I have been thinking about the recent news that Florida and California has suspended executions by lethal injection. Florida because of a (seemingly) botched execution, and California because a Federal Judged ruled the method unconstitutional because the lethal injection method of execution is cruel and unusual punishment.
I can well understand that the current method of lethal injection - a drug to render the subject unconcscious, a drug to paralyze, and the final drug to stop the heart - may, if a mistake is made, cause cruel and unusual suffering. In Florida, it seems that the injection needle was not properly in the vein, and the execution took much longer to accomplish than usual, and the man seemed to suffer for quite a long time. This is disputed, and a autopsy is being performed to determine if suffering took place (how would they know?), but it does seem that this method of execution is needlesly complicated and prone to mistake.
Why not a single massive and deadly dose of barbituate?
I don’t know much about autopsies (but I think someone here might. But I’m willing to bet that it would be easy to tell if such a large dose of meds was given IM instead of IV. The lawyer will probably argue that since it took longer and the pain invovled in taking that much fluid IM blah blah blah.
As for the barbituate, I would imagine that would not only take a REALLY long time, but might not even work for all people.
A further question - would an massive injection of barbiturate be just as deadly injected IM instead of IV? I do understand that it might take longer if given IM.
Joey P, it didn’t occur to me that a powerful dose of barbiturate might not work for everyone. Why not?
If not a standard barbiturate, why not a huge shot of heroin or morphine?
No two people are the same. It’s a total crapshoot as to how a person reacts to the usual injections.
But the most common problem with lethal injections is that many of the people are long term drug users. Finding a suitable place to inject the drug is sometimes a major problem.
This is not meant to be a snarky comment but a genuine question - I have heard before about how difficult it is to find places to inject in a long-term drug user - but how do the drug users themselves manage to do it?
I don’t know why they don’t give them a dose ten times the lethal amount instead of something aproaching enough to kill them. It’s something you want to make darn sure works when you do it. It’s not like an extreme overdose will do them more harm.
I believe it’s China that has execution vans to go around like the book mobile from neighborhood to neighborhood. Some asian country does.
An autopsy can include a brain chemistry analysis that tells you if the person was in distress when death occurred. It can be used to see if the victim was surprised, killed by someone s/he trusted, tortured, fighting, etc.
Need drives them. They’ll use the tiny veins in between the fingers, the veins under the tongue, the veins in the penis. They’ll shoot up into arteries (where consequences can be much worse, I had a patient who lost his forearm shooting up into the brachial artery). They’ll do deep, blind probing and poking with a needle, sticking tendons, nerves, joint spaces, and even intestines, in their search for access.
Most people who know they are being executed will be under stress. I don’t believe pathology science has advanced to the point where it can do much more than identify perhaps a modest excess of stress hormones at the time of death.
gabriela? You back yet? If so, could you address this point?
Ten times the toxic dose shot into a muscle or connective tissue is still going to need to be absorbed, and take a lot longer to have effects than the right dose put into a vein.
I asked that very question of the warden of the Walls unit, the Huntsville prison where Texas executions are performed. He ansered yes, very adamantly, and said that “all proper medical procedures are used.” I understood what he meant, but it’s an odd way of putting it.
You make a good point. If dragging out the death to 30 minutes instead of 15 is cruel, why wouldn’t instantaneous death be merciful?
Let’s back up many years to get some perspective. The guillotine was supposed to be more merciful than the ax or the gallows, because it was a quick, dependable decapitation. Then there was some doubt about the brain suffering after the blade dropped.
The best method, strangely enough, comes from the suicide bombers. They detonate an explosive vest, and the bomber becomes a red mist instantaneously. If there is any pain, it’s just for a tiny fraction of a second. It is much more merciful for the bomber than for most of his maimed victims.
For the purpose of execution, the explosive charge could be smaller, and fitted to a hat instead of a vest. The inmate’s head (and awareness) would be simply gone, and there’d be no worries of dragged-out suffering.
