Anyone who has unfortunately had to euthanize their cat or dog at the vet has seen how drama free the procedure is. They just go to sleep and over the next couple minutes their breathing and then their heart stops and that’s it.
If we insist on the death penalty for humans why does it appear so complicated and fraught with error? Why can’t they just use the same single chemical vets use rather than the 3 separate ones and an elaborate apparatus to administer it as they do in California? Surely, we can’t be that different, we’re all mammals.
The same thing crosses my mind every time I hear about them screwing up an execution. The ignorance of the whole thing just baffles me.
Because execution isn’t actually about ending someone’s life quickly and painlessly. It’s about punishing the criminal and about providing “closure” for the survivors. It’s about ritual and ceremony.
As mammals, sex is quite natural and normal. Yet humans fumble with it like a monkey with a greased live fish.
Why should it be any different when we’re trying to figure out right and moral and humane ways to kill each other?
It isn’t always that easy. Sometimes animals go into convulsions from the drugs, and that looks bad to the owners. Some Vets decline to do this with the owner present for that reason.
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Because drugs which are approved for use on animals are not necessarily approved for use for humans.
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Because if drugs approved for use on humans are used to execute people, it may become difficult to obtain those drugs. Many drugs are made outside the United States, and other countries will not allow drugs to be exported for the purpose of executions.
Actually, the protocol I use as an owner has three steps : Valium to sedate, propafol(?) for deep sleep and then the third drug to stop the heart.
The distinction is that in euthanasia the purpose is, at least in my experience, to mercifully end suffering and also there is explicit consent by proxy. No punishment.
In execution the matter is forced.
Having said that, the veterinary medical protocols could be scaled up, bioethical issues aside.
Plus, vets are medically trained to identify the proper meds (and amounts, etc) for the end-of-lfe to be painless. AFAIK, prison personnel are not rreally medically trained and just do as told. This is what, for the most part, led to the botched execution procedure (wrong med used with autopsy confirmation) of Charles Warner Here’s a WSJ write-up on it. Those who do not know the drugs’ names/effects/usages should NOT be using them in any way. Ever.
Basically, its potassium chloride that stops the heart in large doses, but State of Oklahoma used potassium acetate, totally wrong drug. No one in the process knew this and apparently someone in the chain-of-custody of the lethal-‘cocktail’ placed a label over a pre-labeled syringe of the potassium acetate indicating it was potassium chloride (as I overheard on a local TV news report earlier today). Big fuck-up that calls into question the whole use of any/all meds in human executions when only prison personnel are involved, IMHO.
This is what I was going to say. With respect to human executions (as opposed to animal euthanasia and, where legal, human euthanasia), the people who know how to do it aren’t allowed to do it.
It’s not as if a panel of doctors developed the procedure over time. The 3-drug method was invented by Oklahoma’s state medical examiner (Jay Chapman), approved by one anesthesiologist and became law in Oklahoma. Other states copied the Oklahoma law. Also, this means they can’t change the method without changing the law.
Here’s a recent interview of Dr. Chapman.
I’m sure veterinarians have proper training and much experience performing euthanasia, and the procedure has been improved over time. None of this is true for lethal injection.
Good article! It explains alot. I assumed with Dr. Chapman that these people would at least be minimally trained to use the 3 drugs. The procedure followed by the vet appears so simple that even a prison employee could do it after 10 min of instruction.
And that’s entirely the problem. No one wants to perform the scale-up experiments. No one wants to submit a proposal for the research and put it past the ethics committee. No one wants to perform a double blind assay on various reagents. And no one wants to be the manufacturer of these chemicals for various states to purchase and buy. And when I say no one, I mean there is a small amount, halfheartedly. Its not like a flu vaccine, or a snake-bite antivenom, and we get shortages of those too.
I was watching a BBC program, where Tony Robinson did the worst jobs in history. He tried practice executioner – taking a big ole axe to a pumpkin and a slab of meat. Turns out, he got more training that most medieval executioners. There was no training program for them at all. They were just people due for execution, who did this rotten job, just to save their own neck.
