, nature beat us to it?
What if after he’s revived he keeps having heart attacks. Medical staff says if he doesn’t have an emergency bypass he’ll be dead for good. Give him the bypass and then execute him? Seems pointless.
My guess is that they would do everything they could to revive him if possible and nurse him back to health so that he then be executed in the future by the state…
If the death penalty is to prevent further criminal acts by the condemned then there should be no acts taken to revive the prisoner just to kill them again.
If the death penalty is to exact revenge, by the state, on the condemned to assuage the damage done by their criminal acts then yeah, you have to revive them to kill them.
It does make me wonder what the policy is w.r.t Do Not Resuscitate and death row convicts. The state has a duty of care to people in prision which includes medical attention but you would think after the final appeal fails and the day grows near a DNR would be signed off on.
I don’t think having a heart attack on death row is a ‘get out of jail free card’ that would suddenly change a death sentence to life imprisonment.
It would be cruel and inhumane to let someone who has just had a heart attack die a slow agonizing death just because they are on death row when they could possibly be revived and killed humanely later on. I really don’t see any other option.
Right up until the moment when they flip the switch, the governor could change his mind and make the phone call, or the detective could barge in with new evidence, or whatever. If an inmate has a heart attack before the time listed on the death warrant, the state will take all reasonable measures to save them, same as for any other person in their care.
The real question would come if they’re still in the process of that lifesaving care at the moment listed on the warrant. I would guess that they would then proceed with the execution, according to schedule.
Now that was a day before the execution, not minutes, but it seems reasonable that the people whose job it is to keep prisoners alive would step in at any point until the execution procedure has actually begun.
I saw this question discussed in some news article or op-ed essay or something, some years ago. The answer was: Yes, they’d give him all the medical care it took to keep him alive, just so they could kill him.
Of course, this was discussing a hypothetical case where, say, the guy had a heart attack or something the day before, or other terminal disease that threatened to beat the hangman to it. I don’t recall any mention of something like a severe heart attack just minutes before the scheduled execution.
There’s a third idea, that the death penalty is to prevent similar criminal acts by others, in other words, to send a message that such acts will not be tolerated. Whether that message is effectively communicated is fodder for GD, so I won’t go into it; I’m just saying that there are other rationales besides the first two. (In fact, I could mention a fourth, but then we’ll be WAY off topic…)
Prisoners can sign DNR consent forms, even if they’re not on death row. I ran into a situation once where a nurse and I performed CPR on a prisoner who turned out to have a DNR. But I was okay because the DNR was part of his medical records and I was not medical staff - so I was okay because I wasn’t supposed to know he had a DNR and therefore was supposed to try and revive him. The nurse, on the other hand, got a write-up. He was supposed to have known the prisoner had a DNR, to have not performed CPR, and to have told me not to perform CPR.
I think the human factor would come into play, that though they should save him/her it may be more humane to ‘not do that so well’. There is the law and their is morality, they seldom coincide, but they are often reported observed traveling together.
What’s the protocol on that? Is the staff supposed to have the DNR status memorized for all prisoners? Or would they start CPR and call up to find the DNR status to know if they should continue? Or would they just stand there doing nothing until the answer came?
But how far along does someone have to be before a DNR kicks in? Can they refuse to remove a chicken bone from his esophagus, or watch the prisoner bleed to death if he slits his wrists?
Wasn’t really an issue in this case. The nurse had been treating the prisoner right before this and so he had just been reading that prisoner’s medical records.
I am not a doctor or a lawyer. Or a doctor-lawyer (those guys make the big money). But my guess would be that type of treatment is allowed. DNR, after all, means “do not resuscitate” - if you’re treating somebody who’s still alive, you’re not resuscitating them.
For me, the more telling point re: the OP is that his execution was a day late–they let him recuperate for an extra day so he’d be in better shape for his execution. Can’t be executing somebody on death’s door, after all.
Honestly I thought this OP was in GD when I replied.