Post by sclcookie on May 31, 2006 1:53:42 GMT -5
Death penalty's drug thingytail rooted in Texas----Other states adopted method chosen with little scientific basis.
When states began reviving the death penalty 30 years ago, hanging, electrocution, the gas chamber and firing squads had passed out of favor, perceived as too brutal for a civilized nation.
Lethal injection was embraced as the humane method of administering the ultimate punishment. Deciding exactly which mix of chemicals would most quickly and painlessly put someone to death would seem a question easily answered by science.
But that's not how it was done.
Instead, the procedure of death by needle was the creation of an Oklahoma medical examiner and was put into practice by Texas prison officials.
Now, that chain of events, reminiscent of the stereotypical good ol' boy prison environment in the classic 1967 movie "Cool Hand Luke," could draw Texas into the cross hairs of a growing national legal battle over whether lethal injections are as painless as once thought. And whether they are unconstitutional.
Both the U.S. Supreme Court and a federal court in California are reviewing death penalty challenges that rest on the argument that lethal injection, as it is being practiced, is constitutionally prohibited cruel and unusual punishment.
"All roads lead to Texas on this one because the other states adopted the procedure on how to administer lethal injection based on what Texas came up with," said Sarah Tofte, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group opposed to the death penalty that last month released a report highlighting the growing legal questions over lethal injection. "It's hard to believe that this procedure was developed without any real input from medical professionals, but it was."
Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor who is a recognized expert on lethal injection, agreed.
"If we're going to execute people, we should do it as humanely as possible, but we don't know that the current procedure does that," she said, citing pending court cases in California and Florida. "As incredible as it may seem, the current procedure was developed by some officials just winging it, without any real medical basis for their decisions. So we really don't know how humane the process is."
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a case from Florida about whether an inmate who has exhausted all other appeals can return to court to challenge the cruelty of a specific method of lethal injection.
In California, a federal judge earlier this year delayed an execution because of questions about whether the thingytail of 3 drugs used in that state was actually painless. A hearing is scheduled for September.
And just last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal appellate court, halted 1 execution after the issue was raised. But it withdrew its order 2 days later and allowed another execution to proceed after a review of similar claims.
Legal experts on both sides of the issue say the procedure by which lethal injections are carried out promises to be an ongoing issue.
"But it's much more humane than how their victims die," said William "Rusty" Hubbarth, an Austin attorney who is vice president of Justice For All, a Houston-based national advocacy group for crime victims. "This is just another attempt to have the death penalty declared unconstitutional, and to look at it any other way is naive."
Texas prison officials say they have no reservations about their current procedure.
"We're watching the cases in California and Florida very closely to determine if we, in the future, may need to change our execution protocol," said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. "We're confident in our process, though, that it doesn't constitute cruel and unusual punishment."
In modern times, the Supreme Court has not ruled any specific method unconstitutional.
Idea born in Oklahoma
Although Texas carried out the 1st execution by needle in 1982, the procedure was born in Oklahoma in 1977.
The nation's highest court had halted the use of the death penalty five years earlier, ruling in a Georgia case that its application was arbitrary and capricious. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that changes in Georgia law corrected the legal problems, but many states were facing public pressure to find a more humane method.
Oklahoma was among those states.
State Rep. Bill Wiseman, a Republican from Tulsa, suggested that there had to be a better way to execute criminals than electrocution, a process that had fallen out of public favor because it was increasingly viewed as brutal and violent. Wiseman consulted doctors, who refused to help, citing their oath to save lives, not take them. He got the same response from scientists and other medical professionals.
"I muttered to colleagues that it looked as if I would need to find a veterinarian to tell me how to 'put down' condemned prisoners," Wiseman recalled in a 2001 article in The Christian Century magazine.
Enter A. Jay Chapman, Oklahoma's state medical examiner, a doctor who had been responsible for pronouncing inmates dead after electrocutions in Colorado. Chapman had no pharmacological training, just an opinion and a willingness to help. During a meeting with Wiseman, he dictated what was to become the new national template:
"An intravenous saline drip shall be started in the prisoner's arm, into which shall be introduced a lethal injection consisting of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic agent."
Sodium pentothal and chloral hydrate were the suggested drugs, the former to cause drowsiness and unconsciousness, the latter to stop the heart. "No pain, no spasms, no smells or sounds. Just sleep, then death," as Wiseman recalled.
