I suppose that any discussion of this point could turn into a GD and I’m willing to take it over there. If this is truly the position that these people take, and not a strawman, doesn’t it call into question the punishment vs. revenge angle? I mean, what good does it do to make him realize the badness of his criminal act if he’s going to be dead in a few minutes anyway? It seems a rather barbaric argument.
Forget the morality of the death penalty. Forget that many innocent folks get executed and then there is the “Oh shit, the guy proved to be innocent”. Forget the many innocents who have finally been released from death row for DNA evidence recently examined.
How frigging difficult is it to give some guy an overdose of heroin? People are doing it to themselves on a daily basis. Basically they just nod off to “sleep”. What is this nonsense with first one injection, then another, mysteriously weird hard to procure chemicals with weirder names…
Let’s just use our strong Afghan connection and score some heroin. Safe, fast and effective.
For the life of me, I cannot understand all this debating about procurement of chemicals and suffering at execution times. It makes me aware I am living in some primitive unenlightened culture.
I’m skeptical of the death penalty as a deterrent to crime in general, but surely whatever value as a deterrent it does have is almost entirely from the whole “not being alive anymore” thing, rather than the method of death.
The short answer is that they do often administer an anesthetic - the single drug method currently used by some states involves a massive overdose of thiopental, which is an anesthetic. It’s also the first of the three drug “cocktail” used by most states until recently, and is intended to induce anesthesia before the other two are administered. The Oklahoma execution used midazolam as the first drug, which is also used as an anesthetic.
If the DEA is seizing state’s supplies of thiopental, a legally prescribable schedule II drug, they’re really, really not going to look kindly on the completely illegal importation and possession of schedule I heroin. That said, Ohio recently executed a guy using hydromorphone, a prescription opiod/narcotic painkiller similar to morphine and heroin. I don’t know how they got it and they’re not telling.
Mmm, yes, except, no, preventing unnecessary suffering appears to be a real need. I don’t see states that are willing to proceed with executions without the appropriate drugs, information about the dosage, or trained professionals stopping at any time soon.
Wait, would an anesthetic actually even do anything? As I understand it, most modern general anesthetics don’t actually prevent you from feeling pain: What they do is prevent you from remembering the pain afterwards. But if someone’s getting executed, it’s pretty much a given that they’re not going to remember the pain, isn’t it?
No it isn’t. Protecting society and rehabilitation are also major goals of incarceration.
And prevent horrendous reoffending.
IMHO Pedophiles don’t need to be punished. They need to be gone.
I find that hard to believe, are you telling me I was feeling the pain of having my chest cut open, and my heart taken out, but just don’t remember?
Any surgeons on the dope who agrees with that?
So,
- Medical professionals don’t want to do it
- Drug companies don’t want their drugs used for it
- Some people want the condemned to suffer?
Do anesthesiologists really need to know why they’re putting people under GA? Can’t they just have a list of patients and requirements, e.g. patient 1 - asleep for 4 hours. Patient 2 - just sedated. Then after they’re sedated, patients are taken to the required procedures. You could mix in GA for executions with regular GA (that would require performing them in a hospital). So maybe you sedate 20 people and 1 is to be executed. It’d be like putting blanks in a firing squad, or having 5 people perform the lethal injection, but 4 are injecting into a bucket.
:dubious:
Considering the AMA’s policies against physicians participating in executions, my WAG is that physicians will refuse to release them until they are conscious. Again, medical professionals take a very dim view of people killing their patients.
I don’t think that’s how anesthesia works. AFAIK anesthesiologists stick around for the procedure (rather than just dialing the gas up to four hours and sending the patient off), so even if they don’t strictly need to know why they’re knocking someone out, they’re going to find out.
My WAG is that someone needs to be trained to administer lethal injections. No, it is not a job that I want.
The real question is why that person is not trained to use and supplied with straightforward anaesthetic drugs that reliably do the job. From this side of the globe it doesn’t seem to be that difficult an objective.
In all of the debate on capital punishment, its pros and cons and the ethical dilemmas that go both ways, it seems like the last thing that needs to be thrown into the mix is the possibility of botched procedures. Especially since it could be so easily mitigated against.
This anesthesiologist has an interesting couple of blog posts on the subject, and concludes that if done properly (emphasis on properly) the person should be unconscious at the point of death (although no way is he going to do it):
ANESTHESIA FACTS FOR NON-MEDICAL PEOPLE: LETHAL INJECTION AND THE ANESTHESIOLOGIST
JANUARY 2014 LETHAL INJECTION WITH MIDAZOLAM AND HYDROMORPHONE … AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST’S OPINION
Oh, so if you tell them, “That’s it, no need to stick around for this one,” they’ll know? Hmm maybe this just means we’ll switch to using asphyxia sooner.