The heart is stopped by the potassium (K+) cations. The identity of the anions (Cl- or CH3CO2-) is completely irrelevant, since they have no important physiological effects in this time frame.
It’s as if they were shooting the guy, and the protocol called for .38 caliber bullets and the made a terrible mistake and used .44 caliber instead. No effect whatsoever.
Yep. If they really wanted it to be quick and painless they’d do inert gas drowning.
This is correct. If all executions by lethal injection were performed by the experienced doctors and staff from the anaesthesia department of a busy hospital, there probably would hardly ever be a botched execution. However, the participation of medical professionals in judicial executions is either illegal, unethical or otherwise unacceptable.
The execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the executioner took several tries to completely sever her head. Even back then, good help was hard to come by. The guillotine was invented (by… M. Guillotine) as a speedy and humane way to accomplish the same result.
It was only a few decades ago, IIRC, that Spain did away with the garrote.
However, the US constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment. In the Good Old Days, prisoners hung used to dangle for minutes waiting to suffocate. The more merciful quick drop is a recent invention, as is the lack of drawing, quartering, and dsplaying the head on a pike. The electric chair was a snide attempt by Edison to prove that Westinghouse’s AC current was more lethal than his (Edison’s) nice, safe DC. However, he sold it as a fast efficient painless and less messy way to die - ignoring the fact it took sometimes several tries, often the subject was smoking and sometimes the subject burst into flames. Likewise the gas chamber was supposed to be quick and (relatively) painless.
So too, the lethal injection is supposed to be painless, quick and humane. The fact that it is not sometimes (or often) - well, there’s the famous quote by Napoleon, “never attribute to malice what can as easily be explained by incompetence.”
Medically-assisted suicide is legal in four US states, and several other countries. It would be surprising, to me, if the medical profession were unaware of any medically acceptable methods to carry out this procedure.
By the way, I disagree with Napoleon’s quote above. I’ve seen far too many things occur in my life that could easily have been attributed to incompetence, but there was a great deal of premeditated malice at work. And probably even done a few myself.
Not quite on bullet analogy - that would be more comparing dosages of same thing (projectile, per se).
Firstly, IANAChemist, but
In reading the wiki’s on potassium acetate-v-chloride, I see major different therapeutical and/or typical uses of each drug. Potassium acetate is used in mummification process (Lenin, for one), for example, and in treating of diabetic ketoacidosis, removal of DNA proteins in molecular biology, etc. No mention of cardiac-related treatment(s)/uses. Wiki not the best source, of course. Why not use potassium fluoride or other potassium-based compounds - enough of anythng will kill a person, for the most part (as a broad statement).
My point that Oklahoma used the totally wrong (and lawfully (pre)approved) drug is proved beyond any refute by autopsy, and the drug used was not one manufactured/indicated to regulate and/or stop the heart (as in cardiac surgeries that require a non-beating heart as mentioned in the wiki) in a non-cruel and unusual manner as required by the highest of law levels.
Might as well have used bleach,muriatic acid or whatever to stop heart muscle’s contractions, or some other non-indicated chemical that would would cause such. Or a rifleshot, of course. Potassium acetate was NOT the drug to be used but used in mislabeled syringe (afaik) anyways, assumedly after a number of prison system’s ‘checks-and-balances’ to absoutely ensure proper med administration when administered at time of execution. It was definitely “unusual” to use the acetate instead of the chloride version of potassium compund(s), no doubt at all, medically speaking. Right?
One big difference between pets and prisoners is that many prisoners have abused drugs for years. What might be a knock-out dose for a typical person might only cause mild drowsiness for a hard-core drug user. In addition, many of these users have terrible veins. Just finding a vein suitable for injection is really hard, especially for the incompetent people that get the job in many cases. There have been cases where a needle wasn’t properly inserted and the result wasn’t noticed until the prisoner started showing non-standard responses. Like not dying right away.
The conditions are far from comparable.
If this was the case, wouldn’t we hear about pre-surgery anesthesia for inmates constantly going badly?
Nope. This claim is untrue whatever the manner of execution, unless we’re talking about “breaking on the wheel” (used only in a few states).