This is NOT a discussion of the death penalty.
AND I already know from the Straight Dope TV show that they do swab with alcohol before the injection.
I was curious why the lethal injection execution process is so complex.
Anyone who has had major surgery knows that you are first injected with sodium pentathol (which usually knocks me out in about 3 seconds). So, I’ve wondered, couldn’t this be used for a lethal injection? (Of course, once the person is unconcious, why not inject about 10 or 20 times the normal dose to ensure a quick painless death).
It seems the lethal injection procedure for executions is a multi-stage process involving (among other things) saline solutions.
So, why not just use a sodium pentathol overdose?
I suspect sodium pentathol is not as certain a way to go. Eg the lethal dose may vary too much from person to person, and would not be instantaneous. Potassium chloride stops the heart in seconds. The sodium pentathol may be just to calm the person down so they don’t thrash around too much or suffer any pain during death
One of the purposes of the saline solution is to ease the minds of the executioners. In my state, there are two buttons which must be pushed to administer the fatal dose. One of the buttons is a dummy, which changes radomly each time there is an execution. The people pushing the buttons never know which of them was the one who administered the chemical. (It’s sort of like having a blank or two in the rifles of a firing squad.)
IIRC, there are three chemicals which are administered. (Guards stand by with clamps in case a last-minute clemency comes through, which is why the hoses are so long, and why the chemicals are colored–so they can watch their progress through the hoses.) The first knocks the condemned unconcious, the second paralyzes the respitory system, and the third stops the heart.
The three typical drugs given are pentothal, pavulon, and potassium chloride. In the O.R., I give all three of these drugs routinely. The big difference is that I take over the ventillation of the patient and don’t administer potassium rapidly. A single dose of pentothal, usually renders a patient with zero respirations, though occasionally you get some one who will continue to breathe. After a patient is asleep a paralytic agent aka muscle relaxant is administered to facilitate ventillation and intubation (inserting ‘breathing tube’) as well as prevent movement during surgery. Pavulon is a long acting paralytic agent which paralyzes all skeletal muscle (not the heart). Simply administering pentothal and pavulon will result in death in everyone (assuming someone doesn’t breathe for them). The potassium simply speeds this process up. After a large single dose of potssium the heart will fibrillate and cease pumping blood, killing someone within seconds of administering. Usual doses of each of these drugs given in the operating room are: pentothal 250-500 milligrams, pavulon 5-10 milligrams, potassium 20-40 miliequivalents (infused over an hour). I’m not sure of the doses given in executions, but I assume the pentothal and pavulon doses are similar to those given in the OR. The potassium does, I imagine, are higher and given as a large bolus.
Well thanks for the detailed answers.
and GasDr you would know better than I would but I’ve heard that during an operation, a patient is almost dead (meaning it wouldn’t take much more to kill that person). (Sorry for my very non-medical way of expressing that).
What is the major biochemical difference between the body’s reactions to sodium chloride, which is found in a normal diet, and potassium chloride, which is used for the lethal injection? I recall from biology that the intracellular K+ concentration is much higher, at equilbrium, than the extracellular, and that the reverse is true of the Na+ concentrations, but am not quite able to put everything together into a definitive cause-and-effect realtionship.
The scene: an operating room. The surgeon is saying to the yet-unanesthetized patient, “Dammit, man, I’m a doctor, not a roller-coaster operator! Is your chest going to be breathing up and down like that the entire time?”
The scene: an operating room. The surgeon is saying to the yet-unanesthetized patient, “Dammit, man, I’m a doctor, not a roller-coaster operator! Is your chest going to be breathing up and down like that the entire time?”
I could almost hear a surgeon saying that:smack:
The key to your potassium question is the fact that it is intracellular and remains that way. If all that K was extracellular from massive cell death, renal failure, IV administration etc…big problem.
The reason the process is so formal and complex is that everyone involved realizes they are taking a human life, so they want it to go smoothly and be absolutely painless and non-anxiety inducing for both the condemned and the executioners. In some countries they’ll just take you out to a soccer field and gun you down, but in the US we take the time and expense necessary to make sure it’s all clean and easy. Sure, the outcome’s the same (the guy’s dead either way), but in a real sense the outcome is very much not the same (people feel differently about the state’s legitimacy in executing a prisoner, the executioners feel differently, etc.).
If you’ve seen Gods and Monsters, you’ll remember how one prison guard gets very upset when a very minor part of a guy’s execution gets screwed up (there are other issues driving the guy’s emotional reaction too though).
There was a worrying Guardian article recently, suggesting the process may not be so humane. A campaign group is contesting the present form of lethal injection, alleging that the pentothal dose is insufficent to stop the victim waking up from the respiratory distress caused by the Parvulon, but before the KCl stops the heart.
A rather tangential trivial aside which I have to assume doesn’t warrant its own thread, but wouldn’t the blank-firer(s) in a firing squad notice the reduced recoil?
Or am I being thick?
Well, free radical, usually when somebody overdoses on a drug, it wasn’t Pentothal, but a sedative (i.e. alcohol, barbiturate, or benzodiazepine) or an opioid like heroin. Or cocaine, but in that case it would be pretty stupid to say that the victim “didn’t suffer,” because cocaine induces a panicky heart attack rather than just putting you to sleep and stopping your breathing.
But I don’t know why there would be any pain at all involved in an execution by lethal injection. If I recall correctly, executions usually involve a high enough dose of Pentothal to suppress breathing, so theoretically the Pentothal alone should produce death within 10 minutes or so if the other two drugs aren’t administered first. And as long as the dose of Pentothal is sufficient to stop breathing, it should easily be enough to render the executee completely unconscious for the necessary few minutes it takes to die.
TaxGuy I think that movie was Monster’s Ball,
Chorpler, that was the point of my OP. Why not just inject a phenomenol overdose of sodium pentathol? (Of course others have given the reasons why the other chemicals are used).