The standards for executing prisoners by lethal injection in the USA do not meet those for euthanizing animals, and may leave some prisoners in excruciating pain as they die, according to a report in the British medical journal, the Lancet.
news.bbc.co.uk :
Prisoners executed by lethal injection in the US may have been aware of what was happening to them, researchers claim.
A team from the University of Miami looked at information on anaesthesia and awareness in prisoners.
They suggest some suffer unnecessarily, and claim standards do not meet those for putting animals down.
The researchers, writing in the Lancet, call for the use of lethal injection to cease to prevent "unnecessary cruelty".
more on the flip
The typical execution proceeds thus:
Prisoners are first given sodium thiopental, which acts as an anaesthetic before pancuronium bromide is given to cause paralysis. Potassium chloride is then given to cause death.
Without anaesthesia, the person would experience suffocation and excruciating pain - but would not be able to move.
But many personnel who administer the drugs have no training in how to do so effectively, and autopsy results suggest they may well be botching the job:
The researchers then analysed
autopsy data for 49 prisoners who had been executed in Arizona, Georgia. North Carolina and South Carolina.
They found that concentrations of thiopental in the blood were lower than that required for surgery in 43 cases. In 21 of those, the concentrations in prisoners' blood were consistent with them being aware of what was going on.
Writing in the Lancet, the researchers, led by Dr Leonardis Koniaris, said: "We certainly cannot conclude that these inmates were unconscious and insensate.
"However, with no monitoring and with little use of the paralytic agent, any suffering of the inmate would be undetectable."
They add: "The absence of training and monitoring, and the remote administration of drugs, coupled with eyewitness reports of muscle responses during execution, suggest that the current practice for lethal injection for execution fails to meet veterinary standards."
[my emphasis]
Although I am an absolutist opponent of the death penalty, I know many kossacks are not. But this should give everyone reason to be uncomfortable with prevailing practices in the US.