Later, Chapman added a third drug: potassium chloride. "You just wanted to make sure the prisoner was dead at the end, so why not just add a third lethal drug?" Chapman was quoted as saying in Tofte's report. "I didn't do any research. . . . It's just common knowledge. Doctors know potassium chloride is lethal."
Wiseman's lethal injection bill was soon passed into law. Texas lawmakers approved their version, with virtually identical wording, the next day.
More than 30 other states soon followed suit, including California and Florida.
Getting its start in Texas
In Texas, the lethal injection procedures were a tightly held secret. But court testimony years later revealed that the events leading up to the first execution by needle on Dec. 7, 1982, of kidnapper-killer Charlie Brooks Jr., had little basis in medicine or science.
In 1990, when Louisiana corrections officials developing a lethal injection protocol met with their Texas counterparts for help, they were surprised by what they heard. Texas had no strict policy on the amounts of drugs that were used, according to court testimony in a Louisiana death penalty appeal in 2003, and when asked why they were using 5 grams of sodium pentothal instead of 2, as other states were, Texas' prison pharmacy director laughed.
"When we did our 1st execution, the only thing I had on hand was a 5-gram vial. And rather than do the paperwork on wasting 3 grams, we just gave all 5," the Texas director said, according to testimony by the Louisiana prison system's pharmacy director.
Other Louisiana officials testified that Texas officials seemed to administer one drug after another "without pausing to ascertain whether the drugs were having their intended effect," according to the Human Rights Watch report.
Some of Texas' earliest lethal injections went more smoothly than others. When Stephen McCoy was executed in May 1989, "the reaction to the drugs induced violent choking, gasping and writhing on the gurney - so much that one witness fainted," according to the book "The Rope, the Chair and the Needle," an account of the death penalty in Texas by James W. Marquart, Sheldon Ekland-Olson and Jonathan Sorensen.
When Stephen Morin was executed in March 1985, it took officials 45 minutes to find a vein in which to insert the needle.
When Raymond Landry was executed in December 1988, "2 minutes after the solution was flowing, the syringe popped out, spraying the mixture of drugs across the room toward the witness window. The needle was reinserted and the execution proceeded 15 minutes later."
Other states had similar problems.
In Illinois, the 1994 execution of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy stalled for 10 minutes after the chemicals clogged in the IV tube, a mistake that left anesthesiologists aghast.
In 1995 in Missouri, 7 minutes after the chemicals began flowing, they stopped, and Emmit Foster began gasping and convulsing, which was blamed on gurney straps that were so tight they restricted the flow of the chemicals into his veins. He was pronounced dead 30 minutes later.
Toxicology reports from executions in North Carolina suggest that some prisoners have been improperly anesthetized, according to published reports. Texas does not conduct autopsies on executed inmates.
Earlier this year, it took Ohio officials 27 minutes to find a vein in inmate Joseph Clark's arm that was suitable for insertion of an IV. The vein collapsed, and it took 30 minutes to find another, during which time media witnesses reported hearing "moaning, crying out and guttural noises" from behind the curtain that had been drawn across the execution chamber window. Clark was declared dead 90 minutes after the execution began.
Possible public shift
In decades past, after hangings were botched, electrocutions ended with inmates' bodies afire and gas chamber deaths became a gruesome spectacle, the public eschewed those methods for something more humane.
Death penalty advocates acknowledge that there have been problems with a small percentage of executions by lethal injection but say the method is as painless as it can be. "We are putting them to sleep like a beloved Labrador," Hubbarth said. "The arguments of opponents absolutely misses the point."
Even so, opponents say that the dog could not have been legally euthanized with the chemicals used to execute convicts. The American Veterinary Medical Association issued guidelines in 2002 saying the mix of drugs is unacceptable for putting animals to sleep because 1 drug masks pain and suffering that might be caused by the others.
But veterinary association officials say their recommendations have been misinterpreted and do not address lethal injection of humans in any way.
The recommendations are now in state law governing euthanasia of animals in Texas.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's office, which handles death penalty and other capital cases when they reach federal court, declined to comment on Texas' procedure or the pending legal challenges in other states. So did prison officials, who referred questions back to Abbott.
"This question has been raised in the past, and courts have looked at it and said there is not a problem," said Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Denno, the law professor, and others suggest that the growing questions over how lethal injection is carried out may be triggering another shift in public opinion, away from the current process of lethal injection.
"Whether we are there yet, I don't know, but I think public opinion is moving in that direction," Denno said. "It's taken so long for the country to get to this point because states were very secretive about their process, and only now is the information coming out about how this process came about.