This may be horrifying to some of you. It certainly wouldn’t be pretty. However, you have two goals that are somewhat contradictary. An inmate must be killed to carry out his sentence, but you have to find the least cruel way to do it. What is less cruel, a 15 minute death by drugs, or an instantaneous end to life?
Having lived next to Heroin Alley in one apartment while finishing up high school, I can confirm this. You would not believe the various ways drug addicts, particularly intraveneous users, will satisfy their addiction. I heard of (but didn’t see) one local user who would inject himself in the cephalic vein (up in the upper arm and shoulder) and ended up doing so much nerve damage via repeated injections that he essentially had no use of the left arm.
Regarding lethal injection and other methods of execution: you’d think that this is all done very scientific by someone–say a pathologist–calculating the dosage of poison or electricity, correct procedure, et cetera. That’s what I thought, anyway, until I watched the Errol Morris documentary, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.. Leuchter is an engineer, but not a particularly competent one, and certainly not a medical professional or scientist. Although he has a passion for efficient and painless execution that borders on sociopathy (the guy’s infaturation with execution makes Hannibal Lecter look like Dr. Welby; he objects to then-existing electric chairs because they “overcook the meat”) it’s clear that he’s an amateur with a very limited capacity for empathy. He later becomes a renowned lecturer for the Holocaust Denial circuit based upon badly flawed forensic procedures which “prove” that the gas chambers at Dachau didn’t exist. So, the field of execution does not exactly appeal to the epitome of scientific research.
yes but then there are the needs of the relatives of the executed who will want something for the funeral, right? And the victims are often there to witness the execution, do they want to see all that gore? even the executioners themselves for that matter.
The reports we’re getting on the Florida execution (his hometown is near here, so the local papers have quite a bit on that news item; you can access the main local daily at www.endi.com but it’s all in Spanish) indicate the ME detected large, noticeable chemical burns to Nieves’ arms; and execution-witness reports suggest it took him a very long time to lose either consciousness or voluntary movement.
One thing that really got folks riled in the hometown was that the prison authorities initially claimed that the reason for the slow death was that a history of hepatitis caused his liver to metabolize the drugs more slowly than normal. The ME report refutes that. But why should they even bother floating a bogus explanation? If they did not know, they should have said so and said let’s wait for the autopsy for answers; if they did know that they had flubbed it, the right answer is to be a man and say yes, we messed up.
Qadgop does make a worthy point – We could switch it to a lethalx10 dose of fentanyl and if it still is not correctly applied the subject is not going gently… and the idea of a venom that* by itself * incapacitates instantly and kills painlessly w/o giving you time to register distress is AFAIK so far still fiction (If I understand correctly, the trinary LI kit is: 1 - thiopenthal , to anesthesize; 2 - Pancurorium, a neurotransmitter blocker, to paralyze the autonomic nerves [stop breathing]; 3 - OD of potassium chloride to short out the heart muscle). I mean, I suppose we could have a full anaesthesiology station and first put him to sleep and make sure he’s completely out like a railroad tie before then administering someting deadly; but I think part of the issue with the LI execution is that the idea is to NOT have the complexity of a full anesthesiology suite, but rather a preassembled field-kit that may be administered by-the-numbers, and be done quickly.
As to the explosive hatband, besides the aforementioned “we want a whole body” issue – and it’s not just the perp’s family or queasy witnesses; the state wants a whole body, too, for autopsy purposes – that would mean the staff of the prison would be handling a live high explosive and detonator assembly. I don’t think they want that.
Although the The National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying oversees and issues licensing for Professional Engineers, the vast majority of people who work in the various engineering fields (outside of civil engineering and architectural engineering) do not have PE certification, nor is it necessary or required for most work. Unless he fraudulently imprinted a document as a PE or otherwise claimed to have said certification, he can claim to be an “engineer” all he wants.
It is true, however, that he has no formal training in any field of engineering or science, a fact that is clear by his ignorance. (He does have a B.A. in History according to the Wikipedia article on him, but he appears equally ignornant on that front as well.) In general, as evidenced by Mr. Death, he’s a pathetic, self-promotional, unqualified twit who nonetheless had a significant impact on the methods and mechanics of capital punishment in the United States.
