I realize this question may be silly, but what would happen if, through some bizarre twist of fate, someone on death row were immune to the drugs typically used for lethal injection? As I understand it, there are different drugs that relax the muscles, put you to sleep, stop your heart, etc. I have heard, many times in fact, of people being unaffected by anesthesia and so forth when having surgery, is it the same type of thing with lethal injection? Is it possible for this to ever happen, or are the drugs of a type that will cause effects to 100% of the population with absolute certainty? I realize that there are several drugs used at the same time here, and it’s rediculous to think that they could all be ineffective. If they were however, and the convict could not be executed using them, then what happens to him? And if they did work, but not like they should, could this be considered a form of torture?
Failure of the method does not invalidate the sentence, although there was a guy mentioned in a thread just recently who survived 3 attempts at execution by electrocution and was set free.
Most states with the death penalty have another alternative to lethal injection available. The electric chair, gas chamber, firing squad and hanging are still established as alternates in many states.
See the link below for execution methods by state.
Unless you are not mamalian, the drug to stop your heart always works. It’s potassium cloride, and it interfers with the ionic exchange within the cells of the heart. There is no way around that.
I don’t believe you’ve heard of people uneffected by anesthesia. There are people who require larger doses, and there have been cases of lazy anesthesiologists not noticing when their patient isn’t fully under, but, humans are basicly all the same.
The “muscle relaxers” are actually paralytic agents. They too, are exceeding strong and though a few individuals may require larger doses, they always paralyze eventually.
There actually are questions regarding the efficacy of the anaesthetics involved in lethal injection. As outlined in this Wikipedia article. The courts are begininng to hear cases about whether or not lethal injection is humane or constitutes a violation of the 8th Amendment.
There’s no question that the final ingredient, the Potassium Chloride, is lethal. That’s just the way that humans work. If you’ve got an inmate that’s immune to potassium overdose, than he is not human.
Anyway, if you know that lethal injection would be painful, then it would be arguably unconstitutional. If there’s not another method of execution legally available to the state (and there are, in several states), then the sentence would have to be commuted. Keep in mind that no state is constitutionally compelled to use lethal injections over other methods, and most pro-death penalty states would reintroduce older methods in problems were found with lethal injection.
The humaneness of lethal injection is a thorny problem because the people interested in proving it inhumane are either death row inmates or death penalty opponents. Likewise, its advocates are largely death penalty proponents. It’s hard to get an unbiased opinion.
To complicate matters, many of the anaesthetics commonly used in surgery don’t actually do anything to stop the pain while it’s occuring. They just keep you from remembering it. But in a lethal injection, so long as the KCl goes in, there’s no chance that the subject will remember any pain afterwards, which would arguably make lethal injection just as humane as many surgeries.
By that reasoning, you might as well bludgeon them to death with a crowbar. :dubious:
Works for me. It might be cruel, but it is not unusual.
No, not MOST states, only some. Over half of the states on your list have a sole method of execution. Many of the others there is a catch, eg Wyoming allows the gas chamber ONLY if lethal injection becomes unconstitutional, Tenessee allows the electric chair only for prisoners sentenced before 1999, and so on.
My WAG - in the very unlikely event that the condemned man is a mutant with a radically different biochemistry who is immune to that particular chemical, then the state would be authorised to use different chemicals that will be lethal to that individual. The sentence is death by lethal injection, not death by potassium chloride.
I’d like to point out that, if the anesthetic injection didn’t work, the potassium chloride injection would be pretty darn painful. I’ve spoken to … um … I’m thinking three, but I know it’s at least two, people who attempted suicide by injecting themselves with potassium chloride (after reading that it’s very effective and interrupting the beating of your heart, and realizing that it’s available in large quantities for not much money at the grocery store). To summarize: intense burning pain, from the start. One girl said the pain was so bad she pulled the needle out before injecting more than a little bit, and she said her arm and shoulder burned for hours after that, and felt more sensitive than usual to pain and cold for several weeks.
This isn’t the same thing as being immune to the particular form of execution, but the case of Mitchell Rupe in Washington State may be pertinent.
Wikipedia’s article on him is not very thorough. If I remember the details of his case, after being tried for the murder of three bank personnel, Rupe was given the choice of which death sentence he preferred: hanging or lethal injection, both (at that time) legal methods of execution.
He chose hanging, and promptly began to eat his way up to 400 pounds. Judges ruled that he could not be hanged, as his weight would cause him to be decapitated; and they couldn’t change his sentence because he was, by law, permitted to choose his method of execution (and naturally he didn’t want to change it).
He was re-tried for the case — the law had been changed to invalidate the hanging option, as there were no qualified hangmen to fill the position — but the jury deadlocked 11-1 and sentenced him to life in prison instead. Rupe recently died there, I believe.
[url=http://www.theolympian.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060207/NEWS01/60207062]Rupe died February 6, 2006.
He lived 25+ years longer than the two people he murdered.
Fixed coding :smack: Sometimes I feel that my head has fallen off.
How the heck does somebody in prison eat his way up to 400 pounds? Wouldn’t the prison just put you on a restricted calorie diet, especially if it was widely accepted that your only reason for doing so was to escape execution?
He started out pretty big, IIRC, over 300.
Maybe QtM could speak to diet monitoring in prison.
It’s tough. We put people that size on special diets. But what with trying to prevent murders and rapes, how much time do you think we devote to making sure inmates are sticking to their diets?
But…don’t they all just get the same three meals a day (exceptions made for religous, ethical, and health reasons)? I would think it would be pretty close to a 2,000 calorie diet normally without intervention. Are they allowed to buy extra food? And if so, how much can they really buy if (from my understanding) they only make a few cents an hour WHEN they actually do some work.
Inmates at my institution will get fat if they eat all the food provided to them and don’t exercise.
In addition, they can buy goodies on canteen from their own funds, in most cases.
Getting inmates on a medical food restriction against their will requires considerable documentation, paperwork, and sometimes even a court order. Folks in prison don’t lose all their rights automatically.
Death by … Ooga Booga! :eek:
I think the more likely scenario is one where venous access is difficult. Think of a long term heroin user. Do they then use central venous access? How far will they go? A cutdown?