"That's why it's all coming back to Texas."
(source: Austin American-Statesman)
When states began reviving the death penalty 30 years ago, hanging, electrocution, the gas chamber and firing squads had passed out of favor, perceived as too brutal for a civilized nation.
Lethal injection was embraced as the humane method of administering the ultimate punishment. Deciding exactly which mix of chemicals would most quickly and painlessly put someone to death would seem a question easily answered by science.
But that's not how it was done.
Instead, the procedure of death by needle was the creation of an Oklahoma medical examiner and was put into practice by Texas prison officials.
Now, that chain of events, reminiscent of the stereotypical good ol' boy prison environment in the classic 1967 movie "Cool Hand Luke," could draw Texas into the cross hairs of a growing national legal battle over whether lethal injections are as painless as once thought. And whether they are unconstitutional.
Both the U.S. Supreme Court and a federal court in California are reviewing death penalty challenges that rest on the argument that lethal injection, as it is being practiced, is constitutionally prohibited cruel and unusual punishment.
"All roads lead to Texas on this one because the other states adopted the procedure on how to administer lethal injection based on what Texas came up with," said Sarah Tofte, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group opposed to the death penalty that last month released a report highlighting the growing legal questions over lethal injection. "It's hard to believe that this procedure was developed without any real input from medical professionals, but it was."
Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor who is a recognized expert on lethal injection, agreed.
"If we're going to execute people, we should do it as humanely as possible, but we don't know that the current procedure does that," she said, citing pending court cases in California and Florida. "As incredible as it may seem, the current procedure was developed by some officials just winging it, without any real medical basis for their decisions. So we really don't know how humane the process is."
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a case from Florida about whether an inmate who has exhausted all other appeals can return to court to challenge the cruelty of a specific method of lethal injection.
In California, a federal judge earlier this year delayed an execution because of questions about whether the thingytail of 3 drugs used in that state was actually painless. A hearing is scheduled for September.
And just last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal appellate court, halted 1 execution after the issue was raised. But it withdrew its order 2 days later and allowed another execution to proceed after a review of similar claims.
Legal experts on both sides of the issue say the procedure by which lethal injections are carried out promises to be an ongoing issue.
"But it's much more humane than how their victims die," said William "Rusty" Hubbarth, an Austin attorney who is vice president of Justice For All, a Houston-based national advocacy group for crime victims. "This is just another attempt to have the death penalty declared unconstitutional, and to look at it any other way is naive."
Texas prison officials say they have no reservations about their current procedure.
"We're watching the cases in California and Florida very closely to determine if we, in the future, may need to change our execution protocol," said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. "We're confident in our process, though, that it doesn't constitute cruel and unusual punishment."
In modern times, the Supreme Court has not ruled any specific method unconstitutional.
Idea born in Oklahoma
Although Texas carried out the 1st execution by needle in 1982, the procedure was born in Oklahoma in 1977.
The nation's highest court had halted the use of the death penalty five years earlier, ruling in a Georgia case that its application was arbitrary and capricious. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that changes in Georgia law corrected the legal problems, but many states were facing public pressure to find a more humane method.
Oklahoma was among those states.
State Rep. Bill Wiseman, a Republican from Tulsa, suggested that there had to be a better way to execute criminals than electrocution, a process that had fallen out of public favor because it was increasingly viewed as brutal and violent. Wiseman consulted doctors, who refused to help, citing their oath to save lives, not take them. He got the same response from scientists and other medical professionals.
"I muttered to colleagues that it looked as if I would need to find a veterinarian to tell me how to 'put down' condemned prisoners," Wiseman recalled in a 2001 article in The Christian Century magazine.
Enter A. Jay Chapman, Oklahoma's state medical examiner, a doctor who had been responsible for pronouncing inmates dead after electrocutions in Colorado. Chapman had no pharmacological training, just an opinion and a willingness to help. During a meeting with Wiseman, he dictated what was to become the new national template:
"An intravenous saline drip shall be started in the prisoner's arm, into which shall be introduced a lethal injection consisting of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic agent."
Sodium pentothal and chloral hydrate were the suggested drugs, the former to cause drowsiness and unconsciousness, the latter to stop the heart. "No pain, no spasms, no smells or sounds. Just sleep, then death," as Wiseman recalled.
Later, Chapman added a third drug: potassium chloride. "You just wanted to make sure the prisoner was dead at the end, so why not just add a third lethal drug?" Chapman was quoted as saying in Tofte's report. "I didn't do any research. . . . It's just common knowledge. Doctors know potassium chloride is lethal."