A handful of comments on this and other points…
You may be thinking about midazolam’s “amnestic” quality, which means you don’t remember what happened during the time span the drug was affecting the central nervous system. Midazolam (trade name Versed in the US) is great for this effect. You might also be thinking about a “dissociative” effect some drugs have, which means that you both experience and are able to report sensations like pain, but the part of your brain that cares stops caring about it. In a sense, opioid narcotics are like this, because the euphoria can make you not care about pain even though you are technically aware of it. As an aside, my clinical experience with kidney stone patients is that you can give opioids until they are nearly unarousable; on arousing them, the pain is still (“About a 10, Doc.” They’ve just stopped caring about it. Another story.)
Anesthetics, by definition, actually prevent you from feeling pain. A local anesthetic (lidocaine and lots of other “-caines” are commonly used) prevents a nerve from functioning, so you experience a loss of sensation from whichever nerves are exposed to the drug (typically by local injection or topical application). A general anesthetic (lots of different drugs, typically administered intravenously or by inhalation of a gas form) induces loss of consciousness. One could think of this as central anesthesia at the brain level versus peripheral anesthesia at the nerve level from a local anesthetic.
Some comments on execution.
If we just want to be humane, we should give executionees an option for a liquid cocktail of benzodiazepenes and opioids if they prefer to be drowsy and less anxious while they are killed, and then we should use a device such as a penetrating captive bolt to the brainstem. Apparently we don’t like killing people this way, so that’s not gonna happen. But from a lack of pain and excellent efficacy standpoint, it has a lot to be said for it. Still we prefer this idea that execution be parallel to permanent sleep and should therefore look like the prisoner is getting ushered into a longish nap.
That requires drugs, and here’s the thing: It is drop dead ( 
) easy to kill a human being painlessly, quickly, peacefully and with absolute efficacy using drugs. A typical–but by no means only–combination cocktail would be a benzodiazepene to zone them out, a barbiturate to render them unconscious, a paralytic so they stop breathing, and perhaps a cardiotoxic drug (could be as simple as potassium) so their heart stops. No matter what you read, and no matter how many pretenses there are this is not the case, it is the case. Period.
Big IV dose of Versed; big IV dose of Pentothal or Diprovan (propofol); big IV dose of Zemuron (rocuronium); big IV dose of potassium.
A protocol (were I king of the world) would require bilateral IV access with an intracath and not just an intravenous steel needle (this would diminish the problem of extravasation), and various intramuscular injections to chill out the guy who is over-inclined to rage against the dying of the light instead of cooperating.
Bilateral simultaneous intravenous injections of the drug protocols, in correct order. That person will die and they will exit this world without a peep.
The problem with my scenario is not technical (with the exception of occasional problems with IV access, which can be solved with a cut-down access when needed).
It’s that qualified medical professionals don’t kill people, drug manufacturers don’t like to make drugs that are used to kill people, various regulatory organizations don’t like to make it easy to use drugs to kill people, and death penalty opponents have all sorts of ways to further gum up the process.
This leaves amateurs, hacks, hangers-on and crappy med choices as the agents for a typical lethal injection execution, and whatcha got there is a recipe for incompetently administered marginally, effective efforts by the Keystone Cops playing the roles of Bruno Tesch and Heinrich Himmler. And the gallows humor ( the Pedant is on a roll today! ) that results when one of the most lethal nations in the world, capable of wiping out an entire developing nation with a few nukes, cannot actually kill one guy on purpose without a major outcry of “Oh…the humanity!”
<CP exits, muttering and chuckling, and resolving to be reborn on a planet with less farce consequent to good intention.>
PS: Maybe add a little oral potassium cyanide after the Versed? …I’d have to research it more.
…incompetently administered, marginally effective…
Crap. We need a ten minute edit window for the elderly.
I’m reading this thread, and just shaking my head. It seems the biggest problem is finding licensed people that can accurately tap a vein. Is there no Nursing or Medical Technician rating that can simply find a vein and hit it, and then under a doctor’s observation, connect the medication?
I’ve given blood plenty of times. I don’t know the phlebotomist’s ratings, but I’ve never had a problem–they would seem like amateurs given a state execution.
Tripler
This seems kind of like a no-brainer.
No, there isn’t, because such people have medical ethics also.
That actually appears to be what happened in Oklahoma - a phlebotomist inserted the IV under a doctor’s observation. A nurse probably wouldn’t actually insert the IV for the same reason that a doctor wouldn’t.