Wiseman's lethal injection bill was soon passed into law. Texas lawmakers approved their version, with virtually identical wording, the next day.
More than 30 other states soon followed suit, including California and Florida.
Getting its start in Texas
In Texas, the lethal injection procedures were a tightly held secret. But court testimony years later revealed that the events leading up to the first execution by needle on Dec. 7, 1982, of kidnapper-killer Charlie Brooks Jr., had little basis in medicine or science.
In 1990, when Louisiana corrections officials developing a lethal injection protocol met with their Texas counterparts for help, they were surprised by what they heard. Texas had no strict policy on the amounts of drugs that were used, according to court testimony in a Louisiana death penalty appeal in 2003, and when asked why they were using 5 grams of sodium pentothal instead of 2, as other states were, Texas' prison pharmacy director laughed.
"When we did our 1st execution, the only thing I had on hand was a 5-gram vial. And rather than do the paperwork on wasting 3 grams, we just gave all 5," the Texas director said, according to testimony by the Louisiana prison system's pharmacy director.
Other Louisiana officials testified that Texas officials seemed to administer one drug after another "without pausing to ascertain whether the drugs were having their intended effect," according to the Human Rights Watch report.
Some of Texas' earliest lethal injections went more smoothly than others. When Stephen McCoy was executed in May 1989, "the reaction to the drugs induced violent choking, gasping and writhing on the gurney - so much that one witness fainted," according to the book "The Rope, the Chair and the Needle," an account of the death penalty in Texas by James W. Marquart, Sheldon Ekland-Olson and Jonathan Sorensen.
When Stephen Morin was executed in March 1985, it took officials 45 minutes to find a vein in which to insert the needle.
When Raymond Landry was executed in December 1988, "2 minutes after the solution was flowing, the syringe popped out, spraying the mixture of drugs across the room toward the witness window. The needle was reinserted and the execution proceeded 15 minutes later."
Other states had similar problems.
In Illinois, the 1994 execution of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy stalled for 10 minutes after the chemicals clogged in the IV tube, a mistake that left anesthesiologists aghast.
In 1995 in Missouri, 7 minutes after the chemicals began flowing, they stopped, and Emmit Foster began gasping and convulsing, which was blamed on gurney straps that were so tight they restricted the flow of the chemicals into his veins. He was pronounced dead 30 minutes later.
Toxicology reports from executions in North Carolina suggest that some prisoners have been improperly anesthetized, according to published reports. Texas does not conduct autopsies on executed inmates.
Earlier this year, it took Ohio officials 27 minutes to find a vein in inmate Joseph Clark's arm that was suitable for insertion of an IV. The vein collapsed, and it took 30 minutes to find another, during which time media witnesses reported hearing "moaning, crying out and guttural noises" from behind the curtain that had been drawn across the execution chamber window. Clark was declared dead 90 minutes after the execution began.
Possible public shift
In decades past, after hangings were botched, electrocutions ended with inmates' bodies afire and gas chamber deaths became a gruesome spectacle, the public eschewed those methods for something more humane.
Death penalty advocates acknowledge that there have been problems with a small percentage of executions by lethal injection but say the method is as painless as it can be. "We are putting them to sleep like a beloved Labrador," Hubbarth said. "The arguments of opponents absolutely misses the point."
Even so, opponents say that the dog could not have been legally euthanized with the chemicals used to execute convicts. The American Veterinary Medical Association issued guidelines in 2002 saying the mix of drugs is unacceptable for putting animals to sleep because 1 drug masks pain and suffering that might be caused by the others.
But veterinary association officials say their recommendations have been misinterpreted and do not address lethal injection of humans in any way.
The recommendations are now in state law governing euthanasia of animals in Texas.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's office, which handles death penalty and other capital cases when they reach federal court, declined to comment on Texas' procedure or the pending legal challenges in other states. So did prison officials, who referred questions back to Abbott.
"This question has been raised in the past, and courts have looked at it and said there is not a problem," said Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Denno, the law professor, and others suggest that the growing questions over how lethal injection is carried out may be triggering another shift in public opinion, away from the current process of lethal injection.
"Whether we are there yet, I don't know, but I think public opinion is moving in that direction," Denno said. "It's taken so long for the country to get to this point because states were very secretive about their process, and only now is the information coming out about how this process came about.
"That's why it's all coming back to Texas."
(source: Austin American-Statesman)